On Saturday, the phenomenon known as "Tales From the Far Side of 50" makes its way to Vista.

That's when the play by Del Mar resident Lonnie Hewitt will be performed before a near-capacity crowd at the 385-seat Avo Playhouse. The 2 p.m. Sept. 30 performance is a fundraiser for Operation HOPE, an emergency winter shelter for homeless North County families.

Tickets to the "Tales" performance in Vista are still available but are expected to sell out before showtime. That has happened every time the show has been performed since its debut in November of last year.

"Tales" features 14 women, ages 58 to 88, talking and singing about the ups and downs of getting older. The 70-minute staged reading touches on all sorts of subjects -- some funny, some not so funny -- including regrets, pleasures, losses, children, husbands, health issues and wisdom gained with the passage of years.

"Anything you expect old ladies to say, you probably won't hear," Hewitt said of the play. "We went for things that surprise you. For example, the show starts out with a rap."

"Tales From the Far Side of 50" grew out of an all-women's workshop that Hewitt organized in April of last year. Up until eight years ago, Hewitt hosted local writing workshops based on her book, "The Little Red Writing Book: A Practical Guide to Writing Your Life Story." Last April, she asked some of her former workshop students, as well as family and friends (all of them over age 50) to join her for a special playwriting project on aging.

"Women's voices are much too little heard, especially older women's voices, and I thought it was time that we got up and started telling the truth about getting older. It's not all good news. And I wanted to create a performance based on the ideas that came from this," she said.

Fourteen women showed up, including Hewitt's 88-year-old mother. The women's best ideas were typed up, pasted on index cards and stuck with tape to the walls inside Hewitt's home. Eventually, a narrative emerged from all these scraps of paper, and Hewitt (a songwriter whose music has been featured in Broadway musicals and on "Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company" TV shows) wrote a song to pull together the piece.

Tickets are $25. Call VisTix at (760) 724-2110.

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Ken Jennings, the bookish Mormon computer programmer who won more than $2.5 million on the TV game show "Jeopardy," will present a lecture and book-signing on Oct. 19 at the Escondido Public Library.

Jennings will discuss his new book "Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs" at 7 p.m. at 239 S. Kalmia St., Escondido.

For information, call (760) 839-4683.

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Robert Castro, a longtime resident of Vista, has recently accepted a teaching position in the theater department of his alma mater, UC San Diego.

Castro came up through the Vista school district and honed his craft in theater at the city's Moonlight Amphitheatre. He earned his bachelor's degree at UCSD and went on to attend Trinity College in Rhode Island and Yale University, where he earned his master's degree.

Castro has worked in theaters all over the world with directors and artists that have included Peter Sellers, George Wolfe, Stephen Sondheim, Dawn Upshaw, Chita Rivera, Mandy Patinkin and many more.

But his heart has remained in the San Diego area, and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Castro, live in Oceanside.

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Tickets go on sale Friday for the San Diego County premiere of "Plaid Tidings," a holiday-themed sequel to the musical revue "Forever Plaid."

The special engagement of "Plaid Tidings," presented Nov. 17 to Dec. 3 at San Diego's Spreckels Theatre by Broadway/San Diego, brings back the Plaids -- a 1960s men's vocal harmony quartet resurrected from the dead by a cosmic coincidence for a single concert -- to perform a mix of holiday favorites that have been "Plaid-erized," along with tributes to the Rockettes, the Chipmunks and the Vienna Boys Choir.

"Forever Plaid" was one of San Diego's longest-running musicals in the 1990s. Starring in the Spreckels engagement will be three of the original San Diego "Plaids": Stan Chandler, David Engel and Larry Raben, along with San Diegan David Humphrey, who co-starred in numerous "Plaid" productions in Southern California in recent years.

Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Sept. 29 at all Ticketmaster outlets. Tickets are $19.75 to $65.75. Call (619) 220-8497.

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For the third year in a row, Legoland California has been voted Best Children's Park by amusement park aficionados worldwide.

The awards were announced last month by Amusement Today, a monthly trade newspaper for the amusement park industry.

Winners of the Golden Ticket Awards are determined from an international poll conducted by industry experts at the newspaper. Surveys were sent to a cross-section of well-traveled amusement park visitors and industry members.

The 128-acre Carlsbad theme park opened in 1998. It serves children ages 2 to 12 and has more than 50 rides and attractions.

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A documentary about the "military brats," the term for children growing up in an American military family, will be shown in a free screening Friday at the Oceanside Public Library.

"Brats: Our Journey Home" is a 90-minute documentary by filmmaker Donna Musil that chronicles the experiences of some of the estimated 15 million Americans who have grown up on military bases around the world. The film examines how this lifestyle affects children who grow up overseas and struggle to adapt to the American life, as well as how their childhood experience affects their adult relationships, careers and families.

"Brats" has been playing at film festivals around the U.S. It is being presented by the city of Oceanside at 7 p.m. Sept. 29 in the Library Community Rooms at the Civic Center, 330 N. Coast Highway. Admission is free.

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Hershey Felder's one-man musical "George Gershwin Alone," now playing at the Old Globe Theatre through Oct. 22, has turned into such a sales smash that Globe officials have taken the unusual step of asking Felder to stay on an extra week to perform another of his composer tributes, "Monsieur Chopin."

Felder, a piano prodigy who grew up in Canada's Yiddish theater circuit, wrote and stars in the musical play that examines the brilliant jazz-era composer Gershwin, who died tragically of a brain tumor at age 38. Felder's follow-up play, "Monsieur Chopin," is similar in style, yet follows the brilliant 19th- century Polish composer Frederic Chopin, who also died young, from tuberculosis, at age 39.

Felder has written a trilogy of composer plays based on the lives of Gershwin, Chopin and Ludwig von Beethoven. He mentions the Chopin play each night during performances of "George Gershwin Alone," and Globe Executive Director Louis Spisto said that Globe staff have been bombarded with requests by audience members who wondered if the Globe could book "Monsieur Chopin."

So, as soon as "George Gershwin Alone" ends, "Monsieur Chopin" will take its place, running for seven performances only, Oct. 26 through 31. Tickets are $19 to $62. Call (619) 234-5623.

Pam Kragen is the entertainment editor of the North County Times.