VERNE NOTICE

The weekend of July 20 marks the 50^th anniversary of the moon landing. I decided to celebrate by writing, directing and acting in a one-hour radio play, Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (drawing on both Verne's 1865 FTETTM and its 1870 sequel Round the Moon). It's scheduled to air at 7 p.m. (Phoenix time) Saturday, July 20, and again at 2 p.m. Wednesday, July 24, on Sun Sounds of Arizona; you can listen in at sunsounds.org.

Check out my Phoenix Magazine online article about the production.

Here I am in great-director mode during the recording:

 And here's a better angle on me:

 

This was a passion project for me. I was seven years old that week in 1969 when the Eagle, the lunar module of Apollo 11, touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, and I remember it, and the weeks and months leading up to it, with a vividness matched by only a few of my other early childhood memories.

I remember the gathering of relatives at our rural house, and one of my cousins saying, quite gratuitously, “There’s his foot comin’ down,” as we watched Neil Armstrong, in fuzzy black-and-white, take his legendary one small step. Looking back, it seems like a corny, Norman Rockwell scene, but I also remember going outside shortly thereafter, into the cool, clear Pennsylvania night, and looking up at the moon, as if I’d see the guys waving down at me from above.

One of my sisters, however, has these memories beat; she remembers watching the landing at the Newport Folk Festival, on a TV placed on the stage where both the audience and the performers could keep an eye on it!

The feverish excitement that arose during the early years of the Apollo program turned countless people into space geeks, and I was certainly one of the most insufferable of them, wearying teachers, family members and even friends my own age with space chatter to the exclusion of almost everything else (now I'm doing it again, at the age of  57!). As it happened, the mother of one of my brothers-in-law worked for a NASA contractor in D.C., so she had a connection; shortly after the safe return of the astronauts she somehow arranged for me to be sent an Apollo 11 press kit, complete with glossy prints of the iconic photos taken by Armstrong on that first lunar excursion. I still have them.

Several years ago I had my moon pics appraised when Antiques Roadshow came to the Valley, and was told that they’re fairly common, having been sent to thousands of schoolteachers at the time, and only worth about $20 as a collector’s item. You can well imagine, however, that in second grade I felt like I had been entrusted with high-level government documents, and they made me the undisputed King of Show-and-Tell.

Anyway, Happy Moon Landing Day tomorrow everybody, and may the spirit of America one day soon be devoted again to doing things "In Peace, For All Mankind."

Oh, by the way, check out my review, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Lulu Wang's The Farewell, starring Awkwafina...

...one of the better movies I've seen so far this year.