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People like the stage sets artist Glynis Crabb has done for South Valley plays so much, they have asked if she could put them in their homes.Crabb, 68, spends months building her intricate and authentic designs in a Gilroy warehouse and then has them trucked to the Limelight Theater in Gilroy, South Valley Civic Theater in Morgan Hill and San Benito Stage Company in Hollister.“Set design can set the whole mood of a show,” says actress Rachel Perry. “As an actor, I feel that the set lends itself to the characters we become onstage.”Perry’s known Crabb for a few years through their mutual appreciation of theater.“She is an amazing talent,” Perry says. “Her vision and execution are always flawless and fun.”Crabb’s art varies depending on the production. She’s worked on sets for productions ranging from The Wizard of Oz to Always…Patsy Cline. She’s responsible for the set of Limelight Theater’s summer season production of Lend Me a Tenor, opening this week. The Tony-award winning comedy by Ken Ludwig originally debuted on Broadway in the late 1980s.“When there are original pieces of art on the set that have to be created, she’s my go-to person,”says Kevin Heath, the Limelight’s co-owner.Crabb gets inspiration for her set designs from the larger theater productions in San Francisco and Monterey.“Being part of the set design and the set artist, I usually go to the big shows and either get ideas or pull their set apart,” Crabb jokes. “‘I would have done it that way’ or ‘That’s fantastic.’”She scales down what she sees in big money productions but keeps the essence for the smaller halls.“The big shows rely on projection a lot these days, which is a beautiful thing and I think there’s a designer putting that together,” Heath says. “It can be effective. But for smaller theaters, and ours is a good example of that, we can’t rely on a big flat screen that will tell a story. We have set pieces that tell it. That’s where a set artist like Glynis is super important.”Crabb enjoys working with Heath and said that they seem to be on the same wavelength most of the time.“She’s as crazy as I am, so that helps,” Heath jokes.For the current comedy, Lend Me a Tenor, Crabb takes playgoers to 1934 in Cleveland, where an opera singer takes a knock-out drug and his assistant has to fake the role.“Kevin wanted it to look like a classy 1930s hotel room,” Crabb says. “I wanted to keep the colors down to a minimum, because I think it can get too busy onstage sometimes.”The production, directed by community theater performer Steve Spencer, also marks the Limelight Theater’s annual fundraiser for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research.“Glynis usually donates something besides her time, which is important,” Heath says. “She donates to the fundraiser as well.”Crabb was introduced to set artistry and design in 1999 when her son graduated from Gilroy High School. She got involved with the Sober Graduation event.“We converted the two gyms into four different areas,” Crabb says. “I had two rooms: a disco room and an arcade room. That was the first time I really painted large. I did a 64-foot by 10-foot-high Star Wars battle scene, with the Death Star and everything, in the disco room. The arcade room had Batman, Robin and the Joker.”Crabb said she spent nearly two months in a warehouse on the outskirts of Gilroy working on the event’s artwork. A friend of hers got her involved with South Valley Civic Theater afterwards.“It was The Music Man,” Crabb says. “So my friend called me up and asked if I would help. At the time I worked in a small warehouse at the north end of Gilroy. We had to transfer everything on trucks to the South Valley Theater in Morgan Hill on the back of pickups! We lost a few things.”Crabb has done around 20 shows for South Valley Civic Theater over the years. Her favorite set was the theater’s 2010 production of The King and I.“That was a fabulous set!” Heath says. “One of the best sets I’ve ever seen.”Heath thinks set design is just as important as a good actor or good costume designer.“The set designer has to have a vision of course, and the director has to have a vision,” he says.“Speaking for Glynis and I, I would come up with the bones of the set and have a vision. I’ll send her pictures on Facebook and go ‘I’m thinking of doing this.’ And she’ll come in and make it better than my original idea.”Crabb came to the United States from the United Kingdom in 1975 with her husband and son, who was eight at the time.“I’ve done some art on and off throughout my life, but never really pursued it,” Crabb says. “I wanted to go to an art college when I was young, but the teachers at school said I wasn’t good enough, so I didn’t do that.”Crabb says she left school not knowing what she wanted to do. She became a radiographer, which fulfilled what she wanted to do at the time.“I always wanted to paint. Because I’ve worked all my life, I’ve never really had the time. And so now I’m 68, like pretty much retired from X-ray. So I have the opportunity to pursue it now.”“She had an art exhibit here at the beginning of the year,” Heath says. “She also helped us out last year when we had an artist cancel at the last minute. I called her and said ‘Can you bring your art over, because we need an art exhibit.’ And she said ‘Sure.’ She really supports the center. We couldn’t do it without her.”Although Crabb’s been painting on smaller canvases lately, she says she prefers painting in larger mediums, much like her theater sets.“I enjoy painting large and letting the art speak for itself,” says Crabb. “We’re all different. Every artist produces something different and I think it’s part of themselves.”

