The Art of Living Well

Cafe Owner Follows Her Whims

    Julie Baron has a green thumb, an artist’s eye, a knack for bringing people together and a secret for success: Follow your whims. For example, she was filling her basket with produce at a farmers market in Germany 15 years ago, pregnant with her son and married to a man she had met while traveling Europe. “I suddenly thought: I want to go back to America and be a farmer!”
   
    So that’s what she did. What followed was a journey filled with surprises, the upshot of which is Julie’s Coffee & Tea Garden. In the two-plus years since she opened on Park Street, her creation has become an eclectic art- and music-filled gallery space, a community meeting place, a health and herb-lovers’ haven and an Island favorite.

    When Baron returned from Europe with German hubby in tow, her goal was to grow fresh produce. The former photography and art student found a three-acre spread in Occidental, where her Italian great-grandparents had raised chickens, and she got busy planting. She took organic gardening and landscape-design classes and, often with her toddler son strapped to her back, immersed herself in digging and planting. “I really had found my element,” the limber-lipped Baron laughs—as she does often and infectiously.

    The veggies she had envisioned cultivating took root slowly. “But the herbs and flowers grew like weeds for me,” she recalls. She had long been intrigued by the medicinal qualities of herbs and started learning more. “I made bunches of cooking herbs and wreaths and things.” She sold them at farmers markets and started to develop a regular clientele.

    Baron was thinking of branching into herbal teas when folks from her near-neighbors, Taylor Maid Farms in Sebastopol, approached her. “They had their coffee line and wanted to develop a tea line,” she says. “They asked me if I’d do it.” So she joined them.

    After 10 years with Taylor Maid, Baron realized she was missing the one-on-one people-contact she’d loved when working the farmers markets. Also, she had been dating a man who would become husband number two—and he lived in the East Bay. So she thought about opening a tea and coffee shop where she could grow, sell and offer classes on medicinal herbs, and give vent to her artistic talents.

    Searching craigslist, Baron found the spot that would become her dream place. It had housed an Internet gaming store and, before that, a skateboard and ski shop. She went into the venture the way that works best for her—on a whim. “I hadn’t expected to find something so fast. I didn’t do numbers or research.”

    But from the start, it worked—and she continues to reinvent the comfy, homey, colorful space and add attractions. Skateboards and skis have been replaced with one-of-a-kind arts and crafts, many of them locally made and for sale. And while she has free Wi-Fi so you can surf the Internet, she likes it best when people are game to turn off their computers and turn on to real community and conversation.

Opening night for Baron’s annual Halloween-inspired Fashion as Art exhibit (with models) is 7 p.m–9 p.m. Oct. 5.
Julie’s Coffee & Tea Garden, 1223 Park St., (510) 865-2385, www.juliestea.com.

— By Wanda Hennig

About a Band

The Sun Kings

Beatles Cover Band Rocks Alameda
    You’ve seen their name on posters around town, and they seem to show up wherever there is the combo of sunlight, crowds and good times happening—most often at our festivals and street fairs. It’s the Sun Kings, Alameda’s own Beatles tribute band. From the Peanut Butter Jam and Concerts at the Cove to the Park Street Art & Wine Fair, the Sun Kings have reigned supreme over the Island since the group’s inception in 2000.

    The brainchild of local musician Drew Harrison, the Sun Kings also include Michael Barrett and Peter LoMenzo, both Alamedans, plus Bill Zupko and Steve Scarpelli, whose musical and vocal talents round out the sound. No, you didn’t miscount; there are indeed five members of this band.
 
   “As beautiful as John, Paul, George and Ringo were, it’s about their music,” says Harrison, who is the voice of John Lennon in the band and just happens to have a Beatlesque name himself. “And in order to do their music well, we needed five people.” But George Harrison wasn’t his greatest influence.
 
   “Lennon is a pivotal figure in my life, and not just because I’m singing him. His songs and his lyrics were inspirational,” avers Harrison. “His early solo material instilled in my musical sense, for better or worse, a belief in being honest and visceral when writing and recording. Lennon, in my opinion, could enunciate the truth in feeling whatever it was for him, be it love, anger, self-loathing, hope and joy, in three minutes of song. And I admired that.”

