It appears I will be insane next Saturday. Or to be more exact, I will be in Sane. At least, that's the joke that my classmate from the EN Class of 1974 Paul Richardson uses for his Sane Mule Motorcycle shop near Boulder City. This will be the third time that our band, Natural Disaster, has played for one of his gatherings. The first time was the final appearance of the three girls in the group. That was in July 2003.
We also performed there in April. There was virtually no audience except for group leader/lead guitarist Richard Taylor's wife. The cyclists were usually out riding. You can clearly hear them pulling in and out of the parking lot on the audiocassette tape I have of that performance.
Hopefully, there will be a few people there to listen to the music. I am not sure exactly what time we are scheduled to start, but we practice tomorrow night at bass player Tim Brazelton's home, so I will find out then.
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As I was surfing the web, I checked out lamarmo.com, a website featuring information about Lamar, a town in which I lived in 1978 and again from 1982 to 1990. After that, I still covered Lamar for The Carthage Press until May 1999. In fact, the last story I wrote for The Press was about the Lamar High School graduation ceremony.
Lamarmo.com features a message board and I was surprised to find that I was a topic. Actually, the posters were talking about The Lamar Democrat, and the lack of news and information in it. A poster who called himself Oldtimer recalled the brief time in 1996 and 1997 when the Democrat had competition from a startup weekly called The Lamar Press. I was the editor of that newspaper, which lasted for 49 weeks. I still believe it is the best weekly newspaper I have seen in southwest Missouri. Oldtimer apparently believes that, too.
He recalled the dirty tactics used by The Democrat which kept our fledgling effort from getting off the ground. I had almost forgotten what Democrat Publisher Doug Davis did, or at least what I believe he did. The first issue of The Lamar Press was dated July 15, 1996, if memory serves me correctly. It was jam-packed with more news, more photos, more features, and more local columnists than The Democrat would have in six months, much less one newspaper.
We had our Carthage Press carrier for the Lamar area and another person throw the papers in the city. What we didn't know at the time, and did not find out until later, was that word had gone out about what we were going to do. Doug Davis or someone had our carriers followed and hundreds of people including many of the city's top officials and business people had the newspapers swiped right out of their yards. That happened for the first three weeks or so. The newspaper never recovered. That, combined with a lack of effort on our part to really try to hit hard on advertising sales, crippled The Press before it could ever get off the ground.
The newspaper was probably the only weekly in the area that ever featured any investigative reporting. Cait Purinton, an 18-year-old freshman from Kansas State, who graduated from Lamar High School, was a top reporter for The Press. She wrote a hard-hitting series on abuses in a Lamar residential care center called The Guest House, which eventually ended up getting that facility closed.
Our investigative series on a Lamar man who was bilking people who invested money in his non-existent AIDS cure, ran circles around The Joplin Globe's coverage of the same story. We were the only ones who found out that Pat Graham's investors included singer Pat Boone and the Hershend and Braschler families, who operate Silver Dollar City and other entertainment establishments in Branson.
We ran extensive coverage not only of hard-news stories like those, but also of events like The Lamar Fair and the high school graduation.
At the same time, I was serving as editor of The Carthage Press so I was putting in 80 to 90 hour weeks. I firmly believe I probably would have cut 10 to 15 years off my life if I had continued at that pace for much longer. I still have every copy of that newspaper. For 49 weeks, we put out the best weekly newspaper in southwest Missouri. It was an exciting time.
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Tonight's movie was the 1948 classic "Portrait of Jennie," starring Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones. The movie was adapted from Robert Nathan's 1940 novel of the same name. That book has always been one of my favorites and I have always recommended it to students.
The plot for this fantasy revolves around a starving artist named Eban Adams, whose work has always been uninspired. One day, Eban, played by Cotten, meets a young girl named Jennie Appleton in the park. Something about this girl fascinates him. She has a timeless quality and seems like someone who would have been at home in some bygone era.
After they part, Eban sells a drawing he did of her to an art gallery, where the owners remark about the increased amount of feeling in his work. The next time Eban meets the girl is only a few days later, but she appears to be a few years older. Each time Jennie meets with him, she tells him she is hurrying to grow up for him.
Curiously, though, she talks of places and people that no longer exist as if they did.
The plot, which you will enjoy if you are a hopeless romantic and abhor if you are a cynic, revolves around the theme that love is timeless.
It's odd that when Marlon Brando died last week, I couldn't think of a single film he had been in that I had enjoyed, except perhaps "Guys and Dolls" and he was terrible in that movie.
Joseph Cotten, on the other hand, is one of the most underrated actors of all time has been in many movies that I could watch over and over. He made his movie debut in "Citizen Kane," which some critics consider to be the best film of all time. He was also in "The Third Man" and was a wonderfully convincing, charming villian in the Alfred Hitchcock movie, "Shadow of a Doubt." That's not even to mention his parts in movies such as "The Magnificent Ambersons" and "Since You Went Away." Whoops, I just did mention them.When you watched Brando in a movie, you could always tell he was acting. Cotten, like Spencer Tracy, who is my all-time favorite actor, was just natural. With him, you believed in the character, you didn't have someone trying to impress you with accents and acting tricks.
"Portrait of Jennie" also features solid supporting performances from Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, and David Wayne.