Ric Jacobson is the Des Moines Rotarian in charge of lining up the largest line-up of wineries – 25 – in the six year history of the Poverty Bay Wine Festival, which is coming to the Landmark Event Center in Des Moines on March 6th and 7th.

Ric reports that the following Northwest wineries will be at the festival on Saturday and Sunday to serve the guests. If you taste a wine you want to take home, bottles will be for sale at the event. All proceeds of the sale of wine will go directly to the Rotary Club of Des Moines, who use the funds for the many great things they do for the community.

The following wineries will be in attendance for the event:

• Canyon’s Edge
• Chandler Reach
• Covington Cellars – NEW
• Coyote Canyon Winery – NEW
• Burien’s own E.B. Foote Winery (WLB Advertiser)
• Eaton Hill
• Erin Glenn
• Fall Line
• Five Star Cellars
• Fort Walla Walla Cellars – NEW
• Kestrel – NEW
• Knipprath – NEW
• Masset Winery
• Otis Kenyon
• Page Cellars
• Pondera – NEW
• Sleeping Dog
• Sodo Vino – NEW
• Stina’s Cellar
• Two Vintners – NEW
• Vashon Winery
• Vin du Lac – NEW
• Waving Tree
• Willis Hall
• Windy Point

Des Moines Rotarian, Dave Loft, in charge of food and goodies at the Poverty Bay Wine Festival has lined up the “best of the best” for food and snacks for wine-fest guests:

• Des Moines’ Anthony’s HomePort
• Des Moines’ Salty’s at Redondo
• Charley’s on Central Avenue in Kent
• Cafe Pacific Catering
• Forte Chocolates
• Kauzlarich Smoked Products
• Panera Bread
• Poverty Bay Coffee
• Waters to go
• Redondo Fred Meyer
• Archery Bistro
• Elliot Bay Brewery

The sixth annual Poverty Bay Wine Festival is surely the hottest ticket in town – well lots of towns, surrounding Des Moines. Your ticket includes fun, music, wine, food and even beer, all presented in the historic and magnificent Landmark Event Center (aka Landmark on the Sound), which is located at 23660 Marine View Drive South in Des Moines.

Tickets for the event are just $20 in advance from CorkyCellars (206-824-9462), Des Moines Drug or your local Des Moines Rotarian.

Parking and free shuttles will be available in the South Marina Parking lot.

All attendees must be 21 years of age and photo ID is required.

Click here for more information.

Normandy Park’s first-ever Winter Festival will be held this Saturday, Dec. 12th, from 11am to 4pm at the Normandy park Towne Center (located at 200th & 1st Ave South).

From their poster (download/view PDF here):

Join us at the first Normandy Park Winter Festival in Towne Square (1st Avenue at 200th) for holiday fun.

A free family event with over a dozen kids’ activities including Santa photos (bring your pets, too!), face painting, cookie decorating, Rockie the Police Dog, karaoke and caroling, and performances by Melanie’s Dancers.

Give back. Bring an item for the “Stuff the Trailer” senior gift drive or a food bank donation, and receive a free cocoa, cider or coffee at the Little League Trailer.

Support your local Normandy Park businesses. Raffles every half hour. Win prizes and gift certificates, receive discount coupons, and shop for hand-made gifts from local artists.

Raffle Sponsors:

• Archery Bistro
• Optimal Health Chiropractic
• SkySoles Reflexology
• Benson’s Best Bites
• Richard Steppic Wood Turning
• Emerald City Smoothie
• Companion Animal Medical Center
• Starbucks

Special thanks for generous sponsorship by:

• Normandy Park Senior Living
• Highline Little League
• Melanie’s Dance Unlimited

City of Normandy Park Arts Commission

The Highline Historical Society is holding an online auction fundraiser, which runs until Tuesday, Dec. 15th, and offers local restaurants, foods, trips and unusual experiences – all perfect gifts for the holidays, all the while supporting a great local cause.

You can access the auction here:

www.highlinehistory.cmarket.com.

Proceeds from the auction will benefit the ongoing programs and activities of the Society, including their capital building campaign for the new Highline Heritage Museum on their property in “Old Burien.”

“We cannot thank our local vendors enough for their participation. I encourage everyone to take a look at the website and support the Society by bidding on something fun for the holidays,” said Terry Anderson, Society President.

The new Highline Heritage Museum, designed by Rohleder Borges Architects, will be located on the Southwest corner of SW 152nd Street and Ambaum Blvd. SW, where Karuna Yoga Arts is currently housed.

