SOURCE: B Line Events
- Amanda & Christie Huff
On February 11, 2010, Christie Huff, a ninth grader at Stapley Junior High in Mesa, Arizona, held a benefit for the Wheelchair Foundation to raise money to send wheelchairs to Haiti. Christie sings at Pastis Delicatessen and Eurogrille one night each week and had initially planned to donate her tips one week to a charity working in Haiti. Her plans evolved after Diana Anderson, who is an active supporter of the Wheelchair Foundation, came to speak to Christie’s Student Council group about the Foundation. After this, Christie decided to ask Pastis to get involved and to publicize her night as an actual benefit. Stapley Student Council helped publicize the event and Pastis volunteered to donate 10% of their proceeds that night to the cause. Christie’s younger sister, Amanda, an eighth grader at Stapley, provided additional musical entertainment and helped Christie organize the event. They decided to call the event “Help for Haiti” and distributed hundreds of bright yellow flyers at school and throughout the community.
The night of February 11, the restaurant was filled with regulars, friends, neighbors, and Stapley students. Everyone enjoyed the entertainment and great food. Best of all, over $360 was collected for the Wheelchair Foundation!
Kiev, the present capital of the Ukraine, received the title of Hero City in 1965, in recognition of the stalwart courage of thousands of volunteer citizens and the death-defying bravery of the resistance movement. The city of Kiev, on the western hilly shores of the Dniepner River, bravely resisted the Nazi blitzkrieg, defending the city for as long as they could hold out against the Nazi invasion in the summer of 1941. A mass retreat to safer regions, including Siberia, saved many from sure death.
The Battle of Kiev was a large combat encirclement in the German offensive of the then-Soviet Union, where the Red Army battled to hold their position. The Nazis captured 600,000 Soviet troops, deported them to labor camps and rapidly moved with deadly surgical precision to terrorize the Ukraine. General F. Eberhardt, under the mobile killing squad—the Eisatzgruppen—conducted the largest two-day massacre of Ukrainian Jews on 29-30 September 1941. It was one of the worst singular Nazi wartime-orchestrated atrocities of the Holocaust against humanity. Nazi squads lured the Jews of Kiev, with the promise of resettlement, to the Bykivnia Forest and to a cemetery on Dorogozhitskaya Street, near the Babi Yar Ravine where a staggering 33,771 people, in a two-day frenzy of killing, were machine gunned into mass graves in the shallow gorge.
Four and one half million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along the 1,800-mile front—the largest military offensive in history—code-named Operation Barbarossa. They advanced in military vehicles and on 750,000 horses; the sole motivation being territorial aggression and the quest for ‘lebensraum,’ the acquisition of living space, habitat colonization and raw materials. Additionally, the Nazi regime had contempt for Latins and ethnic Slavs (untermenschen) and the pan-Slavic ideals. To create ‘New Lands for Germany’ they planned to enslave the captured Slavic “inferior and decaying race who choked healthy budding elements” thus condemning the peoples of the USSR to concentration camps or outright extermination that included Jews and 270,000 Gypsies.
Kievites prepared for a bitter battle, and upon evacuation of many citizens, the Red Army planted a network of 10,000 radio-controlled mines. After the retreat, they detonated the mines killing thousands of occupying Nazis. The city blazed for five days—the operation was “the most sophisticated booby trap in history.” The explosions destroyed much of the city, but a lone building stood in the rubble on the Khreschatyk as a defiant sentinel to Kiev’s courage.
It was not the first time that Kiev stood in defiance. In the late 1930s, the city saw mass executions of party activists and intellectuals. Unjustly court-martialed, they were shot and buried in mass graves. In 1240, when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in Muscovite Russia had control of Kiev, the Mongols invaded and fire-branded the entire city.
The city of Kiev and the Ukraine were no strangers to heartache and oppression – it was what made their souls soar higher – for better lives and for peace.
Heroism has Many Faces, Many Facets
From the 1970s to 1990 – the year the USSR disintegrated – the government opened brief pockets windows of opportunity, whereby Jews could emigrate to Israel and the United States. Some candidates for exit succeeded. Many failed. Applications to exit the Soviet Union during the two decades came with brutally cruel consequences–the loss of jobs forever. The aspirant emigrants were branded as traitors of the Soviet People, during the Russification of the Ukraine, and became virtually unemployable and still, the would-be ‘expatriates’ took courageous chances to achieve freedom from oppression and its insidious persecutions—to start a new life.
It is right here that I will relate a most fascinating and heartwarming backstory of courage, determination and a family’s patient endurance for survival of the spirit. I have laid the groundwork of a partial, but poignant, history of the City of Kiev and the ferociously proud fortitude of Ukrainians. There are many such stories of courage, but this is one such story that I know.
In the 1980s, Irene and Henry, two Ukrainian teenagers, whose love for one another eventually bound their two families by the union of their marriage, came to California. After nearly ten years, with constant applications to immigrate to America, and with infinite patience and great tenacity of purpose, the day finally arrived when the papers came through in 1988 with permission to leave the Ukraine for the United States.
