US 287 north from Helena, Montana, is a little short on signs of human habitation.
Eventually, you come to the Census-designated place called Augusta, pop. 300 or so. Part of its Main Street is US 287, featuring the sort of things you expect in a small-town main street.
A main street in Montana, that is.
There are other ideas about what the flag should look like, and considering the wave of new state flags, it might be changed.
Then there was this house stuffed to the gills with stuff, offering that stuff for sale. A lot of stuff. A resale business dealing in stuff, let’s say. No formal name that I could see.
We couldn’t pass that by. The mind boggles at how this accumulation accumulated, and you should boggle your mind every now and then. The place was so jammed that I had to be conscious of every movement, lest I bush into something and cause of avalanche of stuff.
Lots of stuff outside, too.
Say, whatever happened to Lash LaRue?
Just curious. I’m not enough of a fan to buy a beat-up $20 comic book, though I bought a few postcards unrelated to LaRue or Westerns or even movies.
In fact, I didn’t know much about LaRue, so I later read one of his obituaries. He died only in 1996, with B Westerns having long passed him by. Even by the early ’70s that was the case, as reflected by the Statler Brothers’ catchy 1973 bug-in-amber song, “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?” (Who died in 1987.)
Just west of the western entrance of Glacier NP, on US 2 in the town of Columbia Falls, Montana, is Ten Commandment Park, a.k.a. God’s Ten Commandments Park. I hadn’t read that Roadside America article or heard about it in any way. But I saw it. Couldn’t pass that by either. Not retail, strictly speaking, but there were items for sale inside. Or, I suppose, available for a donation.
The welcome center is along a U-shaped driveway that sports many billboards.
Some exhorted one and all to follow a specific Commandment; others were pro-religious quotes from famed U.S. presidents; and yet others lauded Jesus.
I had to go in.
A fellow of about my age, large and gray bearded, was there to greet me. Frankly I expected a bit more witnessing from him. Instead, he told me to look around, let him know if I wanted to buy anything, and he offered license plate-sized Ten Commandments and Jesus magnets for free. Also, a few free snacks. That was it.
Days are still fairly long in mid-August, so spending some time at Badlands NP before driving to Wyoming wasn’t a bad idea. As long as we got to our campsite with some light left, setting things up wouldn’t be difficult.
I’d checked the weather for our destination, Devils Tower National Monument, and the only time rain was expected was the late afternoon on August 19, exactly when we would arrive. Ah, well. Nothing to do about that but press on.
Skies were cloudy and the wind was up by the time we got to Wyoming.
The monument isn’t far from the border with South Dakota. Take I-90 to Sundance, then US 14 and then a short stretch of Wyoming 24 to the monument. Soon after we got off the Interstate, that ominous gray cut loose some fierce rain, so heavy at times that it was best to find a wide place in the road to stop and wait for it to pass. That happened more than once as the rain variously intensified and slacked off.
Even so, we got the the entrance to the monument – and the campground just outside the entrance – well before dark. No worries. Did it snow here while it was raining on us a few miles away?
No. That was hail. Some fairly big hailstones, too; not quite golf ball-sized, but not too far off the mark. We went in to register to find that the campground had lost its power.
“Storm knocked out your power?” I asked the clerk, a middle-aged woman. It had, she said, and done a lot of other damage, including to vehicles parked in the campground. She also explained that the places where tent campers go was probably covered by melting ice. She offered to do a refund for the day’s worth of camping we’d paid as a down payment on two days — as soon as the computers were up again.
And she did. Cell service was possible in the area, to my surprise, and I looked into a couple of motels in Sundance, about 20 or 30 minutes away. The Bear Lodge Motel had what we needed: two nights at a middling price. The motel was a comfortable independent with a fairly traditional streak when it came to motel décor and amenities, though (damn it) no bottle opener attached under the sink outside the bathroom and no Sanitized For Your Protection ribbon. Nice beds, though, and bathroom for that matter.
The next morning was clear and after a simple breakfast in the room, we returned to Devils Tower with the idea that we’d hike the trail that circles the tower. This time I had the leisure to document the approach to the monument.
Soon we discovered that the monument was closed. People from their cars and tour buses found out the very same thing.
I asked a NPS ranger at the entrance about it, and he said that a lot of trees and maybe rocks and other debris had fallen on the road inside the monument, and he didn’t know when it would open again – though he guessed not today, stressing that that wasn’t the official word. I thanked him and we figured, not today was about the size of it.
