You and rest of the Dope. 
Thanks. I remember you saying that about your great-grandfather, that he thought they’d be half-wits. How sad.
I shouldn’t read Sampiro threads before bedtime, though-I had a dream he DID have a Dopefest at his old home and it was set up like a museum. I was frantic because I knocked over some jewelry that belonged to his mother or something like that.
This wins first runner-up for funniest thing in a Sampiro thread, the first of course being the actual Sampiro stories. Can you imagine how many Dopers would travel immense distances to be at that one?
The facts that
1- I misspelled it (it’s Anglesey, nto Angelsea) and
2- To the Druids it was known as Ynis Mon or Mona
probably didn’t help. It was the site of the last stand of the Druids in Britain, a holy site that became a fortress that became a massacre. Boudica used it to rally troops when she went on the warpath after her rape/beating and made Rome sorry for a while.
Tell her some bizarre Canadian girl would love to have 9 acres in the middle of nowhere…throw Canadian dollars into the mix and see what happens then! BTW, I love ghosts! the burning pit has me a bit freaked out, though.
Aha. I thought it was just my ignorance. Once I decided it did not mean Ynys Mon/Anglesey* in Wales, I just thought it must be some terribly famous American thing that I wot not of. We know it has to represent a Great Disaster and a Bad Thing, though.
Can someone explain, please, pretty please?
- Rather a pity, really, because I can jsut imagine how all those druids could have added to the story.
As Sampiro confirmed 3 posts ago, he was indeed refering to Anglesey. My Wiki/Google-fu also returned some discussion of repeated invasions with passing reference to druids, Romans and Saxons and I figured that didn’t really fit with the spirit of the other 3 references. I suppose historians, at least those referenced on the web, don’t seem to hold the battles at Anglesey in the same dramatic and/or climactic regard as they do the better known American, French and Greek defeats. That or Sampiro is making shit up ;).
Mona/Anglesey, always a holy place to the Druids, became a refuge as the Romans took more territory from the Celts. It contained groves (possibly of scuppernongs, but I doubt it- would be cool though) and round stone structures that were particularly sacred to the Druids/Celts.
From Tacitus’s Annales (emphasis mine, some editing for space considerations):
I read at some point that Cat Stevens’ King of Trees (written while he was on the quest that ended in Mecca) was in part inspired by the groves of Mona, but I can’t produce the cite or make claim to its accuracy. I will say that scuppernong wine is good, though- wish I had some now. But they probably didn’t have any at Anglesey.
Point is, Druids got an ass whoopin’.
This place has good scuppernong wine. Ok, so it has nothing to do with any of this, I just thought I’d point it out. A bottle of chilled scuppernong wine and a hot tub have made for some good times at the swampcave. It’s good to have a place nearby to purchase the wine. 
Mona Anglesey would be a really good name for a porn star, romance author or soap vixen, incidentally.
Scuppernongs? Sounds like some sort of amphibian.
“Viable populations of walking Siamese scuppernongs have been found in the Everglades. Local hobbyists are suspected of releasing them.”
Permit me to add myself to the list of Sampiro admirers. Please please please bring a book out, or something*. You write brilliantly of such surreal people and events that I would not believe them if I did not know people to whom similarly-surreal events have happened. Well, almost as surreal. 
[sub]*You could get OpenOffice, cut&paste it all in, export a PDF, upload it to a net-based instant print on demand publisher/fulfillment house like CafePress, and be up and running in a few weeks! [/sub]
And my sister’s journey du jour: she’s been interrogating me (by phone) as to what exactly happened to the land and houses. “Who got what? I didn’t even think most of that land had any mortgage on it.”
“It didn’t.”
“Then who got it?”
“The house and 90 acres had a mortgage on it. Mama took out a mortgage of $9,000 on 36 additional acres that was worth easily 3 times that. That left about 120 acres free of mortgage, but Mama had another debt of about $14,000, a continual refinance of some debts left by Daddy, to a third bank. The house and 90 acres was foreclosed on by the bank that held it’s mortgaged and was sold to a holding company owned by the bank, which is legal so long as it’s the highest bid. The 36 acres, same story, though it was never a public auction. The 120 acres, worth technically over $100,000 but in fact you’d have been doing good to get anything more than half that, was seized by the third bank, who forced a sale and purchased it for the amount owing.”
“So they got $100,000 worth of land for a $14,000 debt.”
“Technically. Though we tried selling it for half that and…”
“They satisfied a $14,000 debt with 120 acres of land? That means… shit, that’s less than $100 per acre.”
“Yes, but…”
“Who did that? Can they do it?”
“They did it.”
