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Sunday, April 22, 2012

Palisade Pedicab hoping to expand across Valley

For two years one man has been taking his business to the streets of Palisade. Now Shawn Robinson is expanding into the streets of Grand Junction.
Peach and wine festival visitors often stop and stare at the tall, sandy-haired driver peddling by in a lime green, three-wheeled bicycle with a two people seated behind him on a bench seat.
 “Palisade Pedicab” printed on the side of the bicycle cab proclaims Robinson’s pedal-powered taxi service designed to give passengers a safe, relaxing and eco-friendly ride anywhere they want to go.
Nine months out of the year, locals are familiar with the sight as Robinson is busy working downtown festivals, parades, Farmers’ Market Sundays, and touring through the wineries through the spring, summer and fall.
He only has one pedicab, but he and his wife Linda plan to grow outside the Palisade events. Shawn Robinson feels his cab can be enjoyed at many Grand Junction events.
“Last year I took my ped to JuCo for three nights. The first night was successful. The next two nights were not for various reasons, but I intend to be there again this month,” he said.
            When the Grand Junction Rockies start their season in June, Hamilton will be there with his pedicab services, taking riders leisurely and safely to and from their homes, cars or just peddling around downtown GJ.
            So, how and why did this couple start a second business?  
Robinson’s first job is in construction, but in 2010 when work slowed down, he and his wife needed to boost their income.
“I read about pedicabs in a cycling magazine. We had seen vehicles like this in Denver taking people to and from Bronco, Rockie games and other events, as well as Peds used all along 16th Street Mall area,” he said.
 “Living here in Palisade surrounded by the orchards and wineries, we just felt it was another way for visitors to enjoy the beauty at a gentle pace. So we talked to Wine Country Inn about offering our services to their customers, just touring the wineries. Then I began driving passengers to and from the Palisade Peach Festival and the Farmers’ Market each Sunday during the summer.
“I have driven Santa through the Parade of Lights and then taken him back home,” he smiled as he talked about the fun aspects of his job.
The Palisade Pedicab man peddled its first wedding last year, delivering the bride in a beautiful outdoor wedding.
 “Who knows, maybe if this business keeps growing, we may have to buy another ped for the Valley,” Shawn considers.
He still feels, “It is a unique way to make a living, that’s for sure.”
Palisade Pedicab rates, pictures and more information is on Facebook, his webpage www.palisadepedicab.com, or contact him whenever he is peddling around Palisade. Shawn Hamilton loves to talk about his taxi business.
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Westley's Graduation - One Year later

Westley's Graduation - One Year later
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The Help: the film dividing America

