From mobile phones to tablets and millions of apps in between, technology is ubiquitous, and our kids’ mastery of it never fails to astound us.

But are they mastering one of the most basic functions of our digital world?

Typing, a skill that dates back to the mid-1800s in Wisconsin, is the focus of one of the newest businesses in the 94941. Barbara Schmidt’s TypeA+, which launched in Santa Rosa three years ago, opened an education center in Tam Junction earlier this month.

Schmidt, a longtime CPA who has worked for giants like KPMG, started TypeA+ because she noticed a trend among her three kids, their friends and her friends’ kids: most of them were struggling to proficient at typing.

“It didn’t seem to dawn on many parents that there was a solution,” Schmidt says. “And kids thought they actually knew the skill and the parents thought they were getting it in school – but it wasn’t happening.”

With some guidance from the Typing Institute of America, Schmidt developed a curriculum that centers on teaching children in grades 2 to 8 how to type with speed and accuracy and avoid developing bad habits that are hard to break once they become adults.

“We’ve got to get them young – when they’re eager to learn and they haven’t learned a lot of bad habits,” Schmidt says. “

Schmidt licensed proprietary software that allows her teacher to monitor students’ progress through 24 50-minute small group classes, with the software itself allowing students to pick up where they left off if they miss a session or two.

“We’re able to tailor the speed to any grade level and make it fun, with prizes, games and rewards,” she says.

TypeA+ is hosting a Grand Opening Celebration, with food and drinks and a Ribbon Cutting Ceremony with the Mill Valley Chamber of Commerce, from 4pm–6pm on Thursday, August 28 at its education center at 247 Shoreline Highway, Unit B6 – in the shopping center that contains Mathnasium and the San Francisco Running Company. Click here for more info on TypeA+.

The following was provided by Susan Royce of the Rotary Club of Mill Valley.

Wheeled zucchinis raced for the second time at the Rotary Club of Mill Valley’s 2nd Annual Zucchini Race on August 17. The event, held at the Mill Valley Golf Course Clubhouse, was a benefit for the Dictionary Project, through which the Rotary Club of Mill Valley provides a dictionary to every third grader. Scores of people showed up for racing and fun. Although there were a few catastrophic crashes that ended in variations of ratatouille, we had many winners in various categories.

The Rotary Club of Mill Valley is an organization of business and professional leaders united worldwide who provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and help build goodwill and peace in the world. In more than 160 countries worldwide, approximately 1.3 million Rotarians belong to more than 32,000 Rotary clubs. The main objective of Rotary is service in the community, workplace and throughout the world.  Rotarians develop community service projects that address many of today's most critical issues, such as children at risk, poverty and hunger, the environment, literacy and violence. They also support programs for youth, educational opportunities and international exchanges for students, teachers and other professionals.  
Rotary club membership represents a cross-section of the community's business and professional men and women. The world's Rotary clubs meet weekly and are nonpolitical, nonreligious and open to all cultures, races and creeds. The Rotary motto is Service Above Self. For more information about the rich history of the Mill Valley Rotary Club, visit its website.

The idea for O Baby Bar – the latest in an increasingly busy market of organic food businesses in Mill Valley – was born out of a predicament facing every first-time mom: how to get your young kids to eat healthy food, and to maintain those habits as they get older.

But unlike many new moms, Ilyse Wassermann-Petter, a New York native who moved to Mill Valley with her husband four years ago, had 15 years of experience as a practicing nutritionist from which to draw, years that had shown her how difficult it is for adults to change longstanding, non-healthy food consumption habits.

“When I had my kids, I said to myself, ‘Let’s start off with the good stuff – vegetables, fruits – and see how their taste buds evolve as they grow,” she says. “As they’ve gotten older and have easier access to junk food, they just don’t have the taste for it.”

Wassermann-Petter, whose children are now nearly 5 and 7 years old, says the results have been profound, with zero ear infections, allergies or lingering illnesses to show for it.

“It’s really become clear to me that diet plays a huge role in children's health and if we could just make it easier when they’re young that they’ll then be able to make healthy choices on their own as they get older,” she adds.

