Art Hansuld tolerates no nonsense when it comes to leading the Pinellas Park Orchestra.
“I do not waste time. I’m driven, as you can tell,” he said before the start of a recent rehearsal, as the players warmed up their instruments and practiced selections for the group’s next performance. “We start right on time, making our way through these pieces. Any problems, I stop and fix the problem right there.”
The orchestra, which boasts about 40 members, plays once a month at the Pinellas Park Performing Arts Center, where they also rehearse. Hansuld, 70, has been its conductor for about three years.
He has a long history in the music business. He earned a doctorate in music from the University of Miami in Florida, where he was later a graduate instructor. Along with teaching in Dallas, Texas, Hansuld also was a music professor at Marietta College in Ohio and Iowa Western Community Concert. He conducted the Omaha Symphony Pops Concerts before moving to Florida in 1985.
But his “pedigree” is not the important part of leading the group, Hansuld said.
“Some people play that game,” he said. “That’s not really what makes this happen. What makes this happen is my energy, my personality, my knowledge of music and my pep-talking people and coaxing them into the group.”
Hansuld took over direction of the group after its previous conductor, Richard Van Dommelen, was seriously injured in a construction accident. Van Dommelen, 73, still plays French horn for the orchestra.
“I try to do what’s best for the orchestra,” he said.
DUNEDIN - February is Love Your Library Month. In honor of this event, the Dunedin Friends of the Library will be hosting its annual two-day book sale.
It’s a major event for the city of Dunedin, according to Phyllis Gorshe, library director, which draws legions of people and is expected to raise about $5,000 with proceeds going toward the many programs and services offered to the public by the library.
In fact, anyone looking to unload gently used reading material, books, audio, CDs, etc. is encouraged to stop by the library on Saturday, Feb. 4, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and drop off these items.
Gorshe acknowledges that although the library has not been as hard hit as others with steep budget cuts, funds are nonetheless limited and do not often allow for extra activities.
As such, FDOL is able to provide enhancements that might otherwise not be feasible.
“They’re a great group, and they’ve been helping us through the years. They are the biggest supporters for all of our programming so that we are able to offer it free to the public,” said Gorshe.
Gorshe said if the library lacks something, she often turns to the Friends to see if they have the funds to purchase it. A kids’ playground completed last year was funded in part by the DFOL who put up $25,000 along with offering to match funds from outside donations.
As a 400-member organization with many volunteers the DFOL will be celebrating its 50th anniversary this fall. The organization spearheads fundraising events and activities. Many of the library’s children, teen and adult programs would not exist if not for the fundraising efforts by the DFOL.
TREASURE ISLAND - The friends may live thousands of miles apart, but that means nothing for a bunch of sailors.
“We met at a marina in DeTour, Mich., at the entrance to the St. Mary’s River not far from Lake Heron and the straits of Mackinac,” said longtime sailor and Treasure Island resident Bob Shogren.
“We became friends in the ‘sailor way,’” added Bosse Niklasson of Sweden. “It was the name on (Shogren’s) boat, The Solstråle, which means sunbeam in Swedish, that got our attention.”
Soon the two men and their wives were reliving a chance meeting that turned into international friendship and a warm, Florida berth for the holidays.
Niklasson, who is now traveling with his wife Helene, said that their multiyear “cruise” began in 2008 when they “Sold everything we had. Home, cars, etc.” and left Gothenburg on the west coast of Sweden. Since then, they have logged more than 16,000 miles on their 36-foot sloop, SeaQwest.
The Niklassons have cruised to a good chunk of the planet including the European Coast, the Canary Islands, Brazil and other South American ports, Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean, Florida’s East Coast, and the Great Lakes area and Canada.
“This odyssey has been a lifelong dream,” Bosse said. Helene added, “We’ve wanted to do this for years, but family and career kept getting in the way,” Helene said. “Now our children are old enough to care for themselves. We expect we have enough money to continue our journey for another year and a half.”
Helene is a real estate broker and writer, while Bosse is a sales and marketing professional and artist. But for now, their lives are the sea.
BELLEAIR BEACH - Undergrounding of utilities in Belleair Beach would be a mixed benefit for residents.
That message was delivered by utility representatives at a well-attended informational meeting on the subject Jan. 23 at city hall. A referendum vote calling for the city to look into undergrounding will take place on March 13.
Nelson Eash, manager of Progress Energy’s Walsingham Road operation, addressed the pluses and minuses of converting overhead wires to underground.
