Animal House and Black Cowboy

mendes2Christine 1978 3

Miss Venezuela, Alicia Machado smiles after winning the 1996 ''Miss Universe'' crown May 17. Nineteen-year-old Machado, a model and first-year law and second-year business administration student will reign as the 4th Miss Universe from Venezuela - RTXGSFT

Miss Venezuela, Alicia Machado smiles after winning the 1996 ”Miss Universe” crown May 17. Nineteen-year-old Machado, a model and first-year law and second-year business administration student will reign as the 4th Miss Universe from Venezuela – RTXGSFT

captureb29

miss2

https://rosamondpress.com/2014/12/02/beauty-and-the-lawsuit/

I was saving this for my book, but, my tale has burst out upon the world political scene. Many foreign leaders shudder at the vision of Donald Trump being President. These sane men and women may have former Miss Universe to thank if Trump’s rise to power comes crashing back to earth!

https://rosamondpress.com/2016/09/28/piggy-and-the-beast/

From the beginning, it was my desire to make Belle Burch famous. This beauty asks about me getting sober. Alas, here is my unedited reply that I am still composing. Mishelle McMindes claimed Ken Kesey took her story and made it his own. Mishelle is from Grand Island Nebraska and posed for Playboy. Rena was from Grand Island. Add them up, the Beautiful Muses who have been captured…….one way or another:

Mishelle McMindes; Alicia Machado; Natriana Shorter, Rena Easton, Belle Burch; Christine Rosamond.

I add Daria Halprin to this list. She starred in movie about radical hippies in revolt, called ‘Zabriskie Point’. I am an original hippie, who along with my hippie friends, did not go see this movie because it is a case of Art Imitating Life.  Ken Kesey appears to be sexless. He married Faye when he was young, and, it looks like he was loyal to her. However, he did screw that Beauty from Nebraska. Daria was married to Denis Hopper, the star of Easy Rider. I’m just looking for some cool and beautiful chics to be in my movie, books, and paintings, so I can be a Pop Culture Icon – too!

John Warner just endorsed Hillary. John is in my family tree because he was married to Movie Icon, Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor.

http://popcultureaddict.com/movies-2/zabriskiepoint-htm/

The other star of Zabriskie Point was a Mel Lyman devotee, Mark Frechette, who held up a bank with another Lyman Family member after he made his movie. He had real-life interests. Mel Lyman is my kindred who created a network of MUSicians, Actors, and Artists. He is in my family tree. He married Jessie Benton, a cousin of my ex-brother-in-law, Garth Benton who acted in movies, as did his first wife, Alli McBride.

Jon Presco

Copyright 2016

MiSchelle McMindes and Mike Hagen piled into Hagen’s Ford Mustang and drove 325 miles west from Eastern Oregon to see Ken Kesey.

Both had high hopes as they set out from Pendleton to Kesey’s farm, about 15 minutes southeast of Eugene.

McMindes was a 26-year-old go-getter from Grand Island, Neb., a brunet beauty-pageant scholarship winner recently turned private eye. She had an idea for a movie about the quintessential Oregon sporting event—the Pendleton Round-Up, a famed annual rodeo that began in 1910. McMindes had spent months researching the Round-Up’s history and collecting photographs before teaming up with Hagen, a 46-year-old television and commercial sound engineer in Pendleton.

All they needed was a screenwriter, and Hagen knew just the guy—Kesey. Hagen had been Kesey’s fraternity brother at the University of Oregon. And in the 1960s, he was one of Kesey’s Merry Pranksters as well as a co-pilot on the LSD-fueled cross-country odyssey that Tom Wolfe chronicled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Kesey was a natural to tell the Round-Up story. He was an Oregon literary legend and countercultural icon who knew how to spin a yarn. And he had time on his hands.

They came to him with the tall-but-true tale of how a Nez Percé Indian named Jackson Sundown, a popular black cowboy named George Fletcher (known in 1911 by a derogatory nickname), and a white Tennessee bronco-buster named Jonathan E. Lee Spain competed together during the 1911 Round-Up. A tale long familiar to Pendleton natives, it blended racial enlightenment far ahead of its time, Oregon lore and rodeo hijinks. They called the project Last Go Round.

By January 1984, McMindes and Hagen had what they thought was a deal with Kesey. And nine months later, they had a Kesey script.

