Oscar Night in Montpelier

I'm sitting at our kitchen table listening to VPR, sipping coffee while our hefty, yet loving Maine Coon, Delilah, spreads wide on my lap. My legs are slowly going to sleep. She's cutting off circulation to some vital part of my body, but I haven't the heart to scoot her on. She's purring up a storm and when I look down at her she looks back at me with a slightly drugged haze in her eyes. She's in ecstacy. Or she's taken Ecstacy. If I bring my chin close to her face she gives me a warm, emory board lick, so that makes it all fine. She can stay.

The other animals are all watered and fed and cleaned up after. It's sleet/snowing outside, snare drumming the back windows whenever the wind picks up. There's a fine beech wood fire to my right cozying up the indoors.

I went to the Oscars last night at the Savoy Theatre in Montpelier. No kleig lights, no paparazzi, but there was a red carpet downstairs where a bobbed blue haired fellow in a light blue tux commented on what everyone was wearing. I had been told to show up an hour before the doors opened at 7 by Donald Rae, the head of the upcoming Green Mountain Film Festival (The Festival is one of my 100 reasons for loving living in Vermont!), because inside sources had told them there would be a line and seating was limited (50 seats - 1 couch, 8 tall bar stools, 12 theatre seats, and the rest black bean bag chairs). Well, let's just say "a line" is a relative term. The ceremony was downstairs in what had been until recently the video store (with an impressively large library) and now has been transformed to a smaller theatre with a bar, very den-like and comfortable. It was a good time.

But I've got to backtrack for one of these uncanny and wonderful Vermont connections that continue to keep cropping up. When I got to the theatre at 6, there was no line at all. Just me, Donald, and Sonia, Donald's wife, so we retired to the Green Mountain Film Festival offices, ideally located just above the theatre, and over a glass of wine discussed the upcoming festival while keeping an ear out to any line forming sounds from below. (None were forthcoming.) Somewhere in the discussion of films being screened we spoke of various themes cropping up this year, one of which is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Now growing up I had been a history nerd, my particular area of expertise, passion and undying love was anything having to do with the American Civil War. We visited battlefields, I collected paraphernalia, antiques, newspapers. I remember going down to our library and checking out the 20 reel silent film "Birth of a Nation" and screening it on our home movie projector and screen. Donald said he'd had a rich collection of Civil War material to choose from, early and impressive silent films he offered to loan me in the near future. And that's when it came to me. There had been a wonderful Civil War movie called "The Raid" starring Van Heflin, made in the '50's sometime, about the confederate raid on St. Albans, VT. I'd happened upon it on some late movie program years and years ago, probably in the '60's growing up in Indiana, and I hadn't seen it since. I had just begun telling Donald about the movie when he interrupted me with:

"We're showing "The Raid" on Sunday, March 20th."

I couldn't believe it! It made me so happy! Like hearing a long lost friend was coming to visit! But I had to ground myself with a little reality.

'Oh, it must be such a B movie. I've probably romanticized it terribly.'

"It's quite good, actually," Donald countered. "Strong performances, good taut story. Holds up extremely well."

Well, blow me down.

I can't wait. I'm pretty sure Lee Marvin's in it too. Or Richard Boone. Wait, both of them are.

I just accessed Green Mountain's site for more info -- There's a great schedule of films this year!! - - and I see that "The Raid" was made in the year of my birth, 1954, and also stars a young Anne Bancroft. I'm so jazzed. The Civil War and Vermont. All together.

Now that I think about it the entire evening was about reunion last night. Coming back together with the movie "The Raid" (About the Civil War which was reunifying the nation. That's a reunion too, don't you think? Okay, I'll drop it.) Watching the Oscars, broadcast from my old home, and where Richard is visiting. Feeling distant and close to the event, to movies, to all of the places and times of my life. Now and then all blended, a constant reunion, reunifying. I like it. Life feels like a lot of movies strung together. It's nice to pop up on a screen every once and awhile and see if they're really the way we remember them, if we have romanticized them, or if it's better than we're giving it credit. Memory serves. A good night.