Undergrounding is costly, some 4- to 5-times the expense of overhead lines, Eash said. Putting existing lines underground, as would be the case in Belleair Beach, is even more expensive.
The cost would be paid by the city, and mostly passed on to the residents. The city also would be responsible for the reconstruction of sidewalks, streets, landscaping and other areas disrupted by the undergrounding process, Eash said.
Eash spoke of other associated costs beyond the undergrounding itself, including procuring easements, restoration of sidewalks and landscaping, trenching to individual residences, and streetlights. Undergrounding projects “take a lot of work to get done,” Eash stressed.
Repair time of an underground system would likely be longer because of the added difficulty of locating a problem, Eash said.
“We have a lot of specialized equipment to locate the problems, but it takes longer to fix than being able to see it on a pole,” he said.
CLEARWATER - Steve Mitchell was all nerves. He glanced at his competitors. He’d overheard his instructor complaining that it looked like they had been dancing definitely more than a year so shouldn’t be allowed to compete in the Newcomer division. But now there was nothing to do but dance his best.
The Tampa Bay Classic was a whole day event, starting with the smooth ballroom dances in the morning, such as the waltz, tango and foxtrot. After about the first two or three dances, he was finally loosened up. Later in the afternoon it was time for the Latin dances, such as the cha-cha and the rumba. He had only begun ballroom dancing in August 2010 - only 13 months earlier. But when it was all over, he had achieved first place in the Newcomer division.
The judges hadn’t even noticed that Mitchell has a prosthetic right leg.
Mitchell lives in Seminole, works in Clearwater, and takes ballroom dancing lessons from Marina Laca, following her to studios in Clearwater, Pinellas Park and St. Petersburg. Mitchell’s oldest daughter, Stephanie, dances, and his wife, Debbie, wanted to start. And that meant Mitchell had to come, too. At first he really wasn’t into it. The moves felt funny. He’d look at the clock, wondering when the hour would be over. But one day, it all clicked. And he was hooked.
Neither Marina nor her husband, Martin, had ever had an amputee student before. She has been teaching for 10 years in the Tampa Bay area, and she has never seen anything like it. The studio had warned her and Martin not to say anything about his leg, but after they all met, it became a nonissue. They discussed it, but it didn’t get in the way of dancing. Occasionally there are technical challenges with the prosthesis, but more often than not, everyone forgets that Steve doesn’t have two regular legs.
“I teach exactly the same,” Marina said. “And I would tell him, ‘Point your foot’ without even realizing it was his prosthetic leg. But I say do as much as you can with your other leg. And usually what we try to do is find where the other thigh is by connecting both thighs, working toward one another instead of trying to find the foot because I think that has a little more connection because if the thighs are close then your feet are close.”
Mitchell said some techniques are more difficult with the artificial leg, such as compression rotation moves where you have to compress, rotate and move across the floor in smooth dances. Also, pushing off the floor in certain dances like foxtrot or rumba are challenging because he cannot feel the ground beneath his prosthesis.
“In Latin rumba, you’re taking a step, extending the leg out and then the other leg comes over, but it’s the back step that gives me problems because now I have to move (my prosthetic leg) and push it back and feel the floor before you go onto it, and that’s a little more difficult because there I’m off balance. So I have to still be straight, pull it straight and move across it again.”
LARGO - Leave it to the Paradise Island Rockettes to get people on their feet.
Janyce Cruse, a member of the dance group, recalled visiting an assisted living facility and noticing a woman using two canes.
“She could hardly walk,” Cruse said. “She went and sat down right in front. All of a sudden her feet were tapping. All of sudden, would you believe, she got up, forgot her canes and started dancing with us.”
Such memories make the time and effort that the Rockettes put into their performances worthwhile, Cruse said.
Sometimes they will dance to “Leroy Brown.” Sometimes they’ll move to the “Electric Slide.” The 14 women in the group, between the ages of 64 and 83, love to line dance.
“We decided, ‘Hey, we are enjoying ourselves so much, and we want to give something back to our community.’ We got ourselves little uniforms for holidays and so forth and we put together an hour and a half show. We sing a little, we dance a little,” she said.
“There is a lady that is 102, and she dances with us,” she added.
They’ve also performed at Bay Pines VA hospital and for military personnel returning from Iraq.
There’s a lot to be said for seniors. They are more calm, patient and even-tempered than the young. Perhaps more importantly, they are usually housebroken.
But despite their positive attributes, the older residents of Pinellas County Animal Services are less adoptable than the puppies and kittens that share the shelter space in the adoption center.
Until now.
