Sometimes you walk into an event with a different concept in mind than what actually unfolds. Such an experience can be enlightening. It can also be annoying. When it comes to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's "performance" Wednesday at the John Wright Theatre, I was annoyed.

The evening started off with a so-so documentary film promoting the highly regarded festival. It was followed by a presentation from six Summer Arts instructors affiliated with OSF. They shared memories, plugged their employer (or, as in a couple of cases, their former employer) and acted out a couple of short scenes from such productions as "Our Town" and "Romeo and Juliet."

I'm not faulting the quality of the information or the engaging manner in which it was presented. There was, in fact, an emotional component to the evening, with veteran actress Kimberly Scott offering several heartfelt moments. Actress Stephanie Beatriz gave a haunting soliloquy as Juliet.

Mike Oz beat me to the punch with his Thursday checklist, but I just wanted to add a couple of interesting options for tonight:

FREE CONCERT: David Skinner was kind of a music nerd when he graduated from McLane High School in the early 1980s. And no one from his family had gone to college. So it probably would have surprised people back then to think that 25 years later he'd be a professor at Cambridge, the holder of a doctorate from Oxford, one of the top early-music scholars in the world and the founder of a prominent musical group with a recording career. Oh, and that he's even picked up an English accent and hangs out with the Duke of Norfolk. I have a story in Thursday's Life section.

Skinner conducts the Choir of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, which is on a West Coast tour. It'll perform 7 p.m. tonight at the Shrine of St. Therese Catholic Church, 855 E. Floradora Ave., in the Tower District. And it's free!

ARTHOP OPTIONS: Mike tipped you off to some good ArtHop possibilities. There are some interesting shows at some of the other usual suspects, including Gallery 25, Corridor 2122 and Fig Tree Gallery. I wrote about them in my Sunday Spotlight column (second item).

DONALD: Fresno's Jason Glover got stuck once again with a dog of a routine in the Top 14 competition in "So You Think You Can Dance." He and partner Caitlin Kinney had the misfortune of being paired with choreographer Brian Friedman, who decided to do something weird and wacky -- in other words, self-indulgent -- with his dancers as guinea pigs. The judges didn't hate the dancing, but they were noticeably less than effusive about the choreography and the costumes, and the result was yet another lukewarm week in the midst of stiff competition. I'm predicting another Bottom 3 finish for Jason and Caitlin. Can you set the "alien" scene, Kathy?

As the California State University Summer Arts program continues at Fresno State, I envision this rolling Beehive post as a place for the day's schedule, news, recommendations, reader reviews, gripes, background information -- anything related to the program. You can leave a comment here or send an email. (Special thanks to Jackie Doumanian at Summer Arts for helping us keep track of the calendar.)

THURSDAY July 2

Last night I attended the Oregon Shakespeare Festival event, and I was disappointed. Here's my Beehive review.

Tonight's public event: Chuck Harvey began his life as an animator beginning with being recruited by Walt Disney Studios right out of art school, to working for over two dozen studios over the course of his career. This lecture/slide lecture will be a great peek inside the amazing world of animation. 7 p.m. Wahlberg Recital Hall. (Note: This event was listed as occurring at the John Wright Theatre in yesterday's Bulletin Board; it's at Wahlberg.)

Coming tomorrow: The delightful Summer Arts combination of flute and guitar played together continues. Flutist Gary Schocker and guitarist Jason Vieaux will perform for the first half of the evening and flutist Christina Jennings and guitarist Jonathan Leathwood for the second half. 7 p.m. Friday, Concert Hall.

It's a big morning for The Bee's Metro desk:

MORE ON BIGELOW: In a follow-up to the ongoing story about the $10 million Alphonso Bigelow donation to Fresno State athletics, the team of Cyndee Fontana, Matt James and John Ellis dig deeper into this interesting story. The university isn't talking much at this point:

Last week, The Bee posed additional questions to the university about the pledge and whether Bigelow presented financial documentation showing it could be paid. President John D. Welty on Tuesday declined to comment, saying he still is collecting and reviewing information.

In his sports column today, Matt James notes that even at Fresno State, there are a lot more crossed fingers than true believers, but he's rooting for Bigelow to come through. Here's the Beehive post discussing the story.

THE VARTANIAN SAGA: Fresno businessman Krikor "Kirk" Vartanian "Fresno businessman Krikor "Kirk" Vartanian pleaded not guilty to assault and domestic violence charges this morning in Fresno County Superior Court, Chris Collins writes in a Web update. In this morning's paper, Pablo Lopez and George Hostetter trace the Vartanian money trail.

Do we have interesting characters in Fresno or what?

Community-theater Shakespeare can be a hit or a miss. The current production of "As You Like It," which opens the Woodward Shakespeare Festival's fifth summer season, belongs in the miss column.

