AT Woodminster Amphitheatre, inside this "Cathedral in To the Woods," as its name indicates, to locate your seats, but hang on to your ticket stubs. At the outset, look on the proscenium arch to note the legend on it "Dedicated to California Writers." Try to imagine a little blond lady declaiming yards of stirring rhymed poetry under that motto. Inevitably she spouted the lines "He gained a world; he gave that world/ Its grandest lesson: *On, sail on.', the reprise from Miller's poem "Columbus." While she lived, Juanita Miller, a Chautauqua monologist, and daughter of the poet Cincinnatus Hiner (Joaquin) Miller, for whom the surrounding park is named, gave an annual recitation here of her father's best known work. wearing as she did so, a ring with relic fingernails and hair from his funeral pyre in it. The tremendous cross of trees Joaquin built to surround the hilltop pyre, when this was his estate, The Hights, can still be seen by incoming airplanes at Oakland airport, but authorities would not let his body be cremated in it. Park officials have an agreement with the Oakland airport that planes will not fly over the amphitheatre during performances, incidentally.
