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Show The Park Record : A-18 SafrSun/Mon/Tues, August 30-September 2, 2008 MORE DOGS ON M A I N STREET I •i-'b 1. By Tom Clyde jj Two fof One Dinner Entrees • The Democratic Convention ^^%heCbrdering two Goldentr Hirsch Restaurant Reservations Required , ' Good through September 21st, 2008 Plcaie present ihls ad for the Two for One . Thii coupon cannot be ued in conjunction with any othfcr discount, offer or gift certificate A 20% granife^will be added to the bill based on the original balance. 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Not on purpose, but the phone rang and the call was a lot more interesting than anything Bill had to say. The best we could hope from him is that he kept his pants on until the convention is over. Apparently he can still fire up a crowd. He's the only Democrat to be re-elected since Roosevelt, so I guess he deserves the attention he's getting. The party faithful describe him as a great president. I'd enumerate his many accomplishments here - if I could think of any. But in the end, there was something that looked like unity. The mnrp OT nf We the more Clintons didn't lead a breakaway faction or That's about an extra Democratic Convention than I expected r storm out of the con$1,000 a year. My neighthreatening to bor has a woodd pile that is il h i tO. ItS HOt like there IS any SUSpenSe vention run as a third party about the same size as his house. I haven't started there. It's a little bit like NASCAR - ter- comprised of Wal-Mart cutting mine yet, but I'm ribly boring unless there is a spectacular shoppers. Now-the less we see or hear from scouting around for the them the better, if you perfect pile of deadfall to crash." ask me. Obama's big cut Up. wmm^m^tmmm^^m^^H^ mmmmmmmmm^^^^^m^^m scene in the football We always close out stadium will happen after my deadline, and I've got the season with a big party out at the ranch. It ends an obligation that will make it impossible to watch it with the traditional burning of the hat. Years ago, at a Labor Day bonfire, my dad took a look at his straw live. 1*11 be anxious to see the replay. It could be hiscowboy hat with the summer's accumulation of toric. McCain is scheduled to name his running mate, sweat stains, dirt, and paint splatters. It had characor running Mitt, on Friday. The short list is Mitt ter, to say the least, but was clearly past its prime. He tossed it into the fire and pronounced another sea- Romney, Joe Lieberman, or the governor of son gone. Ever since, Labor Day comes to a close Minnesota who nobody has ever heard of. He has a with the burning of the summer's grimiest work hat. funny last name that I can't even get close enough I've ended up watching more of the Democratic to Google. If he chooses Lieberman, the ticket is Convention than I expected to. It's not like there is likely to be dubbed "Grumpy Old Men." Most peoany suspense there. It's a little bit like NASCAR - ple seem to think it will be Romney. Just in case, terribly boring unless there is a spectacular crash. Mitt is taking inventory so he will be able to answer Jon Stewart suggested that Bill Clinton could come the important question of how many houses he has. So on to St. Paul and the Republican convention. out and unleash a 40-minute string of profanity. But he behaved. Michelle Obama's speech impressed I'm going to miss that one. I'll be bicycling through me. It more than impressed me. I'll admit to being Yellowstone instead of hearing from the Republicans. smitten. She's smart and she's hot. She had been But you can be sure that whatever problems the painted as some kind of bomb-throwing radical in nation faces, there is a Republican tax cut to solve it. the press. She was more like an updated June Cleaver than Eldridge Cleaver. The introduction by Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s her brother was warm and sincere. They are almost and is the author of "More Dogs On Main Street." He painfully normal, though high achievers at the same has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years. time. There's a little nip in the air these days. For the first time since it quit snowing (that was in mid-June), I've had to close the windows at night. It's cold enough in the house in the mornings that it's temping to turn the furnace on for a minute or two just to knock the chill off. But turning the furnace on before Labor Day is a sign of moral weakness and a softness of character unbefitting life in the mountains. So instead, I sit at the computer with a sweatshirt on, teetrj chattering, waiting for it to warm up. It's not like the house is really cold, but it can be under 60 in the mornings, even if I closed the windows at night. While I'm resisting turning the furnace on, the heating season isn't far off. I bought a new furnace filter the other day. I sort of operate on the basis that a fresh furnace filter is about the same thing as a thorough vacuuming of the house. For those of us in the hinterlands, where we heat with propane instead of pipeline gas, it's going to be an expensive winter. You all know what gasoline prices have done when you fill up the car. Propane has followed it right up, from , around $1.80 a gallon last fcfc ,#ve OnHaH itn $3g hi ' ^Qea Up year to about $3 this year. 