My wound

My wound
Originally uploaded by Broussardish.

On New Year's Day I was following my routine for lunch and making a can of soup. I had the soup can in my right hand and with my left I reached over to stove for a Corningware pot. When it slipped from my grasp, my left hand automatically descended to try to grab it before it hit the countertop. My hand arrived a split second too late and was impaled on a shard of Corningware. I knew it was bad (lots of redness and gapingness) and I made some groaning sounds which my youngest daughter heard from the adjoining room. She found me rinsing my gushing wound over the sink. She remained calm and drove me to the emergency room where I had to sit and bleed on the carpet for a while. We managed to reach my wife and other daughter before they returned to the house to find us missing with blood everywhere. I finally got 7 stitches along my "head" line on my left palm. I also cut or nicked a nerve which supplies sensation to the middle and ring fingers of that hand. More on that later.

Miracle on South Street

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like the world goes a little faster every year. This becomes most apparent at the onset of winter, which is kind of like an annual deadline. There are some things that just have to be done before it gets too cold or else they simply have to wait, and the list of undone tasks grows every fall. For instance, this year I never got around to planting bulbs, one of the easiest ways to cheer up mud season. My driveway is about five years overdue for a coat of sealant. I still have leaves from my late-dropping silver maple all over my yard. (I know, there’s no snow yet and the ground isn’t frozen, but I’m already resigned to cleaning up the yard after the thaw.) I never turned the mulch pile or tilled the garden before I dumped the few measly tarps of leaves I was able to scrap together. My plan to paint the exterior of the house in sections is such a bold initiative that I suppose I can wait another season to start it up.

At a certain point, the activities of the year actually “lap” you and leave you in their dust. But it’s only at that point that you begin to discover the true blessings of procrastination. Case in point, the storm doors and windows I never took down last spring (it was so cool last summer I never felt the need) are fine just where they are. Mission accomplished. But then, while casing my forlorn yard, I noticed that the Christmas lights I strung last year and never took down had been chewed by squirrels and their wires were dangling.

I found some duct tape and with my pocket knife I was able to strip and splice them right where they hung. I pulled the old extension cord out of the weeds, stretched it to the outlet and plugged it in. There were a few goners, but most of the strings worked just fine.

The Broussard home was one of the first on the block to have trees aglow with twinkle lights.

It was like a Christmas miracle.

Happy Anniversary

cassette
Originally uploaded by Broussardish.

In the future, when the robots take over and treat humanity like an exotic breed of cats who require space and pampering, I suspect that all we'll do is lie on plush mats and bat a mouse around to navigate the "Ultranet" (or whatever they will call it). I'm glad that there already are some cats with enough free time on their hands to come up with stuff like this (visit www.says-it.com to create your own). At a record sale in downtown Concord this summer I picked up a batch of cassettes for a buck apiece and I've been enjoying the fidelity and ease of use (my car has a cassette deck, so to play a CD requires two adaptors and all the wires and a place to put the portable CD player). Since then, I've been singing the praises of the cassette. It was such a durable format. I still have a few of them from the 70s that play just fine. I somehow doubt that any CDs that are getting steady use will hold up as well. When I discovered this fun little cassette label generator, it seemed appropriate to use it to acknowledge the most durable format of my life, my marriage to my band-mate Jemi. Our 21st anniversary was last week, and we exchanged notes and had dinner and such, but it wasn't quite as sentimental as it ought to have been. Here's a chance to declare my eternal love in music, without having to actually sing. And you don't want to hear me sing, trust me.

Mighty Clods of Joy

Here's a term I think merits coining: googlestalgia.

You know, it's when you remember something, someplace, or maybe some name from your youth and decide you want to plug it into Google at the next opportunity to see what turns up.

I had a bout of googlestalgia the other day, when a familiar phrase from my youth came to mind and I realized that I had never heard anyone else (other than my older brother) use it in my entire adult life. The phrase is "dirt clod war."

When I was an adolescent those three words caused a thrill at the core of my being. There were only a few places in sandy N.W. Florida, where I was growing up, where high caliber dirt clods could be found, but a trip to one of them with a group of friends was about as excting as life could be back then. The red clay bluffs of "Field 4" on the Eglin Air Force Base reservation near Ft. Walton Beach was the ideal dirt clod war terrain. There was plenty of cover and lots of high ground from which to launch attacks. There was even a clear-running stream in the nearby woods to provide hydration and clean-up.