We wandered around a bit, taking a look at the thing. “Bear Lodge” is the translation of native names for the tower. The reference to the Devil was a Victorian-era creation (another of the four fonts of the modern world, and a particularly big one).
Impressive. If I understand what I read, scientific opinion isn’t quite solid on the exact process that caused the rising of the tower, but there it was: an igneous tower rising over sedimentary plains. Lording over the plains? There’s nothing that can’t be anthropomorphized.
Speaking of which, bipedal and stretched-body space aliens of a distinct green hue can be found in the main gift shop outside the entrance (not a NPS shop).
Remarkable, the ongoing influence (though admittedly minor) of a movie that came out nearly 50 years ago. Guess that shows the value of putting a catchy tune in your movie.
I hadn’t thought about that movie in years, much less seen it. In fact, I’ve seen it only once, as a new movie in late 1977, in those heady first months of having a drivers license, which meant I could take girls out. I did to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though I’m not quite certain now which girl I took.
If you asked me, the gift shop had too much space alien bric-a-brac and not enough Teddy Roosevelt. His name is on the presidential proclamation creating the monument, the very first one under the Antiquities Act of 1906.
I sent a picture of the tower to my old friend Tom.
Tom responded with a text: *Hears the movie theme to Close Encounters*
Me: Looking at the gift shop, you’d think there was a permanent alien settlement on top.
Tom: *Looks around shiftily.* Isn’t there? Have you actually been up there to find out? They could have their own Starbucks up there for all we know.
We had a bit of rain from what might have been the edge of hurricane Beryl earlier this week, as that weather system petered out over North America. Hard for non-experts like me to say, though. Clear today but a high of around only 80° F. Not bad for high summer.
I looked up Sig Ruman the other day. I remembered at least one of his performances – the pompous doctor with the pointy beard in A Day at the Races (1937), who of course is on the receiving end of Marxian wit, especially Groucho’s.
Ruman was in A Night at the Opera as well. Need a pompous German character for your movie? Siegfried Carl Alban Rumann (d. 1967) was one such during the golden age of the studio system. He has 130 credits at imdb.
I looked him up because he also had a part in A Night in Casablanca (1946), the second-to-last Marx Brothers movie. I found it available to view online (with commercials) not long ago, and decided to watch it. I wasn’t sure I’d seen all of the movie, and if I had, maybe on TV more than 50 years ago, so my recollection wasn’t there.
The only scene I remembered at all was typical Harpo. Early in the movie, he’s leaning against a wall, and another character comes by and says, “Say, what do think you’re doing? Holding up the building?”
Harpo nods emphatically. The other character, unimpressed, drags Harpo away, and naturally the building collapses.
A Night in Casablanca has all of the elements of earlier Marx Brothers movies – each of the three brothers doing their own physical and wordplay shticks, a good-looking pair of non-entities as romantic leads, a story that doesn’t matter or even make a lot of sense, straight characters flustered by the brother’s antics (but no Margaret Dumont), a few songs, and a highly kinetic final half hour or so that ought to have the brothers in top form. Such as in Duck Soup, when they go off to the front to fight Sylvania in one of the funnier romps ever put to film.
Sorry to say that A Night in Casablanca is one of the brothers’ lesser efforts. Not a terrible movie, just not a very good one. There are a few laughs. This is the Marx Brothers, after all. Harpo did what Harpo always did, and Groucho had some good lines, such as to the hotel staff:
From now on the essence of this hotel will be speed. If a customer asks you for a three-minute egg, give it to him in two minutes. If he asks you for a two-minute egg, give it to him in one minute. If he asks you for a one-minute egg, give him the chicken and let him work it out for himself!
A lot of the comedy doesn’t work very well. In one scene, the brothers hide in the room of Count Pfefferman (Sig Ruman), a former Nazi trying to get away with Nazi loot hidden in Casablanca. The brothers sneak in and out of hiding to unpack and otherwise re-arrange Pfefferman’s luggage and personal effects, to delay his departure.
It’s comedy, of course, and it depends on Pfefferman not seeing or being aware of the brothers, whom he overlooks in completely unbelievable ways. Even comedy has to have some attachment to reality, and the scene has none, and so it doesn’t really land. The scene had the feeling of being filler, as well, as it drags on.
