Julie looked up and down the street again. “You know, I didn’t appreciate this street when I lived here. I’ll bet it hasn’t changed in seventy years. There isn’t a parking lot in town. The storefronts are out of the nineteenth century—all dark brick and wood-framed glass. It’s like a Hollywood set.”
“It was one for a couple of months,” Jed reminded her.
Julie remembered. She’d been away at college when a Hollywood director used the town to film a period movie. Letters from Josh had kept her informed. The backdrop for the climactic scene of the movie was to have been the hand-carved 1882 vintage bar in Johnny’s Tavern.
The director’s mercurial temperament was ill suited to working with the locals who didn’t do lunch and whose weekends lasted four hours, from the end of Sunday services to the start of evening chores. Their outlook on life was unfathomable to the director, and California-speak indecipherable to them. Alcohol and pharmaceuticals helped the director cope with the novelty, until the studio pulled the plug and he went into rehab. His prolonged treatment became the town’s dubious claim to fame. Even girls on the same floor at Liz Waters, her dormitory at the UW-Madison, had asked Julie about it the following year.
Click Follow to receive emails when this author adds content on Bublish
Comment on this Bubble
Your comment and a link to this bubble will also appear in your Facebook feed.