Fergie, Will.i.am, Taboo and apl.de.ap wowed the crowds in Hyde Park with their four futuristic costume changes, as they performed hits like Boom Boom Pow and Where Is The Love.

Frontwoman Fergie, who belted out her solo hit Big Girls Don’t Cry, stole the spotlight from her male bandmates, as she showed off her perfect pins in various outfits including a space-age black minidress with gold panels, and a black sequinned bodysuit and thigh-high stiletto boots.

Impressed by the 63,000 strong crowd, Taboo shouted out: “I’m going to Tweet that this is the best show we have ever played on this tour.”

True to his word, he later Tweeted: “Biggest tabmagnetic fan in London town. Peas and love to all magneticas.”

Will.i.am, who hit the decks to perform a DJ set featuring Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Usher’s OMG, Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams and House Of Pain’s Jump Around, spoke about how the UK holds a special place in the band’s hearts, because it is where the group had their first No 1 hit.

“We’ve been coming to London since 1998. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you all,” he said, dedicating Where Is The Love to their UK fans. He added in a British accent: “We miss performing on Top Of The Pops, innit.”

The Black Eyed Peas completed their headlining set with I Gotta Feeling, accompanied by producer David Guetta, who played the Pepsi Max stage earlier.

Bruno Mars, Tinie Tempah, Example, Chipmunk, Far East Movement and Plan B also performed on the first day of the music festival, which runs until July 3.

The Chemical Brothers headline Saturday, joined by Chase Status, Katy B and Janelle Monae, while Pulp will close the festival on Sunday

The production will be seen at BAM in January. There are no plans yet for a Los Angeles stop, though it would be right at home in Hollywood, where Shakespeare’s thrillers have given rise to generations of blood-soaked action movies.

“Richard III” is a play that has two characters vying for the role of narrator ” Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who draws us into his confidence as he soliloquizes his evil intentions; and the furious widowed Queen Margaret (a stupendously scary Gemma Jones), who puts a curse on Richard and his royal henchmen and watches with vengeful glee as her words are slowly but surely realized. Sworn enemies, they not only serve up competing scripts but they attempt to upstage each other with the extremity of their chilling stage presences.

Mendes has cast his actresses magnificently well. Jones’ Margaret is a woman maddened by grief who stretches her last miserable years on earth only to see the traitors who destroyed her family choke on their own gore. As Queen Elizabeth, Haydn Gwynne (“Billy Elliot: The Musical”) reveals a horrified awareness that she is turning into a bereaved figure as bitterly deranged as Margaret. And Annabel Scholey, who plays Lady Anne, delicately makes plausible the infamous seduction in which Richard, the man who decimated her world, alchemizes her hate to confounded desire.

Chuk Iwuji’s suave, media savvy Duke of Buckingham, Richard’s Machiavellian aide de camp, and Chandler Williams’ justifiably high-strung Duke of Clarence, Richard’s penitent, sympathetic brother, offer contemporary spins that have moments of novelty. But the most daring, fearlessly anachronistic characterization is produced by Spacey, who delivers the “Now is the winter of our discontent” opener decked in a paper crown and tooting a party favor.

On balance, there’s more wicked drollery than psychological acuity in this showy, slyly winking performance. Spacey’s Richard has a malevolent cockiness that makes his admission “since I cannot prove a lover … I am determined to prove a villain” seem like empty rhetoric. The character’s physical impairments are never lost sight of but they pose no impediment to his quest for unchecked public and private power.

This Richard conquers all obstacles, even if he has to sometimes play the part of a lousy actor to obtain it. I’m referring to the scene in which Richard feigns a lack of interest in the throne, despite the clamoring of the crowd for his ascension. Mendes stages this as a multimedia circus, with Spacey’s Richard impersonating on screen a holy man devoted to meditation rather than mutilation as the Duke of Buckingham, in high evangelical mode, preaches the necessity of Richard taking custody of this wounded land.

Becoming king turns out to be much more riveting than maintaining kingship. As the drums of war blare louder and louder, the production blurs into a generic nightmare.

Spacey rants and rails without much specificity. He huffs and puffs and nearly blows his vocal cords out. The performance seems more of a physical feat than a mental one. The final stretch is too grueling to be impressive.