Ruman has a fairly large part in the movie, but it doesn’t quite work. He’s the main antagonist and villain, and is as nasty as a comedy allows. He’s a former Nazi only because Germany lost the war. But Teutonic nastiness, combined with the sort of befuddled fluster he got from dealing with the Marx Brothers, isn’t a particularly good mix.
Then there’s the matter of the high-octane comic chase toward the end of the movie. That didn’t work either. It was too much like the thrill-a-minute scenes of a cheap action serial of the period, involving the brothers in a truck chasing an airplane down a runway, climbing into the airplane via a ladder, foiling the villain Pfefferman and his henchmen who are trying to get away with the loot, and crashing the airplane in such a way that somehow resolves the story and doesn’t kill anyone. Groucho, Chico and Harpo as action heroes? I don’t think so. The scene was kinetic, all right. Just not very funny.
Still, I’m not sorry I spent an hour and a half watching the movie. I can be a completist when it comes to the Marx Brothers. But I don’t want to see it again, as I do Duck Soup. Or most of the others.
One more thing: an actress named Mary Dees was in A Night in Casablanca as “minor role” (uncredited), according to imdb. That got my attention, but I’m not going through the movie again to see if I can spot her.
Dees is best known, apparently, as a double for Jean Harlow for a short stint. Besides “minor role,” her other movie parts tended to be the likes of “chorus girl, uncredited,” “redhead, uncredited,” “girl, uncredited,” and “babe, uncredited.” After A Night in Casablanca, she quit the movies and reportedly lived on until 2004.
The town of Center, Texas is in East Texas, while the town of West, Texas is in Central Texas. Just a mild example of Texas naming oddities. This is the state with Cut and Shoot, Dime Box and Jot-Em-Down, after all.
We spent the night in Center (pop. 5,200) and the next morning, April 14, took a look around the Shelby County Courthouse, which also happens to the focus of downtown Center.
It’s a less common style for courthouses, Romanesque Revival, at least in my experience. Impressive brickwork. The story of one John Joseph Emmett Gibson is given in a Texas Historical Commission sign on the site. Originally a brickmaker from Ireland, Gibson ultimately made his way to Texas, in time to design and oversee construction of the courthouse in the 1880s, showing off his skill with bricks.
Older than the courthouse is the nearby former jail. These days home to the local C-of-C.
An assortment of buildings line the square. Mostly occupied. That includes the art deco Rio, open since 1926 as a movie theater, without having been closed or put to any other use since then, which is remarkable in itself.
Not a retro theater, either, but one showing new movies. Such as Unsung Hero and The Fall Guy, coming soon.
“Unsung Hero is a 2024 American Christian drama film directed by Richard Ramsey and Joel Smallbone. The film follows Rebecca, Joel, and Luke Smallbone of For King & Country, and their life journey to become Christian recording artists.”
“The Fall Guy is a 2024 American action comedy film directed by David Leitch and written by Drew Pearce, loosely based on the 1980s TV series about stunt performers. The film follows a stuntman working on his ex-girlfriend’s directorial debut action film, only to find himself involved in a conspiracy surrounding the film’s lead actor.”
I’d never heard of either of them, but now I have. 1980s TV series about stunt performers? That didn’t ring a bell either. So that’s what Glen A. Larson did after the implosion of the original Battlestar Galactica, and Lee Majors did after the Six Million Dollar Man was retired for lack of replacement parts.
How did I miss that? Right, I didn’t have a television in the ’80s.
More buildings on the square.
One that’s small but stately. Farmers of Shelby County, it says, your money is safe here.
It was. Farmers is still an ongoing operation, nearly 120 years after its founding. The bank still occupies the building, and has other locations in East Texas.
Not every building on the square is occupied.
Not every building is even a building any more, but clues remain.
Shelby County partly borders De Soto Parish, Louisiana. That morning, we headed for the border, driving on Texas 7 and then U.S. 84 until we got to a town without any sign noting its name (or maybe we missed it), crossing a river without any identification either. I remembered I wanted to mail a few postcards when I saw a sign pointing the way to a post office. When we got to the p.o., I saw that we were in Logansport, Louisiana. We’d crossed the Sabine River, but as noted, there was nothing to tell us that.
Missed the former international boundary marker, too. I didn’t read about it until later. It’s a few miles out of Logansport (pop. 1,300), and once (and briefly) marked the border between the Republic of Texas and the United States.
No matter. Took a look around Logansport.
Here’s the name we missed. Not on the road we came in on.
