Connecting - with EVERYONE!

Married to a Crowd

I absolutely love these connections!!

Sound familiar??

"If those people would just go back where they came from, we wouldn't have any problems here."

That melancholy observation was made on a sunny September afternoon in 1946 by the late Mayor Ben F. Stapleton. He voiced it in answer to the question:

"How will Denver solve the tremendous problems created by all these newcomers?"

...Hundreds of thousands of servicemen had been stationed in or near Denver during World War II. The city's natural charm and the warm hospitality of its citizens made Denver the No. 1 'soldiers' town' in the country. To many GI's, who had sampled the city's friendliness during their brief hitches in Denver, returning to the Mile High City became an obsession.

Who is online?? Who blogs??

Generations Online

G.I. generation (73+)
4.0%
Silent generation (64-72)
7.0%
Older boomers (55-63)
13.0%
Younger boomers (45-54)
22.0%
Gen X (33-44)
23.0%
Gen Y (18-32)
30.0%

The web is still largely populated by younger generations as over half of those online are between the ages of 18 and 44 years old. But these days, larger percentages of older generations are going online and they are doing more activities while there.

Jenny Shank writes that "Blogs are great vehicles for unedited self-expression, as are newsy Christmas letters, and even self-published nonfiction books on overly specific topics, such as the mating habits of Red-winged Blackbirds in Northern Colorado, about which I know a little."

Speaking of Shakespeare and thinking of Grandchildren

I treasure this little note that my granddaughter

wrote when we were en route to Seguin

from Denver one year (spending the night at a motel).

Grandchildren are the VERY BEST!

Regarding Shakespeare, my eight-year-old granddaughter in Denver is memorizing some Shakespeare in preparation for an upcoming audition. If she is in this year's Shakespeare production, it will be her third year. I think her first year (age six) she was a tree or a bush or a flower (non speaking - but believe she sang a little ditty). I love it!!

The Denver Public Schools Shakespeare Festival is an annual event celebrating its twenty-fifth year. It is the oldest and largest Shakespeare Festival in the country. The day-long Festival is held in downtown Denver and provides the forum for students to perform sonnets and scenes from the works of Shakespeare as well as demonstrate dance and vocal and instrumental music of Shakespeare's time. The Festival begins with a parade to the performance venues and continues with performances throughout the day on multiple stages. The Challenge Bowl this year will cover the life and times of Shakespeare and Richard III.

Good and Evil - A Morality Play

My ignorance of Shakespeare and his poetry and plays is IMMENSE.
Thus, I am always especially interested in what those who
DO know his works tell me.
Jolly Ann Ellis, writer-teacher-poet,
gave an excellent talk about Shakespeare's
King Lear to the Shakespeare Study Club.

In Brief

In Britain, King Lear, in old age, chooses to retire and divide up Britain between his three daughters. However, he declares that they must first be wed before being given the land. He asks his daughters the extent of their love for him. The two oldest, Goneril and Regan, both flatter him with praise and are rewarded generously with land and marriage to the Duke of Albany and the Duke of Cornwall, respectively. Lear's youngest and most beloved daughter, Cordelia, refuses to flatter her father, going only so far as to say that she loves him as much as a daughter should. Lear, unjustly enraged, gives her no land.

There is more!

I remember reading Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres (which I loved) and then seeing the movie. Of course, ignorant as I was (am!), it took awhile before I realized I was reading of a patriarch/king with three daughters who were dependent upon their father's beneficience (or his withholding of same) with a King Lear theme. I thought Smiley's book was very well written and I enjoyed reading it.

Smiley is the not the first to adapt a Shakespeare play and in a way, it is amazing that, knowing so little about the man himself, his influence is so widespread centuries after he lived.

Ah - the Bard!

When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
--King lear, Act IV, scene vi

The Worst Hard Time

I initially borrowed this book from our excellent library. At that time Timothy Egan had not yet received the National Book Award. Of course, I had to have the book for my personal library. Believe me, this is an excellent book!

This week Timothy Egan will receive the Evil Companions Literary Award 2009 at the Oxford Hotel in Denver (wish I could be there!). The Oxford Hotel by the way is such a beautiful historic hotel in LoDo (Lower Downtown Denver). Our daughter and son-in-law's wedding reception was held in that marvelous hotel.
I digress!

The Evil Companions Literary Award is presented annually to a poet or writer who embodies the spirit of the West. The award pays homage to a group of Denver writers who met in the 1950s and '60s to drink and discuss writing, and dubbed themselves the Evil Companions.

Working to preserve the memory of the original Evil Companions are Joyce Meskis, owner of the Tattered Cover Book Store, Dana Crawford, owner of the Oxford Hotel and Colorado State University Professor of English, David Milofsky. The trio created the literary award and its accompanying event to promote and build upon Denver’s deserved reputation as a center for writing and literature. The Evil Companions event is quickly becoming a local favorite. Proceeds from the event benefit the Denver Public Library. {Wonder if the Seguin Friends of the Library could have such an event, honoring local writers ??? A thought . . .}

Excerpt from The Worst Hard Time:

At its peak, the Dust Bowl covered one hundred million acres. Dusters swept over the northern prairie as well, but the epicenter was the southern plains. An area the size of Pennsylvania was in ruin and on the run. More than a quarter-million people fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Looking around now, it may seem that most people just hurried through the southern plains or left in horror. Not true. John Steinbeck told part of the story, about getting out, moving somewhere green. Those were the Exodusters. But Steinbeck's exiles were from eastern Oklahoma, near Arkansas -- mostly tenant farmers ruined by the collapse of the economy. The families in the heart of the black blizzards were further west, in towns like Guymon and Boise City in Oklahoma, or Dalhart and Follett in Texas, or Rolla and Kismet in Kansas. Not much was heard about the people who stayed behind, for lack of money or lack of sense, the people who hunkered down out of loyalty or stubbornness, who believed in tomorrow because it was all they had in the bank. Yet most people living in the center of the Dust Bowl, about two thirds of the population in 1930, never left during that hard decade.

...For now, the narrative of those times is not just buried among the fence posts and mummified homesteads. People who lived through the whole thing -- the great town-building, farm-fattening, family establishing prosperity of the 1920s, followed by the back hand of nature in the next decade, when all of life played out as if filmed in grainy black-and-white -- are with us still, shelters of living memory. But before the last witnesses fade away, they have a story to tell.