The rules were simple. Form teams (or make it every man for himself), find some patches of good clod-rich dirt, wait for the enemy (or seek him out), and throw dirt at one another. I can remember the sensations as clearly as my first kiss: the shock of the impact of getting a clod on the back or neck and the following cascade of dirt and sand into the hair or underneath the clothes — and the absolute bliss of watching a clod arc from my own hand and intercept a running figure. When conditions were perfect, red clay dust would explode into the air like a mist of blood. Oh yeah, the only other rule to dirt clod war was that the game would not end until someone got hurt.

I don't think this rule was ever agreed upon. It was just inevitable that someone would get a rock in the eye or go flying down a red clay crevasse long before we were ready to go home, so this would be the signal that the game had to end.

So I typed "dirt clod war" into Google this morning and only got about 257 matches. I suppose that means the dirt clod war experience is actually pretty rare. Pity. Maybe other people called it other things. Here in the frozen North, where I now reside, I'm sure the abundance of snow makes my old gang's weapon of choice seem primitive and inelegant. (My mind's eye just attempted to picture a new Civil War where the South was armed with dirt clods and the North with snow balls. I think I'd put my money on the South in that conflict.)

Many of the "dirt-clod" sites I found were drenched with nostalgic feelings not unlike my own, so after browsing for a minute I typed "googlestalgia" into Google. The search only turned up two relevant sites, both blogs. So I went to Go Daddy and bought the domain googlestalgia.com. Not sure why, but it'll come to me.

Spume of Summer

Spume of Summer
Originally uploaded by Broussardish.

My funny wife read somewhere on the Internet that if you drop Mentos into soda pop it results in a spectaucular geyser. Since today was the last day of school she decided to bring the elements to Concord High School for an experiment when she went to pick up the girls. Apparently the first attempt resulted in ginger ale spurting into someone's nostrils. They regrouped and tried again with an improvised funnel and Jemi had her camera ready. This time it worked perfectly and she captured the spume at its peak. It seems like a metaphor for the last day of school, so here it is. Happy summer!

Respond to This

BRESETTE THEATRE PRODUCTIONS

Bresette Theatre Productions announces the New England premier of "The Pen!s Responds!" by Oscar winning writer Ernest Thompson.

BT Productions is a new theater company with a unique mission — to bring theatre to the masses with a "pay what you can" admission based on the idea that quality live theater should be for everyone.

Josh Bresette had the dream of starting a non-profit theatre company, which would offer high-quality drama and comedies but bring "something different" to the live theatre experience. "I have had this in mind for a while, and Billy Butler was the perfect person to help me kick it off. He is a theatrical force to be reckoned with," says Bresette.

BTProductions will launch their 2006 season with the New England premier of "The Pen!s Responds", by Ernest Thompson known for his play, "On Golden Pond," which earned him an Oscar, Golden Globe and Emmy award. This 90 minute tour de force will have you laughing, weeping, and squirming in your seat. Josh Bresette and Billy Butler are the two-man cast, and will play a multitude of characters including women, men, children and aging queens. Bresette describes the play simply as, "Two actors playing twenty four characters in twelve scenes about 1 subject!"

Says Butler, "It's a great show and we are aroused by the chance to expose it to the seacoast. This is the perfect chance to share the love with theatre fans who are looking for something different."

"The Pen!s Responds!" opens at The West Studio Theatre in Portsmouth, NH on June 2nd and runs through June 18th. With two nightly performances on Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 and 10 pm, and Sundays at 8 pm. The show then moves to the Portland Stage Company, in Portland Maine, June 23rd through July 9th. Finally, the Boston Center for the Arts, July 22 through August 5th. Due to subject matter, this production is not appropriate for young children. For tickets call 603-430-0770 or visit www.BTProductions.org

--
"Unnecessary failures are the ones where an artist tries to second guess an audience's taste, and little comes out of that situation except a kind of inward humiliation."
David Bowie

Tag, I'm It

I got "tagged" recently by Kristen to list these groups of "favorites with kids"... This is apparently one of those self-propagating list deals, but unlike the ones for youngsters that ask things like "name your crush" this one is geared to parenting. OK. I'm cool with that. It needs to be understood that I'm almost done with the close-quarters, hands-on parenting phase. My urchins are in high school and college. Sadly, we don't really do all that much as a group any more. Here's what I came up with.

Four places I'd like to take my kids on vacation

1. Big Sur
2. Dominique
3. British Isles
4. Some desparately poor country -- Haiti or India -- to show them how good they've got it.