Then things got messier than a loose bronco.

mendes4

https://mcgensymovies.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/maybe-next-mumf-the-george-fletcher-story/

“I’d like to hear more of your personal life story. “When I got sober”, “When I was homeless”, “When I was fighting cancer”……. these are words you drop and then let flit by without much detail or explanation or storytelling. I want those details and stories. Please.

Tell me what you thought of my poem. Did it make you feel anything? Did it make you think? If so, what?

To Belle Burch

Apr 20”

“Hillary Clinton picked up another endorsement today from a high-profile Republican legislator, former Virginia Senator John Warner.

Warner was married to actress Elizabeth Taylor when he won his first term in the U.S. Senate. He retired in 2008, making way for his successor Mark Warner, a Democrat, to succeed him.

He was The Secretary of the Navy at the time disgraced Republican president Richard Nixon resigned.

Warner made elected office his second act, eventually chairing the Senate’s Armed Services Committee. His served in the Senate with Clinton for eight years.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3811672/Hillary-gets-Republican-endorsement-time-Senator-married-Liz-Taylor.html#ixzz4LaUQ1l5K
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebookk

On Friday, July 22, 2016 4:09 PM, John Ambrose <braskewitz@yahoo.com> wrote:

Here it is Neil, the Grand Marshall’s car in the new Springfield parade. Leave it like it is and put it on a float. This will be the most photographed car in the world – especially in Japan. Eugene tore down our Eifle Tower, the 8th wonder of the world. A billion tourist dollars did not get distributed in the Emerald Valley.

https://rosamondpress.com/2014/12/02/beauty-and-the-lawsuit/

http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.afam.002

I never told Hollis about my bout with homelessness, because I was careful not to upstage him, put him on the other side of a fence. For helping him, he wanted to help me. He wanted me to get religion. I tried to tell him I already got religion, but, then I beheld the look on his face.

One evening he took me to Ken Kesey’s cousin’s house where he lived for a year. This cousin is a Christian and has a open house for the homeless and the hungry. We got there too late for the meal. Getting out of bed, I got and google and looked for that Cristian’s name. In minutes, I am beholding photos of a beautiful naked woman from Grand Island Nebraska who approached Ken Kesey about him authoring a screenplay about a famous cowboy. Chills came over me. Rena lived in Grand Island Nebraska. I was homeless when we met. This beautiful young woman lived with me a tent for fifty days. Her three sister’s were models. No homeless person has ever been so – blessed!

When I was homeless in 1996, I lived a month in a tent up in Blue River. At a AA meeting I shared the awful nightmare of how the vultures and parasite swooped down and started feeding on the body of my dead sister, the world famous artist, Rosamond. A woman in the group started crying. The chair asked why. She said she wanted to talk to me in private after the meeting.

My sponsor took me to her house where she proceed to tell me that people around me do these things because they want a taste of IMMORTALITY. She told me she had bought the rights to a Kesey novel, and had hired a writer to author a screenplay. Everything went wrong, because everyone wants this view of living forever to be seen through their eyes – only!

Belle Burch and other members of Sleeps have accused me of stalking my ex-muse. They accused me of Cyberstalking.  But, it is God who is authoring this Beautiful Story. Here is the proof.  I would meet the author of the Kesey script in a graveyard near the University of Oregon. He owned a three-legged dog.

January 8, 1984

 To Whom it May Concern:

I have agreed to write a screenplay about bygone rodeo greats Jackson Sundown and Nigger George Fletcher, concerning their historic confrontation at the Pendleton Round Up in 1916 [sic]. The name of the production company that I am writing for is SUNDOWN FLETCHER INC. and the people I am dealing with are Mike Hagen and MiSchelle McMindes.

 [signed]

Ken Kesey

The combination of Kesey’s relentless ability to self-promote and local newspapermen’s interest in a new Oregon-centric Hollywood film got Last Go Round a good bit of buzz in 1984. On Sept. 14, The Oregonian quoted Kesey as claiming that the 1985 Pendleton Round-Up might form the setting of a $10 million feature film with “cowboys, Indians and a story so good it stops the hand midway between the mouth and the popcorn box.”

Back in December, after Natriana Shorter, who is African-American, won the crown for Miss Oregon, Albert commented on a KEZI news story that, “I know this is going to sound racist and it’s not my intention. But I can’t help but think it’s awfully strange that a woman of color would represent [the] state of Oregon. The state that has one of the smallest amount of minorities of any race compared to other states. And yes, she is very beautiful.”