Hence the birth of O Baby Bar, which launches officially in Mill Valley on September 2 as an online ordering and food delivery service for a host of organic, healthy food and drinks.

The menu, which Wassermann-Petter says will evolve, includes a variety of organic, local, seasonal fruit and vegetable purees for babies. The kids menu contains fresh, organic choices aimed to please kids’ discerning tastes, with a variety of school lunches, homemade desserts, organic juice and smoothies as well as juices, elixirs, and cleanses for adults.

O Baby Bar has a pair of holistic chefs cooking out of a commercial kitchen in San Rafael, including Wassermann-Petter’s brother Miles as well as Megan DeWitt.

“The food has the benefit of being healthy at a different level,” Wassermann-Petter says. “We personalize and specialize the food toward the clients’ needs.”

Wassermann-Petter says she eventually hopes to have a brick-and-mortar location in Mill Valley, complete with educational workshops on nutritional topics in the evening that makes the space a hub for “healthy, delicious food in our community.”

But while she’s searching for the right space in Mill Valley, she also didn’t want to wait any longer to bring her concept into fruition. She says she’s gotten great feedback from other parents community about the concept, particularly at the 2014 Wine, Beer & Gourmet Food Tasting event on June 22, where she had a booth and served up treats that included an organic medjool date stuffed with an herbed cashew cream and organic strawberries dipped into a carob coconut dip.

“This is such an educated, progressive healthy population of families here,” Wassermann-Petter says. “These are the parents that would take to this concept – they ultimately believe in it but they don’ realize how influential they can be on their kids’ palates.”

As she’s refined the concept, Wasserman-Petter has seen the marketplace for similar ideas grow immensely, including locally at Urban Remedy, which opened in downtown Mill Valley one year ago, Juice Girl, which opened next to Starbucks in the Safeway shopping center in June, and the soon-to-open Nekter in Strawberry Village, as well beyond the 94941 with Starbucks Founder Howard Schultz's Evolution juice bars.

“It was just a matter of time,” Wassermann-Petter says of the trend. “It was almost more odd and strange to me that these places didn’t exist in Mill Valley – the community really lends itself to have a lot of choice for these kinds of businesses. And I like some healthy competition – it shows me that this is where the trends are going and this is what the community is asking for now.”

The 411: O Baby Bar has its menu and ordering system on its website. Stay tuned for the evolution of its menu.

Only the passing of one of its biggest supporters could halt the institution that is Mark Pitta & Friends Tuesday Night Comedy – and just for one week.

Eight days after the tragic passing of local legend Robin Williams, Tuesday Night Comedy returned to the Throckmorton Theatre this week. Although the night was not a tribute or memorial for Williams – the Throckmorton plans to host one next month – Williams, in all his comic brilliance, was the inescapable presence in the room, according to Julian Kaelon, the Throckmorton’s marketing director.

“There was a very fine line last night with how we wanted to do it,” Kaelon says. “We’ve never missed a day before with this event (since it started in November 2004), so we wanted to bring laughter back to people. It was about, ‘Let’s get started again – that’s what Robin would have wanted.'”

The event, which sold out nearly a week ago, began with host Pitta being joined onstage by eight comics: Dan St. Paul, Larry “Bubbles” Brown, Steven Pearl, Marc Hershon, Del Van Dyke, Johnny Steele, Lisa Gedulig and Michael Meehan.

Each comic knew Williams to varying degrees, and each took about five minutes to share a story or two of a humorous interaction with him over the years, Kaelon said.

“It was a very nice mix of salutes to Robin and reminiscing about how great he was and also bringing laughs to the room,” Kaelon says. “They kept it light – by telling true stories about the hilarious flavor Robin brought to their interactions.”

Local musician Eoin Harrington then performed a cover of “Over the Rainbow” prior to intermission, which was followed by a return to the standard Tuesday Comedy Night format of two comedians doing regular sets – this time Brad Williams and Jimmie “JJ” Walker of “Good Times” fame. Both of them had been booked before Williams passed away.

“They were fantastic – they had crowd laughing in the aisles,” Kaelon says.

“Overall, there was a heavy cloud hanging over the evening but it seemed like everyone was there to have a good time and laugh – that’s what we wanted it to be a heartfelt return to Tuesday Night Comedy.”

