The Solstice is today, and the weather might even get hot again soon. Big thunderstorms are moderating our temperatures. The Ducklings are getting bigger, but the families aren't mingling quite yet.

Northern section of Dry Bridge Slough.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Ida's Places in Paris -- from my first jet-lagged day by the Seine.
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!
NEW! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Make a resolution this Summer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Driving up to the Whitefish Mountain Resort (formerly Big Mountain) is worth one's life if one isn't careful. Not only is the road one lane sometimes with a cliff on one side, and a twenty-foot pile of boulders on the other, but there is massive construction on the main Highway 93 before one even arrives in Whitefish. I think Pulaskis and pictures can wait a little bit.
Tommorow, I'm putting up some BIG paintings at the new Hilton Garden Inn as a community outreach of Hockaday Museum of Art, along with local painters Allen Jimmerson and Marshall Noice.

Media Watch: Montana just lost one of it's finest citizens -- I heard on the radio that Rudy Autio just passed away from Lukemia at the age of 80. Everybody who makes a living in the state's thriving ceramics industry owes something to the efforts of this man -- especially the THOUSANDS of students he taught at the University of Montana.

This photo was taken at the dawn of Montana ceramics in 1952 at the site of the Archie Bray Foundation near Helena, which was a brickyard then:


(L to R) Soetsu Yanagi, who coined the term Mingei to describe finely-crafted Japanese artworks; Bernard Leach, author of The Enduring Art of Japan, Rudy Autio himself as a post-graduate; equally hard-working post-grad Peter Voulkos, later to become THE Modern Ceramicist on the West Coast of America in the 60's; and Shoji Hamada, the greatest Japanese potter of the 20th Century.
This weeks-long visit was more influential than anyone can say -- partly from the energy that Autio gave to the state of Montana in it's aftermath for the rest of his amazingly productive life.