Ann Shields on Letting Go

The Movies and Me

Saturdays meant going to the movies during my growing up years in Chicago.  The Biography and the Crest Theater sat across the street from each other in my neighborhood and sometimes my friends and I started out at one and finished the day at the other one.  Movies were my escape and fantasy.

I never missed watching the Academy Awards through the  years, except for one year when living with my extremely fundamentalist former in-laws who disapproved of movies in general.  I recall sacrificing the night to work on a correspondence course from Moody Bible Institue.  My fervor was short lived when I came to the conclusion that God didn't mind my movie watching after all.  I mean, surely He had bigger fish to fry, or catch in the Red Sea.  Excuse my mixed metphors.

Pressing the foreward button on this tale, while Des and I were good friends with Sheb Wooley, he starred in a movie, titled, The Purple People Eater.  What else?  So he invited us to his premier and made Des wear a purple cumberbund.  Seemed I was inching closer to my fantasy world.

This is all a prelude to my big news.  About 20 years ago I co-authored a book with someone we met in an airport in Mazatlan.  A former green beret and part of Special Operations, he told me about a mission he had been on in Viet Name that haunted him, troubling him with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, among other things.  He invited me to write about it with him and I said as long as my name was somewhere in the credits.  No ghost authoring for me.

What ensued throughout these years has been a meandering relationship, a finished book, Escape From Hell, disappearance of my co-author for 8 years, and then his reappearance with a phone call from Mississippi asking me to send him a bio an picture of myself for the book jacket.  Huh?  What book?  Turns out that he managed to get the book published through First Books, and it was out there for the world to see.  Even on Amazon.com.

But that isn't the end of the story.  As crazy as it sounds, our book will be made into a movie, filmed in and around Winnemucca, Nevada where Doty, my collaborator, now lives.  Not only that, Richard Tyson, the actor you might have seen in Kindergarten Cop or Black Hawk Down, is Directing the film as well as starring in it.  The town of Winnemucca has embraced these guys and the project, along with the Nevada Film Commision, and  all kinds of serendipitous things are happening.  Doty is Executive Producer, and he said when the credits roll at the end of the film, my name will be given a credit. 

What has been most surreal about this is a day last week when Richard and Doty sat in my living room kicking around some of the scenes, then holding a conference call with a couple of guys who are writing the shooting script.  Richard drove up in an old pickup truck from Malibu where he lives with his wife and a 6 year old daughter.  Unpretentious to a fault.  I joked that I wouldn't mind having a cameo shot in the movie and Richard said I needed to know the director first.  Him being the director.

Back to Reality, there is a good chance the project will be finished before November 1st, under a different title from the book...that is being kicked around.  It might be released early next year, and so who knows where this will all lead.  Doty says his bucket list contains an invite to the Academy Awards, just to be able to sit in the audience and soak in the atmosphere.  Sounds good to me.

I have no idea what the 'rest of this story' is, but my daughter says I am a late bloomer. No kidding.

So says Sassy

Tomatoes 'R Us

Spring is upon us.  The farmer half of this partnership has been itching to plant something.  What prompted this surge to grow something edible is the two scraggly carrots that poked up through cracked dirt in a broken down wooden barrel clamoring for attention.  Des proudly brought these pitiful specimens into the house and the fire under the farmerwas lit. 

Off we went to Green Thumb the day before Easter to buy tomato plants.  Two pony packs with a total of eight plants.  They await planting in the back yard, while we have visited two doctors, a third awaiting to decipher symptoms of my erstwhile farmer.  His second soujourn to the Sleep Disorder Center  was kind of a bust, by the way.   We are waiting the results. 

That's what our cardiologist said today, while gazing at the bright green boots on Des' feet.  He had spray painted them green because the original tan got too dirty.  Said cardiologist asked him if he was making a statement, that after he pointedly mentioned Des was nowhere to be seen yesterday at our Easter Service at First Methodist.   Des said he was hiding under the bed.  It did sound plausible.

Meanwhile, we left that doctor with orders to come back for an ultrasound of his carotid arteries, plus another pro time test, and hopefully, the results of the sleep test. He told the doc that on the next visit his shoes would be tan..we just bought the spray paint at Lowe's on Saturday.

Now that he will be planting tomatoes soon, I agreed to order more tomatoes from the Farmer's Almanac Gardening Guide--2009.  The ad promised Italian Tree Tomato  guanteed to produce over 50 lbs of tomaoes per plant.    He thought we should get two plants, I opted for 4, but after talking to the pleasant sales person on the phone, I ended up ordering 8.. . What, she asked, not getting ten for just $2 more.  Sold, I said.  So in two weeks we will be inundaed with tomatoes, a veritable tomato factory in our back yard.

Here's the irony in all this.  Once the tomatoes overtake our lives, I will be boiling, peeling, freezing them for Spaghetti sauce.  Des has declared himself free of the bondage of Italian food.  He made me promise, after the first twenty years of marriage to have a sauce free life.  He can be cruel, you see. 

So what am I to do with all this red stuff coming into my life.I could open a stand at the end of our driveway, once the tomatoes proliferate.  Maybe lemonade on the side.  But at least I managed to talk him out of zucchini plants.  After several years of zucchinis overtaking my life, he switchd to green beans-- of the pole variety - and that enthusiasm hasn't abated yet.

The point of all this being that I am a city girl,  brought up in Chicago where our block had squares of dirt next to the curb where I played 'stick the knife' with the big boys when I wasn't shooting marbles to the consternation of my mother who disliked to see dirty knuckles on her only begotten child.  WE never had a garden, although a huge cherry tree in our back yard fed neighboring birds who took dainty bites and spit out the pits on the ground. .  My mother didn't take kindly to the birds either.  Ah, but she made the best spaghetti sauce this side of Rome.

Back to the beginning of this meandering tale, the next two weeks should bring us an avalanche of tomatoes, a plethora of diagnoses from the medical support team who keep us breathing, and a plan to work on our Christmas letter.  We never did get one out this year, and it is too late to send one on April Fool's Day.  I did intend to do that.  Maybe you'll get one by summer's end, after I have frozen gazillion tomatoes.

So says Sassy