Listening to "Dear Prudence" on WPR's Throwback Thursday. Song from the Beatles White Album. Not sure if I bought the White Album but listened to it a thousand times. Many of the songs were in the movie "Across the Universe," a movie that tugged at the nostalgia that comes with the 1960s.
Beautiful morning here in the High Plains. Heard some good news yesterday. The Cheyenne Botanic Gardens Conservatory opens for business on June 2. Only the ground floor will be open. Each group gets an hour to tour so more people can visit. Not sure how we're supposed to time them. "All right, people. Scram. Your hour's up. Vamoose!" Still, it shows a slight return to normalcy. I've been in touch with the staff over the shutdown. Talked to Amelia to see if we could arrange an August literary reading at the Conservatory. Amelia said that she's not booking anything new for the summer. They are going to rent out rooms for paying customers but nothing new until fall. Rick Kempa of Rock Springs asked me to schedule a summer reading for his new book and mine. I will try the library.
Masked up yesterday and ventured out to Lowe's to buy some plants and replace a window screen. I got the plants but no screen. I did get my money back. I had to wait in line six feet behind the first customer. Two people behind me. My cart was filled with plants, herbs and a few veggies, and some potting soil. The clerk, not happy, gave me my money back and pointed out the aisle where I could find screens if there were any. There weren't. Did find some twine to make a trellis for my herb rack. Trying to do everything on the cheap in this pandemic year. I planted herb seeds in egg cartons and then into pots. But two weeks later and no sprouts. The egg carton approach does not work for me. The soil and the egg carton gets soggy and I think it damages the seeds. Anyway, as I dug up the transplants yesterday there were no seedlings there, nothing of anything. I replaced the nothing with something. I had requested the free seeds from the library seed bank and thought I would be growing my garden from scratch this year. The other day I did plant seeds for cukes, pea pods, and pole beans and am waiting for them to sprout. I have two growing racks on the back porch that get full morning and early afternoon sunshine. I'll be doing more transplanting today.
Local business are opening up. A new downtown craft brewery opened on Monday. Black Tooth Brewery's second location -- its first in downtown Sheridan. During my work travels I visited the Sheridan site and liked it. Sheridan has a neat downtown with lots of indie businesses. Great coffee shop that I frequented when I was at the Jentel Foundation writing a novel that I am now going to finish. The pandemic has been deadly for indie businesses and reviving downtowns. Trends for the last decade have been toward gathering places most located in downtowns that had seen better days and were trying to come back. Black Tooth is the fourth microbrewery in downtown Cheyenne. They've been closed since March 18 except for takeout and the brewing of hand sanitizer. Chronicles Distillery downtown made lots of hand sanitizer and I bought nine spray bottles since none could be found in the grocery stores. Chronicles donated most of their supply to health workers, hospitals and clinics. Then they started peddling the goods to the citizenry. I ordered online and then pulled up outside for the exchange of the goods. Other customers were ordering some of the locally brewed whiskey and vodka which is a whole different kind of sanitizing..
Chris, Annie and I will attend a concert and drive-in movie Saturday night at the Terry Bison Ranch. Tickets for each car were $25 and we registered online. Must stay in our cars which may be a challenge for those of us of a certain age who need to pee. Not sure how we will manage. Might have to leave mid-way through "Back to the Future."
It's ugly on the national scene. Our ugly president wants to reopen the economy no matter how many people it kills. 93,000-plus have died in the U.S., and there are probably many more that went uncounted. The U.S. leads the world in confirmed cases. There's been no direction from the federal government and that's a crime that Trump and the G.O.P. will have to answer for it at the ballot box. Trump is trying to prevent people from voting by mail but this is a state responsibility and not a federal one. Democratic Party-led states are having none of the president's blather and neither am I. I ordered a mail-in ballot and plan to use it. The better the turnout the more likely it is that we can get rid of the criminal element in D.C.
Chris, Annie and I continue to take safety precautions. Annie wears a mask during her shifts at Big Lots. Chris and I wear masks going out and if someone needs to come in the house.
Wyoming reports 11 deaths statewide with more than 500 confirmed cases. The worst hot spot is on the Wind River Reservation in Fremont County. The Navajo Nation in Arizona has more per capita cases than New York and New Jersey, the epicenters of the virus. Very sad. Minority communities in urban centers are being hit hard. All of this points out the many holes that exist in our slapdash health care system. And did I mention that the GOP-led feds are clueless in the face of a national emergency?
