A little bit of melting and drainage was welcome, as was the bright full moon!

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Tucson, Arizona; Helena, Montana; London, Kentucky; Copenhagen, Denmark; Rochester, New York; New York City, New York; Cluj, Romania (again); Wethersfield, Connecticut; Grafton, Wisconsin, and Newark, New Jersey.

Check out: 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 UPDATES! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and especially 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 including my efforts on his Flash Gordon Resources Page -- along with actual creators like Alex Raymond, Al Williamson, and others!

Charity Alert: Play the FreeRice Game -- improve your vocabulary, and donate food to the United Nations. 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. BTW -- AIDtoCHILDREN.com is a bit simpler than FreeRice Game.

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum of Art has Seldom Seen, from the Permanent Collection, First Nations Artists -- Contemporary / Traditional, Crown of the Continent, and Ace of Diamonds. Dan Fagre's new show about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park is a true labor of love by himself and other scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and now.

Media Watch: The Mistress of Spices starring Aishwarya Rai (2005), an English-language production, filmed in Baker's Beach, Golden Gate Park, and The Presidio in San Francisco, the Isle of Man, London, England, and Oakland, California. The original novel was by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and I hope it was better than the film, which wasn't consistent about being mystical or romantic. Rai's character, Tilo, had to follow "rules" which were too dumb to be compelling, and we viewers' willing suspension of disbelief was abused badly. The acting was generally very good -- especially Anupam Kher, who plays lots of fatherly roles in Indian movies. The camera work was excellent, and the feeling of reading a book was strong. There were too many holes in the fabric of the plot, though, and it fell apart at the seams. (At least it wasn't a dawg like Last Legion!)

F-F-F-Flashes: A man contacted me who I hadn't seen since 1984. J.A. Anderson was a charter member of the Salt Lake Mime Troupe, and somehow he found my web pages at http://theatrex.net -- the photo below was published in the Salt Lake Tribune during April of 1973, and was taken at a commercial development called Trolley Square, created from former metropolitan bus garages. I started making videos with them soon after this picture was shot, and the experiences we shared together changed all our lives.

The original Salt Lake Mime Troupe: Mr. Anderson is at the far left, and then there are nine more -- Top Row: Evy Tessman, Patsy Droubay (still my friend), and Stephanie. 2nd Row: Wendy Loring, Franklin Tomorrow, and Matt Child (still my friend). 3rd Row: Becky, Katie Apenzellar/Berger AKA Katie Duck (long story, and still my friend), finally Steve Rasmussen (an interior designer I knew well into the 80's). There were a few others who weren't in this picture -- like my friend Paul Blackwell, Jeff, Duffy, and Wendy's corps of Modern Dancers who performed an animated Pop Art painting.