Thanksgiving is a special time,

A special time of year —

When gratefulness and awareness

Are close and very near.

There’s joy in those that love us,

Our relative’s and friends.

There’s love and happiness that shows,

From other’s without end.

There is Nature, and the Sun and Stars,

Which are companions too.

There are creatures, pets,

And some we’ve met,

Which give affection due.

From the smallest of the Giving,

To the great of outer form —

There’s much to be thankful for,

Like even being born

The sunlight of the bright clear days,

And then the clouds and rain —

Provide the needed changes

For gratefulness to claim.

And all around us, is so much,

To appreciate and feel —

That Thankfulness is a form of Love,

That reveals the right appeal.

The Celebration of Thanksgiving,

Is reflective in each day —

Where Thankfulness, and Love, and Joy,

Brings Happiness our way.

H. Emmett Finch

This letter is a call for support from the residents and business owners of Malibu. After a modest debut in 1999, the Malibu Film Foundation is presently gearing up for the 2000 Malibu Int’l Film Festival, scheduled to begin Feb. 25, 2000.

The Malibu Int’l Film Festival is good for the city of Malibu. The festival boosts the economy during a time of year when business and traffic are slow. The festival is good for the youth of Malibu, creating a venue to showcase their work and inspiration in the early years of their filmmaking careers.

Last year Malibu residents Jack Schultz & Princess Lily Lawrence, donated vast resources and money to support the festival. In order to produce the 2000 Festival, the foundation again requires community support through donations. This is a formal request to the residents and business owners of Malibu. Please be so kind as to send a tax deductible donation to: Malibu Film Foundation PMB 2846 Malibu, CA 90265. As we are a nonprofit organization, the festival operating costs will be funded solely by your donation.

The first 5,000 contributors will receive one screening admission ticket to be used at the 2000 Festival for each $10.00 donated. All contributors will be recognized as supporters of the event, their names listed in the festival program and in local newspapers. Major contributors (over $5000) will be recognized as sponsors of the event. For more information on major sponsorship, please call 310.456.6683. Check out our web-site at: www.malibufilmfestival.org.

The success of the Malibu Film Festival is in your hands. Please respond today.

David Katz, chairman

M.G. “Mick” Mills, community relations director

Dear Skateboarders:

As a follow-up to an open letter written to you in October:

On behalf of the gallery and its neighbors at the Country Mart, thank you for your prompt and positive response to our request for more considerate skateboarding practices while away from your park.

You have returned to us the calm of arriving to work each day, to an environment that is as we left it, and we sincerely appreciate your collective support.

Denyse McLean

McLean Gallery

“Harry had never even imagined such a strange and splendid place. It was lit by thousands and thousands of candles that were floating in midair over four long tables. … These tables were laid with glittering golden plates and goblets. …

“Harry looked upward and saw a velvety black ceiling dotted with stars … It was hard to believe there was a ceiling at all, and that the Great Hall didn’t simply open on to the heavens.” – “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”

It’s like this, Pilgrim. For Gina Armfield’s third-graders at Point Dume Marine Science Elementary, Thanksgiving came a week early. ‘Twas ne’er a more fanciful feast than Friday’s celebration of the first Harry Potter book, which chronicles the boy’s ascent from a drab, unloved existence to challenge and triumph in the realm of wizardry.

With the magic of parents Christel Shaw, Nancye Franzoni, Tammy Gainer and Laura Rosenthal, Armfield transformed her classroom into the scene of the seventh chapter, “The Sorting Hat.”

Beneath a handmade canopy of the night sky, ivory tapers wrapped in gilded stars dangled over lavishly dressed tabletops. Stately banners announced the four houses of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry-Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin.

Dressed as their favorite Potter characters, children were greeted outside by a portrait of the Fat Lady and by their teacher, magnificently costumed as headmaster Albus Dumbledore. Prompted by her clue, kids whispered a secret password to gain entry into the Great Hall.

Armfield conducted the sorting ceremony, assigning each student to one of four groups. The kids crafted magic wands and whet their appetites with home-baked scones and Devonshire cream before playing Harry Potter Bingo.

Then came a quiz of Seven Magical Questions, with a Beanie dragon awaiting each child who answered all correctly. The sport continued with Harry Potter Word Search, where teams of three competed for prizes.

Shaw conjured up a proper English luncheon of bangers and mash, Cornish pasties and Treacle pudding. The most elaborate and authentic of party favors followed.

