The snow followed us south from Fairmont Hot Springs in British Columbia, Canada on Sunday. It was dangerously windy and slippery at first, but cleared up for most of an hour -- until we approached the Crows Nest Pass. A blizzard was literally howling off of the Continental Divide between B.C. and Alberta. Layer after layer of icy slush was building up by the minute, and 25 miles an hour was too fast to drive. After we turned southward at Elko Junction the weather softened within fifteen minutes, thank goodness. We had intermittent, gentle rain once we got home. I was happy to get out of the car and stand up, so I spent another hour putting away the remaining hoses and harvesting some mint -- even though the wind got COLD! Afterward, I sat down to watch some NFL football for a half hour or so. When I looked outside, there was a swirling snowstorm whitening everything -- it's still going on four hours later, as I write this, depositing over a foot (30 cm) so far. Getting to work on time will be a challenge Monday morning. (UPDATE: Thick ice all the way into work, dangerous and nasty. We should have declared a “snow day.”)

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Ida's Places in Paris, from my jet-lagged first day by the Seine.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley
Click on Exceptionally Yours to find Footsbarn Theatre

Visit: Michael's Montana Web Archive
Theater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!
NEW! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Keep that resolution as Winter sneaks in! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: I am giving my illustrated lecture about Women in Science Fiction for the fiction writing class tomorrow. Christy Kabler, their professor, had them read Those Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Leguin
I am also doing my second slide presentation about Footsbarn Theatre for our Theater Department on Wednesday -- this presentation will have more diesel, rope, canvas, wires, and steel. I want the students to see, feel, and even smell the life of a travelling theater company, and know the sacrifices involved with choosing that life.

Media Watch: I picked up a copy of The Phantom of the Opera (1911), from the pen of French crime reporter and detective novelist Gaston Leroux (1868-1927). TCM is showing the Lon Chaney movie from 1925 on Sunday night. I have seen several versions over the years -- An early remake with Claude Rains was so sentimental and drab that cornball-king Nelson Eddy stole the show -- he was perfectly cast as a singer at an opera house, rather than as a singing mounted policeman; Phantom of the Paradise took itself 'way too seriously to really be a parody, and poor Jessica Harper started her on-screen career as an object of obsession. Robert (Freddy Kruger) Englund was fairly good in a gory Late 20th Century interpretation; Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical made Sarah Brightman a star, but he took his own sweet time turning it into a movie -- the principal actors were declared too old for their original roles in 2004, even though Michael Crawford could have done very well indeed, if the producers were actually committed to the integrity of their play. Ms. Brightman was/is doing well on the concert circuit, thank you, but I'm sure she would have appreciated being asked to make an appearence of some kind.



Promotional images of Sarah (Christine Daae) Brightman -- given the Andy Warhol treatment via Photoshop.
Images from sarah-brightman.com. (I'm a member!)
Photos by Simon Fowler/Ellen von Unwerth.

Addenda: It's the Halloween season, so TV movies have been right up my alley: White Zombie with Bela Lugosi is fairly comical with it's exagerrated melodramatic style. I Walked with a Zombie has some good proto-film noir qualities, but screenwriter Curt Siodmak didn't do quite as well with Creature with the Atom Brain a decade later. We enjoyed The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Canadian television while we were travelling, and read an article in the local paper how Rocky's Midnight Movie act-along/act-out has been running in Calgary, Alberta for four years. (Better late than never!)
On a related note -- TCM showed a few episodes of Kirk (Blackhawk) Alyn's first Superman serial from the late 40's last Saturday morning -- maybe they'll show the rest of them. Their credits mentioned both Comic Books and Bud Collyer's radio program as sources. The serial also used Max Fleischer's animated cartoon version of Superman for it's flying sequences. Those three mediums made the character popular at first, but animations didn't work with live actors, despite the very low standards and expectations of chapter-serials. Alyn himself appeared to soar in Superman Flies Again a few years later, but this particular form of entertainment was actually dying after WWII -- partly because of hack writers like George Plympton, who were obviously bored and uninspired by their repetitive labors, but also because the new medium of Television would soon make it's own demands on the Entertainment Industry.
Superman as a TV series was by no means a quantum leap in artistry, but it was successful because it's storytelling was concise. Noel Neill played Lois Lane on TV, after a year or two with Phyllis Coates in the role, but strangely enough, she also played Lois in the unlamented serials. (I frankly prefer Margot Kidder or Teri Hatcher -- they were sexier and funnier.)
The fast-paced and facile radio show turned out to be the most effective template for making Superman an iconic cultural success. Those laughable matinee films literally and figurativly turned a Kryptonite ray on our hero, and would be nearly forgotten until videotape and cable resurrected them out of the media graveyard.
TV stations ran old movie serials in the early days, along with any other cheap programming they could find, but postwar audiences just didn't relate to them, except for a few exceptions -- Flash Gordon's three adventures did well, I'm glad to say. Another Science Fiction character named Commando Cody flew around Planet Earth for over a decade wearing a rocket pack and bullet-shaped helmet in Radar Men from the Moon and Zombies from the Stratosphere -- he and Flash even had TV shows of their own, which was extraordinarily rare for refugees from the lowly entertainment ghetto of chapter plays. Too bad they were lousy, ending up interred with Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, Space Patrol, and Rocky Jones in "space camp."



Kirk Alyn rescues Noel Neill while he battles the evil Spider Lady in the first of his two portrayals of Superman.
Image from Brian's Drive In Theater