What are the most pretentious suburbs in the Bay Area?

Yesterday, my husband and I enjoyed a day out in Marin County. We took a walk along the Tennessee Valley Trail to the beach, and it was gorgeous, breezy and clear. Then we went for lunch in Mill Valley.

Mill Valley is a pretty town: nestled up against Mount Tamalpais, in the redwoods, beautiful old houses, European-like staircases that connect homes in the hills to downtown. My dad grew up here, and I visited it a lot as a child because my grandmother lived here. In the 1960s and early 1970s, it was a hippie town.

It still has a little bit of that hippie feel, even though only very well people can now afford to live there. Now, it's filled with very high-end boutiques selling clothes and home decor. I guess you could call it pretentious. My husband thought Mill Valley might duke it out with Palo Alto for the most pretentious Bay Area suburb. Then he mentioned Woodside, and I pondered some of those famous wine towns up in Napa County.

It goes without saying that San Francisco and Berkeley are pretentious but those are cities, and they didn't factor into our conversation about pretentious suburbs.

Now, we get to the East Bay suburbs. I'm not gonna name names right now. There is one that is older and wealthy, and some of its residents, I have found, can be pretty snobby, especially to people who might--horror!--live in apartments. But that town looses some pretension points because its downtown is not bursting with business. More than a few empty storefronts.

Then there is another one that is also filled with very wealthy people who live in big cookie cutter mansions. The whole experience of journeying into that place is pretty surreal.

In my opinion, some suburbs earn the right to their pretensions, if, like Mill Valley, for example, they are genuinely attractive places. Where does that leave Walnut Creek?

So as much as we who live in Walnut Creek (including our city leaders) need to get over ourselves, here is my list of things I appreciate about WC

--Walnut Creek truly feels like home. Growing up here, in staid, homogeneous Walnut Creek of the 1970s and 1980s, I absolutely could not wait to leave, to attend college halfway across the country, then to live overseas, and then to live in San Francisco. Family circumstances brought me back to Walnut Creek in 2001, and, it really felt like coming home.

--Walnut Creek is a more interesting, diverse, happening place than it used to be. As a one-time urban dweller, I, unlike some old-timers, appreciate some of the urban touches Walnut Creek has taken on … A dining scene that offers a variety of cheap eats, ethnic cuisines, and innovative, higher-end cuisine … The coffee houses, which are new community gathering places … Seeing more than just white faces downtown or in my son’s school, unlike when I was growing up here … Hearing different languages being spoken (Asian, Russian, French, Spanish) while shopping downtown or visiting city parks.

--The schools: We have top-performing schools, with generally talented, dedicated teachers, and strong parent commitment to making our kids’ education environment as positive as possible.

--The city’s arts scene: The city's Lesher Center for the Arts employs and attracts top theater, music, and dance talent to put on hundreds of performances a year. Despite its small space within the Lesher Center, the Bedford Gallery is a unique city-funded art gallery whose curator and staff mount really interesting, diverse, cutting edge art exhibitions. Both the Lesher Center and the Bedford Gallery, with the help of their fundraising arm, the Diablo Regional Arts Association, do tons of community outreach and education programs: to schools, to kids from poor communities, to seniors. Meanwhile, the city-run Civic Arts Education, so I hear, is a national model for city-run arts education programs around the country.

--The city’s recreation opportunities: The city’s recreation department puts on great summer camps. My son is looking forward to attending one of the city-run sports camp this summer … There’s nothing that makes you think of summer more than doing laps at the Olympic-sized Heather Farm Park swim center … The city is surrounded by beautiful open space, maintains beautiful parks and playgrounds, and features the East Bay Regional Parks District’s network of trails that provide running, walking, biking, scootering, and skating links to nearby communities.

-- Finally and very importantly, the city’s efforts to develop more affordable housing in the future, with plans for the BART transit village and the new 48-unit Third Avenue project.

As the Contra Costa Times says, “As housing costs ballooned in recent years, before the market collapse, the city adopted ordinances and programs to help more people afford to live in the city. Ten percent of all new development in Walnut Creek must be affordable to low- or moderate-income people."

Here’s a true confession. If my husband, son, and I had to survive on my salary alone, we would be labeled “low-income.” According to the Times: In Walnut Creek, a household of two adults with a combined income of up to $53,000 would be considered low income and could be eligible to purchase a one-bedroom affordable housing unit” in the new Third Avenue project.

