Tricked-out treats
Trick-or-treating is discouraged because of the pandemic this year, but those who need their October dose of sugar have another option. Lacey’s Parks and Recreation Department is collaborating with May’s Sugar Stop of Shelton to offer take-home cookie kits. For $20, kids and other cookie monster types get four sugar cookies and everything needed to decorate them in holiday style, including a link to a video with step-by-step instructions. The deadline to register is 3 p.m. Friday, Oct. 16, and kits can be picked up Oct. 23 at Lacey City Hall, 420 College St. SE, Lacey. (For those who can’t get enough cute cookies, the department is also offering a fall kit in November and a holiday one in December.) If you’d rather do the baking yourself but don’t want to start from scratch, check out creepily creative Dracula Dentures or many-eyed Monster Cookies.
Name game
Olympia artist P. Calavara (also known as Rick Perry) has finished up his giant quarantine drawing jam-packed with raccoons, rabbits, dragons, aliens and even a coronavirus and is now at work on a children’s book called “Nestor & the Name Gnome.” Throughout October, Calavara plans to create and post a page a day of the tale about a gnome who changes the name of everything, in a way that seems vaguely Orwellian but a whole lot funnier. “One day,” the story begins, “Nestor Nicklesmith woke up to discover that everything in his life was wrong.” The Olympian can relate.
Musical memories
Sunday, Oct. 11, was to have been the start of the Olympia Symphony Orchestra’s 2020-21 season — a season that is on hold indefinitely. As a consolation, the orchestra is offering a free recording of its Feb. 9 concert, the last one the orchestra performed. Called “Jazz-Colored Glasses,” the concert featured works by Ludwig van Beethoven and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor along with George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” performed by Portland pianist Sophie Lippert. More recorded performances will be available to donors, said Jennifer Hermann, the orchestra’s executive director. Meanwhile, orchestra members will be offering their talents to the community in other ways, collaborating with Emerald City Music performers to teach music to students at Tumwater Hill and Peter G. Schmidt elementary schools and perform (virtually for now) for residents of Drexel House, the Interfaith Works Shelter and local church shelters and for clients of the Family Support Center of South Sound.
Freelance writer Molly Gilmore discusses local arts, entertainment and more with 95.3 KGY-FM’s Michael Stein from 3 to 4 p.m. Fridays.
