Things to do and see

My friend Jenny Schaffer is among the performers in the All Women, All Improv show at 848 performance space in San Francisco at 8:00 pm tonight. Jenny is a talented physical performer with an amazing voice, when she cuts loose. She may well do so tonight.

The Castro Theater is in the middle of the same Kurosawa/Mifune film festival that was playing last month at the Film Forum in New York, and tomorrow they're showing one of my favorite films of all time, The Hidden Fortress. This film not only has everything -- comedy, drama, pathos, great samurai fights, singing and dancing -- but it was one of the main influences of the film Star Wars. I can't say enough about this great movie -- go see it!

Poet Kim Addonizio, a National Book Award finalist a couple years ago and a former regular contributor to my zine Frighten the Horses, is one of the folks producing and reading at a book party for Dorothy Parker's Elbow, a collection of literary work about tattoos. That's at 8:00 pm Saturday at the Edinburgh Castle Pub, 950 Geary St. near Polk, in San Francisco.

Finally, check out A Day in the Life of Africa (link courtesy of the highly useful and amusing Boing Boing.)