Author: andres@davidperry.com

Legendary Sailing Yacht Dorade Takes to the Open Ocean for the 2013 TransPac Race

Racing Yachts leave Long Beach on July 8, 2013, traveling 2,225 nautical miles to Honolulu

www.dorade.org

2 July 2013 (San Francisco, CA) — Dorade (www.dorade.org) — The American classic racing yacht Dorade returns to ocean racing for the 2013 Trans Pacific Yacht Race, leaving Long Beach, California, on July 8 for the prestigious and demanding biennial open ocean race to Honolulu. Built 83 years ago as an ocean racing yacht with a revolutionary new design, Dorade helped put the Saint Francis Yacht Club on the map, winning the TransPacific race to Honolulu in 1936 with a course record that stood for many years. She will be the oldest boat ever to compete in this grueling ocean race.

In 2010, owners Matt Brooks and his wife Pam Rorke Levy went to Newport in search of a classic yacht, and were immediately entranced by Dorade’s history and pedigree. Rather than keep her as a museum piece, the couple decided to do something that many thought was impossible: restore her to full ocean-racing capacity.

“We needed to toughen up Dorade herself, but we also needed to develop a stable of crew members with the right skills, chemistry and experience to race a classic boat in trans-oceanic races,” said Brooks.

Dorade‘s 2013 TransPac crew is led by owner Matt Brooks as Skipper/Navigator; Tactical Navigator Matt Wachowicz, whose professional racing career includes three America’s Cup campaigns; and Boat Captain Ben Galloway, who was skipper of the Liverpool 08 Clipper in the 35,000-mile Clipper 2007-08 Round-the-World Yacht Race. Team members include Hannah Jenner, who has completed twelve trans-Atlantic crossings, skippered in the Clipper Round-the-World Yacht Race, and was the highest-place female skipper to finish the 2011 Transat Jacques Vabres Race; Kevin Miller, whose racing experience includes overall victories in Transpac, Sydney to Hobart, Newport to Bermuda, and Cowes Week; Eric Chowanski, veteran of Transpac and Mexico racing, the Farr 40 circuit, management of Udo Gietl’s Andrews 56 Quantum, and nine years with Team Pendragon; John Hays brings many years of yacht racing experience, both in inshore and offshore races, and has completed and won many of the offshore ocean classics and won many National, International and World Championships along the way.

In preparation for the TransPac, Dorade has racked up a number of impressive showings at regattas and ocean races on both coasts and in the Caribbean. She won her class in the Antigua Classic, the St. Maarten Heineken Regatta, and Les Voiles De St. Barth, as well as taking both class and overall honors in the Antigua Concours D’Elegance. In October 2012, Dorade won the classic yacht division of the seventh annual Leukemia Cup Regatta in San Francisco Bay with an all-female, all-star crew led by JJ Fetter, a four-time Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year.

In the Newport-Cabo Race this spring, Dorade demonstrated that she is still a force to be reckoned with in the world of ocean racing, sailing more than 800 miles to win her class and tie for first overall. First held in 1906, the Trans-Pacific Yacht Race was envisioned by Hawaii’s last monarch, King David Kalakaua as a means to strengthen the islands’ economic and cultural ties to the mainland, and is now into its second century as one of the oldest ocean races in the world. For more than a century, sailors have competed in this biennial 2,225-nautical mile blue water contest, sailing from the shores of California to the foot of Diamond Head, Oahu. The competing fleets have ranged in size over the years from the largest fleet of 80 competing boats in 1979, to the smallest fleet of just two boats in 1932. The challenging racecourse across the open ocean takes competitors through a range of conditions, from the cold, wet northeastern Pacific, to the blustery trade winds of the Molokai Channel near the finish.

Dorade was designed by the legendary Olin Stephens II, creator of six out of seven successful America’s Cup defenders between 1958 and 1980. Olin and his brother Rod Stephens designed and built Dorade in 1929, commissioned by their father Roderick Stephens, Sr. as a family yacht. Yawl-rigged with a narrow beam, Dorade was originally regarded as something of an anomaly, at a time when most successful racing yachts had wide beams and schooner rigs. She silenced her critics with a string of victories beginning in 1930 that has never been equaled in deepwater yacht racing.

In 1931, at the ages of 20 and 22, the Stephens brothers sailed Dorade in the TransAtlantic Race, winning against a fleet of much larger boats and more experienced crews. That win was followed by an extraordinary series of victories in the Fastnet, Cowles, and Bermuda races. In 1931 upon her return to New York after winning the TransAtlantic and the Fastnet Races, her crew was given a ticker-tape parade on Broadway from Battery Park to City Hall.