But exhaustion, to say nothing of overkill, is unavoidable with “Richard III.” Fortunately, the kinetic energy of Mendes’ production fortifies against boredom. Spacey’s dastardly panache will no doubt deepen over time. With any luck, Southern California will be added to the global tour and Los Angeles audiences will get the chance to see the ripened fruits of his theatrical malignity.

Theater review: ‘The Cherry Orchard’ in London

–Charles McNulty

twitter.comcharlesmcnulty

charles.mcnulty@latimes.com

Photos: Top:Kevin Spacey as Richard III at the Old Vic. Credit: Tristram Kenton. Bottom: Spacey as Richard III and Annabel Scholey as Lady Anne. Credit: Alastair Muir

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How might the surviving American film-makers of the 1970s appear to someone born in the early 90s, a casual cinema-goer who consumes blockbusters at the local multiplex? Scorsese must seem the longwinded master of glossy action-thrillers, Polanski a maker of earnest European fare, Spielberg the purveyor of soured epic, and Coppola not even a name. Would such a person feel, as I once did, exhilarated about the latest Woody Allen? And Terrence Malick ? If all you had to go on was The New World (2005) and his new film, The Tree of Life , would it be possible for you to understand the reverence that moviegoers feel for his work?

Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), and The Thin Red Line (1998) are masterpieces, but that same casual cinema-goer wouldn’t know them. And without having seen those films first, how odd and impenetrable might Malick’s recent work seem? And if you do know them, I can imagine someone seeing in his last two movies a vertiginous dip in form, the marvels of the early work diminished into mannerisms. Much of The New World would provide evidence for such a view, unable as it is to survive plump, puzzled Colin Farrell’s constant hurt look. But what about the Palme d’Or-winning The Tree of Life ?

The first time I saw the film several people sniggered at the absurd ambition that connects a suburban family to the origins of life on Earth. Its evolutionary sequence resembles a National Geographic documentary coupled with out-takes from Walking With Dinosaurs . As for the domestic drama, sometimes, at its worst, it looks classy. It can feel as if you are watching an implausibly extended perfume ad ” the same earnest breathy voiceover, the same broody enigmas, the same bloodless sheen. Worse, we’re told of the departed joys of family life by the kind of “happiness montage” that ended Notting Hill ; our grown-up hero, Jack, resides in a home that would look swanky even in Elle Decoration; and the brief shots of his implausibly decorous birth take place in a shiny white hospital room. You could dismiss it as Mad Men plus metaphysics, Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain standing in for the gorgeous Drapers, but with the attention (as in Mad Men we sometimes feel it ought to be) on the lives of the children. The film shares that love of Americana, the remote allure of the past made tangible in a picture ” the cars, the hats, the psychological repression.

With all this in mind, you could even start to question how much you loved those early films. Isn’t Days of Heaven laden with a heavy-handed symbolism? Might Badlands be the perfect expression of 70s cinema, wide-eyed and wondering about appearances, and deadpan and indifferent to acts of violence? Does it show its murderous young couple’s vacancy, or share in it?

Such a dismissal would be risky. After all, Malick is a director who is not only more intelligent than his critics, but better-educated too. More than that, there remains something in Malick’s work that transcends all such criticism. The Tree of Life may bebafflingly flawed, and yet it undoubtedly earned that Cannes prize.

There is nothing else like Malick’s early work in American cinema. Days of Heaven is a vibrant film, carrying you along with the vitality of its music, the beauty that it frames. It’s Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove rewritten by Thomas Hardy. That suggests earnest gloom, but nothing could be further from the truth. The story moves fast, telling you more in the first 12 minutes than most movies manage in an hour; in its pure vitality it almost offers a “cinema of attractions”, throwing in some manic fiddle playing, virtuoso tap-dancing, a mechanical puppet gag and a flying circus.

