The San Francisco Mime Troupe wants to entertain and challenge audiences with live satire, but Michael Gene Sullivan, the writer, director and an actor for this year’s show — Disruption: A Musical Farce — says he aims for more than two-dimensional hilarity.

“I’m very much against the pie-throwing satire of ‘here’s my enemy, I set him up, create a straw man, make fun of him, set fire to him,’ ” he says on this week’s Davisville. “When I was describing the [regular working-class cop] character [in the play] to someone, they were like, ‘I don’t want this guy to be a hero.’ I said, ‘he’s not a hero, but he’s not a villain, either.’ He’s totally understandable.…” (Sullivan plays the part in the play; the photo shows him in costume)

The nonprofit can't currently afford its former big summer tours, but has kept Davis on its annual circuit. This year they’ll perform July 10 in the Brunelle theater in Davis. Tickets are free but they ask viewers to donate $20 apiece.

This year’s top graduating senior at the University of California, Davis is Avantika Gokulnatha. She just earned a degree in genetics and genomics, she’d like to help make aging more manageable for people, she values her art classes in the campus Craft Center, and she prizes research. “Research has always been what I define to be American,” she says, and on today’s Davisville she explains what she means, what brought her to Davis, and where she’s headed next.

This UC Davis photo by Gregory Urquiaga shows Avantika Gokulnatha with Jack McGruder of Fairfield as they talk about how to use an app on an iPhone

Davis needs hundreds of additional homes for people with very low incomes, says Bill Pride during today’s Davisville, and other Yolo County cities have similar needs. As executive director of a new nonprofit, Yolo Community Builders, Pride wants to respond to that demand by building more tiny housing units throughout the county, inspired by the innovative Paul’s Place in Davis, for people who would otherwise be homeless.

Today we talk with Pride and Maria Ogrydziak, an accomplished architect who will design the new units. Pride is a former executive director of Davis Community Meals and Housing, which built and runs Paul's Place, a four-story building in central Davis that combines permanent housing, transitional housing, and various services to help people escape homelessness. Ogrydziak designed Paul's Place.

Other nonprofits would own and offer support services at the locations that Yolo Community Builders plans to develop. YCB is developing these partnerships with nonprofits, and Pride hopes to announce the first projects by the end of the year.

(Image, taken from Yolo Community Builders website, shows two tiny homes side by side)

The large tariffs on U.S. imports ordered by President Trump in April have created huge uncertainty and anxiety, amplified by Trump’s frequent course changes and by tariffs imposed on the U.S. in retaliation. Small businesses can’t wait for uncertainty to clear, however. They have to make frequent decisions in real time. Today on Davisville a few businesses downtown tell us what they think of the tariffs, how they’re coping, and how their customers are responding.

The results are not conclusive -- only five businesses responded to a set of questions I sent to DDBA members prior to this program -- but  they are interesting. One respondent cheers the tariffs. The other four rate the impact to be severe and negative. Even so, you’ll also hear nuance.

Today's guests are Brett Lee, executive director of the Davis Downtown Business Association, and Kevin Wan, president of the association this year and co-owner of Sophia’s Thai Kitchen. They comment on the responses and add insights of their own.

(Photo shows a downtown Davis street scene on May 22, 2025)

The Davis school district might have to close up to three public schools over the next decade for reasons that include declining birth rates, high housing costs, and changing job patterns. Adding more homes for families in Davis could blunt that trend, but Davis voters generally resist population growth. So, people in Davis need to start talking about what they want to do, while there's still time to plan for the change. Matt Best, superintendent of the Davis public school district, discusses the choice this week on Davisville.

“We’ve got to plan for one of two scenarios. One, we see housing on the horizon and we’ve got a plan for a reboundary [of attendance areas] if those students arrive. The second path is, there is no new housing on the horizon, and we’ve got to plan to close two or three schools over the course of the next decade, and how are we going to solve that problem as a community?

“The way we’re looking at this challenge now is, the Board of Education is going to make a decision in the fall of ’26 about what the plan is, given the conditions that we have,” Best says. “Which means that by the ’27-’28 school year, we’re going to have to start to actuate some change if there’s no new development. … We can’t have any surprises. We need time as a community to talk about these challenges. We solve our problems best as a community when they’re out in the daylight.”

