The theme of our program presentations will be "Veterans of Past Wars." Our presenter for the next meetings veterans from WWII, Korea and Viet Nam. Make sure to attend these most interesting presentations There will be Question and Answer time provided.

Christos Anesti! It is hoped that all had a Happy Easter and a pleasent holiday. We all have been very busy preparing for some big events for the summer and arranging for elections for new officers for the next administration. To start with Monday, May 7^th, we will be having our 10^thAnnual George Polos Chapter Golf Tournament at the Carmel Mountain Ranch Country Club. It is hoped that all golfers get entered for the event and all non-golfers establish reservations for the Awards Banquet immediately after the tournament. (See flyer insert in this issue).

The months of July and August will be dark for Social/General Chapter Meetings and will resume again in September. However, Business Meetings, every third Thursday of the month, will continue as usual. All elected officers and Board of Governors are expected to attend.

Within the next couple of months we expect to complete the filing for the the Foundation, elect Delegates and Alternates for both the National Supreme Convention in Puerto Rico and the District Convention in Chandler, Arizona, plus planning for summer events that would include our families. We look forward to member inputs for summer events.

See you at the Golf Tournament,

Costa

Best Wishes and CRONIA POLLA to the following Brothers who are celebrating birthdays:

Vince Janikas 05/01

Larry Kavounas 05/11

Laki Vassiliadis 05/12

Sarantis Moursellas 05/25

Nick Anastasopoulos 05/29

Happy Anniversary!!! to the following Brothers and their lovely brides who are celebrating wedding anniversaries:

Larry & Mary Sidiropoulos 05/09

Nick & Georgia Vourlitis 05/12

Larry & Deborah Kavounas 05/13

Marinos & Mary Garbis 05/17

Peter & Celeste Shenas 05/23

Ted & Mitzi Georgis 05/24

George & Carolyn Koumaras 05/26

Yiannis & Rita Kapsis 05/27

Meeting Agenda - The following is the meeting agenda for the next Social/General Chapter Meeting, being held at SS. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church's Senior Citizen Center, Tuesday, May 1, 2001:

Program Presentation (To be annouced)

March 25th Celebration Committee Report

Scholarship Committee Report

Election of New Chapter Officers

Old Business

New Business

Good of the Order

General Business Meetings - General Business Meetings are held every third Thursday of the month. The next meeting will be Thursday, Nay 17, 2001, at Sts. Constantine and Helen Senior Citizen Center at 7:00 p.m. All Officers and appointed officers are expected to attend. Any interested members may attend. Come and see your administrative board at work planning and coordinating for better functions and best events for the membership.

Known To Be Hospitalized - Brother Laki Vassiliadis is in convalescence after surgery. He is doing well and feeling much better, We wish him a speedy recovery and we look forward to having him back with us right away. Perastika sou Laki!

Change of Address or Family Status - Should you have a change of address or change of status please notify and request from the TA NEA Editor a "Directory Questionnaire" to facilitate the update of your new data.

Please Notify Us - Should you know of any Brother recovering from illness or surgery, or known to be hospitalized, please notify Brother Alex L. Rigopoulos at (619) 233-7158 or (619) 469-9239.

Newsletter Entries - Please direct all newsletter announcements for "TA NEA" to the editor: Brother D. A. George, (858) 273-2868, FAX (858) 273-0416 or e-mail: dageo@att.net. All entries must be received by the 20th of each month.

Here's some advice Bill Gates recently dished out at a high school during a speech about 11 things the students didn't learn in school. He talked about how feel-good, politically-correct teaching has created a full generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept sets them up for failure in the real world.

RULE 1 - Life is not fair - get used to it.

RULE 2 - The world won't care about your self esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3 - You will NOT make $40,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both.

RULE 4 - If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.

RULE 5 - Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your,grandparents had a different word for burger flipping - they called it opportunity.

RULE 6 - If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

RULE 7 - Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

RULE 8 -Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished Failing grades and they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

RULE 9 - Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

RULE 10 - Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

RULE 11 - Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

One of the most widely accepted Easter traditions of the Orthodox people is the "cracking" or "breaking" colored eggs. Each housewife makes many and varied preparations for the, Easter table; and rightfully so because the Resurrection of our Lord is the greatest event in the world and after the formal blessing of the Church through the magnificent Midnight Easter Liturgy, the great Fast is broken and Easter festivities commence.