Like all Malick’s films, it turns on theexperience of an idyll. Those first three pictures in particular grace us with entry to an “irresponsible place”. They inhabit for a lingering moment an Indian summer of lucid calm and gratuitous games. Here there is no work, no need for more money, no duties to perform. There’s just the matter of choosing the password for the day, trying on make-up, or dancing laconically to Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange”. Malick’s preference is for islands, river-boats, hideaways and backwaters; his most sympathetic characters all go awol. He is the last film-maker ” and perhaps the last artist of any kind ” to be so clearly in love with paradisal innocence, even to retain the notion of the noble savage. His great original is Huckleberry Finn and the runaway slave Jim drifting down the endless Mississippi on a raft ” the narrating voices of Badlands and Days of Heaven belong to Huck’s delinquent grand-daughters. Even the beauty of the actors forms part of the romance, offering us a world where no one is ugly or disagreeable, where all games are played in a spirit of delight. It’s this pastoral quality that gives his films their air of enchantment. Picture-book images recur, and the films themselves possess something of a picture-book view of the world, not just in the sense that they marry a highly literate imagination to an astonishing visual sense. Rather it is that they share the emblematic mystery which children discover in their books, telling of a world beyond, while being somehow more alive than life itself.

However, shadows are always ready to fall across these circumscribed paradises. Violence, moral corruption, war, colonial conquest, all play their part in locking us outside the gates of Eden ” though Malick allows us to perceive how they were always present within its walls. The contrast between bliss and mayhem is at its strongest in the extraordinary The Thin Red Line , the greatest American war-movie ever made, and a suitably perplexed and awestruck meditation on how human beings die.

It is a very rare talent to be able to show with equal power both the free places for which we yearn and the compromise and wickedness that makes their freedom impossible to achieve. At his best, Malick lets us share his humane, unironic and compassionate vision. He presents life as caught between a fragile innocence and an encroaching darkness. In doing so, he respects the apartness, the privacy of human beings: is he the only director of his generation never to have filmed a sex scene? The perpetual melancholy of Brooke Adams’s face in Days of Heaven is a fitting emblem for all his characters, unreadable and resonant as they are: we see her sadness, but can only guess at its causes. His people act out their lives back-lit against a background of plenitude; there are lives beyond theirs, passers-by who gaze on at a distance, and then the vast unreachable natural world.

In The Tree of Life that same sense is there in the face of Jack (Hunter McCracken). His surly watchfulness frames the film, disabused, never expecting anything good to happen. Idylls don’t contain stories; those come when the suffering begins. Malick has always had an independent view of what makes a narrative. Here what story there is revolves around a frankly Oedipal set-up: the son who yearns for a lost closeness with his generous, soft-hearted mother, while being supplanted from above by his authoritarian father and from below byhis younger brother. Seemingly pushed aside, Jack mirrors his father’s rage; “I’m more like you than her,” he tells him.

The film plays as the attempt to make sense of the younger brother’s premature death: its first words are “Brother,” “Mother.” It is an act of mourning, a retrieval of lost time in response to the lost brother’s words, “Find me.” The path of bereavement takes the movie first to a consideration of the act of creation, showing the formation of the universe and the development of life on earth. Later, creativity proves equally central to the family drama. The younger brother has the mother’s amiable openness, but has also inherited the bad father’s gift for music, as well as an aptitude for art. Meanwhile Jack can only scowl on, excluded and envying.

It is a measure of the film’s complexity that the father should be the villain of the piece and yet also belong to the life-affirming realm of music. True, he stands for a corporate America, a figure strutting among monumental industrial buildings. The mother suggests that the only way to be happy is to love, while the father affirms a life of competition, the petty struggle of getting ahead. Yet the son too inhabits a world out of human scale ” moving among skyscrapers, rooms with ceilings some hundred feet high; even the flat he shares with his wife looks rented, empty, and too large.

The film’s juxtaposition of the Big Bang and a boy’s life in Waco, Texas, has led some to think of it as mixed-up. In many ways, it joins contrasting possibilities, uniting the tyranny of thesuburban father with a God who allows suffering. Similarly the voiceovers address a “you” that might equally be God, the mother, the dead brother or son. Yet the movie turns onthe concept of scale that such comparisons inevitably invoke. It draws into one frame both the universal and the concealed world of the child. The “tree of life” both refers to Genesis and suggests the interconnectedness of things ” our lives as part of greater forces in motion. God is in the details, not merely on the vast level of the cosmos but in the smallest gesture. Malick renders the brutal intimacies of childhood, that odd mixture of threat and affection that marks the friendships of boys. Having shot off his brother’s finger-tip with an air-rifle, Jack tries to make it up by kissing his arm; following each kiss, his brother wipes away its trace.

