Written by September 12, 2007
Blog Numero Uno got so much attention–I’ve been swamped with positive feedback from people all over the country and lots of townspeople here in Eureka Springs, where it got picked up by the local website gaynewsbureau.com–that I find myself already cranking out my second blog just two weeks later. Notice how comfortable I already am using that insufferable term “blog.” If anybody out there knows how to get rich with a blog, let me know. I did send it to Arianna Huffington.
Today is the last day of my thirties! I turn the big 4-Oh! in a matter of hours now and am inviting the whole town of Eureka Springs to help me celebrate! I will be holding court at New Delhi (name another American town of 2,000 people with a fabulous Indian restaurant!) tomorrow (Thursday) night from six until nine, and then it will be on to the terrace atop the Crescent Hotel, the very grand limestone “castle in the wilderness” built in 1886, for a toast.
Television is verboten here at the writers’ colony, which is quite a challenge for a CNN junky like me, so for occasional entertainment, I have been watching old episodes of “Absolutely Fabulous” on a British website I found (tv-links.co.uk). I love the “Birthday” episode, written by the brilliant Jennifer Saunders, who also plays Edina. When the bookish daughter Saffie wakes her mother up on her 40th birthday, Edina says, “I couldn’t sleep. I could feel the forty-ness coming upon me in the night, dahling. Have a look out the window. Are the buzzards circling, sweetie?”
But I am embracing the occasion and have already been celebrating. As a gift to myself, I hopped in the Honda and raced down to Texas, listening to Hillary Clinton on CD reading her very presidential “Living History” the whole way, for Friday’s dedication of the Ann Richards Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin. It was so wonderful to see some of my favorite people in the world–the characters I met working for Ann. As I wrote in my first blog, Ann died on my 39th birthday, so it will be the one-year anniversary of her death on my big day.
I got back to Eureka Springs Sunday in time to see the finals of the U.S. Open on TV at our respectable Tex-Mex restaurant La Familia (another great spot, The Oasis, calls its cuisine “Ark-Mex”). Professional tennis is one of the many things I write about, and I had to email my old friend Martina Navratilova at Wimbledon this summer and tell her that for the first time since 1976, when I was eight years old, I would be neither at Wimbledon (I’ve been three times) nor glued to a TV for the whole two weeks of the tournament.
The Rainbow Gathering was a technology-free zone, and the locale so remote you couldn’t even get a cell phone signal, so I was completely oblivious to what was going on for most of Wimbledon. I did see Roger Federer win the final, matching Borg’s record five consecutive Wimbledon titles, from my room at the Matterhorn Towers Motel in Eureka Springs, where we had decamped to recuperate from the Rainbow Gathering.
With no TV at the writers’ colony, I kept up with the Open as best I could on the Internet, but didn’t get to watch much of it. Federer, who I covered a few years ago when he was in Houston for the year-end “Master’s Cup,” already has my vote as the greatest ever, and he’s a really sweet guy. When he plays, I never pull for the underdog.
And I’m actually playing tennis myself, for the first time in many moons, here in the Ozarks. Amazingly, Eureka doesn’t have one decent tennis court, which must make it the only “resort town” in the world without one. There’s one lousy court at the Best Western on the highway and four lousy courts at nearby Holiday Island, a development originally built as a retirement community. With this terrain, part of the problem is lack of flat spaces.
My new tennis buddy Bryan and I have to drive ten miles to Berryville, where there are two excellent public courts. Carroll County has two county seats, Eureka Springs and Berryville, because back in the day there was no bridge linking the two towns! Carroll County was actually called Lovely County back then, and the impressive, somewhat edgy local weekly is called the Lovely County Citizen.
In my last blog, I forgot to mention the most fascinating factoid about the Eureka Springs compound devoted to all things Jesus, with the 67-foot “Christ of the Ozarks” statue, the Passion Play, and the new creationism museum. Turns out these attractions were the work of one of Eureka’s most notorious figures, Gerald L.K. Smith. It seems ol’ Ger, a white supremacist, had been the founder of the pro-Hitler, pro-Mussolini “Christian Nationalist Crusade.”
Ger and his wife are buried near the foot (feet?) of 67-foot Jesus (I better make clear that it is 67 feet, as I have been mistakenly saying 62 feet!), which sadly altered the gorgeous Ozark landscape in the year of our lard, 1966. They had a big to-do “Happy Birthday, Jesus” celebration when he turned 40 last year. Sorry I missed that. Ol’ Ger must be spinning in his grave over all these fags and dykes invading Eureka Springs, and especially that new “Atheist in the Ozarks.”
Another bad guy in Eureka’s extremely colorful history was “Dr.” Norman Baker, a flamboyant businessman from Muscatine, Iowa, who arrived in 1937 and purchased the landmark Crescent Hotel, converting it to Baker’s Cancer Curing Hospital. Baker’s stay in Eureka was cut short when he was found guilty in 1940 on seven counts of fraud. He was sentenced to four years in the pen in Leavenworth, Kansas and fined $4,000. He never returned to Eureka, dying in Miami in 1957 at 75, reportedly of cancer. He never had one day of medical training.
The above information, a warts-and-all glimpse at the ugly side of the town’s history, is cheerily displayed on the tables at Dr. Baker’s Lounge, the roof-top bar at the Crescent, where I will be having my birthday toast tomorrow night. Visible in the distance will be, you guessed it, 67-foot Jesus, all lit up. As one local says, when the light strikes the statue in a certain way, he resembles Willie Nelson in a dress.
Willie happens to be coming to town October 26, and tickets for the intimate old Auditorium are going for $116.50. I already know “Captain” Don McGuire, who is bringing Willie, but Don is a good promoter so there are NO free tickets for the media or even Don’s closest friends. Don doesn’t generally care for reporters, but he’s considering talking to this one on the record. Originally from Mansfield, Texas, Don has known Willie since 1961, back when Willie had short hair and was years away from becoming a household name. Don can spin a yarn with the best of them, and I hope he lets me help him tell at least some of his wild Willie stories. As I told Don, “If you don’t get your stories down, they die with you.”
Of course I met Willie, along with people like Nelson Mandela and the Queen of England, through working for Ann. Ann and Willie (dare I call them the two all-time greatest icons of Texas?) were born just four months apart, north of Waco, Willie in Abbott and Ann just 20 minutes down the road in Lakeview, where there was no lake to view.
One of the best stories, I say, from Ann’s incredible send-off a year ago was that on the evening news and in the papers the following morning, Ann’s funeral and Willie’s arrest the same day in Louisiana, for vast quantities of weed and hallucinogenic mushrooms, vied for the top story! Ironically, Willie had been asked to sing at the memorial but couldn’t make it back from the road. Sobriety spokesperson though she was, Ann’s sense of the absurd would’ve won out on this one, and she would’ve loved it!
At the bottom of my birthday invite, I wrote, “Fabulous gifts, cards, cash, checks and Willie Nelson tickets encouraged.” I’ve tried this kind of humor before with predictably little success, but I won’t be surprised at all if, in the alternate universe that is Eureka Springs, I manage to be there in the flesh to hear Willie sing “Crazy.”
So Happy Birthday to me!
And Ann, we ALL wish you were here…
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