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The Brussels Post, 1979-08-01, Page 2611111.11114$ OM TAR /0 WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 8, 1979 Serving Brussels and the surrounding community. Published each. Wednesday afternoon at Brussels, Ontario By McLean Bros. Publishers Limited Evelyn Kennedy - Editor Pat Langlois - Advertising Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association and Ontario Weekly Newspaper Association iCA Subscriptions (in advance) Canada $10.00 a Year. Others $20.00 a Year. Single Copies 25 cents each. 1115TAIIL100110 am 4'Brussels Post C&I BLUE RIBBON AWARD 1979 (Continued from Page 1) drawing to a close. People of the area are fortunate to have live theatre so close to them. Many people from a distance have been attending but it would be nice to see more folks from Brussels at some of the performances. If you have not been to Blyth Theatre yet why not go now? .*** * * * Wingham Centennial celebrations were in full swing over the weekend.. A number of Brussels and area residents were there to join in the fun and frolic and watch the monster parade. Brussels Legion Pipe Band brightened the parade with the colorful swing of the kilts and delighted the Scots with the sound of the pipes and drums. something can be done about it in the near future. * ***** There was to be no more about the sewer construction in this column but after having a close-up view of the work, on Friday, across the main street at this corner, there is going to be. The machine that has been digging here, there and everywhere, looks like a greedy, prehistoric monster. It lowers its vicious toothed jaw, digs in and gobbles up fiuge bites of street surface,earth and whatever else it can grab down there, then bending its flexible neck, it raises its mouth and spews out whatever it chewed up into trucks that cart the rubble away. When it encounters rock, as it did here, it lets out ear-splititng roars and stamps in rage until it crushes what defies it. * * * * * '311 * * * * * The old Export Packers building otOlain Street that has been in a disgracefhl and dangerous condition for some time is rapidIN There was a lot of traffic going north and becoming more so. The roof and part of the "south that day and with only a narrow single building at the back recently collapsed:, lane where the work was going on, cars, at Sewer workers had to push some of it out of times were lined up for a block or more the way so their men could work without waiting to get through. danger of injury. It is a hazard to anyone who ventures near it. Children are creatures with It was rewarding to be told by so many great curiousity and it is fortunate that none people that they enjoyed reading, in this have as yet met with an accident there. column, about our trip to England, Scotland Word is expected by council next week on and Wales. It was a pleasure sharing it with the whole situation and it is hoped that you. Only a few performances left If you've been putting off arrangements to attend the plays at the Blyth Summer Festival this year, time is running out. One of the season's plays has already closed, and there are only a few performances left of the season's other three pro- ductions. If you kicked your- self for not getting tickets to "I'll Be Back For You Before Midnight" before it closed, you'll want to make reserva- tions now for the final per- formances of "This Foreign Land", on August 10 or August 18, or for "Child" on August 9, 14, or 15. "McGil- licuddy's Lost Weekend" has several performances left, of which the final one is August 17. Tickets for all performances are going quickly, but most dates are still open. If you missed getting re- servations for the Saturday night country suppers, don't give up hope yet. The Festival has added several Friday night suppers on August 10 (a performance of "This Foreign Land") August 17 (a performance of • "McGillicuddy's Lost Weekend") and August 24 (*performance of "The Donnellys"). The cost is $5.50 per person and re- I PURPOSE., To discuss the .Grey' toweithip secondary plan 'Grey Township Council Grey Township PUBLIC MEETING Thursday, August 16 8:30 p.m. Ethel Community Hall servations must be made in advance at the box office. August 21 sees the opening of a new production on the Blyth stage. "The Death of the Donnellys" opens then and runs until September 1. the space belentie of the advertisement *Ili be. Old for at the applicable rate., occupied by the erroneous NOM', together' with teatonabie allowance for signature, will not be charged for but the eoi,tri Of unioitoited or Advertising is actepted on the condition that In the' event Of a typogeaphitat Otter the be WWII "inky 'Mill Will be made to Iniute they are handled With bete, the poblithetteiinnot .bo responsible for „ WATCHING TERRIFIC BALL—Tournament participants and spectators were loud in their praises of the annual mens' invitational ball tournament held in Brussels on the weekend. Spectators here watched Monday's games which ended at 9:30 p.m. with Wingham beating Sebringville 1 to 0 in a 15 inning game and winning the tourney. (Photo by Langlois) Short