The film suggests an absolute divergence between those who choose the way of nature and those who choose the way of grace. But how can amovie, with its commitment to the literal surface of things, hope to show the path of grace? Reaching for the truth, art-house cinema oftendoes so through an attentive stillness. In his later films, Malick’s approach is quite other; he offers a restless eye, glancing and moving on, intrigued, flitting, American. Things exist in motion, the movie creating a field for another reality. Malick’s camera does not so much point its lens at an event and film it, as become an observer in the scene, moving in the space, catching the perspective of a participant. Yet it is hardly a realist picture: the fey shot of mum literally dancing on air recalls the mother wholevitates in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror .

Elsewhere the simple look of the film stuns us: there are swirling lights and colours representing . . . what? Who knows, but still the camera lingers over grand moments of natural form, the flocks of birds weaving like cloth against a city skyline, enormous fire, ascending clouds, the light shining in darkness. The evolutionary sequence presents a world of turmoil and tumult, creation as an act of turbulent power; at such moments, creation looks like a process of sublime destruction. But at other times, the film quietly places before us an everyday miracle: the magic of a child climbing a staircase for the first time, the serious abstractedness of a baby.

The ultimate effect of all this is that your take on the world does expand. Leaving the cinema at 10 o’clock, I found myself staring up at the high clouds scudding across the still day-lit sky above brutal Rotterdam. Without Malick’s film, would I have taken that look? For a brief instant it was as though the movie had expanded outwards into the city, that it had altered my way of seeing things. That Malick continues to make such films has to be a wonderful thing.

The Tree of Life will be on general release next week.

By Doug Roberson

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

CEDARTOWN – Around 7 a.m. Monday, as the sky starts to lighten in Midtown, the bright yellow wheelchair should crest the final hill of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race.

Krige Schabort, wearing a yellow helmet and a blue jersey, will point his modern-day chariot to the finish line and ask his shoulders, triceps, forearms and abs to give him a little bit more in hopes of winning the Peachtree for the fourth time.

Schabort, 47, has lived half his life without his legs, the result of a missile strike in Angola when Schabort was a corporal in the South African army.

He began racing a year later and has won dozens of races of different lengths and varieties, including Thursday’s Cedartown 5K, a warm-up for the Peachtree and a race that wouldn’t exist if he hadn’t moved there in 1998 so his wife could continue her work as an occupational therapist.

Schabort now is considered a godfather of wheelchair athletes, one who has provided advice to dozens of up-and-coming racers. Though not as fast as he once was, he will rely on his experience to beat those whom he has helped in the race.

Sitting at his cozy home while two of his three kids play outside on a tree-lined street in Cedartown, Schabort says this isn’t how he imagined his life would be growing up as a surfer and a top-of-the-class student near Cape Town. However, losing his legs has provided him opportunities that he dreamed about, but never thought possible.

“I don’t want to change the tide,” Schabort said in his Afrikaan accent. “I have the most fantastic family life. I’m a stay-at-home dad. I can still compete as an athlete. I have basically a normal life. It’s a lot more exciting than if I would have had legs.”

The accident

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, as the sun beat down on southern Africa, the jets flew overhead.

Schabort was roasting a chicken on a spit. He looked up into the sky, but didn’t give the fighter planes much thought. They flew by constantly. It was Nov. 7, 1987.

He had been called up from reserve duty in the South African army in a war with Russian-backed communists in Angola on the western coast of the continent. Schabort, an engineering student before his call-up, volunteered to go into the country to make maps of a base the army captured.

As the chicken continued to cook, Schabort thought about the jets again. They flew from South Africa north every morning. He wasn’t used to seeing them going the other way at such a high altitude.

The jets turned and came in over the treetops. They were Russian MiGs. “By the time they were over us, it was so quick, the sound hits you,” he said.

They dropped their bombs on the base. One landed a few yards from Schabort, blowing him backward.

When he came to, he looked over and saw the hole left in the ground by the bomb.

He looked down at his legs, which were twisted in unnatural angles. A piece of his heel, sandal still attached, lay on his chest. He brushed it aside.

“I knew I was in trouble,” he said.

He could smell burned flesh. The odor still comes to him.

His friends called for a doctor, not knowing that the outfit’s only one had gone on patrol that morning. Medics arrived and attached some IVs, but didn’t touch his wounds.

They stood over him and read Psalm 23. But he wasn’t ready to die. He prayed.