The 58th annual Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival is looking for volunteers to make this class event a great success.  

Many volunteers are needed for this year's event starting Sept. 19 through Sept. 21. Get free admission to the event, a T-shirt, snacks and lots of praise.  

Positions include:

• Friday pre festival set up
  
• Sunday post festival tear down
  
• Gate greeter and money taker
  
• Artist booth sitter
  
• T-shirt and poster sales
  
• Parking attendants and traffic control

Click here to visit the website and sign up.

Contact Trez the volunteer co-ordinator with questions at: 925.323.7735 (cell) or email: vol4mvfaf@gmail.com.

The venue where the late comedian made so many people laugh for so many years becomes a place for locals and visitors to remember him and pay tribute.

Joe Serbaroli is keenly aware of his family’s history, and the vital need to pass it down to the next generation.

But although Serbaroli lives in Yonkers, N.Y. and traces his family roots back to Roma, Italy, that lineage has deep ties to the City of Mill Valley.

That’s because in 1914 – 100 years ago – Serbaroli’s grandfather, artist Ettore (pronounced Et-toh-ray) “Hector” Serbaroli, created the enormous landscape painting of Mount Tamalpais found on the back wall of the City Council Chambers at City Hall.

At five feet high and 20 feet long, the oil-on-canvas landscape of Mount Tam is one of six paintings completed by the Italian-born Serbaroli for the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. It was lifted to its current location by a crane via one of the windows in the Council Chambers.

The painting took a circuitous route to get to City Hall.

When the Pan Pacific Exposition ended, the painting was mounted on a wall at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. A member of the Yost family, whose patriarch Nicholas Yost gave the original Mill Valley Lumber Company its moniker in 1910, bought the painting in 1928 and hung it on the wall of the Mill Valley Bank on Miller Avenue until 1947. From 1954 to 1974, the painting lived in the City Council Chambers, until it was temporarily removed to accommodate renovations at City Hall.

According to a memo from longtime Mill Valley resident Margaret  “Kett” Zegart to Mill Valley’s Art Commission in the 1970s, the painting was stored in a space at the Mill Valley Library that would later become the Lucretia Hanson Little History Room. Much of the available historical information about the painting comes – as does much of Mill Valley’s history – from the work of Little herself.

The years that followed the painting’s move to the library were laden with contentious debate about the painting’s future, Joe Serbaroli says, with city officials exploring possible alternate locations like Tamalpais High School, Oddfellows Hall and auditorium at The Redwoods. By October 1976, the Mill Valley Art Commission motioned “to wrap up in brown paper, to tie with a string and to store the Mt. Tamalpais Painting by E. Serbaroli in the Library.”

A dispute ensued about the painting’s future, and whether it was worth it to restore the painting – and who should pay for it if it was restored. Restoration estimates ranged from $2,500 to $4,000. 

“There seemed to be quite a lot of animosity at City Hall about the restoration and who should pay for it,” Joe Serbaroli says.

The debate was eventually quelled by a fundraising drive led by the late, famed puppeteer Lettie Schubert and her husband Gage. In reaching out to potential donors, the Schuberts wrote that the painting “presents a dramatic view of the mountain and its upland meadows as they were in 1914. The serene stateliness of this beloved southern Marin area is perfectly captured in the peaceful grandeur of Serbaroli’s composition.” 

Their “Serbaroli Restoration Committee” raised the more than $4,000 necessary to restore the painting, drawing financial support from the likes of William Kent III, Lucretia Little, Judith Serbaroli, then-Mill Valley Mayor Ivan Poutiatine, the Tamalpais Conservation Club, the Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival Association and many more.

Joe Serbaroli, 60, says he always had a strong sense of his grandfather’s artistry, but not his legacy. When his own father was getting older in the early 2000s, he began peppering him with questions about his grandfather, who died in 1951 at the age of 70.

“I didn’t want that legacy to get lost,” he says.

Serbaroli, who was born in Rome in 1881, lived and worked in Mexico for seven years until 1913, when the revolution there forced him to flee. With the help of Congressman William Kent, who played a critical role in the creation of Muir Woods National Monument, Serbaroli moved to San Rafael.

