I was 13 when I saw my first William Shakespeare play. We saw “King Lear,” one of the Bard’s last and darkest plays. It was a magnificent occasion for me, and I still have a passion for the Bard’s work, as well as watching performances in an outdoor setting—especially in a park. San Jose residents should feel lucky that special performances will take place next month in Willow Glen, where the Shady Shakespeare Theatre Company will put on its season opener, “The Twelfth Night.”

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of marriage equality, Ray Hixson will assemble at a celebratory rally in Mountain View with hundreds of others. And while the LGBT community and its allies are hoping for a party, others want to head down to the Santa Clara County courthouse to apply for a marriage license. County Supervisor Ken Yeager, who’s openly gay, already asked the courthouse to prepare for an influx of same-sex couples ready to tie the knot.

To handle the surge of complaints, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office set up a fraud hotline in Vietnamese and English for customers bilked by a San Jose travel agency. Sunlight Travel, founded in 1996 by Diane Ho, suddenly closed up shop June 5, leaving customers in a lurch. Many of them stand to lose thousands of dollars for flights bought but never booked. Sunlight Travel catered to a lot of Vietnamese clients from its now-closed strip mall storefront on South King Road.

There have been a lot of reports in the media recently about teens and children being bullied at school and through social media. Dating violence among teens has been studied for years, but the relationship to online harassment is a new issue.

People like Frederick Law Olmstead and Henry David Thoreau claimed that direct access to natural surroundings, such as parks, has psychological benefits for people. Noth based these claims more on opinion than fact, but recent studies show both men were on the right track.

On Friday, June 21, the San Jose Stage Company has an especially auspicious occasion scheduled, as the company will put on a benefit performance to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the political comedy show Monday Night Live! and the 30th anniversary for the company as a whole. The five-hour gala will start at 7pm inside the Silicon Valley Athletic Club’s Corinthian Grand Ballroom. Ticket reservations can be purchased at http://www.thestage.org, or by calling the box office at 408.283.7142.

Original Joe’s has become a San Jose institution by serving the best eggplant parmesan in the Bay Area for over 50 years. It has thrived in Downtown San Jose because their owners, the Rocca family, like so many other San Jose businesspeople, know what it takes to compete. As they compete for the loyalty of their patrons, Original Joe’s has helped to support the college tuitions and mortgages of generations of cooks and wait staff.

The city expects to clear up 40 to 60 homeless encampments a year—indefinitely. Annual cost for the cleanups will range around $550,000, and possibly more, if the city approves a contract with Tucker Construction, Inc., at Tuesday’s City Council meeting. Other agenda items for the last council meeting of the fiscal year include a settlement for a man struck by a police car, a renewal agreement with the city’s Sacramento lobbying firm and a potential shift to store city data through cloud computing.

The Government Attorneys Association (GAA) held a special meeting Friday, and sources tells San Jose Inside that if the county attorneys agreed upon anything, it’s that a “deep division” exists amongst the membership. The big question is how can this be resolved when the union’s leadership continues to focus on scoring fleeting political points.

A schizophrenic man bused with a one-way ticket, no cash and a few-days-supply of meds from Las Vegas to Sacramento earlier this year has filed a federal class action lawsuit against the state agencies he says abandoned him and at least 1,500 other mentally ill patients. Those patients were bused to nearly every state in the nation, many to major cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose.

Archaeologists and osteologists unearthed skeletal remains in unmarked redwood caskets from a pauper’s graveyard Thursday morning. In final excavations to ready the site for Valley Medical Center’s expansion, they found a clay smoking pipe, a wool jacket, an assortment of pocket knives and spectacles, among other personal items buried with the 1,400 or so bodies in the unmarked potter’s field, according to a county spokesperson.

San Jose State University no longer employs a lecturer accused of sexual battery by a student, according to SJSU President Mohammad Qayoumi.

Last Friday, Edison International—one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the country—announced that it would permanently retire the troubled San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS). The decision ended 18 months of uncertainty for Southern California Edison (SCE) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) customers, after a January 2012 leak caused the plant to be shut down. The shutdown and now retirement of the plant has made our state’s energy future uncertain.

Most people do not consider jail inmates to be an empathic interest group. But many in custody are innocent, as they have not yet been proven guilty, and as a matter of law and right they must be treated justly. That’s why the Santa Clara County Department of Corrections (DOC) was right in halting a new proposal to limit mail in county jails.

When the sun goes down, big-rig truck drivers parallel park on Baytech Drive in the Alviso neighborhood so they can rest for the night. It’s not illegal, but it is annoying, says City Councilman Kansen Chu. Other items going before the Rules and Open Government Committee on Wednesday include Vice Mayor Madison Nguyen fighting for the public’s right to take photos in public spaces and potential raises for City Manager Debra Figone and City Attorney Rich Doyle.

Dozens of alleged Nuestra Familia gang members were indicted by a criminal grand jury on 77 charges, which range from meth sales to murder. It’s the largest gang case Santa Clara County has ever tackled: 48 people charged in a hefty 99-page indictment. “This is a sophisticated, complex criminal organization that required a sophisticated, multi-faceted law enforcement and prosecutorial response,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement released Tuesday morning.