The online auction is hosted by cMarket, which is the country’s leading provider of non-profit online auction services. On any day there are as many as 200 cMarket auctions underway online nationwide. With their secure servers and a growing number of community-minded vendors, more and more shoppers are finding that this is an excellent way to shop close to home for the holidays and to also assist a worthwhile local charity.

by Mark Neuman

We sat down recently for a talk with King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg.

Dan joked while recollecting his days playing both offense and defense for Highline High School’s football team in the late 1970’s.

“We were a small team, but we were slow.”

The Pirates won, perhaps, four games during the three years Dan was there.

“But really, I have to say that learning to lose and learning to do so with some grace and class is part of learning to live,” he said. “I think I may have learned more by being on a losing team than I would have being on a state championship team.”

Dan went on to the University of Washington for his BA in Political Science and a law degree.

“My favorite professor in law school was the one that scared me the most. His name was Arval Morris, a constitutional law professor. He was an intellectual giant,” Dan said. “I was in awe of him because of his ability to analyze and his depth of knowledge.

“He taught us so much about constitutional law and the rules of criminal law and how the government interacts with its citizens. The contract between government and citizens is the Constitution.

“It’s a fascinating area because we continue to define what we mean by that contract. The Constitution is a living, breathing document in my office because we look at Fourth and Fifth and Sixth Amendment issues every day as we analyze cases.

“I love the law, and I see those years in law school as formative years,” Dan added. “The prosecutor has a significant role in moving law in new directions. A prosecutor can actually direct traffic.”

JUVENILES WITH GUNS
One area where Dan is directing traffic deals with attempting to separate kids from gang activity before they fire a weapon in commission of a crime.

“You would think that when a 16 or 17 year-old youth is caught with a handgun that we would bring to bear all of our resources because this is a giant red flag. ‘We better pay attention to this kid,’” Dan said. “But the truth is that current state law builds in a tolerance where literally nothing happens until (there are) five felony convictions.

“And only then the kid, by law, would go to a Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration facility, let’s say Echo Glen, for a period of time.

“So the message that we send to a kid is that gun possession is not a big deal.”

Dan Satterberg and The State Prosecutors Association want to change that. They are pressing the Washington State Legislature to make changes to the law during the upcoming legislative session such that a juvenile found in illegal possession of a handgun will “get an immediate response from the system. We don’t wait. The kid gets removed from the community and put into Echo Glen,” he said.

“And while there the juvenile can get help with tried and true programs such as Moral Recognition Therapy which helps him understand his options and the potential consequences of his future actions.”

CANINE COMPANION PROGRAM
Dan spoke about the relatively new Canine Companion Program which involves having a dog in the courthouse to help calm the nerves of those going through the legal process.

“We have a dog in our office. Her name is Ellie, a six year-old Golden Lab. Ellie’s full time job is to come in and lay on the floor and look up at you with doe eyes. She puts kids at ease. We use her with our elder abuse cases as well.

“Once we got Ellie on board we realized this is an essential part of what we need to do to put witnesses and victims at ease. We have a lot of children who come into our office to talk about sexual abuse that happened to them or some scary moment, and when they see the dog all of a sudden everything’s okay. And they want to come back to see Ellie again.

“We even bring the dog up to drug court. Ellie will put her head in the lap of someone who may be heading to prison because they screwed up.

“Ellie doesn’t discriminate. Ellie loves everybody.”

NORM MALENG AND THE JOB OF PROSECUTOR
The duties of King County Prosecutor involve overseeing a staff of about 500, including 220 attorneys. The Office of the Prosecutor has an annual budget of $56 million.

Those duties fell on Dan’s shoulders quite unexpectedly in the spring of 2007 when long time Prosecutor Norm Maleng died suddenly at the age of 68.

Dan was appointed by the King County Council to serve as prosecutor and subsequently won election to serve the remainder of the full term.

“It was a great honor for me to work with Norm Maleng for 17 years. I was just 29-years old when he selected me to be his chief of staff.

“What I learned from Norm was not so much about the law as about life in general. I started with him shortly after he’d lost his daughter in a tragic sledding accident. So he was in many stages of grief and I learned an awful lot about dealing with people in grief.

“One of the things that he taught me was that every one of the thousands of felony cases we deal with involves a human tragedy, a story of someone’s hurt or loss or suffering.

“Norm would always start out a meeting with a homicide victim’s family by reaching out and saying how sorry he was that this happened to their family. He would say ‘Tell me about your son or daughter.’ To make that case and that person alive. The case wasn’t just a file full of papers.