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Delivery to Park City & Product Demonstration is Included! HONDA Power strata M M i s (to &I0 00 0ffaan»12)U3» Equipment A kaleidoscope of images fills my head this night University of Nevada at Reno. The teacher was a wildafter watching Barack Obama accept the nomination of haired kind of guy who played well off my journalism his party for the President of the United States. And, professor, who was the former editor of Reader's mostly, the images translate to a single thought: What Digest. The journalism professor was dapper and the an extraordinary place in the continuum of time I was poetry professor was dark - a beatnik, I guess, looking back. He felt his job was expose us to poets we might blessed to be born into. It is probably why I adore the AMC original series, not find on our own. "Mad Men," too. I recognize those hard-drinking, Langston Hughes, the black poet who was part of heavy-smoking, unseatbelted, pointy-bra people of the the Harlem Renaissance period of the Twenties, had early Sixities as the crossover from my parents' genera- passed away a few years before. My professor (who tion to my own. Each week we watch them make what later that year was removed from teaching because he we now know are exquisitely poor choices. But they are led us in a protest around the track after the murders in transition from a world where the rules were defined by National Guardsmen at Kent State) thought and rigid to a workplace and a world where everything Langston Hughes was the perfect poet to assign to me, is shifting ... from women's roles in the workplace and the girl now engaged to the big white football player. the home to politics as usual... and to the importance So I memorized Langston Hughes and had to give of television as the medium. the class a reading and my teacher laughed and I was born into a family of feral Republicans. I spent laughed. Not exactly unkindly, but he told me to go my youth licking envelopes and volunteering in cam- home and do some research on my own and really try paign offices. But this night, when I saw Obama's two to understand what Hughes meant in that short poem: young girls at the end of his speech, and perhaps 90,000 "...what happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up people in the football stadium watch the fireworks go like a raisin in the sun? Maybe it sags like a heavy load. off and the confetti fall, I knew they would remember Or does it explode?" that moment in various ways for the rest of their lives. I was married the summer after my freshman year Kinda like I remember my mother taking me inside the in college, partly because it was something I was supCow Palace in San Francisco for the Republican posed to want and, certainly, the adults around me Convention of 1956. I wanted it for me. My think I was there to hear grade from the poetry Ike or Dick speak. But had been held in That dream deferred arrived this class what I remember as a fiveabeyance for six months year-old is the ceiling cov- night in a speech one commentator until we were able to conered in red, white and blue vince the administration balloons (held in netting called a 'symphony.' Which is a truth. we had all marched on our though I didn't know that own free will. I was surpart) and then being But what I heard was a poem. prised to learn, after my released like magic. A long-time-coming finally-answered marriage and long after Because all politics is part the course, that I had rhetoric and part real. Part poem." earned an A. And that's illusion and part collusion. m^^^^a^^^^^^m^^^ * n e W 3 V a e w r o t e the n o t e Part dream and part to me: "You earned your dream deferred. A." He cited the fact I had taken on a pregnant, young, It was that phrase, that I heard more than once unmarried black woman to tutor to understand what during this convention, that took me back. Took me happens to a dream deferred. Because "there's certain back to my newly integrated high school where I was amount of traveling in a dream deferred." assigned as the welcoming "hostess" to the junior My marriage didn't work, though I have two wonblack football player. The local paper came to our lily derful children as result of that union. 1 wanted to white school on tie hill that first integrated/bused-in write. My husband told me it would take time away day and, much to mother's horror, interviewed me, from him. He ripped books out of my hands when I happily showing the young man around campus and tried to read at night and threw them across the room burbling some inane happy talk about the change in in rage. My continued interest in growing liberal causcomplexion to our school. es was also a source of constant outrage for him. For a I had a car. A Ford Fairlane, as I recall. And so, at long, long, long time, my dreams felt like "raisins in the the day's end, I offered the young man, who was to be sun." on the football team with my boyfriend, a ride home to I never thought I'd see a black man be the candidate his old school called - honestly - Ravenswood. He of a major party for President of the United States of looked at me a bit askance but was also a bit unsure of America. And truth be told, I bet Obama's mama, the new rules. So I drove him home. (I suspect my even though she wanted him to believe it, never saw it mother is reading this and learning it now for the first coming either. But that dream deferred arrived this time. I was not allowed to drive the car that far, nor to night in a speech one commentator called a "symphothat part of that town.) ny." Which is a truth. But what I heard was a poem. A When I reached his school, about 20 minutes later, long-time-coming finally-answered poem. And I was after babbling no doubt more inanely, he turned and proud. Proud as I ever have been to be an American. looked at me as he got out of the car and saw his old Lucky enough to live in this time in history. Lucky homies looking at him. "Girl" he said, "you lock your enough to walk outside in the black sky and see the car doors and drive straight out of here and you're stars twinkling, laughing softly, I think on this historic never gonna give me a ride home again." night around the world and celebrated here, in the In my bippity-boppity-boo-best fashion I shared my Park... adventure with my boyfriend who, for reasons I could not understand, said that was a really stupid thing to Ten Orris the director of the Park City Performing Arts Foundation that provides programming for the do, not only for myself, but for my new friend. A year later, in college, I was allowed to take a grad- George S. and Delores Dore Eccies Center for the Arts and the Big Stars Bright Nights uate-level poetry course because, prerequisites be Performing Summer Concert Series at Deer Valley. She is also a damned, the rules were very loose then at the former editor of"The Park Record. |