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Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Classic Oscar Party

To all my other friends who laughed when I said, "I'm going to an Oscar Party," see what you missed:
Great fun, great friends and glamorous people here in Western Colorado.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

A little milk in your coffee?


It was the liquor of choice for all adults in the 1950s, but not for children. We were dirt poor farm folks, so grown-ups drank coffee, and children had to drink fresh-from-the-cow, right-from-the-bucket, lukewarm whole milk at every meal. Yuck.
         I suffered through years of the icky stuff three times a day with little relief until I hit the wise age of five. Sitting across the table, I noticed my Dad refilling his third mug of black coffee. He learned over to refill Mom’s empty china cup. She stopped him, “Just a touch, and then hand me the cream and sugar.”
My mother stirred in spoon after spoon, after spoon, after spoon of sugar. When she poured cream to the rim, I held my breath waiting to the white caramel liquid spill over the edge of the too full cup.
 She was an experienced pro, not a drop fell off the spoon or in the saucer as she slowly motioned her spoon round and round. With perfect balance, the full cup touched her pursed lips as she sipped delicately.
“Mommy, can I have a drink of your coffee?”
“’May I have?’” she corrected me automatically.
“May I?” I batted my big brown eyes slowly and looked at her hopefully.
“Oh, baby girl, you are too young. It will stunt your growth,” she sighed at me.
“Please, Mommy. I like your coffee. It’s pretty and doesn’t smell bad, like Daddy’s. I won’t drink much.”
“Your eyes will turn brown if you drink coffee.”
“But Mommy, my eyes are already brown.”
She let me taste the elixir of the adults, my mommy’s form of coffee—sugary cream with a hint of mocha. I asked for more, but the gods giveth and taketh away. Mommy had crossed the invisible line of keeping me on plain milk. Now that I had sipped, I was not going back quietly.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Writing Advice

Stumbled across great advice hidden in my piles of writing conference notes:

“You don’t have to be great,

  You don’t have to be bad,

   You just have to be consistent,

    and stable, reliable and just a tad bit

    of unforgettable.”

Great Oscar Party last night; No matter what Hollywood says

Here in our little sleepy town we had a great time at Laura's seventh annual Oscar Party.
Each year it changes where it's held, who comes and who wins.

This morning the media critics claim "boring,""drowning in old jokes," etc. But for 26 of us local fans who dressed in suits and formal gowns, walked down our little red carpet into the Double Tree lounge,  we enjoyed every minute of the show.  Thanks to Laura, her daughter Amelia, and the River City Singles Club.

 I will tell more and post pictures later.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Oscar Weekend--Are you ready?

It's that time again--Academy Awards presented Sunday Night!

I'm excited but not as anxious as in the past. Since they have made so many changes from moving the presentation date (March to February),  to doubling the number of categories and nominees in each category, the winners and the show have become cluttered and political in so many ways.

BUT, the Oscar Show is always a good reason to party while watching the movie stars walking the red carpet, presenting the awards, accepting the awards and enjoying the master of ceremonies.
This year BILLIE CRYSTAL is BACK! He is bound to be better than last year's presentors. Who were they any way? I forget.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Kids Aid, Founder and Volunteer


Local business man Mike Berry is constantly smiling when talking about his second job, a volunteer occupation, overseeing Kids Aid, a non-profit organization in Mesa County.
Few people recognize that particular title; they just know about the “Backpack program,” where hungry students are provided with backpacks of food donations, so that they would have food over the weekend.
Even fewer people realize that this nine-year-old program was started by a family meeting around the Berry’s dinning room table.  
He explained, “One October morning in 2003, my wife and I had walked our daughter to her 1st grade class. . .when a little girl came running across the playground, crying. We stopped her and asked what was wrong. Her answer pierced our hearts.
“I’m cold. I’m hungry. . . “
This one little girl’s plea touched Mike, wife Debbie and their son and daughter’s hearts, but how could they help? 
After four years of researching and questioning about childhood hunger in Mesa County, the Berry family came up with a plan. Their daughter Kayla named it, the Feeding Friends Backpack program.
Mike and Debbie established the non-profit Kids Aid to run it.
And how it has grown.
They started with a trial program at Orchard Avenue Elementary. We fed 10 kids for the final 10 weeks of the 2007-2008 school year. By the next fall we had five schools and 156 kids,
This simple but revolutionary plan has grown into a hometown organization of award-winning proportions.
What started as a way to help hungry children in our local schools is now a Nationally recognized non-profit organization run by volunteers by individual and business donations of food, equipment and money. 

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Ray Bradbury's Advice

I admit it--I "borrowed" this article from another blog or website or somewhere. Ray Bradbury's words are worth stealing.
Read and Enjoy.

To sum it all up, if you want to write,
if you want to create, you must be
the most sublime fool that God ever
turned out and sent rambling.

You must write every single day of your life.
You must read dreadful dumb books
and glorious books, and let them wrestle
in beautiful fights inside your head,
vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

You must lurk in libraries and climb
the stacks like ladders to sniff books
like perfumes and wear books like hats
upon your crazy heads.

I wish for you a wrestling match with
your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.
I wish craziness and foolishness
and madness upon you.
May you live with hysteria, and out of it
make fine stories--science fiction or otherwise.

Which finally means, may you be in love
every day for the next 20,000 days.
And out of that love, remake a world.

~RAY BRADBURY

Westley's Graduation - One Year later

Westley's Graduation - One Year later
Westley gets a hug from his mom the minute after he receives his diploma from Fruita Monument High School, Class of 2010.

He's BACK! Billy Crystal is 2012 Oscar Awards Host

Remember Bohemian Rhapsody Mountain Dew parody Ad

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.