“Did they get the judge’s signature?”
“Yes. The judge was on the board of directors of the bank, in fact.”
“That’s…”
“Yep. And one of the lawyers involved in the seizures was later disbarred for conflicts of interest. It had some shady elements.”
“Well… I want to find out everything that happened… I want you to tell me in dee- tayull… I mean don’t leave a thing out, I want names, I want dates, I want… names and dates… and amounts… Mama won’t tell me a damned thing. She won’t talk about it and gets pissy.”
“Well, it was a bad time. She wasn’t doing well at the time.”
“Why didn’t she put the land in your name or my name…”
“I asked. I begged. She wouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Who the hell knows why Mama does or doesn’t do anything?”
“Well I want you to start now and tell me everything… I mean e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g!”
“Kathy it was 20 years ago…”
“TELL ME EVERYTHING! I WANNA GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS! AND IF THERE WAS ANYTHING EVEN SLIGHTLY SHADY I’LL GO UP THERE WITH A BATTERY OF LAWYERS AND…”
“I’m pretty sure statutes of limitation have expired all around. Rape and murder are about the only two things that can still be prosecuted in Alabama after 20 years.”
“We’ll see about that! WHY DIDN’T Y’ALL TELL ME HOW BAD THINGS WERE!”
“We didn’t have a phone. And when we tried you’d change the subject. And you weren’t exactly the most helpful sort… you told Mama you’d loan her money to move if she’d get a job.”
“That’s cause she sat around squalling and wouldn’t get a job…”
“Kathy! I was there! The woman wore out a pair of shoes looking for work! She was in her 50s, broke, didn’t have a phone… it wasn’t easy finding gainful employment. She applied for everything from teaching positions to waitress jobs and security guards, she couldn’t get a job…”
“She could have found a job doing something! Now I want to know…”
“Kathy, drop it! NOBODY WILL PROFIT FROM THESE MEMORIES! It was 20 years ago, for God’s sake woman let it die.”
“NO! You remember! You start remembering now!”
[close-up on a cigarette being raised from an ashtray into the mouth of an unseen person, an extremely exaggerated sound of it being lit and burning, the silver smoke pluming into a black background, the smoker’s lips and cheek in profile only as his voice is heard]
“No, I will not revisit that time…”
Voice on phone: "You have to. Tell me about it… I want to hear about
THE LAST DAYS OF LOCKSLEY HALL
Male voice- angrily: "NO! [then regretfully] No. [then emphatically but resignedly] No.
Voice on phone: Tell me what happened. I’ve gotta know…
FLASHBACK
It is Locksley Hall. March 1987. The house, never grand but once dignified and distinguished, is now a shambles, badly overdue for painting, its once proud if simply coiffed lawns now overgrown in all but a few places, and those only because of a late cold. A few scared looking cats and a half dozen stray dogs may or may not be able to remember a time when there were more of them and boxes of $1 scraps from Rockford flowed like scuppernong wine. Panning inside we see a cold house, its rooms sealed off this past winter when the only heat came from portable kerosene heaters and cheap dimestore units because there was no money for the gas central heating, and the furniture shows the cold. A thin layer of dust is on some of the eclectic once-presentable furniture in the ghost of a living room. The camera moves into a den, dark by design but now ominously so, where a near-centenarian with a walker growns on the sofa and the zombie of a former wrestler smokes her thirtieth cigarette and downs her second Evan Williams and Coke of the day. It is noon. A portly blonde gay guy (though he isn’t yet decided on the gay part, and right now it doesn’t matter) is on the wrecked vinyl recliner brought in to replace the urine ruined former chair that occupied the spot; he is exhausted from an evening spent trying to convince his mother not to commit suicide. Was it last night that he faked a divine seizure and spoke in a strange voice telling his mother things from her past that there’s no way he could know, only he does because both parents had alcohol problems and talked often of their pasts but then forgot what they’d told when they were sober? Or was that the night before last? It was the night after the episode of Golden Girls when Dorothy’s favorite student was deported and this is Monday so must have been
The depressed silence is broken by the sound of shouting as if from an army. It is coming from behind the house. The blonde portly eventual homo goes to the back door to look out, the mother, slightly toasted but nevertheless curious, no longer fearful of the inevitable sheriff’s raid but just ready to get it over with, hopeful not that she will live but just that she will take a few down with her, follows him, but neither is prepared for what they see.
The back yard is covered with Asians, seemingly thousands of them, but actually just a couple of dozen or so very well and strategically placed. They are trying to climb the gates in the back yard, expressing their horror and their desperation and their pleas in unison and, stranger, in song:
"Take me with you/take my children
I have a letter/ LOOK! I helped the CIA!
