As the Coasters (Robins) once sang, we're ...diggin all the scenes at Smokey Joe's Cafe. Real clouds and very intermittent rain, but the low pressure keeps smoke out of our eyes! (Look at the picture near the bottom of this post.)

Remembering my friend Georgio at: 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; Bodacious Princess Aura I; Hapless Aura II; The fiery Emperor Ming; The Orson Welles Rumor Debunked; and BOTH incarnations of Jean Rogers!
Read my latest Spitfires in Context essay.

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

In The Community: Workaday tasks at the Hockaday Museum of Art until the poetry reading next week. The new building at the community college is taking a lot of my day, but we see progress as we work. The new theater space is ready for shows, and I saw one tonight -- Play On, about a fractious group of actors in an ill-starred amateur production. The Current Events video I shot around their rehearsals last week is running on local cable TV now.

Media Watch: Condensed from DailyKos.com:
Collateral damage, the 35W bridge, and the value of theater by Leggy Starlitz Tue Aug 07, 2007 at 11:18:20 AM PDT
It was August 2, 2007, the official first day of the Minnesota Fringe Festival. At 10pm, my wife and I went to the Southern Theater in Minneapolis to see our first show of the Fringe - 62, by the Third Rabbit Dance Ensemble. John Munger, the artistic director, took the stage, and announced that due to recent events, they would not be performing their usual opening number, deeming it too lighthearted and silly for our heavy hearts that day. A tear formed at the corner of my eye, unbidden...Twenty hours earlier and some 200 yards away from the Southern Theater, the 35W bridge over the Mississippi River had collapsed. None of us in that room knew how many of our fellow citizens were still in the rubble, crushed in their cars or drowned in the river. None of us in that room knew for sure that no friends or relatives or aquaintances or friends of friends were dead. Perhaps some in the room knew someone who was still missing, or someone who survived. For a moment, the Southern Theater was silent... we all, unintentionally, held our breath together.
After the show, outside the theater, it was unnaturally quiet. The usual roar of traffic on 35W was gone. Figures on the street were out of place... exhausted police and rescue workers, bleary journalists looking for a quiet beer. Trucks with satellite uplinks were parked in the alleys. Half a block down the street, a road repair truck with a ROAD CLOSED sign blocked the Washington Street onramp to 35W northbound, yellow police tape strung behind it to fend off pedestrians...
So now we know what the thing we call "collateral damage," in other contexts, really feels like. A bridge is gone, as abruptly as if bombs had dropped. Different causes and circumstances of course, but comparable consequences in real peoples’ lives.
To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a bridge out with numerous dead and severely wounded is a bridge out with numerous dead and severely wounded is a bridge out with numerous dead and severely wounded.
Think about it. If you live in Minneapolis, or have sympathy for those of us who do, think about how it must feel if your local bridge is destroyed by an American bomb. The same concerns come to mind... are your friends and loved ones all right? Did anyone you know die? Did you drive over that bridge yourself earlier in the day? And now, an American bridge has fallen - not from bombs, but from the negligence and incompetence of the same government that bombs bridges elsewhere. Are we anything but "collateral damage" to those in Washington? Do they feel our pain?
Left there, this seems little more than an existential crisis. We fear and we grieve, but the problem is so large, and we are so small.
How do we relieve ourselves of this pain?

John Munger gives us an answer ... In this painful time let us remind ourselves that during the siege of Sarajevo about 15 years ago one of the few activities that persisted and continued through the siege was the theaters. People actually risked their lives from sniper fire to attend performances. Almost none of those performances could possibly have been of the highest imaginable caliber, nor lavishly produced, nor commercially proven popular vehicles. That’s how badly the citizens of Sarajevo needed the spiritual sustenance that comes from the profound shared communal experience of live performance. That’s one of the things they valued enough to take as it comes, warts and all.

And this, I think, is the source of much of the existential crisis of American society. How many people go to see locally produced plays anymore, or dance, or concerts? When is the last time YOU saw a show? And when is the last time you watched something dreadfully stupid on television? ...the artists don't care that no one else cares, or at least they don't let it stop them. People write poems about their childhood and read them to a half-dozen other slam poets in some coffeehouse. They stage Shakespeare in community centers and church basements. They grab guitars and play their hearts out to the drunks over at the bar. They weld sculptures together in the garage and scatter them all over the yard. They speak out because they must speak out....
We live in a world where bridges may just fall out from underneath us. That fear, that grief, that anger, it has to go SOMEWHERE. Here in Minneapolis, we're blessed. We have the Minnesota Fringe Festival, the largest unjuried theater festival in the country...On sunday night, we watched KIPO!, a show of songs and dances from Tibet, produced beautifully and authentically by our local Tibetan community. At the end of the show, we were reminded that literally millions of Tibetans have been killed, and they are not allowed to perform these songs and dances in their homeland, or to honor His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Here, in America, they have the freedom to preserve their culture, waiting for the day when Tibet is free again and they can sing and dance on the roof of the world.
Some years ago, I was lucky enough to catch a reunion tour by Plastic People of the Universe, the famous underground rock band from Czechoslovakia. Milan Hlavsa, the bassist, had the most disfigured nose I have ever seen. It looked like someone had chained him to a wall and beaten him half to death, then left it to heal unset. Which is probably exactly what happened. The injustice this band faced for the crime of rocking led Vaclav Havel to write Charter 77, and ultimately led to the Velvet Revolution in 1989, when Czechoslovakia became a free nation. Remember, in the 1970s, you could be beaten or jailed for even SEEING a concert by the Plastic People of the Universe. People went anyway.
Art is freedom - whether or not you live in a "free country" where you can say what you like. Those who, quite literally, hate freedom (although they often love to use the word), hate art as well. When they look for someone to scapegoat and persecute, someone to strike fear into the hearts of citizens, artists are at or near the top of their list. That's why artists are the targets of the Commmunists, the Nazis, the fundamentalist mullahs and ministers.
... publicly performed art is community, and compassion. When we go see a show, we see the rest of the audience as well, and we share an experience with them - even if they're different from us. And we share what the artists feel as well. And when we experience the feelings of others, we feel compassion, and togetherness, and community. But compassion and community are ALSO the enemies of those who wish to control us. Besides keeping us afraid, they must keep us divided as well. When we're together with others in our community, we're less afraid of them, and also less afraid of those we haven't met yet. This is why They would rather have you watching television... it keeps you AWAY from your community, keeps you from feeling connection with and compassion for your neighbors. It keeps us divided, as we passively absorb "entertainment" in our living rooms, behind locked doors and privacy fences, angry and alienated and afraid...So go! See a show! See a local band. Watch a play. Watch a dance show. Listen to a poetry slam. And not some famous big-name touring act, but someone LOCAL. Someone who lives in your town, someone who shares your experiences... someone who is also afraid that someone they know might be lost in the ruins of a fallen bridge.



Forest fire smoke pours into the Flathead Valley from Thompson Falls, about 150 miles away -- looking southwest from the western city limits of Kalispell near sunset August 3, 2007. Photo by ME!