Violet

I couldn't disagree more with your editorial "Massacre Valentine's Day" (Feb. 14). As a devoted husband and father for the last 15 years, I don't think it is asking too much to show our women on this one special day how much we care. (OK, my wife just left the room. Help! I am tired of spending $100 for roses I can get for $20 any other day of the year and waiting for two hours at a restaurant I can eat at the next day without waiting. Not to mention standing in front of the gift card rack for an hour looking for a card that won't get me in trouble.

The African violet is often called America's favorite house plant because it's relatively inexpensive and many varieties can bloom year-round. Those with violet thumbs recently entered their best in a show at the 2005 convention of the African Violet Council of Southern California, held at Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge. We stopped by to talk with folks about their favorite posies. Leonard Re Retired project manager, 59 Fountain Valley Tell us about your contest entry. I have 20.

A sweet little neighborhood bistro has just bloomed on Pico Boulevard at 32nd Street in Santa Monica. For those who still can't quite picture the location, suffice it to say it's just east of Valentino and a block away from the new 310 Lounge & Bistro -- an offbeat stretch of Pico that is fast becoming a mini restaurant row. The chef and owner is Jared Simons, 26, who moved up to Santa Monica from the San Diego area, where he had the French bistro Le Passage in Carlsbad.

"Undertow," the latest film from "All the Real Girls" director David Gordon Green, is an offbeat hybrid of a '70s-style revenge thriller and the spacey, character-driven atmospherics of the filmmaker's previous work. Nothing speaks to this dual design quite so much as the character of Violet, a stylishly grungy, wandering ragamuffin played by 25-year-old Shiri Appleby.

"Do I dare Disturb the universe?" -- T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" * Former U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan walked to the microphone at the Sutton Place Hotel in Newport Beach in 1998 to deliver what most believed, incorrectly, would be his political farewell. He'd succumbed--again--to Loretta Sanchez, the savvy Democrat who had yanked his Orange County seat two years earlier while he was running for president. It was just after 11 p.m. and things were about to get ugly.

Mias is a big, noisy ape that chomps melon rinds like potato chips and flings plastic buckets around when he's bored. Yet one whiff of rose oil, and the bruising orangutan wilts, becoming as docile as a lamb. He pushes his nose through the cage and lets Rhonda Pietsch gently daub it with a bit of rosy scent, then inhales dreamily. "They really look forward to this," said Pietsch, an animal keeper at the Denver Zoo. "Smell is such an important part of their lives."

A year after it launched South Coast Repertory's Julianne Argyros Stage, "The Violet Hour," Richard Greenberg's science fiction-tinged play about young Manhattan literati in 1919 who get a strange preview of how future generations will perceive them, has made it to Broadway and divided New York theater critics.

In the nation's most sweeping effort to keep species from disappearing forever, the federal government may declare more than one-fifth of Hawaii as "critical habitat" for 255 endangered plants and two bugs. They include such little-known characters as Blackburn's sphinx moth and the Kauai cave wolf spider, as well as the Aupaka violet -- the ultimate in shrinking violets, with only nine plants known to survive.

In Richard Greenberg's "The Violet Hour," the young 20th century and its possibilities stretch before John Pace Seavering. At 25, just back from the Great War and armed with a Princeton diploma, a patrician's pedigree and the confidence that comes with class, cash and connections, he sets out to make his mark as a publisher of fine literature. Hamish Linklater, 26, who plays Seavering in South Coast Repertory's world premiere production, has a pedigree of his own.

Garden Calendar The 57th annual Santa Barbara International Orchid Show and sale, Friday through Sunday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. at Earl Warren Showgrounds, Exhibit Building. Highway 101 and Las Positas Road, Santa Barbara. Admission: $8 for adults, $6 for seniors and students; children under 12 get in free. For information, call (805) 967-6331 or visit sborchidshow.com. African violet show and sale sponsored by South Coast African Violet Society, Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.