Four shows I like to watch with my kids

1. Gilmore Girls
2. Everwood (now cancelled, alas)
3. American Idol
4. Saturday Night Live

Four restaurants I like to go to with my kids

1. Bagel Works
2. Texas Roadhouse
3. Moritomo
4. Arnies

Four things I want my kids to be good at

1. Listening
2. Understanding
3. Communicating
4. Caring

Four websites I visit daily

1. NHMagazine.com (It's the default on my browser.)
2. Drudge Report( Just to be sure the world is still there.)
3. Ernesto's and/or Kristen's (OK, I don't visit every day, but often enough)
4. Area 603

Four people I'll tag with this

This is embarrasing, since the point of these self-propagating Web dealies is to spread them around, but the truth is, I don't know that many people with blogs and kids. My kids have blogs. None of my siblings do. The few close friends I know to have blogs are Kristen and Ernesto.

I Was There (I Think)

Miss NH cowgirls2
Originally uploaded by Broussardish.

So I spent my weekend judging Miss New Hampshire 2006 and I'm just beginning to recover. Last night, the judges and officials stayed up until 3:30 a.m. evaluating the candidates and coming up with suggestions for improvements in the performance and appearance of the winner (Emily Hughes: Miss Winnipesaukee), to prepare her for the Miss American competition. I’m finally back at home after three nights sequestered in a hotel, van, limo or nice restaurant, surrounded by people for whom the Miss America track runs straight to the heart. (One judge from Atlanta knew the contestants AND RUNNERS UP from virtually every state for the past 20 years. Even the local Miss NH geeks were impressed.) As the “novice judge” I was frequently asked what I thought of everything and, in truth, it was fun and fascinating, but I'm just realizing the profundity of the psychological effect of all this "judging" of smart, beautiful, driven women. Looking back, it seems like an unnatural relationship, a little schizoid, simultaneously voyeuristic and paternal. I feel like I may need some Lithium, or a deprogrammer.

Ten Summer Songs

On the Area 603 blog someone asked for people to compile a short list of songs they'd want to have on a tiny iPod for an endless summer. I wanted to pad my list with things like "Neon Meat Dream of a Octofish" by Captain Beefheart, but I decided to go the sincere route. Here's what occured to me to write, and some of the why behind each choice.

My Critical Summer Songs in Chronological Order of Psychological Imprint

1. God Only Knows, Beach Boys (My first-ever dance at a real boy/girl house party)
2. I Got a Line on You, Spirit (Best song ever to make an entrance to on the Ft. Walton Bch. teen nightclub scene)
3. Summer Breeze, Seals and Crofts (Moved to Tallahassee with my girlfriend and got dumped by her the first day there. This song played constantly that summer and there really was Confederate Jasmine in the air.)
4. Itchycoo Park, Small Faces (Early days of, uh, experimentation)
5. You Ain't Going Nowhere, The Byrds-Sweetheart of the Rodeo (Coming down)
6. Street Fighting Man, Rolling Stones (Growing up)
7. Band on the Run, Wings (That road trip to California in my brother's Dodge Dart Swinger)
8. Mambo Sun, T.Rex (That pagan summer at the farm in N.W. Florida)
9. Thunder Road, Bruce Springsteen (Atlanta, my third Springsteen concert. The promise of the summer, the warning of the fall.)
10. Save it for a Rainy Day, The Jayhawks (This recent fave took me back to that first boy/girl dance party, older (much) and wiser (a bit)).

Can I start all over again? I'm sure I could come up with a few dozen more summer imprints.

Meet a Real Pirate

Aye mateys. Thanky to all who left such yar comments on me last posting. Like it or not, ye all are now members of my crew. And a scurvier bag of bilge rats I've never laid me eyes upon. So avast and heave ho and man the poop deck, we set sail at dawn (to beat the traffic on I-93).

My daughter, a certified World of Warcraft addict, has created a wonderful pirate character named Baracilla. She's a pirate queen whose heart was stolen and broken by a dashing young corsair who went to sea, after the one night they spent together, and then never returned.

Here's one description of herself from a story she wrote called "The Bloodsail Abduction." (Her character is not confined to the game and often sneaks out into the "real" world.) The scenes takes place on board Baracilla's ship "The Darling Pearl."

