Since it’s a long drive back to the Bay Area, we decided to stop along the way in Santa Rosa (one of the best parts of being retired is not having to rush to anything). We stayed at the Hotel La Rose, right in downtown Santa Rosa.
Again, not a terribly impressive building from the street, but lovely inside and we actually stayed at the more modern part of the complex across the street - the “Carriage House”
It had a nice little outdoor patio for morning coffee-sipping
For dinner we chose Jackson’s Bar and Oven. Quite the happening place, though we probably raised the average age of the clientele by 20 years by walking in.
We started with shishito peppers. Then Linda had a lamb-stuffed flatbread and I was able to have a pizza from their wood-fired oven since they had a gluten-free one with a garbanzo-flour based crust (new one to me, but very tasty).
After dinner, we strolled around a bit and came across the Arlene Francis Center for Spirit, Art, and Politics.
People our age will remember Arlene Francis as the most frequent guest on the old TV show “What’s My Line” where the panelists were blind-folded and had to guess which of 3 guests was the person they were all pretending to be based on how well they answered questions put to them by the panelists. She was also the first female guest host for Johnny Carson and played other TV and movie roles. Along with Kitty Carlisle, she embodied a certain kind of real New York City dame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlene_Francis
I was surprised to learn that she was of Armenian descent and that her father had immigrated to the US after his parents were murdered in the Armenian genocide in the early part of the last century. The Center seems to be a place where all kinds of artistic and creative endeavors take place. We chatted up one of the managers who was sitting outside. He told us that at that moment there was a rehearsal for “Shakespeare in the Parking Lot - Twelfth Night”, an open mike night in the cafe, “Circus Jam” - a workshop to teach skills like juggling and clowning, and an improv workshop. The center’s mission is to produce:
“…nonprofit and charitable cultural, educational, social, ethical and ecological activities united by a common purpose—the development of a theory and practice that will foster the creation of a better world, one in which human beings will come to see one another as the source of each other’s completion, as inherently good and caring social and ecological beings who seek to fully recognize each other’s common humanity and interconnectedness with all of life, and to create a world based upon justice, kindness, love, and respect for the earth.”
Phew! That’s some heady stuff. Who knew?