Universal Studios StarWay
Ouray Avenue
addressed to
Miss Elizabeth Smith
Ouray Avenue
Grand Junction
Colo.
reads
Doris Elizabeth Stapleton
requests the pleasure
of your company on
Saturday afternoon
July 2, 1904. from
2 to 5 PM
226 White Avenue
envelope measures
3.5” x 2.75”
by the way
Ouray was the chief of the Uncompahgre band of the Ute tribe
from around 1860 until his death in 1880.
Camp Winacka Song
Camp Winacka Song
There's a place in the mountains
Where the sun and the snow
Nourish the earth and the wild things grow
The hawk and the blue jay, the squirrel and raccoon
Come in the morning and leave by the moon.
chorus
Camp Winacka, the oaks and the pines
Live there together, why don't you and I?
There's covered wagons where you'll make your bed
Unroll your blanket and lay down your head
You can row on the waters in a dugout canoe
Walk across meadows and rolling hills, too.
chorus
Ride spirited ponies on Boulder Creek Road
Pull back you arrows and let it all go
You can gaze at the heavens and watch falling stars
Thank God for living and be who you are.
chorus
Courtesy of the Girl Scouts, San Diego-Imperial Council.
Filmmaking
I saw Into Darkness last Friday and immediately wanted to see it again. From the first moment it grabs you and doesn’t let go. It was the 2D version as I detest most things 3D, though I’m tempted by Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, and I don’t think I missed anything watching Star Trek in 2D.
Something funny happened while I watched. Yes, there was the man with a baseball cap and the bladder of a seven-year-old girl who chose to sit in the center of the row and then needed climb over everyone six times to use the restroom. Six times. But that wasn’t funny.
No, the funny thing that happened to me was that I somehow saw the filmmaking in a way I never have before. This isn’t a criticism. I wasn’t looking for it and I don’t think it was obvious. In fact, I try so very hard not to see the filmmaking. I want to enjoy the story as it unfolds and revel in the magic as it takes place in front of me. The magic isn’t in the technical skill required to make me believe. It’s the fact that I do believe. I’ve always believed. I believed a shark was going to get me, even in Denver’s Cook Park community pool. And that was just from the commercials. I didn’t actually see Jaws until 1986. I believed that Luke Skywalker came from a planet that had two suns and that blew up the Death Star. I even kind of almost maybe believed you could build a time machine out of a DeLorean, at least for the two hours I sat in the darkened theater.
That’s how I like it. I want to be reeled in and convinced.
Then along came JJ Abrams. I’m not going to pretend I’ve followed his career. I haven’t. It was more a realization that I’ve enjoyed his career without knowing it was him I was enjoying. The same thing happened with David Fincher not too long ago. Anyway, it was probably Abrams first Star Trek that hooked me. He was treading on sacred ground to so many and he’d never really watched the show. Abrams is a Star Wars guy so he relied on his collaborators to keep the mythology on track. Or turn it upside down as the case maybe. One of them was Alex Kurtzman who likened the original Star Trek to classical music while Star Wars was rock and roll. Star Trek was submarine warfare, cat and mouse. So what could Star Trek learn from Star Wars? Pick up the pace. Wow, did they ever. The first one was huge. Into Darkness takes the spectacle even further yet somehow remains grounded in reality, even if it’s sci-fi reality. The characters are old and new at the same time and I care about them. But while I like Star Trek I have to say I’m more Star Wars myself.
I wasn't allowed to see Star Wars when it first came out. It was rated PG and I had only seen G rated Disney fare. So I pressed and prodded and pushed for the entire summer. Dad had to give the green light. Mom usually made these types of decisions, but not this time. I wonder if they disagreed and she made him tell me no. I don't know what changed his mind, who he might have talked to that made him feel that it would be okay, that I would be okay, if I saw Star Wars. Maybe he talked to Seth's dad while they were both mowing the lawn. Seth had seen it. He had all the dolls. I hadn't yet learned to call them action figures. He even had the record, just the music, the soundtrack. We listened to it over and over lying on Seth’s living room floor while I made up new adventures for the dolls because I didn’t know the proper story. Seth didn’t mind that I strayed from the script.
At any rate, Dad finally conceded. Maybe he just gave up to my constant nagging. Maybe Fr. O’Malley nodded his approval. Maybe he wanted to see it himself. However it came to be, just before I started second grade, Dad took me to the movies. Not dropped me off like with the Raggedy Ann & Andy movie. In the mid-1970s wasn’t considered child endangerment to drop of a seven-year-old at a movie theater alone. This time though we went together.
It was like nothing, nothing I'd ever seen. No one had. Everyone wanted to know how it was done. So they told us. There was a TV special that revealed some of the secrets. School had just started and I was given permission to watch The Making of Star Wars across the street at Seth's house. He had a color TV We climbed onto the fuzzy mustard colored couch in his family room facing the 18” tube with rabbit ears sticking out the top. I’d changed out of my red plaid school uniform into play clothes, but not my socks. I still had on my white knee high socks with Buster Brown shoes. His mom had made supper, they called it supper, and now their brand new dishwasher rumbled and groaned in the kitchen behind us. Seth had recently started wearing glasses and he kept bumping them on his nose as he tried to brush brown curls out of his face. We each had a Dum Dum Pop; mine was root beer, his was pineapple. Down the hall Jordan, Seth’s little brother, was splashing in a bath. We were giggly and chattering until John Williams silenced us. C3P-O came on the TV and showed us how the land speeder zoomed across the sands of some place called Tunisia, not Tatooine, in one endless circle like a horse on a merry-go-round and how the space ship that had filled the screen was really only about three feet long and that some guy named Ben, but not Kenobi, created the sound for light sabers.