Main Street.
Seen in a shop window in Main Street. Do they celebrate Mardi Gras in Logansport?
We spent some time in a resale store on the main street, Swamp Water Flea Market. I spotted something I don’t think I’ve ever seen at a resale shop.
Yours for $150, an antique leg iron. Not sure I’d want to have it around. Seems like a haunted artifact that might land you in an episode of The Twilight Zone.
When planning our most recent trip, devising its dumbbell structure of three days on the road, five in place, and four more on the road, it occurred to me that with a little southward jiggering from Dallas, we could visit Nacogdoches, Texas, one of the oldest towns in the state, rife with history: home to prehistoric Indian activity and the establishment of a Spanish mission in the 18th century, base of filibusters and other rebellions in the early 19th, mentioned famously in a late John Wayne movie, and much more.
All that would have been a reason to come, but mainly I wanted to visit my old friend Kirk, resident of the town for nearly 40 years. We hung out mostly in high school, but had known each other as far back as elementary school, ca. 1970.
In exchanging text messages ahead of the visit, we couldn’t remember the last time we’d seen each other, but finally decided, once Yuriko and I met Kirk and his wife Lisa at their home for lunch on April 13, that it was probably in April 1986 at the wedding of a mutual friend of ours in Austin.
That’s a long time. We had a good visit, a good reconnect – I find it good to reconnect – spending most of the afternoon with them, hearing about life in Nacogdoches, his medical practice there, their raising six children, all grown.
Later in the day, Yuriko and I spent a little time in downtown Nacogdoches, which offers a more sizable square than most towns, even in Texas, handsome on the whole, with a scattering of specialty retail in the area, but mostly still professional services, city government offices and other utilitarian activities.
Mural detail a block from the square, facing a parking lot.
We arrived during the 12th annual Nacogdoches Wine Swirl, just by raw chance. I’d never heard of a “wine swirl.” The brick streets around what I took to be the courthouse were closed to cars. People clustered here and there and lined up for wine.
The square doesn’t surround a courthouse, but rather a former federal building, now the Charles Bright Visitors Center. Nearby is “The Gateway,” depicting doughty American pioneers traveling the Old San Antonio Road into Texas, a fairly recent work (2013) of Michael Boyett.
“The ticketed wine event will showcase Texas wineries and local and regional food trucks and shopping vendors along the historic brick streets,” Visit Nacogdoches says regarding the event. More marketing at work, with the goal of furthering Nacogdoches as a day-trip town.
That Texas has wineries is not news. I went with Jay to visit one of the earlier ones in the Hill Country in the mid-70s. But did Central Texas wine makers come all the way to Nacogdoches to sell their wares? Further investigation tells me there’s an established wine-growing biz in East Texas.
“But, what if I were to tell you that East Texas has over 30 wineries and vineyards just waiting to be explored?!” Totally Texas Travel breathlessly says. Even if that isn’t the precise number, I’ll take even a paid travel site as a reasonable source the existence of wineries here.
The Piney Woods Wine Trail? In East Texas? That goes against stereotype, and I won’t have it. They make (and drink) either beer (domestic beer, closer to Texas-made the better) or hard liquor, the closer to homemade the better. That’s what I get for traveling into East Texas, a busted stereotype.
It might not feel like spring out there, but no matter. Time for spring break. Back to posting around April 18.
Not long ago, an entire movie on YouTube called First Spaceship on Venus came to my attention, and I decided to watch a few minutes to see how bad it might be. Soon I realized, this isn’t that bad. For what was clearly a pre-manned spaceflight depiction of spaceflight, not bad at all. I didn’t have time to finish it, but I will at some point.
I’d never heard of it. But I have heard of Stanisław Lem. I read His Master’s Voice years ago – nearly 40 years, so I don’t remember much – and saw the 1972 movie version of Solaris, ditto, though I’ve read it’s rather different from his novel. Turns out First Spaceship on Venus is the American title of Silent Star (Der Schweigende Stern), an East German-Polish production from 1960. Lem wrote the source book, The Astronauts, a few years earlier. The American version is dubbed into English and, I understand, cut in length.
More idle curiosity for the day: checking ticket prices for Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks, who are appearing the same night at Soldier Field in June. The closest ticket for sale is pretty close indeed: front section, third row. For resale, actually. There are a scattering of resale tickets available in that section, with those on the third row listed for $3,791 + fees. Oddly enough, fourth row seats list for $2,794 + fees. At least for now. So one row ahead, where you can catch a slightly better glimpse of Mr. Joel’s shiny pate, is worth about a grand more?
