Midnight Special Bookstore

"Mister Rogers . . . puts on a green cardigan sweater. He sits down on a bench and changes his shoes. He takes off brown leather shoes and puts on blue canvas sneakers." That's the kind of descriptive, detailed narration that blind and visually-impaired children will be able hear for the first time when they tune into "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" this week through Friday, courtesy of Descriptive Video Service.

Jonathan Parfrey knows that the debate over the atomic bomb is far from over. Fifty years after the United States dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--resulting in Japan's surrender and the end of World War II--the subject is still painful for many. "The issue still has a mythic hold on Americans, which keeps it alive," says Parfrey, executive director of the Santa Monica-based activist organization Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Since a preliminary roster was released last month, an additional 150 artists and arts groups have signed up to take part in the Fringe Festival/Los Angeles in September, bringing the total to some 400 events presented by about 325 local art organizations and artists. "It's going to be twice as big as I thought it would be," Fringe Festival director Aaron Paley said Wednesday. Paley predicted in March that the festival would encompass 200 events.

"What makes it really crazy," said Joe Diaz, "is that there are eight gangs in a 2 1/2-block area." Diaz is talking about the Pico-Aliso Housing Projects in Boyle Heights, a couple miles east of Downtown, where he has lived all of his 21 years. Although he admits that the area has its problems--gang shootings are not unusual--he still believes the neighborhood is unfairly portrayed by the media as just another crime-ridden barrio. "People here are together, not separate," he said.

Night falls on the City of Angels. The suits have gone home but lights still shine from the high-rise office windows. Inside the towers a nocturnal army is on the move. Time for the Big Sweep. Mixing the intrigue of a detective mystery with a realistic portrayal of the working lives of the city's janitors, a new book offers a glimpse into the world of those who sweep while the city sleeps.

On a January night at Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica, actor-artist-writer Viggo Mortensen reads the prose poem he wrote for an anthology about Iraq, "Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation." It is one of the quieter pieces in the passionate volume and the author reads so softly that the entire audience leans in to hear him. But Mortensen, who played the heroic Aragorn in the "Lord of the Rings" films, is here not as a writer but in his capacity as publisher of Perceval Press.

Everything about Universal Studios CityWalk is big-big-big. The shopper-tainment mecca, adjacent to the Universal Studios theme park, opens a new, multi-level addition today. The 93,000-square-foot area was designed by architect Jon Jerde, who created the original 300,000-square-foot CityWalk, to include more retail and dining, plus a new 3-D Imax movie theater. "T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous" will debut at the Imax on Friday.

Tamblyn, who plays the teen who finds God in the oddest places on CBS' "Joan of Arcadia," is a writer as well. She had her debut as a poet in early February. And why not? Her mother sings, her father is actor and choreographer Russ Tamblyn, so naturally she's creative. But though acting and poetry loom large in her life, they are not all Amber has on her mind. Reading time When my workweek ends, it can be 2 or 3 in the morning. But usually there's time to go to a poetry reading.

Before news broke this week of an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty, Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye had planned to read a new work tonight at 7:30 at Santa Monica's Midnight Special Bookstore as part of the Los Angeles Festival. She has never read it in public before. And now she believes that work is particularly timely.