The Gift of a Golden Voice
George Komsky
By the time, the young Komsky family finally immigrated to California; they had a three-year old child George who was born in Kiev. The two families found the support of one another and settled in the East Bay. It was just a matter of time before young George, showed interest in music. He learned to play piano and saxophone at eight; parroted the great Pavarotti by singing opera at eleven and began formal voice training as a teenager, with the cantor at Temple Isaiah in Lafayette.
When George Komsky started high school at Monte Vista in Alamo, he joined the Speech and Debate Team taking first place in the state competition in 2003 and fourth place in the Nationals. As a member of Monte Vista High School’s Chamber Choir in 2001, he performed Verdi’s Requiem at St. Paul’s Basilica in Rome. He won the Edward Barlow Scholarship for singing at the National Association of Teachers’ Bay Area Singing Competition, and gave the graduation commencement speech in 2003.
George Komsky’s golden light tenor voice won him a coveted vocal scholarship to UCLA and after graduation; he toured with the prestigious Irish sensational production of Riverdance as lead soloist, sang with the Twelve Irish Tenors, and was a semi-finalist on America’s Got Talent in 2006. Judge Piers Morgan added; “he was the best male-vocalist in the show,” Seth Riggs, the legendary vocal coach of Barbra Streisand, Natalie Cole, Michael Jackson and Josh Groban predicted of Komsky, his protégé and star pupil, “George will be the next Andrea Bocelli.”
The twenty-four year old tenor, George Komsky, born in Kiev in 1985, schooled in Danville and Los Angeles, is truly blessed with a beautiful golden voice and who may very well be the next Andrea Bocelli. If the dedication to his music and the devotion, courage and tenacity he inherits from his parents and grandparents is a paradigm by which he structures and pursues his career, then he will be as successful as a Bocelli–he too will reach the stars.
George Komsky will debut his first solo performance with a special dedication to his intrepid and valiant family – and a celebration for those who survived and those who did not – and to the memory of his late grandfather David.
Live in Concert will introduce George Komsky to his hometown and Bay Area audience on March 19 at the Lesher Centre. The concert will comprise opera, pop-opera, Neapolitan songs, and other musical surprises.
In the tradition of his family, who have been generous of spirit and caring for others less fortunate, George Komsky will donate a portion of the ticket sales to Danville’s own esteemed charity The Wheelchair Foundation (www.wheelchairfoundation.org) who sends wheelchairs to people in need of mobility around the world. The Foundation, under the altruistic guidance of Ken Behring and the Behring family of Blackhawk, has donated over 800,000 wheelchairs to people in 150 countries.
George Komsky: Live in Concert, March 19, 8 p.m. at the Lesher Centre for the Arts
Purchase tickets: $25 regular, $15 seniors and students at the Lesher Centre, Walnut Creek.
Call 925.943.SHOW or www.lesherartscenter.org. Information – contact Anita Venezia in**@Al**********.com
SOURCE: ALIVE East Bay
Weeks ago I had been asked to provide dessert for a Wheelchair Foundation event that took place on Saturday night. Originally, I had thought there would be 60 people and the number grew to 100+ people who would be attending. If I had really thought about what I was agreeing to, it would have intimidated me like crazy because in North Dallas, and in all of Dallas for that matter, desserts, cupcakes, cake balls, etc., are discussed and written about in our local newspaper almost as much as wine.
What in the world did I get myself into, and for 100+ people…I have got to be out of my mind.
So on Friday, when I really should have been doing that “other” job that makes me the real money, I was in the kitchen racking my brain about what to do.
Thank goodness I had taken that side trip to Sur La Table the day before and purchased a mini bundt cake pan and the additional tart pans. I donned my chef coat, pulled out the flour and got to work.
First thing I did was prepare a mouth-watering lemon curd from my Williams-Sonoma Pie and Tart cookbook. That went into the fridge and then I started on the tart shells.
I had some of the lemon curd left over and have enjoyed one myself and also shared with CC. She gave it a thumbs up perfect 10 (she’s missing the Olympics). Perfection. Then, feeling as if the tart needed some beneficial fruit, I added blueberries.
Nice.. and can’t we all use more anti-oxidants in our diet?
Next up were the mini chocolate bundt cakes.
So pretty. They needed a little umph and I really did not have the time nor the desire to make a chocolate mousse, but if Chef K were here she would have been able to whip it up in nothing flat. I made due with dollops of melted white and bittersweet chocolate. I think they turned out okay. I like that it’s just enough for one and the cupcake papers give them an elegant touch.
Next up…cake balls. These are white cake with almond flavored butter cream frosting, dipped in white chocolate with a bit of bittersweet chocolate on top.
The cake balls below are yellow cake with orange butter cream frosting, dipped in milk chocolate and decorated with red candy coating.
Next up, red velvet cake and cream cheese frosting dipped in milk chocolate and decorated with bittersweet chocolate.
