Updates are coming: Theater X-Net
Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley
Visit: Michael's Montana Web Archive
Theater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!
Weather: A soft snow this morning with blue skies and big cumulus clouds in the mid-afternoon. California has more rain than is good for the people who live there. (see below)
Wildlife: All our bird pals were feeding while we watched the Tournament of Roses Parade: Magpies, Blue Jays, Flickers, Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers, Juncos, Finches, and Chickadees. The Bald Eagles showed up early, and a small group of Canada Geese explored the pond.
Charity Alert: Keep that resolution! Click on The Hunger Site once a day.
Media Watch: The Tournament of Roses Parade was absolutely awesome this year. We watched it commercial-free on HGTV, plus a behind-the scenes special which featured Raul Rodriguez, the designer of many of the best floats this year, and his partners at Phoenix Decorating Company.
That made the event so wonderful was the fact that everybody was out in a drenching 2 to 4 inch Pacific downpour -- braving the very contrary elements just to have a good time. Some colors ran on the floats, a couple of them needed towing, some instruments needed covering-up from the rain, but there was a lets do it spirit that came though the broadcast. The Rose Bowl isn't until Wednesday this year, so maybe the storm willl be over by then.
Here's some pages describing the floats of 2006:
Page One and Page Two
Here's an audio interview with Raul Rodriguez on NPR:
Rose Parade Float Designer
I stayed up a bit late finishing Larry McMurtry's The Colonel and Little Missie -- Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America. McMurtry makes a case for their popularity being equivalent to the strange phenomena of so-called Superstardom today, as if the status of star isn't a weird thing in itself. His short sketches of the people they knew and worked with coalesce into a biographical outline of their intertwined lives. I'd call the book a long historical essay.
One thing that Larry (Lonesome Dove) McMurtry knows about is the mythological power of the Legend of the West that has existed in the public imagination for almost a century and a half. William F. Cody lived the life of a plainsman until he was in his early thirties, and then was a show business icon until his death. Whatever the truth about his adventures on the western frontier might have been, the fact that he was a living ambassador from that chimeric place and time made him one of the most famous men in the world.
A very good friend of mine who makes her living as a trick roper once opined to me that "Annie Oakley wasn't a REAL cowgirl." I differed with her opinion, but it doesn't matter how anybody categorizes Annie Oakley nowadays. She was a remarkably skilled sharpshooter and showperson, and her own unique star hasn't dimmed over time.
Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley & the cover of Larry McMurtry's book
Karen Quest in Cowgirl costume at the NW Montana Fair in 2002
Take a look at her Cowgirl Tricks Website!
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