(The photo shows North Davis Elementary, one of eight elementary schools in the Davis Joint Unified School District.)

Last year’s idea for a new “civic information hub” in Yolo County has grown into Yolo Local, a budding project to create a new source for local information and news. This spring the project is surveying people throughout the county to get insights on the types of information people want to access about local civic life and events, but don’t necessarily know where to find as the old ways of distributing information and news continue to fragment.

Today on Davisville we hear an update about the project from Autumn Labbe-Renault, the executive director of Davis Media Access and the project’s main organizer. What Yolo Local will look like, and how it will operate, is not yet decided. That will come after the survey results are released, probably in September. Meanwhile, Autumn offers two examples of existing civic information sites she likes—Lookout in Santa Cruz and The Oaklandside, in Oakland—during today's review of what's driving this project, who's involved, and how it all might come together.

You might have seen the famous photo of a U.S. helicopter incongruously perched atop the roof of a Saigon building, with people lined up on a sloping ladder, backlit by the sky, hoping to board. The image illustrates the final hours of the evacuation of U.S. citizens, South Vietnamese allies and others from what was then South Vietnam on the day its capital, Saigon, fell to the North Vietnamese army and its allies at the end of the Vietnam War.

When so many were scrambling to leave, a few Americans chose to stay. Claudia Krich, a retired teacher who lives in Davis, was among them. Her journal of the experience is the basis of her new book, Those Who Stayed / A Vietnam Diary. She went to Vietnam in 1973 to work in a medical relief program. On today’s Davisville she talks about why she stayed when Saigon surrendered, her experiences in Vietnam, and what she saw that day. She’ll talk about her experience at the Davis library at 6 p.m. April 30, exactly 50 years after the end of the war.

If you go this spring to the Gibson House, a 19th century mansion-turned-museum in Woodland, you can see portraits of people who lived in Yolo County in the 19th century. There are a lot of stories in those paintings, and in the painters, all of whom worked in Yolo County.

One of the six artists exhibited is Calthea Campbell Vivian, described as “one of the leading artists of the West” in her time. Another was an accomplished painter who couldn’t make a living at it, which ended his marriage … and his daughter became a famous opera singer in Britain. And her daughter, his granddaughter, became the youngest baroness in England.

Who are the people in the paintings? What did they want their portraits to tell us? What’s it like to stand in the rooms of this landmark house and look at them, looking back at us? We talk about all this today on Davisville with Sarah Bartlett, museum curator for the Yolo County Historical Collection, which is presenting “Picturing Yolo County exhibit: paintings by past local artists” through June 17.

Photo shows painting of 66-year-old Mary Blowers of Woodland, 1896, by Calthea Campbell Vivian

Advances in technology, say today’s guests on Davisville, make it possible to create a community microgrid in new parts of Davis that would deliver clean, resilient, solar-powered energy to its customers for less than Pacific Gas & Electric charges. To accomplish this, Davis would need to form a municipal utility, and a developer building on vacant land would need to sign on. If the community microgrid succeeds, the model could be repeated throughout the state.

Ari Halberstadt and Lorenzo Kristov, who have been working on the project, explain how it all would come together, including why the microgrid would have to serve new customers who aren't already served by PG&E.

The Trump administration is hammering away at the federal government by eliminating jobs, cancelling programs, freezing spending and generally creating confusion. Today on Davisville we look at one part of the fallout in Yolo County -- the effect of the spending freeze on local nonprofits -- by talking with Jessica Hubbard, executive director of the Yolo Community Foundation.

Yolo has about 200 nonprofits, not counting hundreds of small ones like school PTAs or neighborhood associations.

“The biggest thing right now … is uncertainty," she said. Some local nonprofits have been hit by the spending freeze, particularly ones working in the areas of food and the environment, and “a huge number of nonprofits [worry] about the impact of the freeze, or anticipate that those freezes or potential cuts will impact them down the road.”

We talk about reactions, Hubbard's advice for nonprofits and donors, the effect on nonprofit workers and volunteers, giving across the political spectrum, similarities to the turmoil caused by the pandemic, and where all this might be headed. The foundation releases its latest State of the Yolo Nonprofit Sector Report in mid-March.

(Photo shows a storm over Yolo County in winter 2018)