Doing my Columbia blog before the screening since Cat Mazza, my amazing common-law wife, is in town and we are driving through the night to sunny Bluffton, SC after the show. I woke up and watched yet more coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. This time it's the kid's strange multi-media homocide artist's notes. Pretty puerile stuff really. The Columbine kids could get away with it, but this guy is a college student. The news is still talking about how "shocking" it is when every day people are killed in Iraq. Every time a gun control person is interviewed on the news, there is a gun advocate on split screen yelling them down with INSANE ideas like everyone should have a gun and then people would be too afraid of getting shot to do a massacre. They sound logical though. We might as well be in 1938 USSR.
Back to cheerier notes. Columbia is more charming than i thought. I guess i had in my mind corporate new south. I saw the confederate flag which was moved off the Capitol bldg and put on a pole in front of the bldg, pissing everybody off. The football coach wants to get rid of it. He says, among other things, that it hurts recruitment. Good point bub. Love that. I saw the stars on the building where Sheman's cannonballs pierced the bldg. They added red onions to the tuna salad at the Gourmet Cafe. I thought it was tasty but my cousin Tracy who runs a jewelry store here called "Just the Thing" didn't like the addition. I brought it up when i got to the theater and everyone agreed that it is the South and the South tends to add onions. They did not blame her for being annoyed.
Last night while my screening was going on at Clemson, there were a number of fliers for some kind of "terrorism awareness" group, which was trying to convince people to be terrified of Hezbollah. Sure, if you are a right-wing Christian militia member in Lebanon, i agree, you should be scared. Not sure why someone wearing tan flip-flops in Clemson, SC should be scared. I guess they are trying to lay the ground work for an Iran invasion by connecting the group to the Iranians. Reminds me of the horrible Nicaraguan invasion of the 80s. Somehow that never came true. Luckily. Anyway I wrote the word Boo! on each of the papers next to the picture of the mullah and the words BE AFRAID. Pretty ineffectual but still i thought if someone's on the fence and has a sense of humor, maybe they'll get how lame it is and not go.
Anyway, Larry's great here at the Nickelodeon in Columbia. He showed me Strom Thurmond's statue where they carved his black daughter's name: Essie Mae under his white children, which i thought was great. They had to fill in the word "four" in front of children and then re-carve "five". Then he gave me a tour of the theater the city bought for them on Main street. It's an old 30's theater that became of two-story double porn theater in the 70s and then closed. They are going to be doing fund-raising and the city is excited about it. Bringing in the famous James Bond from Chicago to get it ready, who apparently just installed Oprah's home theater. This place seems great so it should be a good crowd tonight. More tomorrow. Going to try and avoid the tv and get off my massacre coverage addiction. They should bill it as the biggest US massacre since Powder River, but i think shooting Indians in those days was kind of like the War on Terror. Loose and open to interpretation.
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