The last days of fall in the Tahoe Sierra, that is. Lovely walk from Reno’s Idlewild Park to the UNR campus earlier this month, as you can see. Along the Truckee, then north through Reno’s Powning district, old-fashioned leafy sidewalks past craftsman homes and big old trees, up the hill to campus and along the Orr ditch to historic Frandsen Humanities.
Riverside Drive between Idlewild & downtown Reno
Further east, approaching the “cultural district.”
Destination: Frandsen.
Later that week temperatures plunged into the 30s and snow wasn’t far behind. By that time, I was at the annual Western Literature Association meeting in Lubbock, Texas, where it hit 80 degrees, then within a few days had dropped to 50 with patchy clouds of brown dust blowing in from the cotton fields and feedlots around town. “Oil, beef, and cotton: you can’t stop it, you can’t top it,” as one character in Edna Ferber’s 1952 novel Giant says.
For our annual WLA Readers Theater presentation I adapted Giant, a Texian saga later made into the well-known 1956 movie starring Rock Hudson, James Dean (his last role), and Elizabeth Taylor. Our readers were no less celebrated or accomplished, playing a range of characters from sweet socialite Leslie Lynnton (Liz Taylor’s part, played to the hilt by Utah State’s Melody Graulich) and third-generation ranching patriarch Bick Benedict (the Rock Hudson role, read with enthusiasm by Western Montana’s Alan Weltzien) to drunken, arrogant, violent Jett Rink, James Dean’s part and perfectly typecast in the rip-roarin’ and robust Minnesotan Al Kammerer. This is me as the King of Sargovia, potentate of a decayed European principality, reacting to the news that “stingers” — huge steel-toothed bulldozers — were being used to rip mesquite from the Texas prairie:
King: But your serfs, the peons I see everywhere here. Could they not have removed this mesquite with hand labor before it spread?
Congressman Clinch: [angry] Serfs! Why, we got no serfs here in this country! Everybody here is a free American!
His country would fit into Bick’s back forty.
Queen: [aside, curiously, to Vashti] “Damas,” “Caballeros” – what does that mean?
Vashti: [finger to lips, loud stage whisper] Shhhhh – that’s Spanish. Means toilets for the Mexicans.
King: Hmmm, I find this interesting, these signs in Spanish. It is like another country, a foreign country in the midst of the United States.
Judge Whiteside: This is Texas! Why sir, Texas is the most American country in the whole United States!
King: I should have thought New England was, or Virginia, or perhaps Illinois.
Judge: [scoffing] East! The East stinks! You could put any o’ them eastern states – hell, you could throw in most of Europe! – put it all down in one corner of Texas and you’d never find it! How big’s your ranch again Bick?
Bick: Something over two million acres. Two million and a half, to be exact.
Judge: [to King] There you are, Your Majesty. I guess that makes you look like a sharecropper.
hipperthanthou 