Both the BART transit village and the Third Avenue project would involve higher-density housing and at least 1,000 more people moving into town. Some might not like this increased urbanization of Walnut Creek because it could further erode what they consider its “small-town” feel.

But all cities around here, for their long-term economic survival, need to provide affordable, close-by places for their workers to live. Talk to any economist on a national or regional level, any urban planner or local business think tank and they all say the same thing: thriving economies, national and local, depend on a diverse range of industries and talent, and much of that talent doesn’t make six-figure salaries.

I’m talking about journalists like myself, artists, teachers, entry-level police officers, firefighters, social workers, health workers, and so on. This need for a diverse income-earning level of talent applies to the future of New York City, San Francisco, and, yes, Walnut Creek. It is necessary for innovation, social stability, cultural richness, and the enhanced quality of life that high-earning corporate executives, high-tech workers, lawyers, and investment bankers prize.

I applaud the city leaders for making moves to bring affordable housing to Walnut Creek.

Suburban wife-swapping and infidelity: Fiction or fact? And who has the time or energy these days?

A topic to ponder post-Cupid’s Day?

I’m slowing getting my way through Couples, John Updike’s famed fictional account of 1960s marital discord and sexual philandering amongst prosperous and dissatisfied Boston suburbanites. The book dissects the inner lives of its characters. They’re fairly ordinary, recognizable WASPs, who, despite their outward appearance of success and happiness, are miserable and lonely.

No, this book is no pick-me-up, but it is captivating to read as this very talented observer of human interaction and psychology peels away at his characters and the society that has formed them. As for the subject of this post—swinging couples and infidelity—I just finished the chapter that deals with the wife-swapping amongst two couples, the Smiths and the Applebys. The husbands, Harold Smith and Frank Appleby work in downtown Boston in jobs having to do with finance. Their wives, Marcia Smith and Janet Appleby, oversee care of their fashionably outfitted offspring and homes back in the suburb of Tarbox.

Frank Appleby, who likes to quote Shakespeare, and Marcia Smith start an affair. When voluptuous Janet Appleby finds out, she falls into the arms of Harold Smith. For some months, each of the adulterous pairs continues to meet up and have sex, all the while keeping these affairs a secret from their respective spouses. But a group of Tarbox friends, including the “Applesmiths,” take off for a winter holiday ski vacation at some New England mountain lodge.

The dreaded heterosexual foursome stay up later than anyone else drinking, smoking, dancing, and talking in rather frank and intimate ways. The one thing that amazes me about these characters is their stamina, for late night carousing and excessive consumption of alcohol. After two martinis I would be ready to curl and go to sleep at 9 p.m. I wouldn’t be able to stay up past midnight, dancing, flirting, and falling into some hot and heavy sex with my husband’s best friend.

On this particular night, as the couples are making their way up the stairs to their rooms, Frank and Harold finally acknowledge to each other that they are sleeping with each other’s wives. No hard feelings, old chap. In fact, the tipsy collegial husbands agree to switch rooms. Frank Appleby will go into Marcia and Harold Smith’s room and do it with Marcia, while Harold Smith will go into Frank and Janet Appleby’s room and do it with Janet. The wives comply, but with mixed feelings.

Wife-swapping: The practice seems like such a relic of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: the decades that introduced Playboy and Cosmopolitan magazines, go-go boots, birth control pills, 1972's bestselling The Joy of Sex, and the then racy 1969 wife-swapping film Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (pictured above) into the social landscape. Wife-swiping, according to literary and film chronicles of the time, took place amongst educated, liberal middle-and upper-middle-class suburbanites. Maybe the participants in these alleged practices felt the weight and regret of mid-life fast approaching--life slipping them by--and they wanted to enjoy a last grasp of youth by adopting the mores and practices of the youth- and counter-culture-driven Sexual Revolution. The mantra these middle-class sexual revolutionaries embraced was that marriage and life-long monogamy are so passé. And unrealistic, considering that improved medical care and prosperity increased life spans. The big question they asked: Could you really commit to having sex with the same person for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years?

As much as I’d like to enjoy Updike's book as a time capsule, it gets me wondering how much extra-marital boinking (do people really use this term anymore?) is going on amongst my friends and suburban neighbors. Look up the statistics on infidelity, and you’ll get varying numbers on how many men cheat on their wives, and women cheat on their husbands. One figure suggests infidelity is a factor in a third of all marriages.