Shots by Evelyn Kennedy Behind the scenes by Keith Roulston New cliches are hard to find Pardon my old cliche, but new cliches are getting as scarce as hens' teeth. You hear a lot of talk these days about haw difficult it is for oilmen to find new supplies of oil to keep our energy hungry world going. If they think that's tough, they should be on the search writers have far something new and different to say. There's no greater insult one can give a writer than to say he or she fills their work with tired, hackneyed cliches. It's telling the writer that there is little imagination in the writing, that everything is borrowed from somewhere else. The trouble is it's getting harder and harder to find something new and fresh to write about. There is only so much new under the sun. Most things in our world take place in an endless cycle. People are born, grow up, fall in love, marry, have children and eventually die. There are good times and bad times, happiness and sadness, war and peace. Any one of those conditions has been dealt with several million times by writers from Shakespeare to Arthur Hailey. Write about them again and you're either running the risk of being told you have nothing new to say or you have to find some new angle to write about. Recently one writer desperate for originality created a novel about Siamese twins who get married to two different men along with appropriate accounts of their love lives. How about a love story about the world's first two test tube babies, one male and one female who fall in love, settle down and start their own little test tube? Coming up with something new to say in a world with a finite number of new things has always been a problem of course. Every time somebody writes a story it means one less topic to deal with for the next writer who comes along. With each generation that passes the next generation is that much harder to find something fresh to write about. But the 20th century has speeded up the process to a dizzying extent. New technology has increased the number of books in print. Radio and movies increased the number of stories being written and recorded. And today we have the hungry giant of television which gobbles up as many stories in a week as were written and published in a century up until our own. If you want to be an inventive writer these days you either have to find something out of this world to write about like science fiction or you have to spend about two years research log to find out if anybody else has come tip with your idea be ore you. If they haven't when you begin that research, chances are somebody'll have written about it by the time you finish. I think that's why there's been so much attention paid to things like gay liberation recently. It opened a new line of story telling and everybody rushed to get in on the action, to write something fresh. Of course only about the first story was fresh. After that we had the same cliches about normal people being regenerated about homosexuals. There was love, rejection, jealousy and hate all played out again just as in a 1940's movie. It's not just individual story situations that are now cliches but whole kinds of stories. Over the years every combination and permutation of story possibility has been so repeated in western movies that now the western movie is a cliche. I've read or watched so many stories about the loneliness of living in an isolated farm- house on the prairies that if I never see another one it will be too soon. An acquaintance on attending a perform- ance of a play of mine recently said to herself: Lord, not another play about small town politics. She was right of course. It's all been said before. Yet the thing about most cliches is that they are eternal truths. They may be stories told a thousand times but usually they've happened a million times in real life. One of the most common criticisms I've received over the years as a writer is that my characters are stereotypes (that's a walking, breathing cliche). To some people I guess they are. On the other hand, nearly every one of those stereotypes was based on a real person that I've met over the years in the various small towns in this part of the country. They're exaggerated a bit for the sake of comedy perhapi, but they started out as real people. The problem is that we have dealt with fiction on television and in movies and books for so long that sometimes it's hard to separate out what is real and what is the copy. Does art imitate life or does art imitate art? Sometimes when I get such criticism I find it hard to figure out myself whether my characters are original or are shaped through the vision of too many stereotypes of small town people perpetu- ated on the television screen. The nice thing about writing for theatre however is that you have the real final judge right in front of you: the audience. Someone phoned the other night to tell me how much they had enjoyed my play. "You lmow," she said, "we didn't realize until we got home that all those characters reminded us of people we had known." The cliches and stereotypes may not be new, but they're still true. I guess I'll stick with them.