Oh, I can imagine Park City UT all a-twitter these days, what with a movie star and a rich doctor in court over a Deer Valley ski incident. It’s “mud season” there now, what normal people call Spring. Post-ski, pre-summer activities. Luckily when I lived there, mud season was when the Greater Sandhill Cranes came to the Preserve to mate, guard their eggs and raise their colts before flying back to New Mexico in the Fall. Now THAT was fun to watch!
Sundance Film Festival came every year. We called the famous visitors PIB’s, People In Black. Most often, at the grocery store, we’d run into SPIB’s, the Slaves of People In Black. They were easy to spot, with a shopping cart blocking the aisle so no locals could do their regular grocery shopping, going through every jar of jam until they hopefully came upon the esoteric fruit their boss craved. Their hauteur knew no bounds. How dare we mere mortals even get near them while they were accommodating their masters’ wishes.
One year I thought it’d be nice to volunteer for Sundance so I put in my application, having worked my way through college at Chautauqua Institution (where Salman Rushdie was nearly fatally attacked last year), a lecture and performing arts venue. A month later, I got a job. I would be standing out in the freezing, snowy weather keeping film-goers in lines until 2 a.m. Nope. Not I. I explained that I was older and have arthritis so can’t be standing out in the cold all night throughout the Festival.
So they gave me a better job. Indoors. Yea! Verifiying credentials. I was to be the person to tell fake press that their credentials were invalid and to go to the end of the line for tickets like everyone else. A volunteer job to deny entry to the big ticket event! Wow. Alas, I couldn’t take it as my husband’s company laid off a third of its tech force and we moved away.
Sundance is a big deal there, but it’s brief, as is this crazy ski injury of the century trial, but life goes on. It’s usually pretty normal, and I even learned to love mud season! Cheers! Dee
Cooking with Dee 