I expect that represents dynamic pricing of some kind, facilitated by soulless algorithms in the service of maximized shareholder value, and varies from moment to moment. But I was never one for front row seats anyway, or even third or fourth. Checking further, I found that you can bring your opera glasses and sit way back for $179. As it happens, I’ve seen both of those entertainers; separately, in 1979 and 1980. I don’t remember what I paid. A handy inflation calculator tells me that $179 now is the equivalent of $47 back then. I’m positive I didn’t pay that much, total, for both tickets.
Visiting Queen of All Saints Basilica in Chicago last month, I took an image of carved text that puzzled me a bit, but then I forgot to look it up.
“Ecumenical Year?” I remembered to look into that more recently, and realized that it must refer to the first year of Vatican II, which was indeed 1962. Formally in English, the meeting was the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican.
Naturally, when one hears of Vatican II, it’s time to listen to “The Vatican Rag.”
The council might have been 60 years ago, but that song never gets old.
Our downstairs calendar is astronomy themed, obtained from my Secret Santa at work during the holidays. The year before, I’d asked for postcards, and got some packs of them. I decided an astronomy calendar would be the thing last Christmas, so that is what I asked for.
It’s called Astronomy with Phil Harrington, published by Willow Creek Press. Harrington seems to be something of a cottage industry when it comes to popular astronomy works. As for Willow Creek, it publishes scads of calendars, from Abstract Art 2024 to Zoo in a Box. Good for them. My calendar suggestions for 2025: Great Elevators of Europe, Vintage American Bottle Caps, and Classic TV Shows That Lasted A Season Or Less.
It’s a fine calendar, chock-a-block with information, and excellent images of celestial sights. For March, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image, said to capture roughly 10,000 galaxies, an imponderable number of places and yet a vanishingly tiny fraction of them all. For April: a photo of the total eclipse of 2017, for obvious reasons.
I look at the calendar often. I looked at it this morning and learned that today is the vernal equinox, at 10:06 p.m. Central Daylight Time, when the sun appears straight above the equator, headed (so to speak) northward. Not, I think, the “first day of spring.” Not around here anyway. For the last week, the chill we didn’t get much in February has slipped into March.
I’d have thought the equinox would be on the 20th or 21st, and I suppose by Coordinated Universal Time it is on the 20th, but the time I care about is CDT. Turns out the vernal equinox is earlier than usual this year, due to the leap year and other factors too complicated for me to relate.
As if to mark the vernal equinox – though I’m sure it’s a coincidence – a tree service hired by the village came by today to trim the trees along the street. Those in the “parkway,” that is, the land between the street and the lot lines, and thus belonging to the village. Public trees.
After the trimming, which I was too busy to document, came a wood chipper. I was ready for that.
I noticed that the machine is a Morbark brand. (Not Mo’BetterBark.) I had to look that up. Turns out the village is supporting Michigan manufacturing by having one.
“The year was 1957 when Norval Morey, a local sawmill operator, took the first risky step into manufacturing armed with a patent for a portable pulp wood debarker,” the company web site says. “The Morbark Debarker Company was born that year, and nobody in Winn, Michigan, could have predicted the growth that the company would experience over the next five decades.”
Fearsome machines, those wood chippers. The kind of death maw that a villain dangles James Bond over, only to fall in himself when 007 inevitably makes his escape from the trap.
The Bond bon mot at that moment (Roger Moore, I picture it): “Bet that chap has a grinding headache.”
Another February 29. If I counted right, my 16th. That got me to thinking, just how many February 29ths have there been? As in, ever? Not as simple a question as all that, first of all because the day Caesar inserted into the calendar was an extra one after the equivalent of our February 24, a situation that persisted for a long time. So a different question might be how many intercalary days have there been since the Julian calendar’s first (let’s say first one after the extra days tacked on 46 BC, the longest year in history).
I feel like I’m staring into a pretty extensive rabbit hole. So, I’m backing away.
2020
Last time around on February 29, no entry. I attended an exceptionally pleasant dinner party at an exurban San Antonio ranch house, on flat land in the direction of the Hill Country. Six of us, I think, eating and drinking a few glasses of wine and conversing. People wonder whether the art of conversation is dying, and I doubt it. But it might go underground.