The walls moaned at the wooing of the waves. She clicked her cabin door shut, releasing a breath. Turning, she faced a tall, tarnished mirror, propped carelessly on the wooden sill before her. Looted from a month-old shipwreck, the surface was warped and grimy, but she could still make out the image of herself, imposing and tawny-skinned, garbed entirely in red. She stepped towards her reflection, sharp russet eyes meeting themselves in the tarnished pane. She studied herself briefly, running a hand through her unruly silver locks. There was a squawk and the shuffle of feathers. Peril bobbed his head, peering through the wire of his cage with beady blue eyes. Baracilla cast a smile on her loyal parrot, abandoning the mirror and crossing the room. She strolled past Peril’s cage, dipping her hand into a small wooden crate. Her glove enclosed around the neck of a tall, dark, glossy friend. With a flash of teeth she wrenched its cork free and fell back on the pilfered silk sheets, taking a long, indulgent drink.

Ah, the pirate life.

Arrr

You know you are in a fairly desperate mode when you post this kind of thing to your blog, but I couldn't resist. (What is the growing appeal of pirates all about, anyway?)

My pirate name is:

Iron Jack Flint

A pirate's life isn't easy; it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

Monster Lab Game

Monster Lab Game
Originally uploaded by Broussardish.

This photo was sent to me by Kirk Demaris who runs the wonderful kitsch and nostalgia Web site www.secretfunspot.com. It's linked in my blogroll so check it out. I'm copying some correspondence I had with Kirk into the comments below, so if you are curious about the how the Monster Lab Game came to be my most current post, follow the thread.

Absolute Beginner

Rick at Wildcat 3
Originally uploaded by Broussardish.

Last Saturday I stepped waaay outside my comfort zone to produce a story we needed for New Hampshire Magazine. The idea was to have a middle-aged person who had never before set foot in a ski boot, go to the slopes and try to learn to ski in a single day. I happen to be a middle-age person (if 53 still fits in that category) and I've never skied so I assigned myself the article. The experience was grueling, but rewarding. I did learn, but I'd hesitate to say that I can really ski. I got to that point where I knew I could go back and have a less grueling time. Anyway, here's me and my instructor, just before I went back up on the lift for my second run. At this point I was actually thinking about declaring myself unfit and going home. It turned out that I was glad I stayed. I'll link this post to the whole story when it's online at the magazine Web site.

That Real 70s Show

Chissom
Originally uploaded by skinnergy.

My good old friend Billy Garrett, who was probably in kneepants when this photo was taken, sent me a link to a collection of photos from the Ft. Walton Beach nightclub scene, circa 1970s.


(You can see it here.)


I liked this one, mostly because of the highly evolved facial hair. I don't remember this band (Chissom) but it got me thinking about the names of other bands from that era. I remember Big Al Zipper and The Phaetons and The Little Juice Band (TLJB are pictured in this collection) but I'm shocked at how few of them I can conjure up from my misty brain cells. Nightclub names were pretty transient back then. I remember the Mind's Eye (some friends and I did the design for their psychedelic wall painting and logo). I remember the adult establishments like Cash's Faux Pas.

I'd love to archive more of this kind of Miracle Strip trivia for a possible book on the era. And if anyone has photos from the 70s of such night spots or even downtown hangouts like Jimmy's Newsstand or the Palm Theater (not actually downtown, but I think the downtown Tringas Theater was condemned due to health code issues), I'd love to start collecting them here.

Drop me a line if you know of some resources for such material. There must have been people taking pictures back then. And there must be a few folks who didn't totally blow out their memory centers with recreational drugs. Mustn't there?

The Dragon Meets his Saint

The Dragon Meets his Saint
Originally uploaded by Broussardish.

One of the many reasons that I've not been updating my blog (the main one being the distraction of having to hold up my end of a religious debate on the blog Detente. (click here to visit it.)) is that I agreed to build a "life-size" dragon puppet/costume for the production of The Reluctant Dragon by the Children's Theatre Project here in Concord. My family has been a part of this group for 10 years, so a contribution of this magnitude was called for, I guess. The dragon turned out pretty good. He performs very well on stage, thanks to some talented kids doing the voice and puppeteering. Here's a look at him in action. For any PETA or animal rights folks out there, fear not. St. George is only pretending to spear him. And he's, of course, only a pretend dragon. And, of course, a dragon is only a pretend animal.


Here's a link to a great album of photos from The Reluctant Dragon.

