It has been over forty years since the film premiere of Ashes From A Long Dead Fire (I would later use this title for a chapbook with totally different content). My student, Jim Barr, whose parents wanted him to be a doc, wanted desperately to be a movie director. So, after his graduation from high school and before his enrollment in college, I spent the summer with him making a film. I wrote the script, gathered family, friends and neighbors to play the parts and we worked like the proverbial dogs for two months. Jim did all the technical stuff and I did the creative stuff (though he was perfectly capable of doing both). The film dealt with a spiritual awakening of a young boy … the kid next door, Dennis Barry. Dennis was incredible … amazing … and if any Hollywood types had seen him, he would be a star today.
At the end of the summer, we held a premiere at my parents’ home … thinking back on it, Jim and I were both kids but what a job we did in putting something we knew nothing about together and packaging it. It was another magical summer … not quite up to Cattail Summer … but a highlight of an average life. It is the only thing I have with my mother speaking and it is precious. I, too, had a cameo role. I was just back from Trinidad and as dark as this half White girl would ever be. Jim won a Kodak award for it and he soon headed to California.
Some years later, his brother John called me to say that Jim had drank himself to death. We were little fish swimming in a little pond. We could hold our heads above water there. We could do some amazing things but we had so little competition that what was probably great in Syracuse was mediocre in the Big City. Often, we must be so careful not to let our dreams outpace our ability to make them come true.