Also, that was the last social gathering I attended until April ’21 counting ones with family members, and June that year that for groups of friends.
2016
“The saying represents something exceptionally easy, of course, but even so I’m not sure it would be.” I wrote. ”Let’s assume the barrel is full of water as well as fish. Unless we’re talking about really large carp or some such, you might disturb the water and scare the fish, but I’m not sure how many small fish would actually be hit. Also, you’d think that shooting would soon destroy a wooden barrel and cause a dangerous amount of flying debris. Or if it were a metal barrel, such as a steel oil drum, the danger of ricochets might be high.
“This is something for the Mythbusters fellows to investigate, but I suspect that shooting fish in a barrel never was anything but a metaphor, and by now a hackneyed one at that. So I’m reluctant to say that making fun of a press release I received recently — especially the first line — is like shooting fish in a barrel. But it cries out to be mocked.”
2012
“I’m sure that I learned about Leap Year at an early age, like most people. But I never knew the details — Caesar and Sosigenes, the longest year in history (46 BC), Julian and Gregorian calendars, etc. — until I read The Clock We Live On. [I forgot to mention that Isaac Asimov wrote it? I’m rectifying that now.]
“The inside cover has an example of my father’s handwriting, something I don’t have too much of, so I wanted to save that too. Apparently he bought it in 1963, the year before he died.” [Sixty years and a day ago. RIP, dad]
“I first read it in 1977. Besides the story of the western calendar, there was plenty of other interesting topics — why days have 24 hours and hours 60 minutes, the development of clocks and chronometers, the establishment of meridians and time zones, and so on. The calendar chapter formed the basis of an oral report I did in high school Latin class.”
2008
“Battlefield gore is a necessary ingredient in any war movie of our time, as well as soldiers’ profanity, and understandably so. My own preference in historical fiction runs to verisimilitude, but that isn’t to say that I didn’t like The Sands of Iwo Jima.
“The most effective horror-of-war scene in Flags involved off-screen gore. At one point, one of the men (Iggy) goes mysteriously missing from the hillside. Later, his comrades discover that the Japanese pulled him into one of their caves and killed him in a way the American soldier who found him would only describe as, ‘look what they did to the poor son of a bitch.’ At that point one of the characters is looking at whatever remains of Iggy, but we don’t see it, and it’s much more horrible that way.”
2004
“Leap Year brings to mind the lore of King Numa reforming the early Roman calendar, Julius Caesar (and Sosigenes) replacing lunar with solar, Caligula trying to name a month after Germanicus (at least according to Robert Graves), Pope Gregory ordering his change but the Protestant parts of Europe ignoring it, and so on.
“When I was a kid I was fascinated by calendars, and would draw my own sometimes. In high school, I read about the history of the calendar on my own time, because it wasn’t part of any class. Even now I have some interest, though not as much as a fellow I know who spent time calculating the dates of Easter in the far distant future — thousands of years further than the standard Easter tables. I think he even wrote a computer program to do that for him.”
Years ago, as I crossed a pedestrian bridge in Shanghai, a young man with construction paper and scissors paralleled me across. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see he was trimming the paper quickly as we walked, and toward the end of the bridge, he showed me the result, which he probably wanted to sell me: my silhouette in black paper.
I only glanced at it for a moment before brushing him off. Yuriko saw it too, and not long after, she said, “That was pretty good.” I agreed, he’d captured my outline during those seconds on foot in a moderate crowd of other people. I should have bought it, I realized, since it would have made an absolutely unique souvenir. Unless of course Shanghai is a hotbed of silhouette artists with roots in Ming dynasty aesthetics or some such, but somehow I doubt it.
No, I think it was just that talented guy. He came to mind when we spotted a couple of silhouettes in metal next to the street in Joliet, not far from the Rialto Square Theatre.
I didn’t need a sign to tell me that was Groucho Marx leading the way, and a few second’s examination told me that Harpo followed. Groucho has, or had for earlier generations, a famed silhouette. How many famed silhouettes are there, anyway? More than I probably realize.
A nearby sign said that the Marx Brothers had played the Rialto when it was new in the 1920s. I don’t doubt it for a minute, but wait – where’s Chico? Did the city not have the budget for a complete complement of Marxes? (Zeppo could have been left out, however.)
I had Ann pose in place of Chico.