8 comments:
Mike,
The Drive-In sounds exciting. I am a bit surprised at your conundrum on maybe having to pee during the movie. At the risk of stating the obvious, and it is obvious, you are a GUY. All you need is a good milk bottle with a wide mouth and a lid and you are good to go! So go, go, go!
Bob
Bob: You're right -- men do have an advantage in this area. I saw it as an issue because I would be sharing the car with wife and daughter. And I am still using a walker to get around and saw myself hobbling scross the prairie to use the port-o-potty. I may have been re-living days gone by when a cooler of beer accompanied Chris and me to the drive-in. I also remember watching movies at the local Gainesville drive-in from a perch in the cemetery. No sound, of course, but who needs it? I have a memory that there was a porn theater at that drive-in. Was there?
Great memories of watching the Gainesville Drive-in from the Cemetery. If the movie was right-say Towering Inferno-then the lack of sound was not a problem. Stormy and I used to unwind from a hard day of school and studying by taking a walk to the cemetery and smoking a joint, or 2, while we watched the movie. That definitley helped make up for the lack of sound.
One evening, as we were standing in the cemetery road passing a joint back and forth, a Gainesville Police Car pulled up and stopped about 6 feet from us (GPD practicing social distancing). We froze for a minute, then realized that they had stopped because we were standing in the road. So we moved off the road and they drove on. Believe I waved at them as they went by. And my next thought was, Wow, this is freaking paradise! And it was.
Now, as to the porn theater, I have no recollection of any porn theatre in Gainesville, but certainly will defer to your greater knowledge of the Gainesville Porn Scene. I did go to the Melody Club once or twice for the great dancers, but do not consider that a Porn place. Just good clean fun for a newly emerging Gay Scene.
Bob
Alas, my experience with the Gainesville porn scene is limited. There was that one time that I went to a strip club with my Vietnam vet friend Mike, a bouncer at the club, and our creative writing teacher, Nelson Algren. We did watch the dancers although mostly we talked about writing and Nelson told some great stories. And we got drunk. And who can forget the nude Macbeth put on by the Hippodrome Theater? Of course that was art and not porn.
Nelson Algren taught at UF? And you went to a strip club with him? Why am I just hearing about this now? And in answer to your question, I indeed did forget about the nude Macbeth at the Hippodrome. Wow, the Gainesville Green must have been stronger than I thought!
Bob
Gainesville Green was good stuff. Might not hold up with other super strains one might encounter at your typical Colorado dispensary. Or so I hear.
Algren was a crusty old guy who liked his Gainesville Green. Said he smoked his first reefer with Chicago jazz musicians in the 1930s. His teaching was more like storytelling and he had a million stories. He was the one who introduced me to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was on his reading list which I wish I still had. Other international writers I didn't know were on the list: Julio Cortazar, V.S. Naipaul, Jaroslav Hasek and others. He liked U.S. writers Terry Southern, Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell. I bet he liked Royko as they wrote about the same inner-city characters.
During his time in G-ville, Algren was working on his Hurricane Carter book that wasn't published until after Algren died in the 1980s. Wikipedia tells me that there's a fountain dedicated to Algren in Chicago's Polish Triangle. Do you know where that is?
Wow, so I have Nelson Algren to thank for getting me introduced, via you, to the best book I have ever read (3 times so far). Still have the paperback copy you gave me in the early 80's. I was not aware of the Polish Triangle in my former home town, so had to go to Wikipedia. They do have a story on it and on Algren.
Will check out the Chicago Jazz connection. My dad left us some great photos and stories about Chicago Jazz in the 1940's when he moved there from Hartwell, Ga to follow his Jazz dreams. He got to hang and play with some great ones.
I am going to read One Hundred Years of Solitude again, but NOT until after I read the latest book coming out from my favorite Wyoming author (hint, hint).
Bob
Finished the novel. I am revising some and working on publishing. I was all set to go to a series of summer writing conferences to connect with editors and agents. And then the coronavirus hit. The Jackson Hole Writers Conference is conducting its seminars online and offering manuscript critiques so I took them up on that. My challenge is to get the manuscript in the right hands. Meanwhile, working on another and blogging about COVID-19. These crazy times need to be documented.
Hartwell, Ga., to Chicago. Must have been quite a culture shock to your dad. Chicago a hotbed for writers and musicians. My book's male protaganist comes to Denver from a job in Chicago's stockyards or "Yards." For research, read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" which caused a stir when it was published. It's not for the squeamish -- you might never eat meat again after you read it.
Have a great summer. I am doing some container gardening. Couldn't go another summer without growing things.
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