Smith: New columnists, Woman of the Year, 1984 and Mule

If you’re new to the PD, welcome.

You may have read that there are two new sports columnists, C.W. Nevius, formerly a heavy hitter with the Chronicle, and Phil Barber, long this newspaper’s All-Star sports reporter.

Maybe you just spotted this column and wondered if I, too, am new to the roster of the PD’s commentators and storytellers. I’m not; I’ve been absent lately but have written for this paper for a long time. How long?

Perhaps you scrunched your nose as you read Phil’s account, in his introductory column, of stepping into a porta-potty as a young sports reporter and accidentally dropping his notebook through the seat. Remarkably, I had just started as a PD news reporter when, while covering a marauding mastodon, I fumbled my stone tablet and watched it sink into a tar pit.

Eons later, I’ve just now concluded the personally unprecedented experience of being off work through two months of hospital stays and recuperation.

It’s so good to be back. I envision us sharing stories and ideas at least until some PD youngster admits to watching his or her bobbled recorder disappear into a volcano on Mars.

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RONIT RUBINOFF thinks she knows why Rep. Mike Thompson welcomed her to St. Helena last Saturday and named her his Sonoma County “Woman of the Year.”

Rubinoff leads Legal Aid of Sonoma County, which is working overtime to defend immigrants and others threatened by the new administration in D.C.

Both Rubinoff and Thompson spoke at the awards reception of the urgency for vigilance and advocacy of all who might be scapegoated and excluded. Rubinoff said for the congressman to select her as Woman of the Year is a tribute, really, to Legal Aid’s intensified efforts on behalf of equal rights.

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APRIL 4 OF 1984, George Orwell wrote decades earlier, was a bright, cold day “and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Orwell foresaw in his book, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” that the true time was distorted by a government bent on controlling thought by rewriting reality.

For some reason, 2017 has seen a resurgence in interest in Orwell’s book and in the “1984” film that starred John Hurt.

Next Tuesday, April 4, many art theaters will screen “1984.” Proceeds from the 7 p.m. showing at the Rialto Cinemas in Sebastopol will go where? To Legal Aid of Sonoma County.

The Arena Theater in Point Arena will show “1984” too.

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STUBBORN AS A ... ‘Mule” is the nickname of John Sears, a leather-tough and most unusual fellow who drew looks hereabout in 2013 as he walked along roads, streets and highways with three pack mules.

Remember him? Sears has trod and camped throughout the west for about 30 years, often enough locking horns with law officers who tell him he has no right to be wherever he is.

Today, Mule is down to one mule and he’s resting near Bakersfield. Meanwhile, a filmmaker fascinated by him and his quest to be free to move about prepares to show at the Sonoma International Film Festival an 11-minute short of a documentary in the works, “MULE: Living on the Outside.”

Director John McDonald will be at the 5:15 p.m. screening Thursday at the Sonoma Community Center. Go to 3mulesmovie.com and you’ll see he welcomes dollars to finish his film on the hardheaded and sore-footed Mule.

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