A captain recognized that Schabort had a chance. Helicopters were on the way, but he told Schabort he had to take him to a safe landing zone. They put him in a sheet and dumped him onto an Angolan flatbed truck loaded with ammunition.

“MiGs!” someone shouted.

The jets had returned. Everyone ran away from the truck, leaving Schabort by himself.

He prayed for the second time.

The jets flew past.

Because landmines were everywhere, the truck carrying Schabort drove helter-skelter beside the roads to the landing zone.

The blood loss and the rough ride caused him to drift in and out of consciousness.

They reached the landing zone around twilight and doctors went to work. They secured him enough to make the flight to a military hospital in Pretoria.

He woke a few days later. Both legs were amputated at the thigh. His left index finger also was removed. The force of the bomb ripped open a hole in his stomach that wasn’t initially diagnosed.

“I was in bad shape,” Schabort said.

But he was alive.

The recovery

Sometime in April, nearly six months after the attack, Schabort walked out of the hospital using prosthetic limbs.

He had promised himself he would walk, not ride.

A year after returning to his parents’ home and re-enrolling in school, he realized the prosthetic legs weren’t going to work well as he tried to resume a normal life. He went back to the hospital wheelchair, using it to compete in 3K and 5K events. He joined a club for wheelchair athletes and began playing basketball and competing in other track and field events, which he had done during rehab.

The next goal was to find a racing chair. “I just wanted to go and ride,” he said.

He purchased a homemade chair. The next day he drove 1,000 kilometers to compete in his first marathon.

The chair’s wheels were wiggly. A sandstorm blew skin-ripping granules into uncomfortable places. The hard back of the chair caused other issues. He didn’t have gloves, and his hands were covered in blisters.

Schabort finished and swore he was done with long races.

He wasn’t about to give up that easily, however, not after working so hard. “You quickly forget about the pains and struggles and work on things,” he said.

Schabort set a goal of competing in the Summer Paralympic Games in Barcelona in 1992. To make it, he knew he needed more experience. He left school and home in May and went to Europe to compete – and learn – from the experienced riders.

Staying in youth hostels and with friends because he didn’t have money or a sponsor, he began to compete. Just before a marathon in Berlin in September, a sponsor stepped up.

“That whole trip then made sense for me,” he said. “All the experience I gained was leaps and bounds compared to staying in South Africa.”

He finished among the top 10 in Berlin, which secured him a spot in the biggest wheelchair marathon race, held in Japan. Competing against 400 athletes, he finished third.

He later qualified for Barcelona, where he finished third in the marathon.

“From Japan, my career took off,” he said. “To me, it was a point of now I’m going to race professionally.”

The now

Schabort’s life isn’t what he thought it would be. It’s better.

He dreamed of surfing in Hawaii. With legs, he didn’t think he’d ever go. Without legs, he has been 11 times. He even rented a board and bodysurfed.

He has helped many others learn to compete as athletes. He taught Kenny Herriot, a Scottish racer, how to construct his first pair of gloves, which are invaluable to wheelchair athletes. He and Herriot are best friends, with Herriot spending as much as five months a year in Cedartown to train with Schabort. He has given tips on road racing to Tatyana McFadden, last year’s Peachtree winner who finished second Thursday in Cedartown.

Early Monday morning, as the sky starts to lighten in Midtown, Schabort hopes to be the first to cross the finish line of the Peachtree Road Race in his yellow wheelchair.

His life isn’t what he thought it would be. It’s better.

“I’m Krieg. I don’t have legs,” he said. “This is part of my identity. If I think back now, if I had legs, I can’t think of what I would be, what I would have done.”

Melbourne, NSW (PRWEB) July 02, 2011

Kia Motors Australia has taken a break from manufacturing new cars to partner with internationally-lauded driver training organisation, Motorvation, in providing young Australian drivers with the best possible start to a safe driving experience.

Through Kia Young Drivers (KYDz) the program has been taken to select Victorian school students for the past two years, introducing learner-age and P-Plate drivers to a concept of a safe and sensible life behind the wheel.

This year through an increase in sponsorship support, an adoption of highly-sophisticated simulator teaching technology and a change of corporate name the young driver program will reach more than 4000 young drivers in Victoria and NSW under the Kia Motorvation banner.

