More HOT weather -- 99 degrees (F) is higher than normal. Those %$#@! noisy fireworks are done for awhile. A pair of Deer were sighted by 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!
Spitfires of the Spaceways
UPDATED! Wilma Deering & Dale Arden to the rescue, plus hapless Aura II.
Watch for a new essay about bodacious spitfire Princess Aura I

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

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum of Art 's 4th of July experiment didn't really fly -- we got about a half-dozen people. The Conrad Mansion's free tours and ice cream outdrew us by several hundreds, plus Independence Day isn't usually associated with art museums. I refined our Permanent Collection pages on the Web, though.

Media Watch: News outlets are reporting the death of Bill Pinkney, one of the Clyde McPhatter's fellow Drifters on Money Honey (1953). Pinkney played a major role in keeping the name of "The Drifters" on the road for five decades. (Read the Wikipedia entry HERE.)
I saw one version of the Drifters live, as part of a Rock & Roll Revival tour, around 1970. There are FOUR possibilities about which configuration performed that night: Bill Pinkney with a pick-up group The Tears; The Tears without Pinkney calling themselves the Drifters; Bill Pinkney with George Wallace, Al Fortsen, Mark Williams, and Benny Anderson; Johnny Moore with Rick Sheppard, Bill Fredricks, and Milton Turner (or Don Thomas). Whomever they were, they were excellent!
I saw one of Bill Pinkney's groups on TV soon afterwards (For sure -- I recognize him from his pictures on the news.) but that performance was fairly lousy. I suspected ongoing battles over their name had adverse effects on the music.
I saw the Revival at the University of Utah. One of my cohorts in SDS had been arrested for "public obscenity" at a protest rally on campus a few days earlier because of a few choice words he spoke at the microphone. I only mention that incident because the Revival featured a lot of sexual content, to the audience's delight. The "climax" of the evening was Chuck Berry performing My Ding A Ling, which was a brand new song in those days. My friend was never prosecuted -- partly because his lawyer mentioned the Rock & Roll Revival as an example of what the U of U allowed in actual practice on it's campus.


Over an ariel photo of the University of Utah in 1970, I have pasted some contemporary photo-details: Clockwise: Our student protest in the wake of Ohio State -- that's my friend, SDS President Jim Beaver at the lower right. I was somewhere in the crowd; A VW Bug like mine with a couple of ladies my age -- duplicating a scene I enjoyed many times, especially when I shot video in the Dance Department, right of the number 2; Me, posing as a SERIOUS Art Student, an inmate of the new Art & Architecture Building, left and above the number 4; The lower "Presidents Circle," where I froze my ass off going to basic core classes in the winter; A detail from the actual rally poster, miraculously preserved online by the U of U Library, right of the number 3 -- the Rock & Roll Revival concert I blogged about (above) occurred about a week later in the Student Union, above and left of the number 1.