The Senior-to-Senior Program was initiated at Animal Services three months ago with the goal of getting more mature animals adopted by matching them with pet owners who are at least 50 years old. This benefits both companions. The pet gets a home for the rest of its life, and the human gets an animal with a lifetime of love to give as well as the proven health benefits of pet ownership.
The program has proved successful at Pinellas County Animal Services: an average of two senior pets that are now being adopted each week.
Tyson Youts, who coordinates volunteers and adoptions at Animal Services, said the program started because of the difficulty of trying to get older pets adopted. He has seen firsthand that, despite their sweetness, older pets are harder to get adopted.
“Historically, older animals that are otherwise adoptable are turned away or euthanized by the majority of animal shelters,” he said. “This is the kind of thing that makes your heart ache at night.”
All of the participants in the Senior-to-Senior Program have age requirements: cats and small breed dogs must be 8 years old, large breed dogs, 6 years old, and humans in the program are at least 50 years old.
PINELLAS PARK - Opera returns to Pinellas Park Sunday, Jan. 29, as the Matinee Opera Players perform a free concert at the Performing Arts Center, 4951 78th Ave.
The cast, headed by Artistic Director Mario Laurenti, will perform favorite scenes from grand operas, featuring the final scenes of La Traviata and Aida. Other performed songs include the quartet from Rigoletto, the “letter duet” from The Marriage of Figaro and the duet “Suoni la tromba,” from Vincenzo Bellini’s opera The Puritans.
The cast also will perform some Broadway show tunes and romantic Italian love songs.
The free concert begins at 2 p.m. Space is limited.
Italian-born Laurenti, who currently lives in Pinellas Park, enjoyed a long career as an opera tenor singer throughout Europe, in Los Angeles and New York. His company, the Laurenti Opera Theater, was one of the first to play in Brooklyn and Coney Island parks in what would become New York City’s “Opera in the Park” series.
But more recently, “Opera in the Park” has taken on a new meaning as he began promoting the art in Tampa Bay, and specifically Pinellas Park, through the Matinee Opera Players. The group, a venture Laurenti has pursued “off and on” over the years, is designed to allow those pursuing opera a chance to perform live and gain experience, he explained recently.
“This time, we want it for just local people,” he said. “I want it to grow.”
Many of the singers performing in the upcoming concert are Laurenti’s students.
LARGO - Centennial celebrations continue at Heritage Village with the Pinellas Folk Festival Saturday, Jan. 28, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Dozens of the Tampa Bay area's premier folk musicians will spread the sounds of traditional folk, gospel, country and bluegrass music on stages throughout the village.
The band of retired train lovers, Four Men and Their Trains, will roll into the festival with more than just the sound of their music. They will also bring their model trains, complete with accessories, to display and run on the platform of the train station all day long.
Other bands such as Juniper with their Celtic sound; Carl Wade’s band, Something Special and the Native American Flute Circle and many more will be seen and heard throughout the festival.
As a memorable addition, the “father of Florida folk” and lover of Heritage Village, Frank Thomas, will also be at the event.
All bands will play at the Lowe Barn for 20 to 25 minutes. Afterwards, half of the bands will go to the Safety Harbor Church to continue playing, where gospel music will be featured, while the rest go to the McMullen Coachmen log cabin. The log house will also house storytellers during the festival.
The music won’t stop playing when the bands do. Two jam sessions, one bluegrass and one folk, will keep music flowing through the festival.
German and Scottish dance groups will join in the fun during the day with their stylish steps.
CLEARWATER - Wistful theater nostalgia, poignant familial conflict and a heavy dose of well-executed zingers highlight West Coast Players’ production of Neil Simon’s “45 Seconds from Broadway.”
The production runs through Feb. 5 at West Coast Players Theatre, 21905 U.S. 19 N., Clearwater.
Simon’s “45 Seconds from Broadway,” which opened in 2001, is a relatively recent addition to his long list of plays. The first act is all about the humor with a steady stream of one-liners flying at the audience from every corner of the stage. The second act adopts a more serious tone and relies more on situational comedy. Sporadically introspective and solemn, various characters face personal issues but the distinct threads of three different plotlines eventually merge.
At its heart, “45 Seconds from Broadway” is character-focused, delivering in four succinct scenes comprehensive sketches of the owners and patrons of a New York coffee shop near Time Square - a location that makes it less than a minute away from the neon lights on Broadway (hence the title).