“I try to keep that practice alive. What makes this job so meaningful is the ability to reach out and talk to victims and their families.”

THE FAMILY AND THE BAND
Dan and his wife, Linda, have two children and live in Normandy Park.

When he finds the time, Dan loves rocking out with his pals in their band The Approximations. Here’s info from their website:

Organized by bass player and singer Dan Satterberg (aka the King County Prosecutor), the band includes harmonica player and vocalist Bill Mattocks leader of the Bill Mattocks Band, keyboardist and vocalist Michael Hepburn from the nationally known 80’s R&B group Pleasure; drummer and vocalist Rusty Fallis, guitarist Tom Pratt, guitarist and vocalist John Rankin, percussionist and drummer Fred Staples, vocalists Linda Norman and Michelle Purnell-Hepburn. Tom, Rusty, Dan and John also play and record original songs as the Treehouse Dreamers. With such a large band and wide array of musical backgrounds, the Approximations are likely to play songs by Smokey Robinson, the Beatles, AC/DC, Savoy Brown, Stevie Wonder, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Fleetwood Mac and Kings of Leon all in the same set.

The Approximations have played their full, multi-faceted, danceable rock sets in Seattle venues such as the Showbox, Showbox Sodo, Mountaineers Club, and the Highway 99 Blues Club entertaining for private functions, special occasions, and benefits for the Domestic Violence Coalition, and the American Cancer society among others.

The band’s website is here, and you can view videos of the band in action here.

You can catch The Approximations at Mick Kelly’s Irish Pub (located at 435 SW 152nd Street in Burien), this Friday night, Sept. 18th:

by Janet Grella

Everyone who knows me knows that I’m studying Italian and that I love all things Italian. So when I heard that native Italian artist Maria Grazia Repetto had moved to the area, I just had to meet her and hopefully talk a little Italiano with her.

My husband Michael joined us for dinner at Osteria da Primo, where Carlo and Lindsay made a fellow Italiana feel welcomed. Fortunately Michael was with us, as he served as translator part of the evening (my Italiano has barely made it past Buona Serra, Bongiorno Buona Notte and Ciao!).

Having just returned from two years of painting frescoes for homeowners and businesses in Arizona, Maria settled with a friend in Normandy Park. She joined us for dinner on a recent Tuesday night.

Her journey to our area began 12 years ago when she visited her college-aged son in Seattle. She loved the lushness, beauty and summer weather here.

“I could live here,” she thought.

So she went back to Milano, collected her 12-year old son, procured a visa and moved to Seattle. She spoke no English, and relied on connections with Italian speakers and her young sons to help her open a shop, begin a business and began working her art. Maria Grazia’s training is in the fine work of murals, frescoes, reliefs, stuccoes, oils on canvas, acrylics, watercolors, sketches and portraits. She quickly found herself accepting commissions in Seattle, and soon Boca Raton, and finally Arizona.

One of her fondest memories of a commissioned fresco was with Hedges Winery in Richland.

“I painted a beautiful view of the red mountains with vineyards and orchards and gold colored soft rounded hills of the desert,” she said. “It was painted in a private apartment above the chateau and can be seen by invitation only.”

She spent four months alone in the chateau, “creating, creating and creating.”

“It is sometimes very lonely when you paint frescoes,” Maria Grazia told BTB over prosciutto e melone and carcioffi fritti at Primo.

Another totally modern fresco (which she prefers over rennaisance style) was “The Tower” which includes a partial view of Qwest Field in the background (see photo at left).

Here’s a video showing her in action, along with the progression of her work on “The Tower“:

“It looks completely weird, and I love it.”

She added that she was taught the art of fresco with a ‘modern’ take.

Maria Garcia proudly told us that every woman in her family is an artist, including her mother and sister who live in Italy, a sister in Brazil and another sister in France, plus two nieces. I guess you could call them the “Painting Repetto Women.”

Maria Grazia began the study of frescoes when she was 15.

“At the time I was studying, women were only expected to become secretaries, maids, shopworkers or wives and mothers” (can we infer, like many women of a certain age, Maria Grazia became a feminist?).

After our double espresso and sorbet de limone we did a passegiatta (walk about) of Burien and B/ IAS. Maria Grazia found our notorius ‘naked woman‘ sculpture “very beautiful and it looks like a real woman.” On the other hand, like many Burien-ites she is still trying to figure out ‘The Passage’ and the torn up grounds around it.

Her young sons are now grown into young men, aged 35 and 25 respectfully. Her oldest is with the FAA and his wife is a pilot for Horizon Airlines. Her youngest just graduated from the UW in Physics.

