River Oaks Theatre - Opening Sooner Than You Think
Unless you thought Thursday, October 3 - then it's opening exactly when you think
These last few weeks have seen me do something I haven’t done since starting this blog almost two years ago—miss a week without posting a newsletter. And not just one week, but two!
The first week was kind of a whiff because I had nothing too exciting to discuss. I would have spun gold from yarn if I had the time, I’m sure, but I just didn’t. My last month has been spent getting ready for yesterday, the day that we revealed the opening date of the River Oaks Theatre. A month of working with studios to program titles. A month of building show pages in unfamiliar web platforms. A month spent meeting with performers and getting contracts signed. A month working on press releases and doing interviews. A month leading up to this: a whole honking heap of awesome films and events planned for the first month of the River Oaks Theatre!
All this and planning a wedding too.
So yes, I had an excuse to skip a week or two of newsletters. I promise.
I’ll be talking more about some of the films and events I’m particularly excited about in the coming weeks (provided I don’t skip any more newsletters), but in the meantime, I encourage you to check out the calendar at www.theriveroakstheatre.com. There’s a lot of cool stuff planned, and I hope to see some of you at the theater this fall!
Last week, I visited McAllen, Texas, a city I grew up in but hadn’t revisited in twenty years. My parents moved to Houston a week after I graduated high school, and I didn’t have any family in the area, so there was no “real” reason to go back to McAllen. I did go back a few times—once during my freshman year of college and then again during my sophomore year. During those visits, I met with friends, drove by my high school, and spied on the family that moved into my family’s old house.
Coincidentally, these were the same things I did on my trip back to McAllen last week. The Rio Grande Valley has changed a lot in twenty years—or, at the very least, my memory has grown hazy of what it was like. There seem to be a lot more businesses, and the construction is a bit worn. The new library is very cool, and the family that moved into my old home has a garage that they somehow managed to fit a pickup truck in. What struck me the most, though, were all the things that hadn’t changed. The drainage ditch whose banks I used to walk home along the edge of from school looked ripped straight from my memories. The park I went to as a kid had the same dangerous playground equipment I assumed had been removed years ago. I would catch flashes of pure, unfiltered memory driving around town and would feel transported back to my 18-year-old self, driving home from high school while cranking Everclear on the radio.
The trip was nostalgic, of course, but it was also a reminder of what I’ve lost: Friendships, nativity, untampered optimism, the dream that I might find a path on the walk home from school that would lead me on some incredible adventure. My childhood was a happy one, I genuinely believe this, but it was a childhood crafted from too many books and too many dreams. It was a childhood where the edges blur into the memories of what I watched and read and dreamed of, instead of the things I actually did. I think back on my childhood and I remember fantasies I had, not real things I accomplished.
Maybe that’s the way things are supposed to be - childhood is for dreaming, adulting is for doing.
I’m glad I visited McAllen. I don’t think I need to go back anytime soon, though.
I do love the palm trees, though.
I’m doing a St. Jude Walk this month. Please consider donating to my campaign.
I have officially finished production on my second comic book—and it's not WHERE WOLF 2. When it's published this fall, I anticipate it being a hot collector's item since I'm only printing 150 copies.
I filled a gap in my Brian K. Vaughan reading with THE ESCAPISTS, a sorta-sequel to Michael Chabon’s THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY. Chabon’s book is incredible, and everybody should read it, but THE ESCAPISTS is also kinda incredible too. A trio of wannabe comic book artists try to resurrect a golden-age hero in a touching tribute to friendship and art. I loved how it served up some inside baseball on the world of indie comic book publishing while also being a great story of friendship. It’s a perfect antidote to most of the real-life stories of comic book publishing, in other words. Comics will break your heart, kid.
Remember, you can request a copy of WHERE WOLF from your local library or buy a personal copy directly from the publisher, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Ghoulish Books in San Antonio, or Whose Books in Dallas. If you've read WHERE WOLF, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon, Goodreads, The StoryGraph, or wherever you discover new books.