I don't have anything against director Michael Peterson's wacky concept for the show -- which involves setting Shakespeare's frothy pastoral comedy in the late 1960s on the southern California coast during the "Summer of Love." Nor is the purist in me much bothered by Peterson's liberties with the script, which includes rather cheekily inserting "surfer dude" into the Shakespearean lexicon.

In fact, I kind of like Peterson's rationale for getting all hippie-groovy on us. In the play, Shakespeare lathers attention on the "simple" countryside, giving us sort of a "noble savage" approach to the superiority of nature, and I like the way that Peterson sees laidback beach culture on one end of a spectrum and uptight L.A. culture on the other.

But the acting in this "As You Like It" is very uneven. And though the direction might seem brisk -- at least the words seem to motor by at a healthy clip -- in the end it comes across as unshaped and aimless.

How flowery do I want to get in describing the beautiful sounds of the flute-guitar duo AlmaNova? Let's just pull out the stops. As I sat there Monday in Fresno State's Concert Hall listening to the duo's CSU Summer Arts performance, I kept thinking of two swallows hurling through the sky -- diving, soaring, swooping, with first one and then the other taking the lead, the two of them sometimes exploding with energy but more often quietly flitting here and there in a graceful, intuitively choreographed display of seamless connection.

Wow.

The husband-wife duo of Almer Imamovic and Jessica Pierce, who are both instructors in the Summer Arts flute and guitar workshop, have a stage relationship that is thrilling to watch. Imamovic strums his guitar so smoothly at times it's as if he's caressing a stone, and Pierce's flute lyrically fills the hall with a gentle, effortless swell. Watching Imamovic watch his wife as they play is particularly sweet. As he stands there -- he uses a guitar strap -- as he plays, periodically turning to gaze at her, his shoulders pulse with the beat almost as if they're dancing.

The California State University Summer Arts festival likes to bring out one of its big guns for the opening night performance, and Sunday night's kick-off concert featuring the returning Joe Goode Performance Group managed to accomplish that goal in more ways than one. The group's first selection, the 1996 "Maverick Strain," was a cheeky riff on the lore of the American cowboy and this country's obsession with guns.

Goode himself came out before the dance started to sing to the audience a "cowboy song," and what a sight he was with his wildly fringed Western shirt. (Later in the piece he would don a pair of woolly chaps festooned with gaudy tassels in a look that suggested the stripping scene from "Gypsy" crossed with "The Magnificent Seven.") After showing off his flamboyant costume, Goode noted that a look such as his, which could seem so ironic in San Francisco, could be interpreted differently here in the hinterlands of Fresno, where the artsy/kitschy myth of the cowboy intertwines with a real-life working industry. I'd go as far as to say that the dance works even better in a place like Fresno.

I'm always telling people in Fresno they absolutely HAVE to go to at least one event in the California State University Summer Arts Festival, which on Sunday is starting its 11th year at Fresno State. Maybe this is your year! You can't plead that you're "too busy that night," because there are 40 public events that unfold almost daily for an entire month. Some are full-fledged concerts/performances, such as the festival's kick-off program 7 p.m. Sunday of the Joe Goode Performance Group, pictured above, which I hear is already a very tough ticket to get. Others are smaller-scale demonstrations or lectures. And the student culminations, which come at the conclusion of both of the festival's two-week sessions, are a great way to experience the festival and save money -- because they're free.

My cover story in Sunday's upcoming issue of Spotlight is about Summer Arts and includes some of the festival's highlights along with an interview with director Jim Spalding. We can't possibly fit the entire performance calendar into one issue of the newspaper, however. I plan to have a daily Summer Arts Bulletin Board rolling post on the Beehive with highlights for the day, news tidbits about the festival and a chance for readers to offer comments and reviews.

Thomas Friedman drives some people crazy because he coins vivid images to explain complex issues. I love it. In the world at large, there's no dearth of obtuse and confusing explanations of how stuff works. Friedman cuts through that verbiage with strong, clear language.

That's one of the reasons that his talk on Thursday night at the Warnors Theater -- a fundraising lecture for science programs at the Fresno Metropolitan Museum -- was so effective.

One of the phrases that Friedman coined is what he calls an "Americon." That's a unit of measurement, he says, that is the equivalent of 300 million Americans living like, well, Americans -- consuming lots of energy, living in big houses, driving big cars. The problem is that the world has too many "Americons." Decades ago, there used to be approximately two: the U.S. itself, plus Western Europe and Japan. Today there are NINE "Americons" -- or nine times 300 million people -- living in the world, including Russia, China and India. Sure, a major problem in the world is overpopulation. But to be crass about it, an even bigger problem is that so many more people are expecting an American standard of living.