Don’t leave us behind here! They’ll kill who they find here!
I have a wife who left already
I have an aunt in New York
I have gold I can pay…
The guards are shooting at them even as the sound of the helicopter leaving from the roof becomes almost deafening. Strangely the helicopter doesn’t seem to actually fly but to be lifted. The blonde eventual gay guy and his mother don’t know what to do, but that they have to do something is made apparent by the cannonball that shatters through the front door of the house and the appearance of Mexican soldiers, mostly peasants who have probably never held a weapon before pouring into the den firing the one shot from their rifle at anything they see as behind them Deguello plays on a loop by a trumpeter. Carrie manages to take out four of them with her double edged knife before going down herself.
Terrified of the Mexicans and the Asians the alcoholic former leg scissoring madonna and her young Orson Wellesian future twink-loving son stand back to back firing at anything that moves. The one deus ex machina that spares them is that just as the Mexicans move in from the front and the Vietcong tanks and jeeps crash through the back fence the appearance, as if out of nowhere, of the front guards of a full legion of Roman soldiers appears and creates a diversion that, though bloody, allows them to grab a rope that seemed to fall from nowhere. Each holds the rope with one hand, spitting on the other and beginning to climb, hands bleeding as they get into the chopper as it departs, filled with a Druid, two Amerasian orphans and a teenaged pregnant half-Mexican bride who knows she has just been widowed, and yet divided as they are by time and space the Druid and the Amerasians and the Texican bride-widow are all singing in English the song 'Anatevka, where else could Sabbath be so sweet? and, not knowing what else to do, mother and son hold each other in the open side door of the chopper and look down as Locksley Hall become smaller and more detached, finally unrecognizable as the chopper leaves the stratosphere and soon the moon, blood red in a full eclipse, is the same size as the Earth, with no idea where they’re going but what the fuck are you talking about
comes the voice from the other end of the phone.
Kathy: I was asking about sheriff’s sales and what not and you’re answering with something about reeducation camps and some Jewish guy with a fiddle.
Me: I’m sorry, was I singing that or just thinking it?
Kathy: Somewhere in between.
Me: Well at least you didn’t see the “If You Wanna Die in Bed”/bottle dance medley, the moves really didn’t work well.
Kathy: Try to get one goddamned straight answer in this family… I guess I’ll have to go to the court house.
Me: 'fraid so. My mind’s a blank.
Kathy: It’s that dope the doctor gave you. You’ll probably be on crack by next Wednesday.
Me: And in a crack house before Locksley Hall again.
Kathy: Fine, whatever. I’ll try to milk some sense when your memory tits seem fuller and more open.
Me: You do that. What’s your dog barking at in the background?
Kathy: The TV set.
Me: What’s on TV?
Kathy: Nothing. It’s turned off. She just doesn’t like it. Well can you at least tell me the name of that judge?
Me: T____ S_____.
Kathy: He still alive.
Me: Last I heard.
Kathy: Fine. That’s all I need to know for tonight I reckon. Goodnight.
Me: Love you.
Kathy: You too. But you and Mama are the two damnedest weird ass people I’ve ever known.
Me: You’re still young.
Kathy: Bye-bye.
The point is that while visually more impressive and in ways more relevant than Les Miserables, it’s full sibling Miss Saigon was ultimately empty. Still, Kim’s nightmare sequence and My American Dream kick major ass if done right.
And just think of the possibilities of an Alabamian version of Bui-Doi.
Sorry. Miss Saigon references on top of the earlier crush… it’s like throwing gasoline on fire, I’m telling you.
The Sordid Lives throwaway line is prefection. Are you really Del Shores?
Somebody got that! So cool! When I said it to my sister I also imitated Brother Boy saying it, but she’s never seen the movie so had no point of reference. (Honesty check: I really didn’t go into quite as much detail on the Mexicans and Druids and what not, but I did digress a bit in the description of why the last days there are a bit of a sore point.)
I’m not Del Shores though I do love his plays (lowbrow as some would insist that they are and, for obvious reasons, I relate to them). It was such a disappointment to see him come across as such a bitter little queen on an interview program (and he married a woman and had kids before coming out in his late 30s- you’ve no right to be bitter, boy!). Trivia: the bartender, Wardell, and the evil “ooooooooold” psychiatrist in the movie are Shore’s former parents-in-law (who seem to have taken his divorce from their daughter amazingly well as the movie was made afterwards) and he states that he is probably the only director in history to ever show his children’s grandmother topless in a movie.
