The Drovers Old Time Medicine Show - Prater's Creek Gazette

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Arts and Music

The Prater's Creek Gazette

16th Issue Winter 2007 Page #6

Mask

cello

books

The Gazette’s Christmas Present to Our Readers:
WINONA RYDER

She was born Winona Laura Horowitz on Oct.29, 1971. A little Jewish girl whose parents were San Francisco hippies that had moved to Winona, Minnesota for a short time, where Winona was born, thus her first name. Her parents moved back to the San Francisco area, to Petaluma, CA, where the family lived in a commune, even living in a teepee for awhile.

There were lots of artists and free thinkers in this crowd, including psychedelic guru Timothy Leary. Leary who was Winona’s godfather, introduced her to the works of Louisa May Alcott and took her to her first Dodgers game. To this day, she is a huge baseball, and especially Dodgers, fan. She has said if she ever has a son, she wants him to have a cool baseball name like “Cool Papa”, “Country” or “Satchel”. Her parents were such hippies Winona has said, that one year the family Christmas tree was a big decorated marijuana plant.

It was this crowd that influenced her creative side and her mother often kept her home to watch classic movies on television. She also fell in love with books like Alcott’s “Little Women” Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” and JD Salinger’s “Catcher In the Rye”. She began taking acting classes where a Los Angeles scout spotted her and signed her. She appeared in her first movie, Lucas, in 1986. When the studio called her house and suggested she needed a stage last name, her dad’s Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels album was blasting out of the stereo. “Ryder” was the name she told them to use.

A couple of forgettable movies followed, then in 1988 she appeared as the little Goth girl, Lydia, in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice. This is where I first fell in love with her, and the critics did too. I fell totally for her in the last scene where she has on the school girl outfit and levitates doing the “Mambo”. Her character Lydia says one of Winona’s best film lines: “I myself am strange and unnatural”. It was also during the filming of this movie where she started getting an ID bracelet with her character’s name on it and surrounding herself with things her character would have and wear.

In 1989, she starred in the role that would send her to the Hollywood A-list. In Heathers she played “Veronica” who was friends with the three most powerful girls at Westerburg High, who are all named “Heather”. This dark comedy wowed all of the critics and wowed ‘em at the box office too. This movie would have been a classic with any pretty young starlet in the starring role, but Winona was Veronica!

Heathers was topical back in 1989, and it still is today with the media’s coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre and the students who died in a beach house fire in NC.

“Heathers was showing how horrible society can be when a tragedy happens,” Winona said. “I had a friend who killed himself in Petaluma High School and afterwards people were saying, ‘Oh, he was so great.’ People treated him like s*%t when he was alive. They never gave him the time of day. Then, I read the script for Heathers and it was perfect,” Winona added.

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