His prominent work isn’t limited to the 94941. He’s credited with the 14 “Stations of the Cross” paintings at Saint Raphael Church in San Rafael that were recently restored. He painted the entire interior of the Church of Saints Peter in Paul in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, with the help of his daughter Judith.

And he worked for the architect Julia Morgan on the interior of William Randolph Hearst's castle at San Simeon before he headed off to Hollywood, where her did portraits of actors at major motion picture studios like Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox until just before his death.

Three years ago, through a chance encounter downtown with Mill Valley Fire Department Battalion Chief Michael St. John on a day that City Hall was closed, Serbaroli was able to show off the painting to his 26-year-old daughter Elise.

“I just looked up at that painting and was amazed – here we were, the grandson and great granddaughter of the artist who painted it sitting there with Mike, looking back at history,” Serbaroli says.

Despite being a town of just shy of 14,000 people, Mill Valley is home to a plethora of distinct neighborhoods, each with its own topography, history and character. Residents of each can tick off a laundry list of their attributes, often drawing a contrast from those neighborhoods around them.

Pacific Union estate agent Katrina Kehl – whose job it is to match would-be Mill Valley residents with a neighborhood and a home that matches their desires – has created a visual look at nine of those neighborhoods, each with its own lengthy caption to spell out their respective traits, in the form of postcards.

Drawing inspiration from a ribald 2012 slideshow from the Bold Italic on San Francisco neighborhoods for people looking to move to the City by the Bay, Kehl reached out to her friend Tom LaMar about designing a 94941-specific series.

“I thought it was the funniest thing – it was a bit too snarky for my business but it was spot on,” Kehl says of the Bold Italic series. “I thought it might be fun and interesting to people in general to do one for Mill Valley.

“So this is my take on these neighborhoods,” adds Kehl, who has lived in Mill Valley here for 21 years and currently lives in the Northridge neighborhood across Camino Alto from Scott Valley. “Each of these neighborhoods has a personality just like San Francisco’s neighborhoods do.”

The illustrations and captions live on Kehl’s blog, which she uses to add some personality and slice-of-life flair. She’s thinking about turning them into a physical postcard series. Let her know in the Comments below if you’d be interested in them, or if you’d like to nominate a neighborhood she hasn’t covered in the first series.

From his widely lauded film "The Invisible Peak" to his viral video time lapse from the Mount Tamalpais fire lookout, with a bevy of films throughout the 94941 in between, Mill Valley filmmaker Gary Yost has shown boundless creativity in casting his lens from and upon the Sleeping Lady.

Over the past weekend during his shift at the Mt. Tam fire lookout, Yost created a pair of breathtaking videos of the mountain, Mill Valley and the Bay Area. The first shows them blanketed in fog under a silvery-blue full moonlight. "It’s a new way of looking at something we all deal with during the summer but never are able to see for what it is… a magical mysterious tsunami of vapor that erases almost all traces of civilization every evening," Yost says.

The second video, 30 seconds long, features a Sun Glory, which is "an optical phenomenon that resembles an iconic saint's halo about the shadow of the observer's head. This Glory manifested in the fog below me as a rainbow halo around the Fire Lookout’s moving shadow as I was leaving my shift on Sunday morning — and it’s amazing," Yost says.

Brilliant work as usual, Gary!

Want to know what's happening around town? Click here to subscribe to the Enjoy Mill Valley Blog by Email!

Robin Williams, a fixture in Mill Valley for decades, was found dead at his home in Tiburon Monday morning. He was 63. 

Click here for the full story by the Marin Independent Journal. 

And while the news is unbelievably sad, we wanted to create a place to share memories of tributes to a man who was famous around the world but so dear to many people in the 94941 and throughout Marin. Whether it was his surprise performances at Mark Pitta & Friends Tuesday Comedy Night, his improv sets with the likes of Rick Overton at Comedy in the Plaza or  his appearances at local events like the opening night of the Mill Valley Film Festival, seemingly everyone in town has a favorite Robin Williams memory.

Share your memories and tributes in the Comments below. Here's one man's sheer amazement at one of Williams' sets at the Throckmorton in 2010.