Amongst these preparations is the dyeing of the traditional Easter eggs. Some people dye the eggs in different colors and, of course, various interpretations can be given. But the most popular color is red, for it symbolizes the Blood shed by our Lord Jesus upon the Cross as well as the great joy that Easter brings.

We dye the eggs and give them to our relatives and friends, then we proceed in cracking them, only because this is what we learned from our tenderest years.

I think that if we knew or realized the deeper meaning attached to this tradition, the "cracking" of the eggs would have a greater significance.

We know that even in the history of pre-Christian people, the egg was considered as a symbol of life and immortality. This conclusion was commonplace because from the egg, life springs forth. However, in the Christian era, the egg becomes another symbol of the Resurrection. The egg represents the sealed Tomb that held the Body of our Crucified Lord. The shell of the egg is considered the wall of the Tomb, which held within it the "Life."

For this reason the Church blesses the eggs and distributes them to the Faithful after the Midnight Liturgy in order that they may figuratively partake at the festive Easter table. The Faithful they proceed to "crack" one another eggs giving the salutation of the day: "Christ is Risen!" and hearing the response: "He is risen, in deed!"

With this practice of crackin the eggs we are reminded that the seal of the Tomb was broken and that Christ came forth to give new life to the world.

What a glorious celebration! The March 25^th Greek Independence Day presentation of Brother Mike Merica's exciting play "Under Her Command," featured at the Del Mar Hilton Hotel, was spectacular. How fitting... March 25^th also happened to be the day of the 73^rd Annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles, California. Little do this year's winners know... they may soon be presented with very stiff competition. Those who witnessed this year's dramatic performance of "Under Her Command" will undoubtedly agree.

Brother Mike Merica wrote, directed and also performed in this most vivid portrayal of Greek heroism and fortitude in gaining victory over the Turks. The lead performer was Sister Hillary Pathe who played the role of Laskarina Bouboulina, the heroine of the period when Greece gained its independence from the tyranny of the Ottoman Empire. The performance was further enhanced by Hillary's husband, Brother Art Pathe, who performed the dual-role of Theodoros Kolokotronis (the well-known hero of the time) and Omar Bey, the co-conspiritor of Ambassador Stroganoff. Their performances were definitely worth of an Academy Award!

Among the star-studded cast was:

Gayle Hanson Laskarina's Mother, Skevo

Gary Kaprilian Papaflessas

Joanna Pathe Valideh Sultana

James Rigopoulos Dimitris Bouboulis,

Laskarina's Husband

Mark Stagnaro Giorgos Bouboulis,

Laskarina's Half-Brother

Jim Kanterakis Giannis Bouboulis

Estelle Stone The Old Woman

Stephen Stubberud Ambassador Stroganoff

Athena Merica Anthi Koutsis

Marinos Garbis Koutsis

The very capable technical crew consisted of Jeannette Rigopoulos as Narrator; Mimika Kaprelian as Prompter; George Pappas as Production Manager; James Caldes as Make-up Artist and Frances Bakay as Artistic Consultant. The recital of patriotic poems and songs was conducted by the Ss. Constantine and Helen Greek School students under the direction of Mrs. Myrtali Anagnostopoulos. The students did a tremendous job in preparing for their debut performance. The following stars need to be mentioned for their great performances: Alexander Aram, Darius Aram, Arianna Aram, Alexis Kailas, Eva-Marie Kailas, George Kailas, Leutheris Kailas, Nicholas Koutoufidis, George Letsos, Alexios Rigopoulos, Gregory Robinson, Anastasia Serberis, George Serberis, Nadia Sinno, Alexandra Staikos, Theodora Staikos, Melissa Sweet, Eleni Taousakis and

Stefanos Taousakis.

We thank the many generous sponsors for their support of our Chapter and the talented actors and youth for making this celebration and performance a tremendous success!

One of the most titillating stories to come out of Greece in the last decades was, of course, the lurid romance between Greece's septuagenarian prime minister and a 34-year-old stewardess. As we well know, Andreas Papandreou (said prime minister) left his wife of 38 years, Margaret Chant, married Dimitra Liani (said stewardess) and spent his last years ruling Greece from an exorbitant residence dubbed the "Pink Villa."