    Harrison’s not the only one who feels that way. Audiences love to come out and hear the Sun Kings perform Beatles songs. In fact, the Sun Kings performed in July at the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love in Monterey, where they were tapped to perform the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album in its entirety, with an orchestra. (The album is also celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.) And throngs of fans also turned out to see the band at Concerts at the Cove.

    “It’s nostalgia about our youth. It taps into something—feelings inside people and they want to feel it. People are hungry to feel good,” says Harrison.

For more about the Sun Kings, including where to see them next, visit www.the-sun-kings.com.

"I Am the Walrus"       



—Julia Park


Alameda “Professor” Brings Ancient Fantasies to Life

    Our film is set in the 17th-century Scottish highlands. The locals, dressed in the Pilgrim-style costumes most often seen in elementary school Thanksgiving pageants, are about to burn an innocent young woman at the stake because they are being tormented by one of her ancestors—a witch who was burned a century earlier. Suddenly, a muscular bare-chested man in a loincloth arrives on the scene to rescue the villagers. To save them, he must venture to the depths of hell, strangle a lion and make the witch recant her evil curse.
 
   What is the son of Hercules doing in Scotland? It’s not explained. With production techniques that look like they predate Birth of a Nation (1915), perhaps the scariest thing about Maciste in Hell is that it was actually filmed in 1962. This sword-and-sandal saga is just one of the cinematic “classics” featured in Alameda Television’s Ancient Fantasies series: B movies made in Italy and dubbed eccentrically in English and saved from oblivion—somewhat undeservedly—by Ed Schneider, the producer of Alameda Power & Telecom’s public access channel. Schneider has had a passion for bad movies since he studied film in college. He edits them for “time and viewer sanity,” cleaning up the dirty prints where he can. “I feel sometimes as if I’ve spent more time editing them than [the filmmakers] did when they were originally made,” he says. “They were done very quickly, on very small budgets.”
 
   To put the movies in their proper sociological context, they are introduced by Professor Edison J. Nello, whose delivery is wooden, at best. Nello’s language, though, is alive with hyperbole: “It’s all here—the gelatin-coated colors, the surrealistic surreality, the hallucinatoriness of violent beauty and the endlessly enthralling females contrasted by horrifyingly foul monsters. Oh, the sheer widescreen epicness of it all!”
 
   Tired of endless movie reruns on traditional cable channels? Other B movie series offered by APT include Monster Island Theater, Crime Street and Alameda Drive-In. The movies are shown as double features on Saturday nights on Channel 31.                                         

 —Elisa William


TAKE FIVE with Teddy Tabor

Sweet Spots

1. PARK STREET AT 7 A.M.
    Sometimes on the weekends my husband and I walk down Park Street before the stores open. It’s a really different experience at that time of morning. We love waving or saying hello to the shop owners as they prepare for the day ahead. As we walk, we can smell the coffee brewing from the different coffee shops while we see proprietors sweeping the sidewalks or washingdown tables or windows. It’s the friendliness and the hope for the new day that I love.

2. ALAMEDA MARKET PLACE
    This is a spot where I can one-stop shop and always count on getting what I want. My husband and I are big fish eaters, so we regularly shop at the fish market there. Another staple I get from the grocery store is my morning fix that I can’t live without: Granola No. 621.

3. CROWN BEACH
    Playing on the beach with my 2-year-old granddaughter is definitely a highlight for me. It reminds me of when I did the same thing with my now-16-year-old granddaughter, and before that, my own kids. All of our beaches are magical to me.

4. ACLO INTERNS
    It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan and supporter of ACLO. But besides being proud of our shows, I’m incredibly impressed with our student interns who work extremely hard for very little money. Seeing their discipline and passion as they build sets, load the shows and work backstage is awesome.

5. CARDINAL POINT
    My 85-year-old mother moved into this incredible facility, and it has been the most exciting, wonderful move she’s ever made. She went from getting old to totally getting a new life. The beautiful setting, the opportunities, the people—all lifted her spirits like never before. And after witnessing her positive experience, my in-laws moved in there as well. It’s truly a haven for people of many ages. As my friend Mark Sorensen says, “It’s the cruise ship that never docks.”