Smith: Filmmaker in awe of enthusiasm for Healdsburg iPod project

The first film ever shown at the Green Music Center’s Schroeder Hall had just wrapped up Thursday evening.

Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett stepped onto stage to robust cheers and applause. Quickly, humbly, he returned the praise.

“I came here from New York tonight because of what you people have done,” he told the folks who filled nearly every seat. “I bow before you.”

His documentary “Alive Inside,” a winner at the 2014 Sundance festival, shows the awakening of old folks who’d been virtually among the living dead. The lights come back on as music they once loved returns to their brains through personalized iPods.

When Kim Carroll and Josie Gay showed “Alive Inside” last summer at their activist film festival in at Healdsburg, people were so moved to purchase iPods for withdrawn residents of nursing homes they tossed money into popcorn buckets. A couple announced they would double, no triple, no quadruple every dollar donated.

That money bought iPods for those residents of Healdsburg Senior Living with dementia or Alzheimer’s. While studying the brain in class, seventh-graders at The Healdsburg School began to visit the seniors, befriend them and explore what kind of music each would like in his or her iPod.

“I’m very proud of this community,” said Rossato-Bennett, whose film documents the work of Dan Cohen and promotes Cohen’s ambition to get an iPod and, ideally, a buddy to every care-home resident in America.

The filmmaker said he speaks often of what “Alive Inside” has moved Sonoma County kids and adults to do. He urges, “Do what these people have done.”

GUY PAYS IT BACK: Guy Fieri once mentioned to Dan Brown, an exec at Santa Rosa’s landmark Flamingo Hotel, that his first restaurant, Johnny Garlic’s, would have failed early on were it not for all the referrals from the staff of the nearby Flamingo.

Fieri has repaid the favor.

Brown says that just this month and next, the 80 rooms occupied by the production crew of the locally shot “Guy’s Grocery Games” will generate more than $500,000 for the Flamingo.

And our restaurateur turned TV phenom celebrated his upcoming 47th birthday this weekend, so the great pink bird held another 20 rooms for his friends.

TAMARA STANLEY grew up in Sonoma County and worked in business before it struck her - she wants to exert her energy and creativity helping people in need to elevate their lives.

Stanley was a star staffer at the Volunteer Center, then Hanna Boys Center. The 1986 Montgomery High graduate now has become CEO of the Sonoma County Chapter of Habitat for Humanity.

No doubt, Stanley will succeed at building or rehabbing houses for families who invest their sweat equity in the effort. But watch for her also to tear down the walls that for no good reason keep all manner of charitable agencies from working together to get more people into homes.

BAKE ‘N’ BIKE: Marscell Rodin is back in the saddle.

Nearly three months after the theft of his sole means of transportation and delivery, Santa Rosa’s pedaling baker beams gratitude to the community that helped him purchase a new bike.

“I was really devastated” when his silver Raleigh was ripped off in downtown Santa Rosa in late October, said Marscell, a wiry and youthful guy at 80.

“But I’m right back where I started from.”

Donations and the proceeds of sales of 50 of his healthful holiday fruitcakes allowed him to buy a 21-speed sSpecialized bicycle from the Bike Peddler shop, which cut him a break on the price.

Soon the longtime organic baker will return to his retirement vocation of preparing baked goods and delivering them to customers throughout the Santa Rosa Junior College neighborhood and other parts of central Santa Rosa.

As much as he loved his silver Raleigh, Rodin clearly is smitten with the shiny Specialized, which is baby blue.

He notes, “It matches my eyes.”

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD.