BetterMost Community Blogs > Shakestheground's Rumblings

Shakesthegrounds Rumblings

<< < (4/1161) > >>

Shakesthecoffecan:
I am actually going to Wyoming, for the second time this year.

The idea was first floated on the Yahoo Bulletin Board for Brokeback Mountain a few months ago, and from that genesis it has come. One of the organizers commented to me that on the Dave Cullen's Ultimate Brokeback Board there are numerous gatherings all over being planned.

It is amazing to me how many boards are out there for this story and movie. Amazing the need so many people driven to participate in the discussion, and the thought that for ever one there are more, lurking, silent, or out there on their own. Somewhere there must be a line betwixt a force of nature, and a life of its own.

I think back to last, what was it, October, when I first heard on NPR that at the Toronto Film Festival a gay cowboy movie was getting a lot of attention. I thought I was going to have to listen closely for that name again because I sure wanted to get the DVD and see it at some point. Had no idea I would get to see it in a theater, six times. Had no idea....but the closer it got I was paying attention.

A friend of mine in D.C. saw it opening night. This guy IS Mr. Film. He knows the medium backward and forward, can explain the original idea behind cinemascope vs. the commercially sucessful version of the format, has see thousands of films. He is gay, and his excitement over this movie was palpable, but when he called me the next day, there had been a shift. He told me, very soberly, "it was the best movie I have ever seen." Jezus. That is saying something.

I bought a newspaper to see if it were playing at an art house theater where I imagined it could be found. At the top of their ad: "Brokeback Mountain Next Week". I could hardly wait. That next friday came, and me and my partner drove 50 miles to Roanoke, Virginia, to the Grandin Theater, met a friend there and managed to get tix for the next showing. The place was packed. The car drove down the River Road Logo, and those words came up: BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. I thought "I can't believe I am finally going to see it."

I had not read the story, had only a vague impression of it from the previews. Was not prepared for what I saw and have spent months trying to make it make sense to me. Well, all the boards are full of that tale, so I won't go into that again. I wonder though as I write this, what is it about these tears, the ones that always come when I get to THAT point, that place within me that remains as raw as it was four months ago. Will it ever heal? Am I making this trip to heal it? 

What has welled up in me is a big ole black hole of sadness. It is a pain I feel daily, sometimes its prompted by thoughts of Ennis and Jack, sometimes not. It is an acknowledgement of generations of men and women cut off from one of lifes greatest joys. As a gay man I feel the duty to greive this pain for them. I also have a duty to myself to live my life and grow. How to find balance when your world has been rattled.....

Now, this force of nature is carrying me practically to the source, not very far from where Annie Proulx herself lives. There to meet people I have talked to on line, come to know somewhat, who have been effected like me. Gay, straight, bisexual, trangender, I wonder what it will be like. To hear their stories, not just with the BBM experence, but how they got to where they are in life now, and what they see ahead of them. It may well be a one shot deal, but there is a certain magic about a group of people being drawn together, around a campfire, on the greiving plain, who would be there for no other reason.

Plans call for trips to Riverton and Lightning Flat. Riverton I have read a bit about, a fair sized place, I was even able to chat with a gay guy from there who had heard his town was a part of the story, but had not seen the movie because it didn't play there. But Lightning Flat, that's another story. I wasn't even sure it existed until recently I spied it on a road atlas, the tiniest of dots at the end of miles and miles of unimproved road north of the Devil's Tower. Right on the Montana line.

Google it: you will find basically three things. It is where Jack Twist came from in the story. It had its own newspaper from 1920 to 1927, and its geographic coordinates. The huge county it is in has a population of about 5,200. I am not sure if anyone lives there. There are no maps of the place, it is not a mapquest has no details. I did find a satilite image that seems to show a human mark on the landscape. What must Lightning Flat be like? The most desolate destination in modern America?

I feel drawn to it some how, this is my preconceived notion of the trip that Lightning Flat will somehow be the highlight for me.  It will be interesting to see how that turns out, how I look back on it. I know there will be no mailbox with John C. Twist on it, I know there will be no ranch hands as I am used to seeing them depicted, but what is there? What is the truth about Lightning Flat? What is the truth about anyone or anything? What will I learn about myself if I make that long drive out that dirt road.....perhaps only a greiving plain where I can speak to the lost souls Jack Twist has come to represent. Perhaps there greif can be let go of.   

Shakesthecoffecan:
So I checked out Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories from the library, it is the book that Brokeback Mountain appears in as the last story. I am throughly enjoying it, reading one or two stories an evening. Oddly wonderful stories, full of despiration and violence and longing. I highly recomend it.

Shakesthecoffecan:
So it is about mid day on Saturday, the 27th day of May, A. D. 2006. Me and the partner were heard to a campground south of Siler City, North Carolina. We are on Highway 49, approaching the town I know is the final resting place of the actress Frances Bavier, known to the world as "Aent Bea" on the 1960's CBS series "The Andy Griffith Show", which to this day remains in reruns in the area.

On the left hand side of the road is a building with a hand lettered sign that say: "Live Bait and Game Room". Directly across from it came a cemetary.

I says to him: "I wonder if that is where Aent Bea is buried?" I look almost over my right shoulder and recognize her huge granite monument from from the pictures on www.findagrave.com. I told him this would only take a minute, and appropriatly enough I turned around in the highway patrol parking lot and went back.

Frances Bavier I have not been able to learn much about, She was an actress on stange in New York way back, back in the 20's and 30's. She appeared in The Day The Earth Stood Still, and my world came to know her as Miss Beatice Taylor, maiden aunt of Mayberry, North Carolina's Sherriff Andy Taylor. Once it and its sequals left the air she retired to of all places, Siler City, North Carolina. She became a fixture I understand, and there is a vague recollection of a story involving a damaged green DeSoto. She died in 1989, unmarried and without issue.

Her headstone towers above her neighbors. It is also visited frequently. We placed a small buttercup and a small hawkweed we found growing there, but there was a pot of fresh flowers, and a gallon jar of kosher dill pickes that had been cooking in the sun for a while. We seemed to recall an episode with the plot calling for some drama betwixt the characters Aent Bea and Clara, over a pickle recipy or contest. See attached photos.

One wonders at times like these, this woman with no known family, in an adopted home, still inspiring devotion in people stong enough to make them u-turn. There were no such gags as the pickles on the other graves, with their Twist Family Plot plastic arrangements. One has to wonder at a person who played a character people loved. Who loved this woman? What was her joy? Who was her joy? No, gaydar is not ground penetrating, but I point out the epithapt: "To Live In The Hearts Of Those Left Behind Is Not To Die".

I sang "Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye!" and we took off down 421.

Shakesthecoffecan:
The Pix are too big, will have to figger out how to resize them and then I'll post them.

YaadPyar:
OMG!  I can still hear her say in that unmistakeable soprano voice..."Andy!"

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page