I met Katherine Wilson at an AA meeting held in the McKenzie Bridge Christian Church. My sponsor had come and got me at the loggers campground I was staying at. I had been homeless two months. After Micahael Dundon’s wife took him back in, the owner of this land wanted me to………move on. I had oversdtsye my welcome.

My kin was a foreman for for several of the established family owned logging companies up the McKenzie. After many close calls he wanted out of the forest. We were fixing up a old lunch wagon, when Michael went to to town to get his wife out of a bar where she was feeding her inheritence into a electronic poker machine. She threw us both out. No one telkls her what to do with her families cosmetic money. Her folks were dying all over the place and leaving each other their money they got selling lipstick. We thyught there was better things she could do in Oregon themn sit in a dark bar sucking on ciggerettes, and pushing a button over and over. Guess not!

It rained almost everyday that April. My concern was keeping my Brother world processor dry, and the two novels I had begun. There was the beggining of a biography getting soggy under the brown plastic I threw over my tent. Micahale gave me a look that said;

“There’s another big waste of time! My best ffiend sits arond pecking on a keyboard while I scrape off years of grease on my new enterprise. All I want is to fry sine eggs and turn over a  golden patch of hash brown ptotatos. This is what makes the world go round, not gambing and writing bad novels.”

Are you sure?

So, there I am at the AA meeting smelling like shit because I have not had a shower in weeks. My sponser would come by and visit me as I sat in front of Gino’s Crazy-making store in Blue River. He, his wife, and kids, were traring up the town. The model McKenzie river boat I made was sitting behind the borken window. If it was for sale it was It was another sob story. Gino’s wife was convince her husband was cheating on her, She got out a ballpen hammer, and smashed away.

My sponser is aking me if I have any good ideas on how to save Blue River. He wanted to take me to a Lion’s Club meeting. It never occured to him to invite me to his home for a cup of coffee, and let me use his shower. A wee earlier he took me to the McKenzie Bridge Store where in back was a little art gallery that needed saving.

“Do you think you can save this little home spun Art Thing. I think Art may be the asnwer to akll our problems. Arent your kindred famous artists?”

The year is 1995. My famous sister has been dead a year. The fight over her cretive legacy, is hideous beyond compare. There is talk about a book and a  movie. With both of te family artists out of the way, this should be a cakewalk. The Sane Ones know how to get it done. Artists and Gamblers are difficult, hard to get long with. I got crysty-butt. I sit at the far end of the table so my fellow alchys dont get a whiff.

“Do you think we need more fern plants in the window, Jon? ”

“Well, actually I know a man who logs eugcyltpus in the Oakland Hills employung his miniature railroad he built. Hes’ thinking about relocating, We can run it thre Blue River up towards the old gold mine. You dont have to go all the ways there. You just need a Destination, and an ice cream parlor alongside the tracks. Folks will drive a hundred miles out of theor way to get their kids a ‘Little Red Cabose Cone’ made from an old loggers wives recpe broght to America from Finland.

“Sounds like sa really Big Idea to me! How about some planters and lattice work out front? Will this bring in the Art Buyers, lure them in off the highway, Jon?”

My sponser had led a revolt against my our old minister, Gary, who flipped out. He was at my graduation from Serenity Lane in 1987, alog with my childhood fried, Nancy Hamren.who gave the Kesey family her grandmothers recipe for yogurt. She wondered who Gary was, and why he speaking about God and Jesus at my big event. He was talking some real shit. One Sunday mornings Gary share this with the River Crowd;

“I hope the Russians drop an atomic bomb on San Francisco and kill all the homosexuals!”

Gary worked the old Blue Overall Boys at the White Water cafe. These grey haired relics owned the woods. There ancestors fled North as Confederate Traitors. they were officers. They got themselves some big saws. These are the Peckerwoods Mim’s talks albout that kept the niggers out of their Country. No black man ever cut down a tree in their rnecks of the woods. They hated progress – and change. They liked Michael because he was the best tree-topper around. He was their tree-climbing moneky that made then a million. I was his kin, and waskin to his wife, a Frye. The Fryes were lived in Finn Rock for five generations. The last time I was up there, I discovered I am releated to everyone who lives and works up river. We took over the Ranger Station by spreadint our gentic material all over the place. I talked to my kind who runs a Deli. I ran past hi an idea on how to bring more folks up river so ehty will buy a cornbeef and rye sandwhich from him;

“Welllllllllllllllllllllllll. To tell you the truth, we don’t want more folks coming up here and trashing the place. We just want our stuff to mysteriouskt  fly off the shelf so we dont have to move to town and get a citified job. Are yu going to buy one my my nick nacks after I wasted myt time jawing with you. How about a cut borwn bear fishing in a burchbark canoe?”

