Pamela Bordisso e-mailed me this week to let me know that Frank Turdici, a former teacher of the year with the Konocti Unified School District, is returning to art instruction at Yuba Community College”s Clear Lake Campus.
Konocti honored Turdici as its Teacher of the Year in May 2006; he retired that same year from Konocti after teaching for 22 years.
Bordisso reported that Turdici has been an art instructor for more than 30 years, teaching at Lower Lake High School, Yuba College and California State University Chico. He resumes teaching this fall at the Clear Lake Campus with art appreciation and print-making classes.
Art appreciation will encompass historical and contemporary with a multicultural focus. “I guarantee the student will look at art differently after taking this class,” Turdici is promising.
At art, and perhaps also at life.
Wilson Quarterly magazine (Summer 2008) presents a case for the importance of the humanities (www.wilsoncenter.org). The humanities, which include the arts, “instruct us in the range and depth of human possibility,” they “nourish and sustain our shared memories.”
Or consider the words of Jim Lyle, our first Lake County poet laureate: “In 50 years, teenagers will not recognize most of the names of today”s world leaders. In 100 years, our current wars, periods of peace, triumphs and catastrophes will be mere lines in a textbook. In 200 years, history will be understood only as explained and illuminated by the arts. In 500 years, our only history will be the arts.”
Our Toastmasters group in Lakeport had a “Shakespeare”-themed meeting this week. It fit right in with Lyle”s timeline. Any familiarity I have with daily life in Elizabethan England has been experienced through the filter of books, movies and television, or selectively explored in a reenactment group.
But William Shakespeare”s plays continue independent of the playwright”s time, with new casts and new directors interacting with his plays in ways that make them as fresh and as relevant to theater-goers today as Shakespeare was writing for his audience.
My mother once drove us to Healdsburg to catch an Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of “The Taming of the Shrew.” A single image dominates my memory of that performance: Katerina hurling an apple over the partition of the stage.
Years later, I saw the play in OSF”s outdoor theater. With a brand-new cast, led by a new director, it was like seeing a different play.
That early trip to Healdsburg, however, was extra special for me ? even though I subsequently traveled even farther to attend OSF.
My mother obviously cared about arranging to see that lavish touring performance. Traveling distances seem so great as a child and then seeing the production onstage opened new horizons for me.
So I can share the sense of celebration in which Bordisso e-mailed me. From everything I”ve heard about him, Turdici has been opening horizons through his 30-plus years of teaching art — and he will very soon be opening more horizons.
Classes at the Clear Lake Campus start Monday, Aug. 18. Look for course schedules in the community or download a schedule online from www.yccd.edu/soc/index.html. Adobe Reader software, available free of charge, is needed to view the document.
For more information about registering at Yuba Community College”s Clear Lake Campus, call 995-7900.
Contact Cynthia Parkhill at cparkhill@clearlakeobserver.com.
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