Here they are, nine necessary know-abouts for the week ahead. It’s the B9:

  1. There’s something particularly otherworldly about top-flight female vocal harmonies, and this SoCal trio Trousdale, they got it going on. 
  2. New Yorker journalist Charles Duhigg can make you better at a vital but underestimated skill: talking to people. 
  3. One of the giants of Santa Cruz’s theater arts is director Don Williams, who again leads his African American Theater Arts Troupe with a new production of Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s” at UCSC.
  4. There’s something so very … American about the rootsy sound of guitarist Eric Lindell, a Bay Area native who moved away to soak up some New Orleans mojo.
  5. The Santa Cruz Symphony and a battalion of other local performance groups get family-friendly with a lively performance of Saint Saens’s “The Carnival of the Animals.”
  6. Wanna talk about the greatest women jazz vocalists still performing? Fine, but Dianne Reeves better be in that conversation, or you’re wasting your breath.
  7. It’s the biggest date on the calendar for local quilters. It’s the “Galaxy of Quilts” on Saturday and Sunday at the fairgrounds. 
  8. Sure, there’s Boston style and Manhattan style. But the center of the clam chowder universe this weekend is in Santa Cruz. 
  9. The reigning literary hero of Oakland, “There There” author Tommy Orange, celebrates his new novel with a few friends in Santa Cruz. 

Wallace reports and writes not only across his familiar areas of deep interest — including arts, entertainment and culture — but also is chronicling for Lookout the challenges the people of Santa Cruz...