A margarita to remember
Janet Silver Ghent writes that the annual women’s retreat for Congregation Beth Am of Los Altos Hills, held earlier this month in the Santa Cruz Mountains, included an unusual, memorable and poignant feature: a memorial margarita bar.
Louise Stirpe-Gill, a retreat organizer, planned the bar to honor the memory of her best friend, Sonia (Sunny) Goldstein Mehler of San Jose, who died last August after a five-year battle with pancreatic cancer. One of her last requests was for “a real margarita, not the mix kind.”
For the memorial bar, Stirpe-Gill brought fresh limes from her own tree and made “the strongest margaritas most of the Beth Am women had ever tasted.” The result: a touching memorial, and a satisfying snooze. “I slept through the night for the first time in months,” noted Ghent.
Talented teens
Sam Lerner, 16, of San Jose showed his film “Glazed” to a sold-out audience at the Retro Dome cinema in San Jose, reports his mom, Heather Lerner. Sam, a junior at Kehillah Jewish High School in Palo Alto, wrote, directed and starred in the movie, a 48-minute comedy about two socially awkward guys who work in a doughnut shop. He’ll be enhancing his skills this summer with an internship in Amsterdam with Dutch filmmaker Johan Nijenhuis.
Daniel Naroditsky is sharing his secrets to playing chess in a new book, “Mastering Positional Chess: Practical Lessons of a Junior World Champion.” The San Francisco resident, who is 14, has been a chess master since he was 11. According to the press material, Naroditsky provides “practical and entertaining lessons that will improve the skills of chess club players.”
Celebration time
Among the celebrations coming up is what the Contemporary Jewish Museum is billing as its “slightly unorthodox Passover event” — the Out of Order Seder on Wednesday, March 31. The fundraiser will help launch the CJM’s new young professionals membership group, the Contemporaries. Hosts include Martine Krumholz and Jonathan Abrams, Claudia Ceniceros and Eric McDougall, Alison Gelb Pincus and Mark Pincus, Michael Moskowitz, Jessica Mullens and Scott Engelman, Tristen Gottlieb Sturm and Lael Sturm, Daniel Lurie and Becca Prowda, all from San Francisco; Jonna Hunter and Josh Becker, and Melodie and Ben Rubin from the Peninsula; and Stacey Silver, Jon Yolles and Julie Chaiken from Marin.
Chairing JVS’ 18th annual Strictly Business Lunch, slated for April 12 at the Marriott Hotel San Francisco, are Carrie Schwab Pomerantz and Tracey B. Warson (event co-chairs); Dana Corvin and Jean Strunsky (Employee of the Year Award co-chairs); and Carolyn Duvall and David Feldman (Business Leadership Award co-chairs).
Short shorts …
Julie Ann Kodmur writes that a “busload of rabbis” visited some Napa Valley vineyards, including Hagafen Cellars, on a tour organized by Rabbi Oren Postrel of Congregation Beth Sholom in Napa. The rabbis were in the Bay Area earlier this month for the annual meeting of the Central Conference of American Rabbis … Oakland City Council member Rebecca Kaplan got a big plug in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 12 about her possible run for mayor in Oakland. Among other info, columnist Chip Johnson noted that Kaplan was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in Toronto and “she studied the Torah from age 5 and the Talmud at age 12 — in the original Aramaic language.”
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