In what is now one of the trendier areas of London, a large flat above an electrical shop at No. 292, Westbourne Grove was my early childhood home in the 1940’s. Even back then, a stone’s throw from Notting Hill Gate and close by the antiques and fruit & veg markets of Portobello Road, it had a lively and eccentric atmosphere.

Streets were gap-toothed from the bombing, the old mews passages behind tall, shabby Victorian terraces were still cobbled and lived in by working people. Opposite us, at No.297, my aunts lived above their hairdresser’s shop; I would go to ‘work’ there aged about six, in a small pink overall (cut down by Mum), sweeping up hair from the floor, handing pins to the stylists, chatting with ladies who were wired up to permanent waving machines like strange hydras.

In their large premises over the road, the Jones family sold antiques or, more accurately, second-hand goods; clever at business, they would go on to make a fortune by being in exactly the right place when the trade took off in the sixties and the sweet times started. Years later, Mr. Jones pulled up by a bus stop where I was queueing and whisked me home in a gleaming Rolls Royce…The walk to school in Chepstow Villas took me past Henekey’s pub where the aforesaid Uncle swore that he had seen my Mother Superior dancing on the table with a pint of Guinness. I half believed him. Sam, another uncle, once told me as a joke that his job entailed knitting barbed wire, this I reported as interesting to my friends and suffered the full fallout. I was a gullible child.

Further up the Grove was the Roxy Cinema, a flea-pit really, where Mum took me to my first film – Nelson Eddy (wearing lipstick) & Jeanette MacDonald in Rose Marie. I couldn’t get over the wonderment of it. More wonderful still was to be my first local and very tentative contact with the theatre.

Glenda Korella has done it again. The effervescent director of the Peninsula Singers has stitched together an action-packed, upbeat and altogether inspiring selection of music for Get Happy featuring A Salute to Canada. The spring concert series of the 55-voice show chorus’s will run April 25, 26 and 27 at Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney.

It’s the kind of feel-good show you expect from Korella, a mother of three, and grandmother of nine, who once conducted a 200-voice glee club in Calgary. Luckily for the Peninsula Singers, she moved to Dean Park several years ago, where she teaches piano and voice when she’s not directing the chorus The choir’s president, Lynda Spence, says Korella’s “joie de vivre, musicianship and boundless creativity spurs the choir on to greater professional heights every year.”

If you are attending for the first time, be warned. This is a choir that delights in surprising its audience with plenty of humour, lots of props and vocal and musical ensembles drawn from the chorus.

During the second half of the show you might encounter native chanting and a voyageur or two, not to mention Nelson Eddie and Jeanette MacDonald from the movie Rose Marie. You’ll also meet the Homemade Jam band complete with fiddle, banjo, guitar and washtub bass…

Link 

“How did Natoma Avenue get its name?”

by Abby Lindros

This street, near Santa Barbara’s West Beach, is named after what has been called the “first American grand opera.” In 1909, composer Victor Herbert approached San Francisco attorney Joseph Redding to come up with a theme for a new opera. The result was Natoma: The Maid from the Mountains, an opera in three acts set in Santa Barbara in the early 1800s, when Alta California was under Spanish governance.

Victor Herbert, an Irish native, became one of this country’s greatest composers of light operas. His best-known works were Babes in Toyland, made famous by a film version with Laurel and Hardy, and Naughty Marietta, the movie that made stars out of the romantic duo of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald.

Link to the rest of the article