We are serious Documentary types but for some incomprehensible reason we wanted to escape for an hour and a half and watched a Stone Gap movie with Ashley Judd and Patrick Wilson, a man I always knew would be believable as a Virginia coal miner. Never mind.
Goodness, it starts with a pageant of TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE based on the book which was written by Johnny Fox, a law partner of a Schlemp cousin of mine. I still have a Slimp cousin in county office in Wise. He's black haired! How odd. And they used Dougherty as a local name, where my Dougherty families there go back to Lord Dunmore's War before there was a Schlemp and Dougherty marriage. And then there were Melungeons. Who? said my friend. Oh, I said, stopping the movie, I told you about that stories about the Lost Colony of Roanoke and the book CHILDREN OF PERDITION by Tim Hashaw which I got because the Goings family were Melungeons, and I used one of them in a David Fanning article and besides one of the Tindall uncles may have married a Melungeon. And they say that the Redbones I knew in Calcasieu Parish in 1953 were Melungeons kin to the Goings. And there is a Slimp connection in Morro Bay because my brutal Schlemp cousin George Scott who slugged Ava Gardner and messed up her jaw permanently (and she liked to say she was a Melungeon) was shipwrecked right here, but not right on the Rock. And of course Cousin Bascom Slimp (or did he use Slemp?) was in Coolidge's cabinet and got to meet my hero, John Buchan.
So wonderful to be distracted for an hour and a half and totally forget what I would emerge to suppress for as long as it takes. I am going to get a 24 inch television for my office wall and go on an orgy of watching all the Shakespeare I can get on Netflix again. It's been four or five years since I saw the older better CORIOLANUS. That should take some hours when I don't have to be in conscious denial.