In 1936 San Francisco’s Jim Flood purchased Dorade and brought her to San Francisco. Since then, she changed owners many times, and after an active life on the West Coast, she was bought by Italian Giuseppe Gazzoni and was extensively restored in 1997 at Cantierre Navale Dell’Argentario in Italy.

Dorade’s stellar history of major ocean racing results included:
• The Bermuda Race, 1930—Second in Class B, third overall, winner of All-Amateur Trophy; 1932—First in Class B, eighth overall; 1934—Fourth in Class A, fourth overall.
• The Transatlantic Race, 1931—First to finish, first overall

• The Fastnet Race, 1931, 1933—First overall
• Oslo – Hanko, 1933—First place
• The Honolulu Race, 1936—First to finish, first in Class B, first overall; 1939—Fourth in Class B, ninth overall; 1953—Seventh in Class B, eighteenth overall
• The Swiftsure Race, 1947-52, 1954-57, 1961, 1963-64, 1979. First in Class AA, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1964.

“My idea,” says Brooks, “is to enter Dorade in all the races where she was victorious during her early years including, but not limited to, the race across the Atlantic. To accomplish this, we need to toughen-up Dorade, readying her for the kind of long-range sailing she hasn’t seen in decades, keeping in mind that while she may be game, she is also an eighty year old lady. For this kind of demanding racing, we must assemble and train a crew with the right skills, chemistry and experience to race Dorade and win trans-oceanic races.”

“Our goal is to repeat all of her early ocean races, including Newport-Bermuda which we completed last year, the TransPac and Newport-Bermuda in 2013, and in 2015 the TransAtlantic, Fastnet, and Cowes,” said Dorade owner Pam Rorke Levy. “In her early years, Dorade won all of these ocean races, a record that stands unbeaten today.”

Owner and Skipper Matt Brooks, a native of San Leandro, California, learned to sail in Monterey Bay as a boy, and went on to race on San Francisco Bay on his first yacht Quarter Pounder, sailing under the St. Francis flag. Brooks is also a well-known mountain guide, and over the past forty years has racked up first ascents in the Sierra and the French Alps, established a mountaineering equipment company, and has been honored with a Presidential Gold Medal and a lifetime achievement award from the American Mountain Guides Association. Since soloing as a pilot at age 13, Brooks has also set many world records in the air, including the record time for circumnavigating the globe (westward) and flying westward across the US, all in a specially equipped Citation business jet. Pam Rorke Levy is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and creative director, well known to Bay Area audiences and the arts community for creating and producing such shows as KQED’s arts program Spark.

Mission Forsaken: The University of Phoenix Affair with Wall Street

Success & Controversy of University of Phoenix is chronicled by one of its founders

www.missionforsaken.us

Media Contact: DP&A, Inc. / David Perry (415) 693-0583 / news@davidperry.com

1 July 2013 – San Francisco, CA: As John D. Murphy writes in his seminal new book Mission Forsaken: The University of Phoenix Affair with Wall Street: “The high-profile success of the University of Phoenix is both admired and reviled, but the real story lies in the Herculean struggle to create, refine, and institutionalize cutting edge and enduring educational innovations to serve working adult learners, and the diligence of the hard political will necessary to protect and defend those efforts.”

Part history lesson, part trenchant analysis, Mission Forsaken: The University of Phoenix Affair with Wall Street, is very much the tale of two unlikely and visionary friends from different sides of the tracks: the book’s author, John D. Murphy and University of Phoenix principal founder John Sperling. Mission Forsaken is the only insider account about the University of Phoenix since Sperling’s 1997 book on the subject.

“The history of the University of Phoenix is an odyssey of educational entrepreneurship in a sector of society with a congenital resistance to innovation and change,” writes Murphy, 66. “It is a cautionary tale of what can happen when the financial values of the corporate world are applied to the provision of postsecondary education with an outmoded regulatory system.”

Dedicated to the “hundreds of thousands of University of Phoenix working adult graduates who have been subjected to the scandal-ridden decline in the well-earned reputation and standing of their alma mater,” Mission Forsaken reads like a novel as it lays out a visionary educational utopia now threatened with the dystopian possibility of loss of accreditation.

According to Murphy, the University of Phoenix has abandoned its core principles: “Stock valuations appear to have eclipsed the founding mission. It resulted in the hiring of executives—if measured by graduation and student loan default rates, regulatory fines, and legal judgments—with unrealized commitment to the optimum operation of an academic degree granting institution solely for working adults.”