Word is that Liani, nicknamed "Mimi" by the Athens press, is planning to write her second book, and this time it will deal with her encounters and impressions of celebrities she met while she was Greece's First Lady. Having given some hints as to what her book will cover, Ms. Liani said that it will touch on Francois Mitterandls secret visits to Greece with his mistress and the gorgeous bouquets she would receive from him out of gratitude for her discretion and hospitality; the "naughtiness" of Prince Charles; and more about other prominent figures like Boris Yeltsin. Mohommar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and others. Readers may recall that Liani's first book, "Ten Years and 54 Days," was not so well received by the critics and that, because of it, a female civil servant slapped the socialist leader's widow and told her that she was offensive to all Greek women.

While coronary disease and cerebral strokes are declining in

the United State and in countries of the European Union, they have increased in Greece by 30%-40% in the last two decades. This was stated by Professor Giorgos Ziakas University of Thessaloniki conference in that city. The reasons for the increase (as one could easily guess) are excessive smoking, high fat intake, hypertension and lack of exercise.

Fifty years after his Turkish citizenship was taken away by the military government of his country, Nazim Hikmet (Turkey's most prominent 20th century poet) has finally

had it restored. Imprisoned and denigrated for inciting Army and Navy cadets to spread Communism, Hikmet died 38 years ago, and one has to wonder why it took the Turks that long to realize that the poet could no longer be a threat to their country.

For the first time in its history, the 51st Berlin Film Festival will have three Greek films competing for the Golden Bear award. A relatively unknown director, 35-year-old Philippos Tsitos, is his film "My Sweet Home" while Stavros Ioannou takes part with "Dead End Streets" and Christo Karakepelis was selected for his film "The participating with Tsitos's film, about the diverse identity different immigrants in Germany, is mainly a German production, with help from Greek Film Center. Tsitos has been living in Germany for the last 10 years.

Archeologists in the Verginia area reported that, around the ancient city of Dion diggers discovered a luxury hotel, for illustrious guests, and next to it two taverns and a less expensive hotel (probably for the servants of the official visitors), all dating from 180 to 230 A.D. Dozens of copper coins were also unearthed and archeologists have indications that a temple of Zeus is located in the vicinity and they will be searching for it.

You may have seen it; it was a prominent news story in most newspapers. In fact, "The Los Angeles Times," in a front page article, headlined the event by proclaiming "Genie Out of the Bottle on Human Cloning."

The news was about Cypriot-born Panayotis M. Zavos and his colleague, Dr. Severino Antinori, who announced in a conference on January 26, in Lexington, Kentucky, that they plan to clone the first human being and thus become the first scientists with expertise in human reproduction to publicly embark on such a venture.

The two men have already lined up ten infertile patients who want to be cloned and about a dozen other researchers who want to help. The reaction to the announcement, however, has been largely critical or skeptical. Critics argue that cloning would likely produce stillborn or diseased children and is bound to provoke lawmakers to ban such experiments on a wide scale of medical research which aims to use tissue from human embryos for cures of various diseases.

Zavos responded that he was well aware that many cloning efforts produce flawed embryos, but, he added, he and his team are working on minimizing or eliminating that possibility. "It will take some experimentation to get to where we need to go," Zavos said. Zavos, incidentally, is professor of reproductive physiology at the University of Kentucky. He was born in Famagusta in 1944 and served as a soldier in Cyprus's National Guard.

Bon Downing in a recent issue of "The New Criterion" has an article on entitled "Philhellene's Progress: Patrick Leigh Fermor," which traces the life of the philhellene from his formative years in India, to his service as a British commando in Crete in the 40, his wonderful travel books about his adopted country, his perspicacity as he writes about his experiences in countries other than Greece, and finally, about his return to where his heart is - the Greece where he still lives at the age of 85.

Nicholas Macrozonaris competed for Canada in the Sydney

Olympics in the 100-meter race. Clocked in at 10.9 seconds in the national trials, he had hopes of being among the top three finalists. Because of a hamstring injury in a pre-Olympic warmup, the sprinter not only failed to qualify but was also withdrawn from the 4X100 race. Now hack on track, Macrozonaris, whom the Canadian media has labeled "the Greek White Hope," has disputed rumors that he will soon compete for Greece, the homeland of his parents.

A few weeks before his death the Music Department of the University of Thessaloniki bestowed on lannis Xenakis an honorary doctorate for his contributions to the worlds musical compositions and innovations. Xenakis, whose electronic music has been praised world-wide for its originality, studied in the Polytechnic University in Athens and graduated in 1947. In the mid 60s the used computers and electronic synthesizers to compose his music and with revolutionary noteworthy results. Because of his health Xenakis did not attend the ceremony in Thessaloniki but was represented by his friend Spyros Sakkas who is himself a world-renowned artist.

