Happy Late Night, Sweet Baby,
I saw your pic of Shawn this morning right before we left for church. Great silhouette. And I assume that is the State Capitol building behind him? It makes for a dramatic background, with the cloudy sky too. :) Your pics were all over the place today, all the different photos you got of DMC with various band members at Taste Of Madison. It looks like you had a great time, and the steady work continues. :)
We had fun as always singing in church, except we got a surprise because the anthem was switched at the last minute, and so we had to sing "Great, Great Morning" without much preparation. Usually with an upcoming anthem I can study it during the week, Youtube it, sing it in my car. We had rehearsed this song before, so it wasn't entirely unknown, but the beginning is all Tenor. If you've ever seen the movie "Oklahoma" with Gordon MacRae singing "Oh, what a beautiful morrr- ning"......well, our song starts out in a similar manner : "My Lord.....what a morrrn-ing'". I thought we were singing the song next week, and so I had to be ready to Belt It Out at a moment's notice. We only have two tenors, me being one. And it came out pretty good....but I'd like another chance at it when fully rehearsed.
Tonight I was all out of "Under The Dome" episodes (until the next dvd arrives from the Libe) so I watched a movie called "There's Always Tomorrow", directed by the great Douglas Sirk, who was famous in the 1950s for classic melodramas focusing on themes of passion and morality. Plus, the guy could Flat Out Shoot A Movie. Good Lordy Moses, could he ever. Sirk always set up hyper-romantic premises, and in this film, Fred MacMurray starred as a family man who owns a toy company. He loves his family but they basically ignore him; he is The Provider, the Bread & Butter, and they - the mother and children - have a life of their own. And Fred feels neglected. Enter into the picture Lady Barbara Stanwyck (of Northridge), a fantastic actress who should get the credit given to the Bette Davises of the world. Stanwyck was great in everything she did, and (re-teaming again with MacMurray), she plays a former employee of his who re-enters his life and causes sparks to fly, which confound his adult son, who finds out about their meetings.
With Douglas Sirk, you are always gonna get a ton of plot, a ton of romance and melodrama (and a message therein), incredible set design (he puts you right inside middle-class 1950s America), and some of the best photography you will ever see, and in this case it was black and white, my favorite. So the picture turned out to be a minor classic. I've been on kind of a mini Fred MacMurray run this summer anyway, and had earlier seen him with Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity", so this one was a great find, by using the Library's search engine.
Tonight I am a little tired, but I want to keep the investigation going, so tonight's 1989 Tidbit will be brief, but important. I wanted to note - and I may have already done so before so please forgive if I did - the incongruity between the unbridled rage that several of the participants exhibited, and their seeming abandonment of caution when doing so. We have been examining Ray Tippo, in the case of The Ex-Neighbors, and we also have Howard Schaller's vicious attack at Northridge Hospital and Jared Rappaport's truly psychotic behavior after he kidnapped me at gunpoint.
All three men, as previously noted, had careers. Not just jobs but careers. All three men had families and all three men owned (or were paying off) houses in the Northridge/Reseda area of the San Fernando Valley.
Under ordinary circumstances, these men would not seem to be the type of people to risk everything - i.e. loss of job, possible loss of family/divorce, and most importantly loss of freedom via a jail or prison sentence. Not to mention the psychological "loss of normality" that would ordinarily result with the attendant publicity, when the world at large finds out through news media that the person in question in not in fact "normal" but a hidden criminal.
One would think - and an investigator would certainly think - that all of these risk factors would cause a person hiding secrets or criminal actions to "lay low" if something happened to cause the truth to come out. Especially in Jared Rappaport's case; we have a family man/college professor, who has just moved into his nice middle class house, and yet who is seemingly willing to risk a life sentence in prison for his actions, which he did indeed undertake.
It doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense, because......well, we know Jared is a sick man, and violent, and perverted. But in comparing him to other cases, Jerry Sandusky for instance, or the Catholic priests of that scandal, what we see in those cases is what we would normally expect - a non-response by the accused, or a denial through a lawyer.
In other words, a passive response, if there is a response at all. The last thing one would expect a Jerry Sandusky to do, upon being discovered, would be for him to go to the accuser's house and beat him up or kidnap him.
Because such an action would only confirm his guilt.
And so we see that in all normal cases of people being accused or discovered in these types of crimes, the reaction of the criminals is to "lay low" and hide behind a lawyer and/or a denial.
If we had street criminals involved as those who Had Been Discovered (ala Howard Schaller), then we might understand their wanton "acting out" in rage and violence. And Howard was a biker, for sure, but he had also been in his job at Metrocolor (a damn good job) for over 30 years. He dealt drugs, but he was no street criminal.
He was a family man with a house and a good job, just like Rappaport and Tippo in their respective actions of rage-induced crime.
Family men, even when they are criminals, don't generally take such risks. If they are gonna beat someone up, they don't generally do it in broad daylight, in full prospective view of a neighborhood. They don't kidnap a person when the result for them, if caught, would be life in prison. These are family men we are talking about. And if they do decide to go all the way, like that nut job in Cleveland a few years ago who kidnapped those girls, then they don't fool around, and they make sure they don't even get noticed, let alone caught.
So, this is a complex question (as is everything involving this case).
The rage and violence these men exhibited, in their separate actions, was real, it was not acted, it was not part of a drill or "real-time" simulation. All three exhibited a similar, unbridled, even psychotic rage that led them to abandon caution of the consequences.
Why?
That is our question for tonight. ////
See you in the morning, SB. I Love You. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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