I told this yongster about our Old End Time Plan,

“We were going to fell trees acorss 126. When we went to town we made sure we got pleanty of dented can food at that store with the sloppy rainbow. I forgot the name.”

Then we started doing cocaine and drinking too much. Our workd came crashing down around us. Our children were thrown into a dysfntional whirpool. There was wife-swapping going on. We thiught we were cool. Everyone wanted more white powder that coud only be gotten in the city. We never thiyught about gorwing cociane trees and getting some big iron pots to cook it in. We’ed have to get a rocket launcher to shoot DEA helicipter out of the sky.

So, who the fucks  Katherine Willson and why s she balling her eyes out as I share my twisted convoluted tale about the legal family fued over a shitload of Rosamond prints that no one could sell, while christine was alive, but, now that she was dead our sibkling – who knew nothing about art – were convicnced they would sell like hotcakes. They had pused the adult heir and her uncle to the side in a very brutal manner, and had cone to bievled they had a forest of old growth redwood that would make them wealthy beyond belief. We are talking about a Real Windfall! They ase not in Rosamond’s Will.

“Kesey abandoned prose as ‘archaic’ and set off to make The Movie,” says Mark Christensen, a Los Angeles writer and former WW staffer who’s completing a study of Kesey, Timothy Leary and other ’60s narcotics gurus titled Acid Christ for Schaffner Press. “He bought into the dream, which is the old cliché of Hollywood: What I really want to do is direct. In other words, he wanted into the movie business! This was in the wave of all that French New Wave shit, where people literally believed the novel was dead, and cinema was going to be the new medium. And Kesey bought that dream.”

http://www.leagle.com/decision/In%20FDCO%2020090408709/KESEY,%20LLC%20v.%20FRANCIS

photo by Jon Stinnett James “Izzy” Whetstine, left, and drummer Kenny Reed take a break from filming a documentary on the making of ‘Animal House’ Friday. Whetstine played a janitor responsible for dealing with a dead horse in the movie.

Katherine Wilson, Oregon filmmaker

October 10th, 2012 by Anne Richardson · 1 Comment · Oregon filmmaker, Oregon producer,Oregon writer

Katherine Wilson stepped into the role of writer-producer with Animal House Of Blues (2012)  after a lifetime working in location casting and location scouting.

When John Landis needed local college girls for the pillow fight in Animal House, it was Katherine who auditioned them. When Milos Forman came to Oregon State Hospital to shoot One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, it was Katherine who served as the liaison between that production and the Oregon Film Commission. Having seen for herself what Oregon had to offer Hollywood, and vice versa, she spent her entire career encouraging her home state to develop the economic potential of its film industry.

She worked on Stand By Me, The High Cost Of Living and Personal Best, among others. Without leaving home, she worked with Michael Douglas, Milos Forman, Rob Reiner, Robert Towne, John Belushi, and Jack Nicolson.

Her first film as writer-producer, Animal House of Blues, uses interviews and archival photos to tell the story of how Curtis Salgado, a young Eugene blues singer, taught visiting actor John Belushi how to sing the blues. Belushi paid close attention and later used  Salgado’s trademark sunglasses-fedora-harmonica combination to create The Blues Brothers with Dan Ackroyd. As a friend of both Salgado and Belushi, Katherine Wilson was witness to the entire, slightly Faustian, saga.

Here you can see Katherine Wilson preparing extras for the parade scene finale in Animal House, the film which launched her career.

Here’s Katherine in Deafula, a lost Oregon movie I am dying to see. Katherine acted in Deafula and did the make up and art direction.

Here she is with Ken Kesey, who taught her to splice videos using scotch tape, a lesson she definitely wouldn’t have learned in film school.

Along with launching Animal House Of Blues, Katherine Wilson is also in pre-production for a feature length narrative film about the legendary Nez Perce rodeo champion, Jackson Sundown. She is the fifth Oregon Movies, A to Zfilm figure to come from Klamath Falls, joining an illustrious list which includes James Ivory, Marc Davis, William Kittridge and Chris Eyre, pictured with her below.

About Royal Rosamond Press

I am an artist, a writer, and a theologian.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to Animal House and Black Cowboy

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.