As he outlines in the book, the University of Phoenix went astray when it eliminated admissions standards with the stated goal of fulfilling its founding mission: solely serving working adult learners. With the elimination of entry standards, a new generation of University of Phoenix attendees now depend almost exclusively upon taxpayer-funded student loans and grants from other governmental sources. When the University of Phoenix went public, 80 percent of its working adult students had some or all of their tuition unwritten by their employers.

As Murphy writes in the book: “From its founding in 1976 and continuing until 1998, the University of Phoenix never received a federal or state regulatory reprimand, censure, or fine, or was the target or victim of lawsuits or legal judgments. Between 1999 and 2013, the University of Phoenix and Apollo Group paid for or are liable for $242 million in regulatory fines and whistleblower judgments.”

Murphy was a founder of the University of Phoenix and served as Senior Vice President for Institutional Affairs and Academic Vice President. He was a voting shareholder member of the board and executive committee member of its publicly-traded holding company, Apollo Group, Inc. Murphy also founded and directed a community mental health program while an adjunct professor at San Jose State University. In 2007, he wrote and produced the award-winning film Valley of the Hearts Delight, a dramatic retelling of the notorious San Jose Brooke Hart kidnapping and subsequent lynching of two men accused of that crime.

“The graduation rate when the University of Phoenix went public stood near 65 percent, about the same as traditional nonprofit private colleges and universities,” says Murphy. “After adopting a taxpayer-supported community college open admissions policy, the graduation rate fell to approximately 33 percent. This never would have happened when the employers of its working adult students underwrote some or all of the cost of tuition.”

Selected excerpts from the book Mission Foresaken:

The University of Phoenix went public through its holding company, Apollo Group, and spawned publicly traded, multibillion-dollar, controversial and lucrative for-profit sector of the education-industrial complex. This sector now dominates growth in postsecondary enrollment, percentage of federally guaranteed student loans for its number of students, and student-loan default rates.

Successful innovation is rooted in the commitment of its innovators to fight for it, regardless of the form of opposition or obstacles in its path. The University of Phoenix prevailed against stunningly impossible odds because its founders never turned away from any challenge and once maintained absolute fidelity to its founding principles.

I picked up the Arizona Republic on the way to breakfast. The thick Sunday paper sat on the counter while we ate; none of us had even glanced at it. Why would a conservative newspaper contain anything about a budding nontraditional university with eight working adult students that had been granted accreditation candidacy from the same entity that accredited all educational institutions in Arizona? I don’t remember who caught the headline on a front page, but we were all floored: “Quick-degrees college in line for accreditation.” In a lull of the endlessly intense work days and nights in the crazed weeks and months that followed, I ask John how it felt to be in the crosshairs of an educational assassination. Silence grew as we tried to imagine what that meant. It took no time to find out.

Nearly half of undergraduate degree-seeking students today are over twenty-five and work full or part-time. The traditional structure of higher education, due to punishing annual cost increase and impediments to working adult productivity must be changed to reflect the world in the twenty-first century rather than still operating like it was the late nineteenth century.

Traditional higher education remains structured and operated primarily for those who attend full time at a single campus. This compels working adults to earn degrees in a manner that can consume a decade during the most productive years of their lives. The negative impact on careers and on the economy is staggering.

It is well beyond the time for comprehensive structural changes in the way in which higher education is conceived and delivered. The University of Phoenix was established closer to the twenty-first century than the twentieth century and both its design and operation acknowledge and reflect the time in which it was founded. The majority of America’s traditional higher education institutions remain configured and managed as if we were at the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1900, communication was measured in weeks, months, and even years, today in nanoseconds.

Traditional higher education manifests a congenital resistance to change. In the early twentieth century, private colleges and universities—once the majority of institutions—protested fiercely against the creation of tax-supported land-grant colleges and universities. Another pitched battle followed World War II when both private and public higher education institutions fought the GI Bill because they earnestly believed it debased student quality.

At core of everything University of Phoenix is the refusal of many traditional academics to acknowledge that full-time working adults require an educational delivery system and teaching/learning model designed and operated in recognition of the specific learning needs and place in life. Recognition of differences in educational delivery systems and teaching/learning models for the traditional-aged student and the one for fill-time working adult learners with real-world experience is the key to the transformation of undergraduate higher education in the twenty-first century.

The original University of Phoenix teaching/learning model permitted working adults to earn degrees while they continued to meet their full-time personal and professional responsibilities. The failure of traditional institutions to acknowledge the importance of the personal and professional responsibilities of the adult learner constitutes a barrier to access.