What’s next for our new resident italiana artist? She is shopping for a studio in the area.

“The medium I prefer is olio (oils). But I can’t do olio at home due to the smell.”

She’s currently working in acrylics in her Normandy Park home.

Here are some more videos that showcase her work:

To find out more about Maria Grazia Repetto and see her masterpieces click here.

The City of Normandy Park’s 2009 summer concert series “Music In The Park” begins Sunday July 19th with indie folk rocker Damien Jurado, from 5pm-6:30pm at Marvista Park, which is located at 200th and 4th Ave SW.

In addition to FREE music, there will also be free iced coffee from Starbucks and smoothie samples from Emerald City Smoothie.

Here’s the poster, which includes the schedule:

Here’s a video of Damien Jurado to whet your musical appetite:

The City of Normandy Park’s Annual Arts Festival will be held this weekend, Saturday, June 6th and Sunday, June 7th, from 10am to 4pm at the NP city hall, located at 801 SW 174th Street (map below).

Here are the details:

WHAT: The City of Normandy Park’s Arts Festival

WHEN: Saturday, June 6th and Sunday, June 7th from 10am-4pm

WHERE: Normandy Park City Hall, located at 801 SW 174th Street

INFO: This is a wonderful time for everyone in the community to enjoy viewing the talent of local artists, participate in the annual Walk-In-The-Park, or to just kick back and listen to the sounds of live music.

• JURIED ART SHOW

The juried show is open to amateur’s and professionals. Awards are given in both categories. For those who are new to the art experience, the City offers art classes throughout the year. These classes can prepare you for our annual Art Show. See the Fine Arts Program Flyer for details (Search FAP).

• ARTS AND CRAFTS FAIR

An opportunity to sell or purchase original art work and crafts.

• ENTERTAINMENT

Live music throughout the day. Performers include various local youth groups.

View Larger Map

The Highline Historical Society will be holding a Garden Tour on Saturday, June 13th from 10am to 5pm, where people can visit gardens in Normandy Park, SeaTac and Burien.

Here are the details:

WHAT: Highline Historical Society Garden Tour

WHEN: Saturday, June 13th from 10am to 5pm

WHERE: Various gardens in the area, including Seike Garden

COST: $12 per person for groups of four or more; $15 advance purchase, $18 day of tour. Please mail check with name, address, phone, email and # of tickets requested to:

PO Box 317
Seahurst, WA 98062

Or charge via VISA or MasterCard by calling 206-241-5786.

INFO: The Highline Historical Society presents a visit to our neighborhoods for a day of gardening inspiration.

Highline Historical Society invites you to visit our neighborhoods for a day of gardening inspiration. Visit lovely gardens in Normandy Park, SeaTac and Burien, where you will be treated to music and artists-in-action. Visiit the Seike Garden at Highline/SeaTac Botanical Garden, talk with a Master Gardener, attend Marianne Binetti’s program and learn about creating your own show garden.

Music program of “artists in action” by Marianne Binetti.

Special sponsor drawings for gardening gifts.

“The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied.” – Vita Sackville-West, 1892 – 1962 .

The City of Normandy Park’s Arts Festival is coming up June 6th and 7th, and they’re looking for local artists to submit artwork for their annual juried show at their City Hall.

They will also provide an area for artists to sell their handmade artwork and crafts and are seeking additional artists to be vendors.

The deadline for application is May 15th, and those interested in participating as an Artist, Vendor, or Volunteer should contact the Normandy Park Arts Commission at artscomm@ci.normandy-park.wa.us. The 2009 Entry Forms are now available.

This will be a wonderful time for everyone in the community to enjoy viewing the talent of local artists, participate in the annual Walk-In-The-Park, or to just kick back and listen to the sounds of live music.

Some of the events at this arts festival will include:

• JURIED ART SHOW
  The juried show is open to amateur’s and professionals. Awards are given in both categories. For those who are new to the art experience, the City offers art classes throughout the year. These classes can prepare you for our annual Art Show. See the Fine Arts Program Flyer for details (Search FAP).

• ARTS AND CRAFTS FAIR
  An opportunity to sell or purchase original art work and crafts.

• ENTERTAINMENT
  Live music throughout the day. Performers include various local youth groups.

More information is available at the Normandy Park website.

We just launched a new feature here at the Normandy Park Blog, and we’d love to get both your feedback and your input:

An Events Calendar Page!

If you know of an event we should list, or have feedback on this new page, please email us. We’re always trying to improve this site and make it more functional, and we’re open to any ideas.

Thanks!