The Mobile Training Centre will bring a pair of high-technology simulators, complete with realistic hydraulic movement, to a variety of centres and give the students “real world” experience through bespoke software scenarios.

“There is nothing more important than our children and their safety,” Kia Motors Australia President and CEO Mr M.K Kim said. “They are the future and to help best prepare them for a safe and rewarding time as motorists is something Kia Motors Australia is proud and pleased to be associated with.”

Through the support of the program’s sponsors the training is offered to schools at a below- cost rate to ensure the benefits are available to all education outlets that want to be involved.

“Motorvation is excited to be increasing our involvement with Kia Australia to improve safety outcomes for young drivers,” Kia Motorvation co-principal and chief instructor, Geoff Fickling, said. “It is wonderful to work with a company so committed to road safety, and making the program mobile increases our ability to reach more young people who could not otherwise access such world-class training.

“The Kia Motorvation Program is a life-changing, enjoyable, and essential one-day course for young drivers. It is suitable for pre-learners, learner drivers and P-Plate drivers – in fact, anyone aged between 16 and 25 years, the most risky time for any driver. It is not about learning how to drive nor how to become super skilled.”

During the course professional and entertaining presenters provide a combination of focussed discussion and hands-on driving, guiding young drivers to understand that driving is a function of two parts: their attitude or driving behaviour, and their action or skills and knowledge.

” Kia Motorvation does not seek to increase skills, but focuses mainly on achieving an awareness of thoughts about driving that are often unconscious, and using this new awareness to completely change driving behaviour, therefore removing dangerous behaviours or habits,” Mr Fickling said. “If you don’t understand how you think, you can’t change what you do.”
The course also provides tuition in how to avoid or deal with the ‘One-Percenters’ – emergency situations that can happen to even the most careful driver.

“Motorvate exists only to create safer drivers and reduce crash risk, and we welcome independent research of our training,” Mr Fickling said. “Extreme care is taken to avoid creating a false sense of overconfidence in young drivers during the hands-on driving component.
“In fact, the opposite is achieved for already over-confident drivers through a combination of teaching methodologies, evaluation, and experienced supervision.

“The Kia Motorvation program is not a defensive, advanced or learn-to-drive program. It is a unique system of understanding drivers’ attitude and action.”

For the original version on PRWeb visit: www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2011/7/prweb8613154.htm

Haynes’s essay was not published in his lifetime, but he was part of a bigger social and political movement, and other similar uses of the phrase did see print. In a sermon given in 1778, a white antislavery minister from Hanover, N.J., asked his listeners and later his readers “if ’tis self-evident, i.e. so clear that it needs not proof, how unjust, how inhuman, for Britons, or Americans, not only to attempt, but actually to violate this right?” That same year, a Quaker from Pennsylvania named Anthony Benezet suggested that a nation that made the public declarations of equality and rights present in the Declaration while simultaneously supporting slavery risked divine punishment during wartime. In 1783, David Cooper of New Jersey published an address directed to “the Rulers of America” in the Continental Congress on the inconsistency of slavery in a land of liberty, using the second paragraph of the Declaration to hold them to account. Could Congress, he asked, have truly meant only “the rights of whitemen” and not of “all men”?

Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, Calif., has been teaching students how to adapt to life with an animal at their side since World War II.

The training process lasts about a month, and recently, about half-dozen blind students were preparing for their second class. Some are here for the first time and have to learn everything from scratch, like how to put on that harness. The school serves about 300 people a year.

Training supervisor Adam Waskow helps them get started and shows one client ” what students are called here ” how to slip on the harness. The dogs and humans are just getting to know each other.

It’s a pretty intimate relationship. They sleep in the same room in the dorm and spend most of each day working together on the streets of San Rafael.

This area was rural when Guide Dogs moved here after the World War II. Now it’s part of the leafy suburbs that stretch north of San Francisco.

The trainees pile into a bus that takes them into downtown San Rafael, which offers a real urban environment in a small town setting. The school was founded to help returning vets deal with blindness, and it’s still serving that role today.

Learning To Be Equal Partners

Mark Schrand of Mesa, Ariz., rides the bus with his new dog, Chester. Schrand lost his eyesight after his transportation unit was hit by an IED attack in Iraq.

