Happy Labour Day to my twelve loyal readers. When I
lived in Buffalo, this was the day when neighbors would assemble on the beach
near our summer home and pull the boat lifts out of the water. Almost like
clockwork, after the first of September the winds would shift to the north, and
anyone with a boat moored in Lake Erie had better be prepared for nasty weather.
I once sat up half the night and watched my 1957 Chris Craft as it dragged it’s
mooring 200 yards across our bay in high winds. Fall on the east end of a Great
Lake can be pretty windy. The weather up here in the Almaguin Highlands has
been a bit sketchy, and Saturday, it looked as if my Kearney gig with Christina
Hutt might not happen. All day I consulted my phone weather app to see when the
rain and thunderstorms were expected. It was hard to tell. I finally got a text
from Christina saying we were on for 7PM and, with some trepidation, I headed
over to Kearney to accompany her. She sang beautifully, my accompaniment was
not disastrous, and the fireworks display went off without a hitch at 8:30, a
little earlier than planned due to the imminent storm. It was one of those lovely
moments when everything just fell together perfectly. The icing on the cake was
Nature’s light show shortly after the fireworks, and we got some much-needed rain
to boot. Perhaps I will be able to burn our accumulated brush before the end of
the season.
I saw an ad for a movie the other day that made me
belly laugh. It was for a new scary movie entitled The Nun and, based on the trailer, it looks very silly. These days
with all the apologizing by the Catholic Church for past indiscretions, this
movie seems to be well-timed. I love silly movies, and the more outrageous and
violent they are the better. I do not share this love with my wife, who
routinely claims that my movie choices give her bad dreams. Movie critic Joe
Bob Briggs used to host a show wherein he rated these movies according to their
breast and body count. In other words, the more naked breasts and dead bodies
the movie featured, the better the rating. I eagerly await the day when I can
watch The Nun on one of my nobody-else-wants-to-watch-it
movie channels. Bride Of Chucky is my
benchmark for the “so-bad-it’s-good” genre of film merde, and there seems to be
no shortage of contenders. Back in my ill-spent youth, I and my friends
actively sought out horribly bad movies to view, usually under the influence of
copious amounts of alcohol. We would then add our own commentary during the
movie, a la Mystery Science Theatre. Some notable mentions: C.H.U.D (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground
Dwellers), Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes,
The Blob (the original of course), Plan
9 From Outer Space, most vampire movies, and just about any movie Ed Wood
made.
As another summer has almost come to an end, I fondly
remember Labour Day celebrations from my youth. Down at our family beach house
in Fort Erie, this was the weekend when bonfires and fireworks lit up the beach,
and it was the last hurrah before school. Western New York and Fort Erie seem
to usher in the cooler fall weather much sooner than we do up here in the near
north, but either way, our summer is winding down. While I can’t say I’m
looking forward to winter, I do enjoy the quiet and colour of fall. I also look
forward to my evening putt around our little lake without seeing another boat. Boating
season isn’t over for more than a month. For every yin there is a yang.
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Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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