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

PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

Arts and Music (CONT.)

The Prater's Creek Gazette

16th Issue Winter 2007 Page #7

Mask

cello

books

(Cont.) The Gazette’s Christmas Present to Our Readers:
WINONA RYDER

“When you see all those sappy made-for-TV movies about teen suicide when you kill yourself and everyone’s your best friend at the funeral, it’s enough to make you jump in front of a bus. It’s a fantasy for teenagers to get all that attention and it’s dangerous. Heathers showed how screwed up that all was.”

Veronica meets the new kid at school, played by Christian Slater, and their dislike for the popular students leads them to start killing off these classmates. “Dear Diary”. Veronica writes, “My teen angst now has a body count”.

Next, in quick succession, came Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael and Great Balls of Fire. In Great Balls of Fire, a hilarious, and sort of biopic of Jerry Lee Lewis, Winona plays Myra, the 13 year old second cousin that Lewis married in 1958. Winona is beyond cute in this movie. Dennis Quaid plays Lewis, and John Doe, of the LA punk band X, plays Myra’s father, who was Jerry Lee’s first cousin and bass player. Mojo Nixon, who played Jerry Lee’s drummer in the movie, had a MTV video hit out with his song “Debbie Gibson is Having My Two-Headed Baby”. In the video, Winona wears a blonde wig and plays the role of Gibson!

Her next movie would see her wearing a blonde wig again, and wearing a cheerleader outfit, in Edward Scissorhands. Johnny Depp played the lead role and he and Winona had been dating and were becoming the “Hot Couple” in Hollywood. Depp had a tattoo put on his arm that said “Winona Forever”.

Winona was on every magazine cover that year, and in her interviews she talked about her favorite bands such as The Replacements, Soul Asylum, and Tom Waits.

There was blockbuster after blockbuster starring Winona. Mermaids, starring Cher and a very young Christina Ricci as Winona’s younger sister. There were the “costume period” pieces such as The Age of Innocence, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the movie adaptations of two of her favorite childhood books, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

She and Depp broke up, and he had his tattoo changed to “Wino Forever” Then she started dating other rock stars such as Replacements singer Paul Westerberg (whose name had been used for the name of the high school in Heathers), and fellow Minneapolis indie rocker Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum.

It was during the time, when she and Pirner were an item, that Polly Klaus was kidnapped. Polly was a 12-year-old student in Winona’s hometown of Petaluma, CA. Winona felt sickened seeing the story on television and immediately flew to Petaluma to use her celebrity to try and find the missing girl. Polly had lived two blocks from Winona and had also been an actress in the junior high’s plays, and Winona felt a bond between herself and the missing girl that she had never met. She was seen in TV ads begging for Polly’s safe return. Because of Winona’s interest, phone banks were set up to find the missing girl. Polly’s father says Winona’s interest and help “She single handedly put the story back on the front pages by offering a $200,000 reward.” But after two months the little girl’s dead body was found. Polly’s father started the Polly Klaus Foundation to help find missing children, and Winona served on the foundation’s Board of Directors for many years. When Pirner’s band had a video on MTV for the song “Runaway Train”, Winona convinced them to make the video about missing children and listed dozens of names and photographs of missing children.

PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

Designed and Maintained by AJs Web Solutions and powered by AJs web hosting