As the lights go up, the audience finds itself in the Polish Tea Room - a fixture in New York’s theater scene (based upon the Edison Hotel coffee shop) where struggling actors, notable celebrities, comedians, theatergoers and aspiring playwrights mingle. The place is owned by Bernie (Rick Kastel) and Zelda (Vicki Flores). Kastel does a fine job conveying Bernie’s love for his business, concern for his customers and love for his wife. Flores, too, delivers a portrait of a protective, independent Jewish mother and wife.
Much of the play revolves around Mickey Fox (Bill Harber), a Jewish comic somewhat in the style of Jackie Mason, albeit less abrasive. Mickey is a classic wise-cracking insult comic capable of dishing up a witty comeback for every straight line he’s served - and Harbor possesses the perfect snese of comic timing to make the character convincing.
Bernie displays his chronic generosity by employing Solomon (Gyula Nemeth), a penniless South African playwright, who also seeks advice from Mickey to improve his first play. Nemeth appeared in the WCP productions “Picasso at the Lapin Agil” and earlier this season in “Small Craft Warnings.” Born and raised in Hungary, his portrayal of Solomon is subtle and moving at times as he expresses both the frustration and the optimism of a starving artist.
Other patrons include a couple of suburban theatergoers who fancy themselves armchair critics. Arleen (Stephanie Bell) and Cindy (Stacy Rein) meet in the café to exchange observations of their most recent matinee experience and their inconsistent critiques are routinely shallow, pedantic and capricious. Bell and Rein give the characters an amusing haughtiness that evokes plenty of laughs.
INDIAN ROCKS BEACH - What began several weeks ago as a discussion to limit the littering of cigarette butts on Indian Rocks Beach ended up as a heavy fine for any types of litter.
The City Commission unanimously approved the first reading of an ordinance that would impose a $500 fine for anyone caught littering anywhere in the city. It equally punishes the smoker who discards a butt in the sand on the beach, and a child who drops a candy bar wrapper outside the corner store.
It was that part of the ordinance that irked Commissioner Terry Hamilton-Wollin.
She had previously spoken out against the cigarette litter on the beach and was hoping the new fine would apply only to people who dropped their butts.
PINELLAS PARK - After hearing arguments from both sides Jan. 24, the Pinellas Park City Council unanimously agreed that fluoride should be added back to city water.
The city will be applying for state funding to help cover the capital expenditure and could begin building the new infrastructure at its water pumping stations in July. Once new storage tanks and other equipment are installed, annual personnel and maintenance costs would work out to about $1.40 per resident, Public Utilities Director Keith Sabiel said.
The council’s decision to go forward with the plan came out of the informal setting of a workshop, attended only by a small audience. Mayor Bill Mischler asked for both proponents and opponents of the fluoride debate to present their case before the council weighed in on the issue.
“A decision is going to have to be forthcoming,” he said.
An active lifestyle may not be the proverbial fountain of youth, but it can lower the risk of certain physical ailments and help people live better longer.
“As an older adult, regular physical activity is one of the most important things you can do for your health,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It can prevent many of the health problems that seem to come with age. It also helps your muscles grow stronger so you can keep doing your day-to-day activities without becoming dependent on others.”
The National Institute of Health’s National Institute on Aging recently launched a new initiative aimed at helping older Americans stay fit. Go4Life is an exercise and physical activity campaign designed to help people fit exercise and physical activity into their daily life.
It’s a daily frustration, motorists stuck in traffic with a nearby car playing music so loud it rattles the dashboard.
For others, it’s a nighttime problem as they are unable to sleep due to “audio terrorists” driving their neighborhood streets.
Loud music blasting from car stereos is a nuisance and it’s illegal, says Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, who is determined to do something about it.
Motorcyclists throughout Pinellas County will be gathering in Tierre Verde Saturday, Feb. 11, for the first-ever non-stop police escorted Coast Riders Motorcycle Run.
Proceeds will benefit the county’s Crime Stoppers program.
A kick-off party on Friday, Feb. 10, 7 p.m. will start the festivities at the Post Card Inn, 6300 Gulf Blvd, in St. Pete Beach. Activities include advance registration for the ride, live music and drink specials. The next day the bikers will start their 31-mile run along the beach from the Tierra Resort Marina, Madonna Drive in Tierra Verde. Registration starts at 8 a.m. with kickstands up at 10:30 a.m.
The ride ends at Coachman Park, 301 Drew St. in Clearwater where Jen Holloway from Bright House Networks will announce the winner of a 2012 FXDC Harley Davidson, valued at $12,000. Other activities scheduled from noon to 4 p.m. include music by Up the Creek. Food and beer will be available.
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