Kupec Family as "Surfers"

Getting ready to hit the surf at 41st beach for my birthday!

Birthday Weekend

I turned 41 on Friday. To mark this momentus occasion, we celebrated in style!

Friday night:
Dinner at Le Papillon in Saratoga,CA. Fine food and wine with prices to match. I had the 6 course Prix Fixe menu for $70. It was very, very tasty! Location gets a c-minus, but food was a+!
Website: http://www.lepapillon.com/

Dinner was followed with a trip to the San Jose Repertory Theatre for some jazz as part of the San Jose Jazz Festival. We saw Jason Moran and the Bandwagon. I liked the set we caught, but Mimi found it a bit "too modern".
Festival Website: http://www.sanjosejazz.org/home.html
Jason Moran's website: http://www.jasonmoran.com/

Saturday:
Started the day with a trip to Santa Cruz for surfing lessons with Richard Schmidt's surf school at 41st beach in Capitola. Our 2 hr lesson, including surfboard and wetsuit rentals, was $72. Our instructors were Mike Brumett and Joey Hutson. There were six students and 2 instructors. Both guys were awesome instructors and very, very helpful with the kids. Sean was the best surfer out of the four of us. Our fellow students were Lisa & John from Palo Alto and they were both very good too. I didn't fare as well as other five - let's just say it is a lot more work than you'd expect. Surf school website:
http://www.richardschmidt.com/school.html

Saturday night:
Dinner party with our friend Hali White and then out to downtown to see some more jazz with our friend Dennis Massanari and his friend Mimi.

First stop was at the Rep again to see Wally Schnalle and his band. Funny thing was that Dennis' cousin plays with Wally's band. His name is Jeff Massanari and he plays guitar. Awesome set all the way around...
Jeff's website: http://www.jeffmassanari.com/
Wally Schnalle's website: http://www.itrhymes.com/

Second stop was the Brit to see Kaweh. He plays with a quartet and per their website, the group's music can be best described as World, Jazz, Nuevo Flamenco with a touch of Latin, Brazilian, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern with vocals in English, Spanish, Italian. It was an awesome set, but it would've been much, much better if they had a decent sound engineer...
Kaweh: http://www.kaweh.com/index.html
The Brit: http://www.britanniaarms.com/sanjose/index.htm

Third and final stop was the Hotel De Anza's Hedley Club to see JP & The Rhythm Chasers. This fun and funky band played classic jazz to a full room and had a ton of energy.
Their site: http://www.therhythmchasers.com/
Hedley club: http://www.hoteldeanza.com/entertainment.asp

Sunday:
We hit the Fiesta de Artes in Los Gatos. Good craft's fair and we caught a set by Marshall Art Shapiro. This four-piece band was headlined by the keyboardist. Loved their set and enjoyed the stand-up bass to boot.

Fiesta website: http://www.los-gatos.ca.us/los_gatos/assoc_clubs/kiwanis/fiesta.html
Band website: http://www.marshallartjazz.com/

Sunday afternoon we had a cubscout event on the Calero creek. We went crawdad fishing and the kids both had a ton of fun.

I'm just tired writing about every thing we packed in to a short weekend. It was great and I had fun celebrating my birthday.