20 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM If you’ve been around long enough to remember the Summer of Love, we’ve got a couple of fun flashbacks in our April issue. Award-winning documentary filmmaker David Hoffman takes us behind the scenes on the day he drove up into the Peninsula hills to record a poignant jam session with Woodside’s iconic singer-activist Joan Baez and visiting bluegrass star Earl Scruggs and his two talented sons. (Page 114) And we head down the road to Menlo Park to get the lowdown on Loretta, an elegant new downtown cocktail bar with a surprising connection to the Grateful Dead. (Page 64) Looking for a new way to get the most out of a trip to wine country? Find a host of immersive experiences that go beyond the tasting room, from punching down grapes at the annual crush to savoring a winery’s farm-totable feast with expertly matched wine pairings. (Page 41) In this month’s pages, you’ll also find a sword-wielding Ukrainian couple who share their love of fencing in Los Altos. (Page 50) We peek inside a pair of Stanford professors’ 1920s Tudor-style house that’s been lovingly remodeled to maximize its timeless charms (Page 73) and the owners of two popular Indian restaurants—Saffron and Rasa— explain why they chose to make Amara, their newest eatery, an homage to everything they love about Mediterranean cuisine. (Page 59) With so much in store, here’s hoping that you’ll make this an April to remember! Andrea Gemmet andrea@punchmonthly.com {editor’s note} something deep inside of me. After that ninth-grade revelation, I never seriously considered pursuing a different career. Even if I hadn’t accidentally found my calling as a result of switching Spanish classes, I still wouldn’t have regretted that decision. I adored my excellent second Spanish teacher, a nononsense polyglot with a handlebar mustache and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. Señor Macias even helped me learn some Italian before I spent a summer as an exchange student and kindly bestowed upon me his battered old Italian grammar book, which I’ve kept to this day. That’s not to say that I don’t sometimes wonder what my life would be like if some other seemingly unimportant decision had sent me pivoting in a different direction. Being in the business of telling other people’s stories, I often find myself thinking about those serendipitous moments that change a life’s trajectory, revealing a path that we otherwise might have missed. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since sitting down to interview Linda Hubbard for a story in this month’s magazine. One of the first things I did when setting up my PUNCH email account was sign up for daily emails from InMenlo, the community news site Linda’s been running for 15 years. It’s one of a number of local news resources I rely on to stay up-todate on all things Peninsula. Like me, Linda discovered a love of journalism when in high school, and while her career took a different trajectory, it’s safe to say that we share a deep love for the people and places that make this little slice of the Peninsula so special. Find out more about Linda and the (almost) all-volunteer operation that keeps InMenlo humming along. (Page 31) I owe my journalism career to my first high school Spanish teacher. Frustrated by his lax attitude and despairing of learning the language, my friend Leslie and I decided to drop out and start over the next year with the other Spanish teacher. With a gap to fill in our schedules, we transferred into one of the only classes willing to take us mid-year. Despite my inauspicious entry into the journalism class, I quickly found my place on the school newspaper and became hooked. Something about the constraints of constant deadlines, the freedom to ask questions and the satisfaction (and potential peril) of sharing ideas with a larger group of people sparked
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