Dear Belle,

How would you like to have a Big Sur adventure with me?  I have been invited by Erin Gafill to videotape a little bit of Nepenthe's 60th Anniversary celebration on Friday.  I would use it for a segment of Life in the Arts. All of the Big Sur artists and characters will come out of the woods for this one.  I am looking for someone to help me with this assignment.  Are you interested/available?

I would need you to shoot stills, hold the microphone and ask questions of some of the guests while I videotape. I'll work up the questions in advance. For an event like this Marie and I would usually have three questions prepared that we would ask all of the subjects. If you are willing, I will bring a second camera, the PDR-150 with which you are a little familiar so that we can better cover the dancing.

What do you say, can you help me out with this one?  I would be most appreciative.

Thanks,
Paul
ox/tfj [terrorist fist jab]

I received the above email from friend and film maker, Paul Boczkowski last Wednesday.  His wife and director, Marie, was in Buffalo, helping to catch their grandchild as the baby girl emerged from the womb.

My response to his email was a unqualified YESSSS!  Nepenthe is the Greek name for an elixir which helps one to forget sorrow (my Chinese name Xuan means the same).  I would get to see and renew my acquaitance with Erin and Kirk Gafill, who I knew from my days at Carmel High School, and meet their mom Holly.

This time, I was trying to be the invisible one behind the cameras, the one asking the questions.  Paul is a supurb teacher, having patiently taught me how to use the video camera.  He was also the one who gave me the impetus to create my graphic novel Youtube promo.  At the end of the session, I learned good questions were very important, but if you have a set of general questions, those being interviewed will elaborate on their own without further prompting.

Erin is an arresting, statuesque painter, specializing in incantatory Big Sur landscapes.  I am told by Steve Hauk, she can break up a fight, ejecting the rabble rouser with one arm.  I imagine Odysseus’s Penelope would have been like her.

Her older brother Kirk—I knew him as Kirky--after interning in his twenties with Leon Panetta had to make the hard decision  whether to pursue a career in Washington D.C., or inherit the family business to work alongside his mother, Holly.  He chose the latter (and has never regretted it).  I silently agreed with him.  The “real world” of “real people” are interesting for a few years, but I’d choose the Los Padres forest, the cliffs, the redwoods and the wine blue sea for a life time.  A formerly quiet, dreamy boy, he was now fully a man in charge of an operation with over one hundred people working under him.  I’d rather be Kirk, the energy behind Nepenthe than Leon Panetta, the CIA director in D.C.  I’ve seen Leon Panetta in town, when home form Washington, being driven along the ocean by his wife Silvia. The tired look in his eyes was underscored by all the cares of the warring world.

People think the Fassets/Gaffils are lucky to own the Nepenthe business and property.  Luck is only a bit player on the stage of a meaningful, rich life.  It takes sheer hard work.  The creation of Nepenthe is due to the muscle and heart of the entire clan for three generations.  Holly Fasset’s father and mother opened for business sixty years ago, and all the children had worked to dig the hillside, to erect the building, to landscape and to run the myriad chores of business.  Last year, they fought the Big Sur fires by hand to keep the flames from jumping across the two lane highway.  It is no wonder Nepenthe has become a legendary destination on the California coast.  It is no mere restaurant.  It bears shrine status.  (The movie, “The Sandpipers,” with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton was filmed at Nepenthe and Erin garnered many a pat fon the head from the screen godess, Taylor.)

In mid-afternoon, the dancing began on the Terrace to the music of the Chicano All Stars.  Far below, whitecaps skipped on the water. I felt I had been transported to the Mediterranean.

Initially, I had worried I’d be too anemic to haul equipment up the winding flights of stairs from the parking to the terrace.   But the air, the air was so pure, I returned home in the dusky light, entirely energized.  Paul said he felt the same.

Youtube video of Belle's book trailers, graphic novel demonstration, art work, etc.