Artists’ reception

FAR HILLS, N.J.– As an elite field of the best female golfers in the world prepares for the ultimate test in women’s golf at the U.S. Women’s Open Championship in California July 4-10, the USGA has set a grand stage for spectators to enjoy the action at stunning CordeValle.

Former Gilroy High School science teacher Douglas Le was charged with 20 felonies Monday after impersonating a female porn star and soliciting photos from high school boys, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office.

From humble beginnings as a poor, barefoot, cotton-picking Georgia farm boy, Robert Shipp rose to become an engineering specialist who helped build nuclear power plants around the world—and a beloved family man.Indeed, when the Fukushima plant in Japan he worked on was hit by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, his whole being focused on one thing only—his granddaughter, Jessica Brewka.She worked in Japan as the liaison with Gilroy’s sister city; for several days, no one knew if she was dead or alive.“He wanted her to come home, he said she should come home,” recalled his wife, Eileen Shipp, of Gilroy.The young Morgan Hill woman, a former Garlic Festival Queen, stayed safe and unharmed in the small northern Japan town of Takko-Machi, where she worked for the rest of her yearlong assignment.Shipp had faith the power plant would not fail. Indeed, it only went out of service when seawalls were breached by the tsunami wave, according to Eileen Shipp, a retired Santa Clara Valley Water District project coordinator.After retiring from a career as a metallurgical engineer, Shipp kept his hand in consulting, helping to restore an antique airplane, building a water system for a mushroom farm and doing metal failure analysis.An inventor, avid gardener and inveterate tinkerer, Shipp was building a souped-up golf cart to ride with his grandson in the Boulder Creek July 4 parade. He collapsed and died of a heart attack May 25 while planting tomatoes with grandson Anthony Heinz, 20, of North Fork, California. Shipp was 79.Family members, including the second family that came when he and Eileen married, each for the second time, said he was the most decent of men, supportive, positive and genuinely caring; a brilliant engineer and happy adventurer who loved life and had a great sense of humor.He would greet the day by walking out his front door every morning singing, “Good morning America, how are you” from the song, “City of New Orleans.”Shipp spent years showing his children the world and reveling in watching grandchildren grow up, his family said.“He was a natural grandpa,” said daughter Linda Brewka of Morgan Hill.Her daughters, Jessica and Julia, she said, were his first grandchildren and were “Papa’s girls.”When they dressed up for children’s theater “Bob would sit in the family room and be entertained for hours,” she said.That she was a stepdaughter never entered anyone’s mind, he was just “Papa” to everyone, she said.Son John Shipp of Boulder Creek, from his first marriage, said, “He did an amazing job of opening the world for me.” He described numerous family side trips to foreign lands while his father worked for General Electric building nuclear plants overseas.Robert Shipp also is survived by children Melanie Richards, John Heinz and grandchildren Grace, Skyler and Anthony.The family returned from Europe to settle in the Almaden area of San Jose. Shipp took an engineering job with Newtech in South San Jose, was divorced from his first wife, then met and married Eileen in 1983 in a backyard ceremony.She was attracted to Shipp, she said, because he was “A good guy and a nice man, plus he was funny.” They moved to Gilroy in 1996 after he retired.After moving to their new, rural home, Shipp tended a garden with grapes and fruit trees, devised gadgets, kept the swimming pool clean and helped his neighbors,“He was always building or designing,” Eileen Shipp said. “He never really threw anything away. If I had a mixer that went out, he would take it [to his workshop] and end up using it for something.”He worked so much on cars and repairing things with welds, he became the go-to fix-it man for the neighborhood, she said.“He was that way from the day we met, an innovator and willing to be an entrepreneur, that always fascinated him,” said Bud Van Cott of Lincoln, California.They’d been friends since their days as engineering students after Van Cott left the Army and Shipp left the Navy, which he had joined at 17 at the end of the Korean War.While in the service, Shipp was an airplane mechanic, for a time at Moffett Field in Mountain View. Later the friends worked together at Newtech.John Shipp says his dad’s time in the military was the turning point in his life.He used the GI bill to get his engineering degree, which transformed the Georgia farm boy into a world-class metals engineer, according to his family.“It was a blessing that he joined the Navy,” his son said.“Just think of it,” said his son, John, who inherited his dad’s creative and inventive abilities and works with poppy jasper rock and others for a jewelry booth each year at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. “For a poor, cotton-picking Georgia farm boy he did an amazing job. His cousins are still in the same little town [Hiram, Georgia]. He opened up the world for me; we went to India, South Africa and Australia, Nepal, Thailand and Malaysia.“He really had a sense of adventure; he was the right dad for me, I’ll tell you,” he said.Even after his death, Eileen Shipp marveled at his creative capacities and the breath of his interests and curiosity.“He was always making things. Like with all our tomatoes, he was making something that would take off the peels and he was coming up with a machine to squeezed out the seeds,” she recalled.Shipp was cremated. A life celebration will be held in July.In the meantime, Eileen Shipp said, he’s in the garden in a birdbath specially designed to keep ashes.“What could be more appropriate?” she asked. “I don’t think he’d want to be in the house overlooking his garden. And he loved birds, so he is out there.“I opened it up and put a little tiny bottle of Crown Royal in there,” she said, “and some vodka for when I join him.”