By Philip Sherwell 7:30AM BST 23 Oct 20115 Her book has sold 1.3 million copies in Britain and 10 million in the States, the film adaptation has already earned $160 million as the movie hit of the summer in America, and now Oscar buzz is mounting ahead of its release in the UK this week. These should be heady days for Kathryn Stockett, author of bestselling debut novel The Help, a publishing phenomenon that earned the devotion of book clubs and legions of predominantly female fans on both sides of the Atlantic. The Help is the emotive story of black maids in the segregated world of Sixties Mississippi at the height of the civil rights struggle – their narratives recounted by a sympathetic, young white woman who rejects the virulent inbred racism of her old school friends. There are clear autobiographical parallels with Stockett, 42, herself, a blonde Southern belle raised by a beloved African-American nanny in Jackson, the Mississippi state capital where the story is set. And her success is all the more remarkable, as the manuscript, five years in the writing, was rejected by some 60 literary agents (she stopped counting at 45). The Disney film version is being marketed as an inspiring mixture of chick lit and civil rights, based on a heart-warming sorority between the races. And there is growing speculation about Oscar nods for Viola Davis (who plays the central character, Aibileen Clark), Octavia Spencer (her feisty friend, Minny) and newcomer Emma Stone (as white socialite Skeeter Phelan). But not everyone in the US is feeling so good about the “feel-good” juggernaut that is The Help. Certainly not Ablene Cooper, the black housekeeper for Stockett’s brother, who brought a lawsuit against the writer, claiming she was the unwitting and humiliated model for the similarly named lead figure. Nor a leading black actor, or the commentators – many of them also African-American – who view the book and film as patronising portrayals that sugar-coat one of the most violent eras in modern history. Those visceral responses reflect deep and enduring fault lines about race in a country where the horrors of segregation, a painful living memory for many, were not washed away by the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president. In Mississippi, the scene of some of the most brutal acts of the freedom struggles five decades ago, those sensitivities are particularly raw. And that violent past reared its ugly head again recently when a black man was viciously beaten up by a gang of young whites and then mowed down and killed by a pick-up truck in what prosecutors claim was a racially driven hate crime. Against that turbulent backdrop, Stockett was perhaps always courting controversy. Most poignant among the objecting voices is that of Mrs Cooper, who sued the writer for $75,000, a humble sum by America’s litigious standards, for using her likeness without permission. She said she was distressed that in the book Aibileen lost her son – just as she had – and that in one exchange the maid said her skin was blacker than a cockroach. The case was thrown out under the statute of limitations, as Mrs Cooper failed to lodge it within a year of being sent the book. Still, she was not alone in her complaints. Wendell Pierce, New Orleans-born star of The Wire and Treme, launched a blistering attack on the film after watching it with his mother, who told him afterwards for the first time that she too had once worked as “the help." In a series of scathing tweets, he called the film “passive segregation lite that was painful to watch”, said his mother thought it was an “insult”, that it was a “passive version of the terror of the South” and a “sentimental primer of a palatable segregation history." Mr Pierce was at pains to praise the cast, particularly Davis and Spencer, but added that Hollywood often seeks films with black actors as long as there is also a “great white saviour." The most damning verdict on its allegedly saccharine version of reality was delivered by Max Gordon, an African-American, New York-based writer, who described his outrage as he watched the film. “The phenomenon of The Help is so depressing, as it undercuts the real heroes of the era by ignoring the real horrors,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “This is not the South of lynchings and beatings, it’s the comfortable Hollywood take of the civil rights era. “I don’t think you can compare suffering and oppression, but what would people say if there was an executive decision to make a movie about the Holocaust and the Nazis without brutality, featuring only German officers’ wives and Jewish women, with no concentration camps or trains to Auschwitz?” But the two black stars are defending the film. Spencer, a friend of Stockett, was particularly combative. “We’ve gotten so PC and we’ve gotten so weirded out. We start labelling. You have to be a black person to write about black people, you have to be a white person…” she bemoaned in one interview, not needing to finish the thought process. “I have a problem with the fact that some people are making that an issue.” The book also received the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey, the Mississippi-born talk- show queen whose views carry great weight with her overwhelmingly female and African-American audiences. The Help was described as a “favourite book” on her website. Stockett, a recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old daughter who worked in the magazine industry in New York before moving back to the South, is now working on her second novel, another tale of women, this one set during the Great Depression. The writer addresses some of the criticisms of The Help in a newly published version of the book. She denied that, despite the coincidence of names, her brother’s housekeeper was a model, saying she had barely met the woman. Rather, she wrote that the inspiration for the character was Demetrie, her beloved childhood maid who largely raised her after her parents divorced when she was six. “The Help is fiction, by and large,” she continued. Yet as she wrote it, she wondered what her family would say – and also what Demetrie, by then long dead, would have thought. She acknowledged that she was breaking what some have seen as a cultural and literary taboo. “I was scared a lot of the time that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person,” she said. “What I am sure about is this: I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the Sixties. I don’t think it is something any white woman at the other end of a black woman’s paycheck could ever truly understand.” But, she concluded, “trying to understand is vital to our humanity”. Loyal readers and cinema-goers might agree with these motives. Her critics, as adamantly, do not. As British box offices prepare for a lucrative new release, the polarisation shows no signs of abating. 'The Help’ is released on Wednesday in Britan.