Ode to (or for) Mom

Here's something that's been rattling around in the back of my mind for a long time. I've been feeling closer to my folks lately, even though I do a lousy job of keeping in touch with Dad and Mom passed on years ago. But somehow it seems right to try to carry on or complete some work that belongs to one's parents. I've been following in my father's footsteps in puppetry, and thinking about cooking and bread making to honor Mom. The following, I hope, explains itself. It's still a work in progress.

The Ballad of the Built-in Fingernail

While my mother always believed she could write
Her poetic musings took over at night.
With family in bed and the house still chaotic
She'd spin the mundane into something exotic.

But glasses of Coke mixed with old Heaven Hill
Doused the fire of her muse and gave it a chill,
And bright seeds of poetic inspiration
Bloomed into dark flowers of accusation.

Mom wasn’t content with how her life turned out.
She drank to find peace and her faith turned to doubt.
But still she had dreams and a few great ideas
Of how to make hay in the poetry biz.

She’d write an homage to Erma Bombeck:
An author best known for describing the wreck
That comes when a maid turns into wife and mom,
She turned foibles to fables with pen and aplomb.

While now we bow down to our domestic divas
Bombeck’s works were odes to a domestic Shiva.
Her observations were both funny and frank.
(And grass still grows greener o're the septic tank.)

My mother and thousands of others found hope
To know that it really was common to cope
With clutter and chaos and lackluster kids
And husbands accustomed to life on the skids.

Now our house would get cleaned for special occasions
And all would be ordered to our battle stations
When Grandmother came to survey the domain.
We’d shuffle the clutter and cover the stains.

And during one flurry of hectic housekeeping
Came the inspiration that Mom had been seeking.
“I wonder,” thought Mom, “why no mop, sponge or broom
Can finish the cleaning required of a room?

“Why no soap solution can lessen the toil
Of cleaning the final small, dark clumps of soil.
A vacuum can suck up the bulk of debris,
Dead bugs and dust bunnies that long to run free.

“But to whack that last lonely sticky detail
The weapon of choice is a good fingernail.”
“Aha,” said my Mom, “Here’s a message to share.
With housewives and cleaning girls everywhere.

“You’ve heard the commercials that tell you what’s new
To make your house perfect. Well tell them, ‘Scrub you.’
"You’re more than the sum of your cleaning supplies
And the greatest tool lies right before your eyes.

Someday an inventor will set us all free,
We’ll never more grovel upon bended knee
The greatest companion to woman and pail
Will be the Mop with the Built-in Fingernail!"

As epiphanies go, this wasn’t as hot
As a bathtub “Eureka,” or Einstein’s big thought
But Mom warmed her muse and she sat down to write
And writing continued late into the night.

I never did see the poem that resulted
But friends that she showed and the family consulted
Agreed that the poem was a quite worthy text
That rivaled the writings of Erma Bombeck.

“Submit it’” they’d urge. “It deserves to be seen
in Reader’s Digest or Redbook Magazine.”
But it's one thing to open your heart to your peers,
Another to welcome professional jeers.

As far as I know now the poem is still bound
In some yellow pad, nowhere to be found.
But in garret or attic it bears her initial
And glows like a light, hidden under a bushel.

Now Mom has passed on and left so much unspoken
That I collect each of her words as a token.
I cherish the wisdom she freely imparted
Much more near the finish than when I first started.

For life takes a turn when you get near the end,
And looking both ways as you head ‘round the bend.
Beginning and end shine with bright clarity
Revealing how simple life’s answers can be.

How time washes off all the grime of the past
Exposing the memories destined to last.
How things that seemed small in the daily debris
Can glow like the stars in God's eternity

So now it is my chance to say what I see
To my son and daughters who come behind me.
And something as handy as Mom’s cleaning tip
Is precious, indeed, to provide for the trip.

So here is Mom's motto for my kids to keep
Even when their dreams wind up in a heap:
Sure life is a mess, but don’t sweat the details.
As long as you’ve got your built-in fingernail.

Symbol Status

So much has been happening that I haven't been posting very regularly. I know, this statement reveals that I am not a "true blogger" or the opposite would be the case. Anyway I thought I'd post my Editor's Note, written for the October issue of NH Magazine, since it's probably more timely now than it will be when the magazine finally is shipped at the end of the month.

I posted this same thing to my "official" editor site, www.granitegumbo.blogspot.com. That's how lazy I am.