Things started humming in the kitchen and on Saturday morning Mr. Man helped me load up the Tahoe with the following:
2 dozen coconut macaroons dipped in chocolate
1 dozen chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting
1 dozen vanilla cupcakes with butter cream frosting
1 dozen mini chocolate bundt cakes
6 dozen cake balls in a variety of flavors
8 lemon tarts
On Sunday I received a call letting me know that the event was a smashing success and they raised over $10k for the Wheelchair Foundation! It feels so good to be a part of something that helps people live better lives. The money raised will be used to purchase and deliver wheelchairs all over the world to those who do not have the means to obtain a wheelchair for themselves.
If you are interested in donating to this very worthy cause, please visit https://rep.iqj.mybluehost.me
SOURCE: Miss Ginger’s Blog
George Komsky remembers how determined he was during his first couple of years in college to practice singing opera.
Unable to do so at his university dorm, Komsky drove to a campus parking garage at 1 a.m., put on an opera CD, sat on a chair by his car door and — not to be deterred by occasional passers-by who were yelling at him to keep quiet — Komsky sang his heart out.
“That was really the only way I could practice, freshman and sophomore year,” he said. “I was singing in a garage imagining I was performing in front of an audience.”
George Komsky
Now, Komsky, 24, finally gets that chance. After garnering the attention of Hollywood premiere vocal teacher Seth Riggs, with whom he’s entrusted his training, the Danville resident and 2007 UCLA graduate returns to the East Bay to perform in his first solo concert March 19 at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. The concert, which will benefit the Wheelchair Foundation, has already sold out; Komsky is currently working on getting another concert date and venue soon.
Komsky said he was initially afraid he would perform to a small audience, and had no idea every seat would be sold.
“It gives me hope that people have an interest in opera and that it’s not dead,” said Komsky, who will perform classics from the “Barber of Seville,” and “The Elixir of Love,” along with “Tosca” and other timeless classics. “I feel blessed to sing gorgeous music written by geniuses.”
Komsky, who attended Buena Vista Elementary School and Walnut Creek Intermediate in Walnut Creek, knew music would be his life when, as a little boy, he would sing along to a tape of Luciano Pavarotti played in the car.
“My mom heard me sing in the shower,” said Komsky. “I was a kid imitating this great tenor.”
Already immersed in piano lessons, at age 11 his grandfather took Komsky to study with the local cantor at Temple Isaiah in Lafayette, where he began his vocal training. From there, Komsky’s passion for opera grew as he traveled with Monte Vista High School’s chamber choir to Italy to perform Verdi’s “Requiem” at St. Paul’s Basilica in Rome.
While attending Monte Vista High, Komsky — who remembers reading “The Economist” magazine for four years — developed a passion for speech and debate, often competing with top student debaters from prestigious schools across the country. He even went on to major in political science while at UCLA.
But then, in his heart, there was always opera. He performed and practiced any place he could, including the campus parking garage.
“I was thirsty for the opportunity to do something creative,” he said.
Bruce Koliha, choral director at Monte Vista High, said Komsky sang in that school’s Winter Concert last December as a featured guest, and had been in the school’s Chamber Singers.
“George has grown from a strong, slightly-under-pitch member of a high school choir to a true professional. We were all blown away by the power and beauty of his voice,” Koliha said.
Komsky celebrated his 19th birthday in Dublin while rehearsing for the North American tour of “Riverdance” in 2004. He also competed in “America’s Got Talent,” where he made it to the semifinal round.
He remembers racing to North Hollywood in 2007 to audition for “Twelve Irish Tenors” immediately after taking his final exam in economics, only to arrive to his audition 10 minutes late. When he was given a chance to audition, he sang “dead-tired,” after 36 hours without sleep.
“I hadn’t heard from them for six weeks,” Komsky said. “Then I was hired.”
By the time famed vocal coach Riggs heard him sing, Komsky was ready to come under the tutelage of the man who coached singing greats such as Natalie Cole, Barbra Streisand and Josh Groban.
“Seth gave me hope. He said I have something that I can develop if I can continue to sing opera to the best of my ability,” Komsky said.
Even as he prepares to audition for the San Francisco and Los Angeles operas, Komsky has made time to sing at various charity events, including the Wheelchair Foundation’s “Wine for Wheels,” a recent charity fundraiser at Blackhawk Auto Museum. Proceeds from his March 19 concert will benefit the Wheelchair Foundation.
“The Wheelchair Foundation gives mobility to people who have no mobility. They bought wheelchairs for people in Haiti,” he said. “The idea is simple — give mobility to people who can’t afford it.”
While Komsky’s concert is a result of months of dedication and hard work, it is also a tribute to his beloved uncle who passed away recently. Before his passing, Komsky said his uncle had already bought his concert ticket. But, Komsky said, his uncle will be there in spirit.
“I want the concert to be a celebration of love, of opera, of life, of love lost and love found,” he said. “We’re getting together to celebrate music. Helping people is the greatest thing we can do.”
GEORGE KOMSKY LIVE IN CONCERT
For information, visit www.lesherartscenter.org or www.georgekomsky.com
SOURCE: Inside Bay Area