We were horrified to learn recently that the Republican Convention in Cleveland next month will be a gun-free zone, violating the Second Amendment and endangering thousands of delegates to the threat of Radical Islamic Terrorists or Democrats.The party of Guns and God is mysteriously turning its back on one of its biggest planks: speak loudly and carry a big assault rifle.We are particularly surprised that the presumptive nominee would lay down while the Obama-run FBI forbid firearms during the nominating process. Donald J. Trump made his strongest pro-gun statement after the murder of 49 Orlando night clubgoers.“If some of those wonderful people had guns strapped right here—right to their waist or right to their ankle—and one of the people in that room happened to have it and goes ‘boom, boom,’ you know that would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks,” Trump told supporters a rally in Texas.We say, yes, Donald, yes. Americans need to be armed everywhere they go at all times, preferably each with her or his own AR-15 or comparable military assault weapon. There are already more guns in this country than people, but we so rarely see them out and when we do, it’s usually in the hands of crazy people or law enforcement, who could at any time turn against the country and enforce communism on the great unarmed masses.The only way to stop gun violence is with more guns—this we have realized after an onslaught of pro-gun messages following the most recent of 1,000 mass murders over the past four years since 20 children and six adults were shot to death in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.Think of how different the world would be had those children been trained and armed. More guns. We need more guns. After all, guns don’t kill people. Terrorists kill them with box cutters, bombs or guns. But if we were all armed, they would cower. They would be defeated. We would be safe.We are even more surprised that the Cleveland convention will be a gun-free zone, and as such, a fun free zone. Back in January, Mr. Trump made a strong statement about such zones in a Burlington, Vermont, campaign stop.“I will get rid of gun-free zones on schools, and—you have to—and on military bases,” he said. “My first day, it gets signed, okay? My first day. There’s no more gun-free zones.”Uhh. Mr. Trump, sir, why are you going to be nominated in a gun-free zone? Are you breaking an election promise even before the election?Stop the madness, please.The Senate took aim and hit the target this week, murdering Democrat proposals to put restrictions on weapons. They shot down all four proposals, to limit assault weapons sales, to require stronger background checks and to prevent terrorism suspects who aren’t allowed to fly on planes from buying guns.It’s a slippery slope. The minute you stop suspected terrorists from buying guns, you might encourage them to use bombs instead. Give them their guns, and give us guns, too. There are more of us, right?Back to the Republican Convention, which should be the best political entertainment since Chicago in 1968: We say let the people bring their weapons and bear them proudly. Can you imagine if a terrorist infiltrated the hall and pulled out a gun and 30,000 people pulled out their own weapons and fired away? That would send a message all over the world. Don’t mess with us. We are armed and willing to shoot first.

Gilroy’s urban growth boundary (UGB) initiative has more than the required number of signatures needed to qualify for the November ballot.

Gilroy Library is running a reading program that will make kids feel like they are on a gameshow.

Nathan Bonsell is living the dream of every young baseball player: To stay up late playing ball and no one—not parents, not school and not work—telling him he can’t.