Here's the post:

My wife and I just dropped our son, our first-born, off at college. The ancient trees of his small campus in Maryland were throbbing with the shrill orchestra of cicadas that had recently emerged in droves from their 17 years of larval life underground. I plucked a few of their amber husks and showed them to my son and his roommates. I thought the cicadas were a particularly apt symbol for college freshmen. After all, their fine young minds were just emerging after a similar number of years in the cocoon of homes and public schools, but they were a bit too excited about the opportunities before them to dwell upon symbols of the past.

Back at home, one week later, Hurricane Katrina hit the shoreline of my past. When I was growing up in Florida, my family took an annual summer drive through Biloxi and over Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain Bridge on our way to visit my Cajun grandparents in Lafayette.

The contrast between the secure seaside village where my son was now soaking up great books, and the demolished seaplains of my ancestral homeland made me feel a bit like a survivor of some great tragedy, like a Jew who had traveled out of Warsaw before the Swastika cast its black shadow across Poland. (Can you tell we took a side trip while in Maryland, to visit the Holocaust Museum in D.C.?)

Since then I’ve heard many people trying to convert the devastation of the Gulf Coast into some kind of dark symbol: Environmental Revenge or God’s Wrath poured out because of Abortion, The War in Iraq, Mardi Gras Debauchery or Fill-in-the-Blank.

I’m a great lover of symbols. Like Orthodox icons, I see them as windows into heaven, links to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. But here’s a lesson I just learned from my son. Symbols pale beside opportunities.

The catastrophe on the Gulf Coast is big enough that everyone in America needs to lend a hand. It’s so big that other countries, so often the beneficiaries of American aid, have an opportunity to return the favors. The purpose of a powerful symbol is not to fixate upon the past, but to guide us toward the future. The great struggles of our history, from the Revolution to the Depression to Vietnam, have become guideposts for our culture. More recent ones, like 9-11, are still being processed. When the challenges are finally faced and overcome, each momentous event can become a symbol of hope and inspiration.

I hope that when Hurricane Katrina is finally boiled down to a historic icon, it stands not as a symbol of judgment or disaster, but one of unity and self sacrifice. In a country (and a world) that is so often divided against itself, that’s the kind of symbol I can get behind.

Rick with Puppet Friends

Rick with Puppet Friends
Originally uploaded by Broussardish.

We just got back from a long drive to explore the neighboring state of Vermont and to visit good friends Ernesto, Kristen, David and Sophia. A highlight of the trip was a visit to the Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, north of St. Johnsbury. We arrived there as it was growing dark, just in time to visit the museum for a minute before the Friday night "dance" performance. The evening was cool and damp and there was a feeling of destiny in the air. Young creative people hovered about and older creative people mingled easily among them. Odd wooden buildings, old vehicles, a painted bus and a myriad of unfinished projects seemed to sprout from the soil and weeds. At one point, Jemi mentioned that the Bread and Puppet farm must remind me a bit of our old farm in DeFuniak Springs, and I replied, "It's like the Farm fully realized." And it was uncannily like the farm might have been if my friends had focused their creative energies and allied with those of my mom and dad. Puppetry and bread baking were always key expressions of art (and love) in my family. I'm still making puppets (so is my dad). After this trip, I'm planning to try my hand at baking bread. Peter Schumann, the genius behind the theater, uses an outdoor clay oven to bake the bread that they hand out at their pageants. I've begun to investigate the materials and specs to put such an oven in the backyard here at 233 South St.

I guess artistic hunger is contagious.

Frank Thompson Joins the Foreign Legion

Had a nice e-mail back-and-forth with one of my best old friends and learned that he has a Web site. It's very cool, so I'm linking to it below. Frank Thompson encouraged me to submit the very first article I ever had published in a "real" magazine. He also introduced me to the pleasures of silent films -- D.W. Griffith to Georges Milies -- and to old black and white classics like "Scarface" and "Beau Geste." In fact, the page I've linked to on his site has an essay on the French Foreign Legion, one of Frank's many eternal boyhood obsessions, but every page in his site is as packed with treats as a new bag of marbles and evokes the past like a whiff of smoke from the barrel of a cap gun.

Enjoy.

Frank Thompson--Foreign Legion

Graduation Day

Graduation Day
Originally uploaded by Broussardish.

I suppose the past couple of posts are good illustrations of how quickly the milestones pile up when your kids are teens. Day before yesterday prom, yesterday graduation, today sleeping late and avoiding work, tomorrow a bright collegiate future. We hope. At least we have this photo of a pretty special day.