Chris Smith: Santa Rosa couple gets a makeover on the ’Today’ show

Like so many of us, Ron and Kellie Castrillo have gone a good long time without finding a reason to get really gussied up. The Santa Rosans certainly have no cause to exert great effort to beautify for their jobs.

“My wife goes to work every day wearing a green uniform and I go to work every day wearing an orange uniform,” Ron, 42, said Wednesday.

He’s employed by Caltrans and on his own time dons grubbies for his business, Sonoma Trappers, which captures and relocates coyotes and skunks and raccoons and such for landowners who prefer that the critters be elsewhere. Kellie, who’s 50, loves her job on the sales floor at the Santa Rosa store of Friedman’s Home Improvement.

But she misses getting dolled up with and for Ron. So when she saw that the “Today” show was looking for couples who’d treasure pre-Valentines Day makeovers and wardrobe upgrades, she applied.

On Tuesday, there she and Ron were — being coached and groomed and dressed by a style expert and a makeup artist, and oohed and ahhed by hosts Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager on national television.

You can see the segment here: www.today.com/shop/style-me-something-good-makeover-t205534

Of local interest: Amy E. Goodman, the fashionista who adorned the Castrillos along with makeup artist Delina Medhin, is a Santa Rosa native and 1991 graduate of Santa Rosa High.

Back to Kellie and Ron. They rocked on “Today” all through their recorded, grungies-to-glamor transformations, and also in the live portion in which they carried on with Hoda and Jenna right from their Santa Rosa home.

In her new look, Kellie modeled a 1950s-style, boldly striped and flared swing dress and the first pair of heels she’s worn in modern times. Ron was razor sharp in cropped white pants, high-necked sweater, light jacket and Oxford shoes.

There’s a date night coming. And Ron and Kellie will pack their new outfits for the trip the “Today” show will send them on: a four-night vacation in one of the island paradises of the West Indies.

“I’m ecstatic,” Ron told me. “I want to look sly in the Bahamas.”

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PETER COYOTE, the actor-author-director-Zen priest-Sebastopolian with the trillion-dollar voice, will on the eve of Valentine’s Day recite love poetry paired with a fine, local pinot noir. We can listen in.

Early the evening of Feb. 13, Coyote will co-star in the virtual, charitable fundraiser “Pinot and Poetry.” He will appear with someone he befriended many decades ago at a commune: Ross Halleck, owner of Sebastopol’s Halleck Vineyard.

Together they will host an hour of poetry and conversation. They hope the people taking part via Zoom will enjoy what they hear along with a bottle, or two, or three, of a Halleck Vineyard pinot.

Guests of “Pinot and Poetry” who act by Feb. 7 can arrange for the wine to be delivered ahead of the program. It’s also possible, for $50, to forgo the pinot and to take in just the poetry recited by Peter Coyote.

The benefit will raise dollars for Boys Hope Girls Hope of San Francisco, which helps disadvantaged young people to graduate from high school and college and to thrive. The regional organization’s director is Sebastopol’s Anjana Utarid, who previously led the Sonoma County Children’s Village and the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

There is more on “Pinot and Poetry” and on the hosting nonprofit at https://bhghsf.org/pinotandpoetry.

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FUMIGATION is happening at the historic landmark in Freestone that started out in the 1870s as the Hinds Hotel and more recently was integral to the beloved, former Wishing Well Nursery.

West Sonoma County resident and champion Eric Koenigshofer the other day noticed the two-story edifice had been tented by a pest-control firm. The attorney and former county supervisor snapped a photo and dispatched it to someone he knew would be interested: Doug Bosco, the Santa Rosa attorney and former congressman.

Bosco, an investor in Sonoma Media Investments, which owns The Press Democrat, examined the picture of the tented landmark. Then he texted to friend Koenigshofer, “I thought Christo had died.”

Christo had indeed died, just last May 31. But while extremely alive the audacious, Bulgaria-born artist and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, astounded and perplexed and sometimes enraged people around the world with vast, environmental artworks that wrapped Berlin’s Reichstag and the Pont Neuf in Paris, and that in 1976 erected a meandering and billowing curtain — the Running Fence — across grazing lands of west Sonoma and Marin counties.

Bosco and Koenigshofer are well aware that early on in the project, Christo and Jeanne-Claude befriended and were helped hugely by an art lover in Freestone named Tom Golden. And that Golden and his life partner, Jim Kidder, lived for decades in the old hotel and ran alongside it the Wishing Well Nursery. And that Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent a good deal of time at the Freestone landmark. And that before Golden died in 2002 he donated his vast collection of art by Christo and Jeanne-Claude to the Sonoma County Museum.

Today the artists and Golden and Kidder all are gone, and the Freestone landmark has been sold and is tented for fumigation before it’s repurposed into whatever it is to be next.

Bosco said he imagines that Golden, who’d become like family to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, would be deeply tickled to see his former home wrapped.

You can contact Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.