The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Season’s greetings as Concert Band returns after 2 years
The Pomona Concert Band’s 2020 and 2021 seasons both were scrubbed because of the coronavirus, but the band was back onstage Sunday for its holiday concert. Instead of indoors inside the cozy Palomares Park Community Center, the band braved the outdoors of Ganesha Park, and so did its audience.
Ganesha Park is where the venerable band, founded in 1947, typically performs weekly in July and August, not in December. But the midafternoon weather was favorable, if brisk, and audience and band members alike seemed jazzed to be there.
“It’s been 737 days since we last played for you,” Allan Small, a trumpet player and the band president, told the audience at the start. “Remember how hot it was the last time we played for you here and you said, ‘It’s too hot; when will it cool off?’ You got your wish.” Everyone chuckled.
I was emcee for the first time and was pleased as punch to have been asked. This involved introducing each number from the script they’d given me, but of course I added some flair. I also had to roll with the unexpected, like when I read aloud that the vocalist would return for the next number.
“No, he won’t,” conductor Linda Taylor said from across the stage.
“It’s here in the script,” I replied in mock consternation. “Sorry!” she said.
When the script later called for me to introduce the vocalist again, I added, “Unless this is another trick.” It was not.
I also took the time to say something uncharacteristically serious, but appropriate for the occasion, I believe.
Noting that 800,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, I added that Pomona’s toll is 513. The city is the seventh-largest city in Los Angeles County, but No. 3 in deaths behind only L.A. and Long Beach, a sad testament to Pomona’s population of essential workers who didn’t have the option of isolating or working from home.
And so we had a brief silence to remember them as well as the losses of any of our friends or family.
I placed this moment prior to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” a Judy Garland
song from “Meet Me in St. Louis” that I remembered, correctly, as melancholy.
But I had forgotten just how poignant the lyrics are until Isaac Gonzalez sang them, with such lines as “Next year all our troubles will be out of sight” and “Next year all our troubles will be miles away.”
And this: “Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore/faithful friends who are dear to us, they gather near to us once more.”
And there we were in Ganesha Park as in olden days. And it was lovely.
Have yourselves a merry little Christmas, friends.
Your hopes for 2022
It’s easy to get down in the dumps over the state of the world. But let’s look at the glass that will be 2022 as half-full, not halfempty. What is something in the new year that you are hopeful about? It can be realistic or it can be wishful thinking, an expansive idea or a personal goal, something earnest or something irreverent. In other words, anything about 2022, no matter how mundane, that isn’t filling you with existential dread is a good answer.
Drop me an email with your new year’s hope along with your name and city of residence, please, and I’ll compile some of them here in a week or so.
101 minus 1
Pulitzer-winning food critic Jonathan Gold, great as he was, never once reviewed a restaurant east of Covina. But last year, the L.A. Times’ guide to the 101 best restaurants crossed the Mason-dixon line into the Inland Empire.
Kra-z-kai, a Laotian barbecue spot in Corona, made the L.A. 101 courtesy of then-critic Patricia Escárcega, a Riverside native.
But she’s gone, and unsurprisingly, the latest 101 list, newly out, retreats to L.A. and Orange counties. It doesn’t even venture east of the 605.
In fact, the list again includes the famed Mariscos Jalisco truck in Boyle Heights while pretending its brick-and-mortar restaurant in Pomona doesn’t exist.
Oh, well. Kra-z-kai (1218 Magnolia Ave.) still is serving up its delicious beef jerky, short ribs and sticky rice. Buy a housemade sausage and shake it angrily in a westward direction toward L.A. And then eat it.
Meanwhile, the Times’ Top 40 list of California wintertime destinations has eight from the Inland Empire: San Bernardino County resort communities Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead and Riverside County’s Idyllwild, Indian Canyons, the Mission Inn, Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, the weekly Palm Springs Village Fest and the Sunnylands estate.
Eight out of 40 beats 0 out of 101, doesn’t it?
briefly
Redlands leaders have agreed to buy a vacant Kmart and convert it into a new police headquarters, as my colleague Jennifer Iyer reports. An official told the City Council that the $16.1 million purchase price is “well under appraised value.” Evidently, the fading retailer remains committed to offering discounts, even on its own property. Unanswered question: Does buying a Kmart for a cop shop qualify as a “blue light special”?