Tagged: Occupy Wall Street

Last Friday, 18 Occupy Cal protesters were detained in the early morning after setting up another on-campus encampment. On Monday, around 700 demonstrators convened at San Quentin to Occupy the prison. Tomorrow evening, San Francisco’s Occupy Bernal is hosting a forum to discuss the more than 80 Families facing eviction or foreclosure on Bernal Hill.

The movement is still going strong, but it’s also having some growing pains. Zappo Montag, a longtime Occupy Oakland activist, has been feeling them.

If you assumed, as did I, that the coming of winter would mean the end of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, well guess again. Whether because of the unseasonably mild weather prevailing here and elsewhere, Occupy Wall Street encampments stubbornly persist. And despite increasingly more aggressive measures taken against them by local authorities, the “movement” appears to be growing. “Occupy the Dream” demonstrations highlighted the celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday in Sacramento, Oakland, San Francisco and many other places around the nation early in January, and an “Occupy Congress” rally was held in Washington D. C., on January 17.

The Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, built in 1910, is a rustic theater with 328 old-fashioned seats and high wooden beams. It’s not exactly the kind of place you’d expect to see a spirited performance from a troupe of teens, but that’s what happens there.

Jennifer Boesing is artistic director of the Youth Musical Theater Company (YMTC). “There is something about the combination of theater and live music that is really thrilling to young people,” she says. “They’re experiencing what it is to be in a professional production without actually being a professional production.”

Not yet, anyway.