This Friday, Aug. 22, the Napa Valley Museum launches a new program, “Fourth Fridays,” designed to entertain the community with live dance music, show off its new “Manga and Anime” cartoon exhibition, and bring in funds for operation. Admission is $15 for museum members and $25 for non-members; doors open at 8:30 p.m.

The 2008 Napa Valley Open Studios season begins this weekend with the launching of the annual exhibition, this year at Mumm Napa.

Proclaiming from the outset, “this is the premier Napa music room,” pianist Mike Greensill laid the groundwork for an invited audience of Wesla Whitfield devotees and an evening of the Great American Songbook as well as the obscure and esoteric songbook.

Cal Performances 2008/09 dance series opens with a new work by Mark Morris: “Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare.”

Wing Young Huie, an award-winning photographer from Minneapolis, has photographed thousands of people in a disparate array of communities. His best known project, “Lake Street, USA,” transformed six miles of a Minneapolis street into a public art project during the summer and fall of 2000. His goal was to reveal “not only what is hidden, but also what is plainly visible and seldom noticed.”

Always happy to see Napans on stage we went over the hill to Sebastopol last week to enjoy the Sebastopol Shakespeare Festival’s production of “The Taming of the Shrew,” which not only includes Jay Rogers and Benjamin Stowe in the cast  but was directed by Jennifer King, the who is in charge of drama at Napa Valley College.

Larry Tsai has been named executive director and chief operating officer for the Napa Valley Opera House.

One of the highest honors in my career as a poet has been to be elected poet laureate of Napa County this May. Poet laureates have typically read their own works at public ceremonies, such as Robert Frost’s astounding reading at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. The tradition of poet laureate has also recently included projects such as Robert Pinsky’s “Favorite Poem” project (www.favoritepoem.org), and I have felt that the local “grassroots” poets of Napa County need more “exposure.” Thus, this is my first “Napa County Poet’s Profile.”

It began as a movement, born out of San Francisco’s barrio in the 1960s and ’70s. It evolved into a style, then  a revolution and finally a musical genre of its own: Latin Rock.

American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) announced Jean Racine’s passionate play “Phèdre” as one of its productions for the 2009–10 season in a first-time coproduction with Canada’s prestigious Stratford Shakespeare Festival.