Schrand says he had a long time to think about whether to get a guide dog. “It was something I really had to think about because I gradually started losing my vision,” he says. Schrand had developed good skills with a cane before switching to a dog.

When they get downtown and hit the streets, the students work one on one with a trainer.

“Forward” Schrand tells Chester. It’s a word Schrand will use often in the years they spend together. Schrand and Chester are equal partners, learning to communicate through a new language.

Nearby, another client tells a dog to cross the street. But the dog stops short because a car is coming.

Trainer Waskow explains this is an example of “intelligent disobedience.” The dog disobeys a command because it senses danger.

“That, in essence, is difference between a guide dog and any other service dog. The guide dogs are actually making decisions based on safety and the greater good of the team,” Waskow says.

This process is exhilarating for former cane users accustomed to walking by feel. “I don’t think anyone really forgets their first walk with their first dog,” says Natalie Martinello, 26. “Especially if you’ve never used a dog before, it’s so fast. And so you kind of feel like you’re running after them.”

Martinello is learning to work with a yellow lab named Almanor, after Sherbet, her first animal, retired.

Learning to work with a dog is a big adjustment at any age. Many of the students here have developed blindness in middle age ” through diabetes or macular degeneration. The switch is eased by all the help they get. Clients pay nothing for training or for the month spent living here.

But the client does owe something in return, says Guide Dogs Acting President Morgan Watkins. “These dogs are 100 percent dependent on us for their love and care and feeding. Your partnership, that camaraderie, that bond, has to be very strong,” he says.

People who make the shift to a dog say that it frees up their senses. They can smell the coffee again, without the need to worry about basics, like crossing the street.

The wedding planning is complete. It’s been months of details, meetings and decisions all leading up to the big day. Before you turn in your wedding planner tools, there’s one more event to add — the bachelorette party.

Who says guys get to have all the fun? While bachelor parties have been traditional pre-wedding events for years, bachelorette parties are a fairly recent event. While the standard bachelor party is looked as “the last night of freedom”, women tend to view a bachelorette party as a time of bonding with her friends before taking on her new role as wife.

The bachelorette party is as unique as the bride and has far less traditional activities than the bachelor party. Here are a few options to look at when planning a bachelorette party.

Girls Night Out

One tried and true bachelorette party favorite is a night out a favorite night club. Rent a limo for the evening, have a nice dinner out and then head to the local hotspot or the bride’s favorite night club.

To add a special bachelorette party touch to the evening, accessorize the bride so she will draw attention everywhere she goes. For example, have the bride wear a tiara or a veil, the bigger and tackier the better. If the traditional veil is a little to boring for the bride, a more risqu option would be to handcuff her to a blow up doll for the evening.

Depending on the group, spend the night clubbing and crawl home in the wee hours of the morning, or for a tamer crowd, enjoy a night club or two and then wrap the evening up with coffee and dessert on the way home.

Girls Going Wild

For the woman who wants to celebrate her last night of freedom in a more traditional bachelor party manner, there are exotic dancers who “strip” at private parties, as well as adult night clubs to fill this void. If hiring an exotic dancer be clear about exactly how “exotic” you’d like him to be and give the agency the “type” you are looking for. Do you want a business man to strip down to briefs or a fire fighter stripping down to the tiniest thong you’ve every seen in your entire life?

Pole Dance Lessons

Pole dancing and exotic dance are all the rage. Have a private group lesson with a professional dancer either in their studio or in your home. Follow up your lesson with snacks and drinks to replace all those calories you burnt off during class.

An Afternoon at the Spa

Spa day is a perfect bachelorette party activity and a much deserve retreat. Enjoy a massage, pedicure, facial or other spa treatment. Most spas have a signature treatment, which is an especially nice gift for the bride. When making the group reservation, let the manager know about the bachelorette party and ask if they have any recommendations or special packages available.

Wedding planning can be stressful, so make sure to plan a little quality time with your girlfriends to celebrate and unwind. The bachelorette party is perfect excuse for everyone to get together to reminisce about the good old days while sharing a special time with the bride-to-be.

About the Author:

By: Amber Coco

Amber Coco is a professional event planner with over 15 years experience planning parties and events. For more information on www.hostingtheperfectparty.com/bachelorette-party-planning/“>bachelorette party planning or to sign up a free “Hosting the Perfect Party” mini-course, visit www.hostingtheperfectparty.com.