Here's a selection of Tweets from others upon hearing the news:

And here's a hilarious video of his first time on The Tonight Show:

As Melora Johnson saw it, summer in Mill Valley was the perfect time to open her new Juice Girl shop.

With everyone seemingly out of town for long stretches of time, she’d have plenty of time to get settled before the school year started and throngs of Tam High and Middle School students descended in droves on her shop – located in the 45 Camino Alto building in the space that formerly housed Jamba Juice.

But while Johnson’s Juice Girl opened quietly right before school let out in June, business has boomed, apparently feeding a hefty appetite for her products that had built up over the past nine months when she was selling them out of the Yolo Yogurt Lounge on Miller Avenue. From Mean Green and Clean Green juices to Dandy Apple and Blueberry Detox smoothies, Juice Girl has hit a nerve, despite an increasingly crowded juice space in the 94941, from Urban Remedy to the soon-to-debut Nekter in Strawberry Village.

“Business has been really great,” Johnson says. “We’ve been getting loads of traffic – and it’s all been word of mouth.”

Being busy right out of the gate – all while dealing with the myriad logistics of getting a new business off the ground – has meant 14- to 16-hour days for Johnson.

“It’s been truly exhausting,” she says.

And rewarding – in addition to the fans she brought over from her days at Yolo, Johnson, a native of New Hampshire, has recently welcomed a bevy of new faces, including a group of Mill Valley firefighters – and even a movie star. Colin Firth, whose 2010 film, The King’s Speech screened on opening night of the Mill Valley Film Festival and later garnered Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actor, stopped into Juice Girl last weekend to have a juice, as they were staying with Johnson and her family.

“They’re dear friends of ours,” she says.

Firth and his wife Livia Firth, a well known advocate for environmental causes in the fashion industry, are close friends of Melora and her husband Rod, as their children went to school together in London, where the Johnsons lived for eight years before they moved to Mill Valley in 2012.

Rod Johnson, a longtime Oracle executive, was transferred to the Bay Area and now makes the Mill Valley-to-Silicon Valley commute. As Melora Johnson adjusted to life with three kids (ages 9, 13 and 14) in a brand new town (“we just fell in love with the place,” she says), she was drawn to the idea of Juice Girl.

“I was appalled by the diets of a lot of kids and teenage kids – I was shocked,” she says of her first few months in Mill Valley. “In some ways, this is my attempt to fight that and show that food can be really good and still be good for you.”

Surprised that Mill Valley didn’t “have a really good, fresh, organic juice bar” at the time, she bought a pricey press to do cold-pressed juices, and connected with Karen Kauh. Johnson began renting Kauh’s kitchen in the early mornings.

Word of Juice Girl at Yolo spread quietly but steadily.

“We developed a very loyal following,” she says. “The location was funny – you had to really know I was there to know I was there.”

As Johnson was preparing to move her operation over the Sweetwater Music Hall & Café in the spring, she got word that Jamba Juice was closing, and she leapt at the chance.

“I signed a lease almost right away,” she says.

Since opening, Johnsons says she’s received plenty of feedback, much of it from kids about making the menu more affordable. She’s made some minor tweaks to do so without compromising the quality of the products. She's also added food items like avocado on toast and the "Nutty Banana Square," bread lathered in almond or peanut butter with sliced bananas and cinnamon.

“I’ve tried to strike that balance between not wanting to feed them junk but wanting them to afford what I have,” she says. The minor changes have included expanding the menu of fruit smoothies, which are less expensive to make than green smoothies.

With the school year set to start, Johnson is catching her breath for a minute and readying herself for the onslaught of students.

“It’s been amazing so far,” she says.

The 411: Juice Girl is located at 45 Camino Alto, Suite 104. It’s open Mon.-Fri. 8am-5pm, Sat.-Sun. 9am-5pm. 415.322.6160. Click here for more info and click here for the daily menu.    

Before the kids head back to school, don’t miss out on the last two events in the Mill Valley Public Library’s free summer performance series for children and families. On Sunday, August 10, the Fratello Marionettes will delight guests of all ages when they use their puppet artistry to perform the classic tale "The Frog Prince. And on Wednesday, Aug. 13, get ready to boogie as Steve Lucky & the Rhumba Bums featuring Miss Carmen Getit bring their high energy jump-blues and vintage jazz tunes to the Outdoor Amphitheatre in Old Mill Park.