I’m hoping to see Leslie Jordan’s one man show in Atlanta sometime in the next three weeks. All reviews are it’s a riot until it gets a bit serious.
Nothing personal, but I find that equally flattering and disturbing. 
One of the strangest days on the Dope I can recall was flipping between threads in which Bricker was alternately defending William Bennett (or some equally right wing figure) and quoting Mimi from Rent, confounding forever any attempts at pigeonholing.
The wedding song might be interesting as well.
ALABAMA CHORUS:
Jewboy way
Jew toys mine
Jewboy way
Fanny moist
Bama Chris: It’s pretty but what does it mean?
Bama Kim: It’s what all the girls sing at weddings. They didn’t know what else to sing.
Bama Chris: Hmm. We just sing ‘The Rose’ or ‘My Heart Will Go On’.
[Bama Kim gives him a pissed off Southern woman look.]
Bama Chris [recognizing danger]: It’s the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard…
Did you know that shooting is supposed to start on a movie versio of Southern Baptist Sissies this fall?
Cool. I haven’t seen the play but it’s got most of the same cast, I see.
I actually thought that Ty brought down SORDID LIVES- he was such a buzzkill til the final scene. The whole thing about the Wizard of Oz… OH GOD JUST GET NEKKID AGAIN OR SOMETHING! The last thing the world needs is another gay guy whining about his childhood. (Well, alright, this would seem a bit more sincere if it weren’t from a gay guy whining about his childhood in the south, but at least mine doesn’t mention Wizard of Oz.)
And one more interesting item: My mother had to go to the hospital tonight for breathing problems. She thought she was having a heart attack. She’s back home now and a family friend is with her as a just-in-case, but essentially it was a combination of panic attack and asthma (she’s had asthma and emphysema for years, takes several breathing treatments per day and still smokes unfiltered Pall Malls like a fiend). I started to make a midnight run to see her but she seems fine now and I have a fairly important work commitment tomorrow (my family history has an incredible amount of people being committed in Tuscaloosa (one census had six [6] of my grandmother’s close relatives listed for that particular hospital) so I’m going early tomorrow afternoon instead.
However, her take on what happened: “It was a heart attack. They can’t tell the difference between a heart attack and a panic attack, I don’t care what they say. But you know what brought it on… it was Kathy and her damned Weokahatchee talk.” I told her to call if she needed me and I’d get in the car immediately and she reassured me that “Don’t worry. Even if I died I’ve told Annie not to call you til morning; you’re not a doctor or an undertaker.”
Not that it matters as she can’t possibly die on a night that I’ve talked to her. It’s a well established fact that “I’ll be dead for two weeks before anybody notices and the neighbors notice the papers pilin’ up” because nobody ever calls or comes by. (Point of fact I doubt there’s been a two day period in six months that neither me nor my sister has called her, but no reason to let that stand in the way of good melodrama.)
Meanwhile Kathy is coming up for Easter. While my mother is blaming her on a “heart attack”. And Kathy takes the religious ramifications of Easter very very seriously and wants us to observe them. Oh madonna but this is going to be a fun weekend.
In other and completely unrelated news, I’ve tried to decide on pseudonyms for the book about my family. I’m changing the names of living relatives for obvious reasons. As I change the names I’m trying to keep some type of logical and semantic consistency (Biblical names remaining Biblical, odd and mundane names remaining so, same basic sound, etc.). My mother, who in real life is Blanche, is probably going to be Norma for three reasons- 1) she was named for a silent film actress [Blanche Sweet, but if I mention it in this it can be Norma Talmadge] 2) she always disliked the fact that her name wasn’t particularly pretty and couldn’t be shortened into a nickname and 3) Blanche is best known now as the name of a famous neurotic frail nympho from a classic dark b/w 1950s film turned unbeloved 1990s musical adaptation and a similar argument could be made forNorma.
Anyway, the one that’s given me the most fits is the family surname, which I hate to publish under a pseudonym but I will (besides which my real name is the same as that of a schlock slasher producer director). If anybody has any preferences on the following names (whether preference for or against) I’d love to read them. (I’m keeping my real first name probably.)
Toombs (a bit macabre, but it is a family surname [the name in fact of my paternal grandmother’s most famous evil relative and her father’s first and middle name)
Cotton- also a family name and on both sides of the family (though the two Cotton lines weren’t related for at least 200 years back) and a fairly common name, but I can’t decide if the cotton:southern connotations help or detract
Diarmid- the original surname of one of my father’s lines
Garland- my father’s middle name (his first name was Stephen, which like Garland means crown); his name was pronounced “Gahlun June-ya” by most.
Tresvant- also a family name and definitely unique