Epilogue – Christmas 2018 It was a packed audience. The twenty-eight-hundred seat Paramount Theater had standing room only for the city of Seattle’s premier Christmas Concert. Mary and her family were in attendance having flown up from LAX as well as Annie’s...
Part 7. Christmas 2012 By the time Itsuki was twenty-one years old, he was making quite a name for himself. He studied and honed his skills under the tutelage of Yuga Wang, Dimitris Sgouros and Marc-André Hamelin, all world-renowned concert pianists. For someone so...
Part 6. Christmas 2005 Mary, Annie and Seth were among the packed audience in the Kellogg Middle School gym of for the Christmas Musical Program featuring 9th grader Itsuki Gonzales. As the eager friends and relatives found their seats and before Principal Evans...
Professional hockey is coming back to the Emerald City. On DEC 4, the NHL welcomed the Seattle (name and colors TBD) as its 32nd franchise playing in the Pacific Division of the Western Conference. The first puck will drop in the renovated and historic Key Arena...
Part 5. Christmas 2003 By the time Itsuki Gonzales was twelve years old he was receiving national recognition as a prodigy on the piano, but Seth kept him humble and grounded. He would take Itsuki with him as he volunteered at various area Food Banks, helping those in...
Part 4. Christmas 2000 Mary was in her sophomore year at Western Washington University in Bellingham, twenty miles south of the Canadian border. It was the northernmost university in the contiguous United States. Her undergrad major was Literature. The family was...
P-O-P was LA’s forgotten theme park. It was a nautical themed poor mans Disneyland, but it was right in our backyard on the shores of Santa Monica. I remember us piling into my dads station wagon on a summer day in 1963. Driving north on Ocean Avenue, us kids would...
Part 3. Christmas 1997 It was a rough transitional year for the Gonzales family. Mary and Annie had to learn how to become big sisters to a little brother they didn’t even know existed. At first there was resentment towards little Itsuki and not wanting to share their...
Part 2. Christmas 1996 Seth Gonzales sat at his artist easel on the back-deck solarium of their wooded cottage in the suburbs of Seattle along with the trusted family beagle, Buddie, the dog formally known as Prince. After a circuitous path he was right where he felt...
Christmas 2018 It was a packed audience. The twenty-eight-hundred seat Paramount Theater had standing room only for the city of Seattle’s premier Christmas Concert. It had become a neighborhood tradition at the Paramount, that opened its doors in 1928 and would...