"We've had a fantastic summer with so many great performances for our Sunday Specials and Wednesdays on Stage, and the last two performances will close our summer series with magical puppetry and high-energy dance music that the entire family will love," said Senior Children’s Librarian Jessica Ryan.

Both the August 10th and August 13th events are free and open to the public; no sign-up required. The August 10th Sunday Special with The Fratello Marionettes begins at 11 am in the Main Reading Room of the Mill Valley Library. The August 13th Wednesdays on Stage event featuring Steve Lucky & the

Rhumba Bums starts at 3:30 pm in the Outdoor Amphitheater in Old Mill Park.

The Children’s Room of the Library will continue the Sunday Special series into the fall with once-a-month performances, theater productions, storytelling sessions, and much more, all aimed at children and families. All events in the Sunday Specials series take place in the Library’s Main Reading Room and begin at 11 am, two hours before the Library opens to the public. 

Film looks at 38-year-old organization committed to deploying media literacy education as an antidote to propaganda and censorship; filmmakers and organization’s director Mickey Huff will be in attendance for free August 13 event.

In the 38 years since Dr. Carl Jensen created it at Sonoma State University, Project Censored, a fervent advocate for media literacy that’s the subject of a film screening and Q&A at the Mill Valley Library on August 13, has never suffered from a lack of material for its annual roundup of the most censored and under-reported stories of the year.

But in its nearly four decades of existence, Project Censored’s purview – corporate journalism and the stories that simply don’t get enough attention – has had to evolve with the explosion of the digital media landscape, providing context not only to what gets covered, but how it gets covered.

Take the latest burst of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, says Project Censored Director Mickey Huff.

“It’s getting plenty of headlines and coverage,” Huff says. “But it’s the perspective that’s not available in most of the coverage that people have access to. If critical thought and media literacy skills aren’t behind the keyboard, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack – people, especially students, just don’t know what to trust.”

Project Censored’s longstanding campaign to improve those media literacy skills – the group calls it “flexing your media muscles” – caught the attention of real estate agents, Sonoma resident Christopher Oscar and Petaluma resident Doug Hecker, a former Project Censored student. The pair spent six years crafting Project Censored: The Movie, a documentary about the organization that was released in 2013.

The film is Oscar and Hecker “telling their story about us and describing how average people can get involved and make a difference in the world,” Huff says.

Huff, Oscar and Hecker will be in the house at the Library event for a post-screening Q&A. Huff says the film has helped the organization’s visibility beyond its core audience, a boon for a group that is often “preaching to the choir.”

“It reaches beyond the choir and reaches the population beyond those that would ever pick up one of our books,” he says.

Project Censored was recently honored at the National Whistleblower Summit in Washington, D.C., receiving the Pillar Award for Persons of Conscience in New Media and Journalism on National Whistleblower Appreciation Day.

“We’re encouraging people to think critically – to actively search for media and stories rather than just sitting down with a clicker in your hand,” Huff says.

The 411: Project Censored:The Movie screens on August 13 7pm at the Mill Valley Library, 375 Throckmorton Avenue, with a Q&A with filmmakers Christopher Oscar and Doug Hecker, along with Project Censored Director Mickey Huff, to follow. Registration recommended. Click here to register.

Want to know what's happening around town? Click here to subscribe to the Enjoy Mill Valley Blog by Email!

Mill Valley Arts Commission's monthly celebration of local art includes a host of venues, including the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, the Mill Valley Public Library, Robert Green Fine Arts, Terrestra, the Depot Bookstore & Café, City Hall, Gallery 291 at the Image Flow, Thompson Dorfman Partners, Famous4 and the Mill Valley Community Center, Seager Gray Gallery and the Throckmorton Theatre, where an exhibit of the late, legendary Mill Valley photographer Suki Hill's work will be on display throughout the month. Reception is Tuesday from 6–8pm at each venue. More info below.

Click here to access the First Tuesday Artwalk Guide, with a full list of artists and venues. The map below indicates the downtown venues.