There were coins of Gringott’s bank — golden galleons, sickles and knuts in rich chocolate. And a goodly portion of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans: “When they say every flavor, they mean every flavor.” Lastly, Milificent’s chocolate frogs accompanied a quartet of wizard trading cards on parchment. Armfield molded the frogs, created the cards and assembled more than 60 treat bags.

The Malibu mom began reading J.K. Rowling’s first novel aloud last semester. “I’d turn out the lights, put on my green banker’s lamp and my fake English accent,” said Armfield. “When it was time for P.E., some of the boys would beg, ‘Please, keep reading!’ If boys are willing to miss P.E. to hear a story, then you know you have them.”

She’s got them, all right. Armfield rounded up present and former students to attend the Westlake stop on the national book-signing tour. Along with nearly 1,000 fans, she spent five hours in line on Oct. 17 to meet Rowling, a former teacher.

Further to the Potter phenomenon, she urged, “Regardless of how old kids are, parents should read to their children. Show them how to use inflection and emotion, and where to pause and the kids will emulate it.”

In just two years at the Point Dume campus, and without benefit of broomstick, Armfield clearly has cast a spell on students. “I have a great time,” she said. “I figure if it’s fun for me to teach it, then it’s fun for them to learn.”

I want to walk in the woods again

When October comes to the hills,

And bittersweet shines along the lane,

And a woodpecker drums and drills

On a dying tree. And sweet

And plaintive I hear the trills

Of a flock of roving chickadee.

And all alone on the bare blue sky

A hawk is a pasted silhouette.

And a truant serpent, gliding by

Slips o’er the path and through the wet

Dank logs that steam. And the sun

On the earth casts a warm vignette,

Making last night’s frost but a dream.

Here the warmth of summer lingers

On the lonely hills and the stream,

But the touch of icy fingers

Cuts the air, and I seem

To feel them in my heart. As the leaves

Flash and gleam and fall

So must we part.

And the tan of summer lingers

On your lovely face and brow.

But the touch of autumn’s fingers

Has flushed your cheek, and how

I thrill at the blend of seasons

That is in your face, and now

I know this is the end.

But we shall walk in the woods again

When October comes to the hills,

And you’ll pick bittersweet in the lane

And hear the woodpecker at his drills

And I shall see once more the seasons

Blend in your face, and thrill

To have you close to me.

Bill Dowey

Every Thursday morning, we have an editorial meeting, and we make up a log of all the upcoming stories for the next week, and then we assign reporters to cover the stories. But there is always one entry for which we make no assignment, and that’s the entry in the log that’s just titled, “Breaking story??”

You might think in a town as small as ours, with perhaps fewer than 12,000 people, there wouldn’t be that much breaking news. You’d be very wrong because more often than not, there is that story, and it happens on Monday or Tuesday. Sometimes it’s just political news, more often it’s the weather and occasionally it’s a category three — a breaking news story.

Monday morning was a category three event, and at slightly after 9 a.m. the phones began to ring. Our photographer, Jan Crane, and her husband, Kevin, passing by the Pier, seeing a construction crane had just fallen, grabbed their cameras and went to work. I was out the door within seconds but not before four more calls from other people passing by the scene who called us on their car phones to alert us.

In the few minutes it took me to get to the accident scene, somehow the TV helicopters had already gotten the word, perhaps listening on the police scanners. It was only a matter of minutes before an entire armada, every news channel on your TV dial, began to hover over the Pier, followed a few minutes later by the ubiquitous TV trucks with their aerials that extend.

I put on my press pass and started shooting pictures right away because I knew from past experience it was only a short time before the sheriff would rope off the scene and start throwing us out. You could also see this one was going to be tense.

It was the posture of the firemen and the paramedics that said the operator, trapped inside the cage, was hurt, and no one was sure how badly hurt, but it could be bad. No one said it, but those cages where the crane operator sits are heavily reinforced to protect the operator if something falls or if the crane topples. If the operator was hurt, that might have meant something had collapsed or something had penetrated the cage, which lay on its side, under the body of the crane. The operator was down in the cage and couldn’t be seen, except for his arm. People around and above him were trying to cut him out with special tools, some holding an IV bottle connected to his arm, which might have meant they were afraid he would go into shock.

Meanwhile, the rescue workers were trying to secure the scene, to make sure there weren’t any hot wires someone could touch and to begin to get some wood under parts of the crane so the boom wouldn’t fall any farther if the rest of the prep kitchen building, which was holding up the boom, suddenly collapsed.

You could feel the tension rising. There were just wisps of conversations I overheard.

“He seemed like a young kid.”

“He seemed to be losing feeling in the lower part of his body.”

“He was still trapped.”

“They must have been thinking about the possibility of fire.”