I know these revelations ignited imaginations in future filmmakers, Abrams included, for which I am most grateful as a movie watcher. But it burst a bubble in mine. I didn’t want to run out and buy a movie camera. I wanted to believe. Filmmakers are magicians and I love what they do. I don’t necessarily want to know how the trick works. I don’t want to think about blue screens or green screens or stop motion animation or make sticky software or the shutter in 3D glasses or RED cameras. When the lights go down I don’t want to think about these things. I want to believe.
I do though. Know stuff. Not much, but I did help roommates with their 8mm masterpieces before digital. I can pull focus walking backward next to a Radio Flier being wheeled down a never-ending dorm hallway. I’ve lived in a room with strips of film taped to the walls waiting to be spliced together with a clank and projected at twenty-four frames per second. I’ve seen the benefit of letterboxing and signed a petition to get Ted Turner to quit colorizing the classic black and white films, especially the ones shot after color was readily available. I have spent ages tracking down obscure source material for adaptations before Google.
Abrams is a Star Wars guy. He was one of those that made his own 8mm films as a kid. Look at Super 8. So when George Lucas sold to Disney and Abrams signed on Episode VII, I was cautiously thrilled. He seemed to be the perfect answer to take my first true cinematic love and have the reverence and respect for the source material and then make it bigger and better while still getting it right. I don’t know what “right” looks like but I trust that Abrams does. I trust that he can make me feel like I’m seven-years-old in a theater sitting next to Dad watching the most amazing thing either one of us has ever seen and believing with everything that I am that it could really happen in a galaxy far far away.
Ash Grove Elementary
I attended kindergarten at Ash Grove Elementary in Denver. My mom was wonderful enough to write all of my classmate’s names on the back of my class photo.
Row 1: Mr. Seeber, Mrs. Coffey, Sara Wilkins, Scott Hays, Katie Kennedy, Andrew Samaras, Lauel Gregory, Michael Wolfson
Row 2: Laurie Hansen, Cara Olin, Richard Mohr, Jody Ambrose
Row 3: Katie Flanigan, Adam Welter, Danielle Pokonney, Patrick Bailey, Jill Fogel, Brian Geraghty, Christa Michele Doty, Steve Higgins
Row 4: Me, Meghan Jones, Lisa Burkhart, Gabriel Gehia, Charne Schmidt, Jenny Olson, Seth Matus, Millyon Pak
Row 5: Lisa Berg, Nicole Campbell, Marcella Epper, Joy Wagner, Dana Swartz
Seth Matus lived directly across the street from me and was my very first best friend.
I’m pretty sure that plaid shirt was blue...
...and my jumper was red with red yarn ribbons at the end of each braid.
We were all pretty stinking cute.
Sara Wilkins, from row 1, was my partner in crime. No, really. I committed my first crime with Sara. We shiplifted stickers with our initials from some hardware store. Mine are still stuck to my toy chest.
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Robert Herrick
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.
Daily Booth
Hollywood, CA
It's been a good day so there's no particular reason for the face.
Elizabeth Smith
My grandmother, Elizabeth Katherine Smith, was born June 29, 1899, in Grand Junction, a town in Colorado about 250 miles west of Denver. It’s situated on the Colorado River where it meets the Gunnison River, hence the “junction.” The area was originally home to the Ute people with the white farmers moving into the area in the 1880s. So the town wasn’t even twenty years old when Grandma was born.
I never got to know Gramma, not really. She died when I was seven-years-old. By most accounts she was a pretty cool lady. To me she was kinda creepy and just a little annoying. Parkinson’s had confined her to a wheelchair. Her hands shook unless she was reaching for her cup of tea, then they were steady which sort of made my little-kid-self think she might be faking. I know now that’s one of those weird quirks of the disease, steady in some situations with debilitating tremors in others. She also had these crazy black cat eye glasses that, to my adult self look rather awesome but set against her little-old-lady-blue/white hair made her look a little like a muppet. When Gramma and Grampa came to dinner we didn’t get to watch Dick Van Dyke reruns, we watched Hee Haw and Lawrence Welk. A one and a two…
I’m pretty sure she died on St. Patrick’s Day, which was also my best friend Seth’s birthday. Needless to say, St. Patty’s Day has always had a wee bit of a weird connotation for me, especially when you take into consideration that I don’t like beer. I keep trying Guinness thinking that my Irish heritage will kick in. Then I take a sip of the foamy brown slop and that’s that for another two or three years. I think I’m due to try Guinness again in 2015.
About twenty years ago, Mom started giving me things Gramma had saved. Recipes. Some letters and invitations she had received as a child. Poems she had copied by hand. Mom gave me a small black three-ring binder full of these things. Now they are my collection of odds and ends. In looking through it all I’m hoping to learn more about my mother’s mother.
The talented Sarah Swen scanned all of these archival documents, some of them more than a hundred years old, so I can share them instead of stashing them away in a drawer. They are too cool to keep to myself. I’ll be posting them from time to time.
Hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Daily Booth
Hollywood Hills, CA
Today was one of those good days where I got a ton of stuff done and am
feeling pretty good about it all.
Yup.
Feeling good about it all.
You know what?
I'm feeling good.