If that’s the case, it must be going on, but it pains me to say that I’m a bit out of the gossip loop in my Walnut Creek neighborhood. A big drawback: we don’t belong to the community swim club where the stay-at-home moms hang out together with their kids on summer afternoons, the kids compete in swim team, and the adults enjoy a lot of hot-summer-night socializing.

I see some of these couples at school and at my son’s sports games. They present themselves as exemplars of loving, loyal couplehood. I can’t imagine any of these people doing it with someone on the side. But who’s to know? Another couple’s marriage is such a strange, mysterious creature.

At the same time, I hear about couples breaking up. For example, there was the one couple in which Dad had affair. Now he’s married to his one-time mistress, and they have a new baby. Mom has remarried, too, to a man whose wife cheated on him by sleeping with the owner of a popular Walnut Creek restaurant. Now, after all the pain and loss, everyone, it seems, is content: The adults have wound up with their true loves, and, at the very least, the adults and the kids are making the best of life around new partnerships and around new and blended family units.

A good friend, who used to work in the Walnut Creek headquarters of the Contra Costa Times, shares with me tales that depicts that newsroom as a nest of sexual intrigue and betrayal. Editors got flirty with each other and cheated on their mates, some who also worked at the paper. Bit emotional stinks occurred on a fairly regular basis.

There was the talented writer and very religious who wound up cheating on his long-time girlfriend by falling for a pretty young reporter. Then there was the driven, glamorous reporter who was married to this cool dude who insisted on an open marriage. Apparently, they threw wild parties. A real Peyton Place. You know, if the struggling Times wanted to increase its circulation, perhaps it should consider airing this bit of dirty laundry. One former staffer already aired some of her own dirty laundry. For the New York Times, the Contra Costa Times' former film critic Mary Pols wrote an essay about how her buy-out from the paper prompted a quickie affair with a co-worker.

Of course, we're talking about mostly rumpled newspaper reporters and editors. Do any of us really want to read about or imagine these people getting it on? They're not in the same glamour category as Updike’s prosperous, Kennedy-era WASPs.

As for me, I wouldn’t cheat on my husband, and not just because he is the love of my life and my best friend in the world.

(NOTE: With regard to the Mayor of Claycord at Claycord.com, as our publicists, Moe, Larry and Curly have advised, I must repeat that “we are just friends.”)

Beyond that, as I said before about Updike’s characters, I just don’t think I’d have the mental and physical stamina for an affair. Maybe it was easier back in the 1950s and 1960s. Maybe people had more energy for their social and extracurricular sexual lives. This was when professional men seemed to worked 9-to-5 jobs Monday through Friday—not 7-to-8 jobs, and on weekends, too, like men--and women--do today. And back in the 1950s and 1960s, women could focus on domestic duties during the day, and not have to catch up on laundry and bathroom cleaning at night after getting home from working all day themselves.

Another thing, parents back then—at least mine—weren’t called upon each night to monitor their elementary–school kids’ homework, because, in my experience, kids didn’t do much homework until they got to high school. For me, after trying to decipher my son’s math homework, which these days involves dividing fractions, I wouldn't have the energy to skulk out after I put him to bed and meet some paramour at a hotel.

Also, parents, in Updike’s book and, from what I remember of my mom and dad, weren’t running around all weekend to their different kids’ sports activities. Rather, parents were running around to each others’ tennis, golf, boating, and dinner parties.

I’m one of those women who believe that the promise of the 1970s feminists was a bit of a crock. This was the promise that women can have it all. No, we can’t—and that includes having a lover on the side. Something’s gotta give. And this goes for me, too.

Oh, I often come across a few women who seem to have it all—an impressive professional resume, terrific marriage, happy, successful kids, beautiful house, narrow waists and tight abs. They juggle all their responsibilities, either because they don’t sleep, they skim across the surface of life, or they are absolute mistresses of time management. And as much as they might be mistresses of time management, I can’t see them also managing to be mistresses of some secret lover. That might be asking too much, even of these superwomen.

Me? An affair? I suck at compartmentalizing my emotional life, I’m a lousy liar, and I could never pull of that kind of deception. Most of all—and I’m going against what our busy, grasping economic and social climate demands of its citizens at this time—I really don’t like multi-tasking. It seems that in order for me--or anyone else--to have an affair in our go-go 24/7 life-style, I’d have to sign up for a class in time management and multi-tasking. And I just don’t have the time or energy for that.