Taking its cue from Wayne Merry's scare tactics "The Sunday Times" of London reported last month that the names of American athletes are on the hit list of November 17 terrorists. The FBI must be alerted and guard American athletes with special vigilance, suggested the paper. Now, it baffles me how the English paper came to find this out since the group never made such a detail public. So, if the newspaper has inside information about the evasive group, Scotland Yard should investigate its staff.

(Re-printed here by permission of The GreekAmerican).

Think life was so much simpler 100 years ago? Take a look at the following and you may just change your mind.

The average life expectancy in the United States was forty-seven years.

Only 14 percent of homes in the United States had a bathtub.

Only 8 percent of homes had a telephone. A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.

There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S. and only 144 miles of paved roads.

The maximum speed limit in most cities was ten mph.

Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California. With a mere 1.4 million residents, California was only the twenty-first most populous state in the Union.

The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.

The average wage in the U.S. was 22 cents an hour. The average U.S. worker made between $200 and $400 per year. A competent accountant could expect to earn $2,000 per year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1500 and $4000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.

More than 95 percent of all births in the United States took place at home.

90 percent of all U.S. physicians had no college education. Instead, they attended medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as "substandard."

Most women washed their hair only once a month and used Borax or egg yolks for shampoo.

The leading causes of death in the U.S. were pneumonia and influenza.

The American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet.

Drive-by-shootings -- in which teenage boys galloped down the street on horses and started randomly shooting at houses, carriages or anything else that caught their fancy -- were an ongoing problem in Denver and other cities in the West.

The population in Las Vegas, NV was 30. The remote desert community was inhabited by only a handful of ranchers and their families.

Plutonium, insulin and antibiotics hadn't been discovered. Scotch tape, crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't yet been invented.

One in 10 U.S. adults couldn't read or write. Only six percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.

Marijuana, heroin and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores.

Coca Cola contained cocaine instead of caffeine.

18 percent of households in the United States had at least one full-time servant or domestic.

There were about 230 reported murders in the U.S. annually.

H FWNH THS FILIAS

(The Voice Of Philia)

DAUGHTERS OF PENELOPE

PHILIA, CHAPTER #380

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

Dear Sisters,

The next meeting will Tuesday, May 1, 2001, in our meeting room in the Senior Citizens Center. We expect a presentation be Brother Michael T. Merica of his military exploits in Greece toward the end of the war. We urge all members to make an effort to appear.

One of our agenda items will be discussions concerning our new Chapter officer nominations for the coming year. We look forward to your input. Take care and we will see you all at the next meeting.

Yours in Theta Pi,

Joanna Pathe

As Greeks embark on the pre-Pascha seven week fasting season, we can look to Italy for a delicious meal that satisfies the austere no-meat no-dairy no-blood fish restrictions of the Lenten diet. The only drawback, of course, is that the combination of shrimp, scallops, calamari and mussels may seem a bit extravagant for days otherwise reserved for making sacrifices.

An added incentive: Known as "frutta tis thalasas" (fruits of the sea), this cold salad of seafood and vegetables is as healthy as it is delicious.

1 small bag of mussels 1/2 red onion, diced

1/2 lb small shrimp 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

1/2 lb bay scallops 2/3 cup red wine vinegar

1 lb calamari, cleaned and sliced into rings

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

1 tomato, diced 3 tablespoons granulated garlic

2 roasted red peppers, diced 1 tablespoon oregano

1/2 cucumber, diced 1 tablespoon onion powder

1 tsp pepper

After rinsing the mussels in lukewarm water (recommended three times) to remove sand, place in a pot of cold water and cook to boiling. Discard any mussels that have not opened during cooking. Cool cooked mussels in cold running water and remove from shells.

Place calamari and scallops in cold water (add shrimp after a few minutes) and bring to a boil. Test for doneness, but be careful not to overcook. Cool seafood under cold running water.

Place cut vegetables in a bowl and add olive oil and vinegar. Next add spices and mix thoroughly. Finally add mussels, scallops, shrimp and calamari, mixing lightly but thoroughly.

Refrigerate the mixture overnight and serve the next day. Serve over mixed greens. Yields ten medium-sized appetizer portions. Enjoy!