Given the wars, skirmishes, firefights, ambushes, dustups, attacks, dry-gulching, and bushwhacking the University of Phoenix endured at the hands of traditional higher education, five major factors ensured both survival and prosperity: high quality educational content; efficacy of the teaching/learning model; candor, accuracy and responsibility in all relationships; political hard will to fight for survival on our merits; and absolute accountability for student academic achievement.

www.missionforsaken.us

Kim Epifano’s Epiphany Productions celebrates the 10th Anniversary of the FREE SAN FRANCISCO TROLLEY DANCES

Saturday and Sunday, October 19–20, 2013

Tours every 45 minutes, 11AM to 2:45pm
Starting at The Market Street Railway Museum at 77 Steuart Street at Don Chee Way just south of the Embarcadero Plaza. 

Trains K,L,M or the F line
www.epiphanydance.org

Media Contact: DP&A, Inc. / David Perry (415) 693-0583 / news@davidperry.com

10 June 2013 — San Francisco: This Fall, Kim Epifano’s Epiphany Productions celebrates the 10th Anniversary of SAN FRANCISCO TROLLEY DANCES, with rolling performance tours along Market Street trolley routes on Saturday and Sunday, October 19 and 20, 2013. SAN FRANCISCO TROLLEY DANCES 2013 marks ten years of dance in transit in this urban trolley tour all for the price of a MUNI ticket. For information, visit www.epiphanydance.org

“This particular kind of site-specific project, one that incorporates dance, music, and theatrical elements in untraditional ways, has brought special meaning to the artists and communities that have participated in it over the last 10 years,” says Kim Epifano, Artistic Director of Epiphany Productions and organizer of the annual event, which has become a highlight of the Fall arts season. “It really is ‘Art for Citizens’ because it is free, of high quality, and it makes people fall in love with the city again, or for the first time, if they’ve never been here before.”

Voted Best Transit Ballet by SF Weekly, SAN FRANCISCO TROLLEY DANCES 2013 offers an unparalleled opportunity to see dancers up close performing site-specific work in surprising and spectacular venues. SAN FRANCISCO TROLLEY DANCES 2013 will include performances by a wide variety of dancers and dance groups. Performers announced to date include: Inkboat, Lizz Romann and Dancers, Epiphany Productions Sonic Dance Theater, and Jean Isaacs San Diego Dance Theater. Additional performers will be confirmed by the end of June 2013.

On Saturday and Sunday, October 19-20, audiences will join tours of the performances on selected MUNI trolley lines along the Market Street corridor, beginning at The Market Street Railway Museum, 77 Steuart Street at Don Chee Way, just south of Embarcadero Plaza, across from the Ferry Building. The audience will board trolleys with SFTD tour guide to take the F, K, L or M MUNI trolley lines, riding up Market Street to Church Street, with dance performances en route.

Audience members can take the full tour or see one or two events along the way, at their own pace. Performances are accessible to passersby at no cost, or for those who choose to arrive by car, foot, or bicycle to each site. Bicyclists can make use of a do-it-yourself-bike route map to each location, available at the event’s starting point, end point, and online. All sites are wheelchair accessible (wheelchair accessibility for the full trolley tour is at 11am Saturday and Sunday).

Tours depart from the Market Street Museum at the foot of Market Street every 45 minutes, beginning at 11:00 am and continuing to 2:45 pm (11:00 am, 11:45 am, 12:30 pm, 1:15 pm, 2:00 pm, 2:45 pm). Tickets are regular MUNI fare: $2 general, $.75 for children, seniors and persons with disabilities. Tours will be on a first come, first serve basis. Spaces are limited.

Epiphany Productions gratefully acknowledges collaborative support from the SFMTA / Muni and Intersection for the Arts, which for over 45 years has created opportunities to “imagine new cultural experiments that aim to transform our world.”