Rain!!! Taking a walk in the rain is the absolute best way to spend a winter Friday afternoon

Taking a walk with my son through our Walnut Creek neighborhood on a winter afternoon...

Our shoes getting filled with water, our hair soaked with rain. We have hoods on our rain slickers, but we let them down and both look skyward, letting the rain drops pelt our foreheads and cheeks and lips.

We breath in the clean, wet, cold air. We hear the sound of water rushing down our hillside gutters.

The water, clear and rain-fresh. Little waterfalls suddenly forming in streetside gutters. Truly a thing of beauty if you stop to look and contemplate.

Such an afternoon brings back many memories of similar afternoons in my past and his past, similar rainy afternoons in different places when we were both younger, and life seemed so full of promise and radiance.

But life seemed full of promise and radiance on this rainy Friday afternoon walk. My son on his scooter, gliding through puddles, making a whoosh of wheels through the water. Us strolling together, chatting, together appreciating the wonderfulness of it all.

Cars cruising up the hill. Wheels slick on the wet asphalt.

Little raindrops on twigs, that water rushing in the gutters pushing itself past small barriers: Twigs and a leaf that probably fell from a tree in November and was never blown by the wind from its place.

I don't want to get too poetic, because poetry is not my forte, but my son and I had a beautiful few moments together, on our walk in the pouring winter rain.

Big, wild party in WC Saturday night

Okay, it was big, but no so wild, and the cops didn't have to break it up.

Actually, it was the 30th Annual Shellie Awards at the Lesher Center for the Arts in downtown Walnut Creek Saturday night (You can see late Contra Costa Times publisher and local philanthropist Dean Lesher in the portrait in the background of this photo, which was submitted by my local arts fan friend, TheaterGirl).

At the Shellies, Contra Costa theater companies honor one another and individual artists for achievements in plays and musicals that were produced during the 2007-98 arts season. The gala event is sort of our area's version of the Tony Awards. Movers and shakers in the local performing arts world, as well as politics and media, get all dressed up in gowns and tuxes to celebrate great work in acting and directing as well as crucial backstage work in set and lighting design.

Participating companies include Act Now!, Antioch Rivertown Theatre, Center Repertory Company, Contra Costa Musical Theatre, Diablo Light Opera Company, Galatean Players Ensemble, Onstage Theatre Company, Pittsburg Community Theatre, Role Players Ensemble, Town Hall Theatre Company, and the Willows Theatre.

TheaterGirl apologizes that the photo might be a little blurry. I say, thanks very much for sending the photo.

A Glorious Autumn Day in Suburbia

Sunday was, wasn't it? Brisk, breezy, clear. The leaves, orange, golden, and red, dropping off trees, making a skittering tap-tap-tap as the wind blew them across the sidewalks and into the streets.

I went running this morning, diverting from the Lafayette-Moraga trail into some of the older neighborhoods in and around downtown Lafayette.

These are neighborhoods with cozy cottages and bungalows, built pre- or post-World War II.

Moraga Boulevard, between Carol Lane and Moraga Road, always makes me think of a setting you'd find in an old 1950s or 1960s TV show, something lifted from a Universal Studio set. Classic, comfortable, prosperous, but not too ostentatious American homes on a wide, quiet street--fronted by lawns and lovingly tended gardens, and sheltered by big old trees.

Moraga Boulevard and the surrounding streets, with their houses, some idiosyncratic and funky, are especially pretty this time of year, with their trees bursting with the colors of fall.

By the way, who says that California doesn't have seasons? It's those natives of the East Coast and the Midwest. Well, I lived in Chicago for four years when I went to college. Sure, they have seasons, pretty overt ones (hot muggy summers; 80-below winters).

Meanwhile, a native Californian like me, and like many of you, I suppose, has learned to discern and appreciate the way our seasons change in subtle, delicate ways. Even in September, when it might still be 90 degrees out, I can still breathe in a changing scent in the air, filled with the aroma of damp and earth and oak and leaves. The sunlight also begins to change, a subtle changing of its slant in the sky, like someone shifting it to a lower spot in the room while slightly dimming its wattage.

I love days like this. On these days, life is good--especially after a run through those quintessential suburban streets of Lafayette, next door to my hometown of Walnut Creek. That crisp air filling my lungs and filling me with a sense of, yes, optimism. And, yes, a sense of gratitude, that I get to live in a place like this.