Fresh snow on the nearby peaks! Thunder, lightning, rain, and oh yeah -- sunshine in the valley.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Vancouver, British Columbia (again); Tallahassee, Florida (George Clinton's office); Cascade, Montana; Kaneohe, Hawaii (Dave Fagiolli); Saint Louis, Missouri and Clearwater, Florida.

ROCK against Reaganomics 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in the Saturday Matinees and Sunday Comics.





Many thanks to Jim Keefe (Visit his Website) -- the LAST Flash Gordon illustrator of the 20th Century, and Flash's first illustrator of the 21st, for his recommendations -- HERE!

Charity Alert: Check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site. Keep that Resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum of Art features 20/3 -- Twenty Artists/Three Days for a couple of weeks.
Check out Fall for Glacier -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better!

Theatre/Theater: (From The Guardian) All the world's a tightrope
Juliet on a high wire, Ophelia in a waterfall - Footsbarn's riotous take on Shakespeare has toured the globe for 25 years. Now they're coming home. By Lyn Gardner Wednesday May 21, 2008

'They are genuinely bananas - that's why I love them so much," says Dominic Dromgoole, the Globe theatre's artistic director. He's talking about Footsbarn, the company of travelling players who wander the world playing Shakespeare and other classic texts, mixing languages and styles, using shadow puppetry, kabuki, surrealism and tribal dances. "They are wild and imaginative," Dromgoole continues. "It's liberating, particularly for British audiences, to see Shakespeare done this way. They bugger about with it."

This summer, British audiences are to get a rare chance to see Footsbarn in action. The company is bringing its new show, Shakespeare Party - a riotous Shakespeare compilation featuring a tightrope-walking Juliet, Titania descending from the heavens and Ophelia drowning in a waterfall - to the Globe, their first performance in the capital in 17 years. They will then set off on a tour of the UK with a carnival-style production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

It is a quarter of a century since Footsbarn was resident in the UK, but its name has passed into theatrical legend as a once-great British company that we somehow allowed to get away. Now based in a farmhouse in the Auvergne region of France, where its members dream of founding a theatre school, the company grew out of a meeting between student actors Oliver Foot and John Paul Cook at Goddard College in the US, a college with a strong tradition in radical theatre, at the end of the 1960s. Back in Foot's native Cornwall in 1971, the pair set up Footsbarn (taking its name from the barn owned by Foot's family, where the company initially lived and worked) and travelled around the south-west, setting up a tent on Cornish cliffs and Somerset village greens, and putting on theatre for local people.

The company's aesthetic was make-and-do; a magpie approach using found materials and alighting on anything its members admired in the work of theatre-makers from Grotowski to Brook. Its pick-and-mix bag of styles appealed to new audiences. In the words of company member Paddy Hayter, who joined Footsbarn soon after it started and never left, bringing up his children on the road: "We share a performance with the audience, rather than perform it for them."

When Dromgoole caught a performance of Hamlet in Somerset in the late 1970s, the audience were so enjoying the grave-digger scene played by clowns that it went on for more than 20 minutes. Dromgoole remarked on this to a company member. "This is nothing," he replied. "You should have been here last night. It lasted an hour, and the audience still didn't want it to stop."

Footsbarn left the UK in 1984, driven out by the cold funding climate of Thatcherism, and also by a desire to see the world and become a genuinely itinerant group of players. The company that left England was predominantly British; now Footsbarn boasts 12 nationalities. "We weren't rejecting our roots by leaving England," Hayter says. "We just recognised that the world is a very big place and that we would like to see some of it. We were going to Avignon and we had another booking in the Pyrenees. After that we just kept on going. A nomadic existence gives you freedom and it tests you. Everywhere you go you have to attract an audience."

It's always been a hand-to-mouth existence, with everyone in the company earning the same, or on some occasions earning nothing at all.

My Interjection: That's right! It was neither fun nor romantic sometimes, and after I left they went through a period called TEN YEARS HARD.


Now, Footsbarn's influence can be detected in a subsequent generation of companies. Without Footsbarn, we may never have had Complicite, Kneehigh and Told by an Idiot: companies which reach out across the footlights and embrace the audience, recognising that circus and clowning are not dirty words.

And in an age when even touring theatre has become globalised and branded - with companies such as Cirque du Soleil demonstrating that you can run away to join the circus and still become a multi-millionaire - there is something enormously romantic about the idea of a group of travelling players traversing the world, pitching up in Portugal or India and just putting on a show. Almost 40 years after it was founded, Footsbarn is still doing just that. "The aims with which we began are still there," says Hayter. "We've never been very business-minded. People have called us all sorts of things over the years, including saying we were just a bunch of hippies. But our creativity has sprung from the fact that we have lived and worked and travelled together. We can't stop now. We don't have any choice. None of us can retire, because none of us have pensions. I think we'll just have to go on until we drop down dead. We won't be the first. Molière and Tommy Cooper both died on stage. It's a dream of a way to go".

· Shakespeare Party is at the Globe Theatre, London SE1, May 23 to 26. Box office: 020-7902 1400.

Tour Dates:

Coventry, United Kingdom
21 June to 26 June -- A Midsummer Night's Dream at Warwick Arts Centre
(in the footsbarn tent) www.warwickartscentre.co.uk/home

Angers, France
02 July to 04 July -- A Midsummer Night's Dream
(in the footsbarn tent) presented by le Festival d'Anjou
www.festivaldanjou.com/

Polzeath, Cornwall, United Kingdom
10 July to 27 July -- A Midsummer Night's Dream at Carruan Farm Centre
(in the footsbarn tent) www.crbo.co.uk/events.php?evGrp=34

Edinburgh, United Kingdom
01 August to 25 August -- A Midsummer Night's Dream
at Calton Hill (in the footsbarn tent) presented by Assembly Rooms

A Transition from Performances to Politics
For various reasons, there was a discussion about the films of actor/philanthopist Paul Newman on Daily Kos, including Blaze, about corrupt Louisiana governor Earl K. Long's infatuation with burlesque artiste Blaze Starr.

Here's the REAL Blaze Starr -- between the club and the street. I can't blame her for making a third choice in life, namely powerful rich men who paid for discretion above all else. Dialog from Blaze, starring Paul Newman and Lolita Davidovich (Hee Haw alum Gailard Sartain was in the movie, and looked much more like E.K. Long than Newman did.) Earl Long: Would you still love me as much if I wasn't the fine governor of the great state of Louisiana? Blaze Starr: Would you still love me if I had little tits and worked in a fish house?

Election Madness: Barack Obama recently said -- ...when it comes to the economy, John McCain and I have a fundamentally different vision of where to take the country. Because, for all his talk of independence, the centerpiece of his economic plan amounts to a full-throated endorsement of George Bush's policies.
Thank you, Senator Obama.
I also say:
Support our troops -- bring them home.