Sure, Chico’s silhouette might not be as distinctive, though his hat might be. But so what? Those in the know would spot Chico right away, considering the context. There’s no excuse for no Chico. As Chico would have said, “That’s-a no good.”
We’d come to town to see the majorly entertaining Christmas movie Elf at the Rialto.
I knew it was a grand old movie palace. I’d known that for years, but never got around to stepping inside. Just how much of a grand old movie palace we didn’t find out until we entered.
One minute we were in Joliet; the next we stepped into a piece of Versailles, adapted to the needs of early mass entertainment in my grandparents’ time.
“Joliet, Illinois, having a published population of 38,400, today has what is unquestionably the finest motion picture theatre for a city of this size in the country,” crowed the Exhibitors Herald on June 12, 1926. “In fact, the new Rialto Square theatre… is a playhouse which it takes no stretch of the imagination to place on a par with any of the picture palaces of Chicago or New York.
“Further, the Rialto was designed by C. W. & Geo. L. Rapp which makes it a foregone conclusion that it can lack nothing in beauty of appointment or modern comfort.”
The ’20s was a time of boosterism and its prose, but I’m going along with the Exhibitors Herald on this one.
“At the west end of the inner lobby is an arch of mirrors and along the walls between marble pilasters are huge mirrors, eight feet wide and 20 feet high, three on each side. The vaulted ceiling, 45 feet in height, is paneled with figures cast in plaster from clay models made by Gene Romeo, a sculptor.”
The theater itself is certainly grand, too, but not quite like the inner lobby.
Over the stage, gilded myth.
A theater organist expertly ran through a Christmas song medley in the minutes before the screening.
When the time came, the organ and organist slowly disappeared, as a mechanism lowered them past sight of the audience, level with the orchestra pit. Nice organ. Aural icing on the lavish visual cake of the theater.
I couldn’t find a fitting Chico quote to laud the Rialto, so I’m making one up: “Atsa-some theater, eh boss?”
From the Department of Not My Beat, excerpts from a PR pitch that arrived in my inbox recently:
While the Covid-19 pandemic has officially ended, the male loneliness epidemic in the U.S. persists… AB, Founder and Executive Coach of CD, knows this struggle all too well. He was the “Mayor of the Friend Zone”… Over the span of a decade, he immersed himself in the art and psychology of male-female connection, meeting countless women all over the world while training with the most elite dating and attraction coaches…
AB is available to speak on the male loneliness epidemic, how to find success on dating online and IRL, trending news stories, and the following topics:
Logic is the Death of Romance: Many of CD’s clients come from analytical fields (doctors, engineers, software developers). CD helps them get in touch with their inner emotions that attract women — more Captain Kirk than Mr. Spock…
My eyes are a little sore, having rolled them so much reading that pitch. Or maybe that’s just a lack of empathy on my part.
Nah. Still, anyone can call him- or herself a “dating coach.” I don’t think there’s a specific NAICS code for that. (I had to check: probably 812990, “all other personal services.”) Moreover, how does one get to be an elite dating coach? Is there a series of tests, like for actuaries? Doubt it. Do dating coaches have trouble keeping a straight face when they meet each other? Could be.
Interesting to note: the Kirk-Spock yin-yang is so completely woven into the culture that no elaboration is required. But I will say that Spock got lucky a few times, too. I seem to remember a dalliance with a high-placed Romulan, though it was a ruse, and a hot woman in a cold cave. Also, as evidenced in “Elaan of Troyius,” an episode that Ann and I watched just last weekend, not even an alien space babe with love potion tears could pry Jim Kirk away from his one true love, the Enterprise.
The sorry state of romance, if that’s really the case, reminds me of an entertaining video I happened across earlier this year, one made for the song “Silent Movie” by Little Violet, using artfully edited clips from the movie The Artist (2011).
After seeing the video a few times, I was inspired to finally get around to watching the movie on DVD, which I enjoyed a lot. The leads, especially French actor Jean Dujardin, nailed it, as was widely acknowledged. Take him back in time 100 years and he could have been a silent movie idol.
As for the video, it manages to loosely tell a rather different story than the movie did, and listening to the song without the video isn’t as good an experience. The British label Freshly Squeezed calls Little Violet a “retro pop piano-playing chanteuse and band.”
The Little Violet lead singer is one Cherie Gears, which AMV Music – a music booking agency based in Newcastle, England – describes as a “Yorkshire Wedding Singer Pianist.” Quite the voice.
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