CALENDAR LISTING
Please note: high-res jpegs are available at: www.epiphanydance.org/trolley-dances-2013-press/

WHAT:
Epiphany Production’s 10th Anniversary San Francisco TROLLEY DANCES 2013
WHO:
Epiphany Productions Sonic Dance Theater, Inkboat, Lizz Roman and Dancers, Jean Isaacs San Diego Dance Theater, Tezkatlipoka Aztek Dance and Drum, Keith Terry & Corposonic, Maru Dojo: Akido/BJJ and more TBA
WHERE:
Guided tours leave from the Market Street Museum, 77 Steuart Street at Don Chee Way—just south of Embarcadero Plaza, across from the Ferry Building—on the F, K, L or M MUNI trolley lines.
WHEN:
Saturday and Sunday, October 19 and 20, 2013 Tours leave every 45 minutes from 11:00 am to 2:45 pm (11:00 am, 11:45 am, 12:30 pm, 1:15 pm, 2:00 pm, 2:45 pm)
COST:
FREE with regular Muni fare of $2 (Youth and Seniors $.75)
INFO: (415) 226-1139 / www.epiphanydance.org (information is in English) ###

Iconic Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf and Madame Tussauds: A Partnership 50 Years in the Making

Media Contacts:
Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf: David Perry, DP&A, Inc. / (415) 693-0583 / news@davidperry.com

MERLIN ENTERTAINMENTS: Sally Ann Wilkinson / ++ 44 20 8899 6110 / saw@thefirmcomms.com

www.waxmuseum.com

30 May 2013 – San Francisco, CA: After 50 years at the center of Fisherman’s Wharf, a new chapter has begun for San Francisco’s famed Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf (www.waxmuseum.com) guaranteeing the continuation of a Wax Museum attraction as part of the City’s tourist landscape. Merlin Entertainments, the world’s second-largest visitor attraction operator, has signed a lease with the Wax Museum building to open both a world famous Madame Tussauds San Francisco wax attraction, and The San Francisco Dungeon at Fisherman’s Wharf. Both of these exciting new attractions are scheduled to open in Summer 2014, as part of a $35 Million investment by Merlin.

“It’s hard not to wax nostalgic about our half-century mark,” says Rodney Fong, 47, representing the third generation of Fong family ownership. “Without exaggeration, the Fong family and the Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf helped create the tourist industry along our waterfront. Now, the wax mold is being passed to a new generation.”

“The Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf will be a hard act to follow but we believe we can build on its success, and complement and enhance all the other amazing things on offer here,” said Merlin’s Midway Managing Director Glenn Earlam, noting that Fong and his team had made a very compelling case for them to come to San Francisco. “Like all Merlin’s attractions both Madame Tussauds San Francisco and the San Francisco Dungeon will be unlike any others, reflecting the unique culture and excitement of the City, each in its own special way representing the true ‘face of the place’.”

The Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf was opened by Thomas Fong in 1963, in a renovated grain warehouse across the street from the handful of shops, crab pots and restaurants which then comprised Fisherman’s Wharf. With remarkable vision, Thomas Fong saw the potential of his site to lure San Franciscans and visitors alike to the waterfront and to see it as a place to spend the day, rather than just passing through for lunch. Inspired by the wax figures at the Seattle World’s Fair, he decided to open a Wax Museum. The museum started with 75 life-sized figures in front of black curtains on the first floor and opened as the largest wax museum in North America.

In the 1960s, the museum grew to four floors of exhibits with over 200 figures in elaborately staged scenes, with costumes, props and lighting, carefully constructed to authenticate people at the peak of their fame. Many scenes were designed and sculpted by Thomas Fong’s son Ronald, who co-directed the family business in partnership with his father from its inception. Ron continued to add new elements to the museum over the years, also adding a collection of gift shops and new attractions. This group of Fong operations was known as the Wax Museum Entertainment Complex and at one time included four attractions, four gift shops and an arcade, as well as a Galleria of rental shops, which were leased to independent specialty retailers. In September 1998, the historic 100-year-old San Francisco landmark that was The Wax Museum Entertainment Complex for 35 years, was torn down to make way for the current 100,000 square foot building.

MADAME TUSSAUDS is world’s best known wax attraction. Every figure is the result of 200 years of expertise and painstaking research and takes Madame Tussauds’ gifted sculptors a minimum of three months to make. Most contemporary figures are also produced following sittings with the celebrities themselves and are the result of hundreds of separate measurements, and hours matching skin tone, eye and hair colour – with every individual hair inserted separately. Underlining the close relationship Madame Tussauds has with its celebrities – they and their film studio wardrobe departments often even supply clothing for their figures, or designers will reproduce significant or iconic outfits as exact replicas, only for Madame Tussauds. www.madametussauds.com

THE SAN FRANCISCO DUNGEON will be the ultimate thrill-filled journey through the dark parts of San Francisco’s past. The black comedy of attractions, The Dungeons use a combination of theatrical storytelling by skilled actors, comedy, special effects, rides, jumps and edge of your seat surprises to really involve visitors, and bring history alive in a way that makes you laugh and shiver in equal parts. www.thedungeons.com