I didn’t see anyone with any kind of a cutting torch, just a portable band saw and the large scissors for cutting steel, the “jaws of life,” and a few large, specialized tools whose use was impossible to figure out.

With each minute more emergency trucks and personnel materialized — fireman and lifeguards in yellow slickers, paramedics in gray-blue, state parks people in brown and TV crews in the everything.

After an hour or so, they brought in an emergency evacuation helicopter, which meant they were getting close, and firemen kept pulling off pieces of metal, which looked like they came from the cage. Then he was out, onto a gurney, into the evacuation helicopter and off to UCLA, leaving exhausted rescuers behind and a swarm of reporters and investigators crawling over the scene trying to find eyewitnesses, and I went back to putting out a newspaper.

Recent events at Malibu High School have caused parents, teachers and students to have a heightened sense of concern about student safety at our school. Yes, we live in a wonderful community, but we have all seen recent examples of violent tragedies occurring in upper middle class communities and we know that Malibu is no exception. It can hit us too.

One of the ideas brought up at a recent town meeting was the idea of bringing trained dogs to campus for unannounced visits. These dogs are trained to locate illegal drugs and any weapon. They are amazing animals. Many parents believe that the threat of the dogs making a surprise visit would make students more wary of bringing anything illegal onto campus. That has to make our campus safer. I completely agree, and the Malibu High School Governance Council recently unanimously endorsed the idea.

I am asking for your tax deductible donations to help us bring these dogs on campus and make our campus safer. You can make your checks payable to Malibu High School. The cost is approximately $4,000 a year for two visits a month. We can have more visits if there are more funds.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call me. Thank you for your consideration.

Michael D. Matthews

principal, Malibu High School

In response to James Scott, I disagree. What efforts have you made, as a volunteer, to help the community obtain better services and value from a local business monopoly? The dismissal of Nidia Birenbaum from the Telecommunications Commission by Hasse was not only cowardly, but also rude and mean-spirited, done for ulterior personal political motives, in concert with Peacock and Chanel because Birenbaum would not go along with Hasse’s “program” calling for disloyalty to Keller and Van Horn, and concession to Falcon Cable’s business interests which have been adopted by Hasse to serve his desire to control the governmental channel to promote himself and his selected candidates for the next election.

If Peacock is a “good” city manager, then why has he not put the cable franchise out for bid, as he promised the council he would, and as would be proper to gain the benefit of competitive bidding for citizens who are overpaying for poor service from Falcon. Have Peacock, Hasse, and Chanel made their deal with Falcon, and Birenbaum was “in the way?” Why did Chanel edit the commissioner’s report that made recommendations for citizens that were not in Falcon’s best interest? When Birenbaum civilly objected to censorship, she was screamed at and then dismissed. So much for democratic dialogue. It’s OK as long as it is not detrimental to vested interests.

If Peacock is a “good” city manager then why did he say the public record (tape recording) of the last commission meeting “does not exist,” when witnesses saw the recording being made and Chanel announced that copies could be obtained from the City Clerk? Is it because Peacock acted out a temper tantrum and did not want evidence of his verbal abuse to be presented just as his “job performance evaluation” was coming before the council? He runs this town, but not well, or for the citizens, nor according to the council’s directions. That is why Hasse is so mutually obedient with Peacock. A complaint to the sheriff’s department will intitiate an investigation (there are at least six witnesses to be interviewed) for grand theft/destruction of public property.

Hasse is a carpetbagger. He recently came from out of town, (Chicago where his mom is a councilmember), got Keller and Van Horn to appoint him to two commissions and obtained support from Remy O’Neill, Joanne Segel, Nidia Birenbaum and others and has deliberately cut off all ties to those supporters after the election, in a backstabbing obsession for control of the city and as a steppingstone for his political ambitions. As for his “list”, he repeatedly claims he is the only councilmember who does anything; another self delusion as demonstrated by the reasonable preservation of the best of Malibu since Walt and Carolyn began as volunteers against the nuclear plant. He has refused to attend informational meetings with the land conservancy, while secretly meeting with major developers to “cut a deal.” At least Jennings was up front about his development viewpoints. Hasse cannot be honest about himself, so how can he be honest with others? Birenbaum’s dismissal is an example, not just because it was done, but by the way it was done. How obvious. How shameful. Only the citizenry ultimately loses when good volunteer efforts are dismissed and loyalty is disregarded. Hasse should be recalled from office before he is able to finalize his current objective of controlling the upcoming election to empower his personal agenda that now serves the aggressive development of Malibu.

Sam Birenbaum