Nobody even noticed, but Sunday June 12th was Indiana Jones Day at the Montreal Fringe. A chance to wear a beat up fedora and leather jacket, and show of your skill at using a whip. June 12, 1981 was the day "Raiders of the Lost Ark" came out.
I saw it early, at the Imperial, but I'm sort of blank about it. The concept was novel enough, so just like when Star Wars came out (I saw it twice the afternoon it first played Montreal), we weren't sure what to expect. Oh, preview shows pointed otu it was an homage to the serials of the old days, but in 1981, it wsa a fork in the road. I thought I saw it at midnight, and came back from somewhere to do so, but not on June 12th, so I must be mixing that memory with one of the Star Wars films, or even when the 2nd Indiana Jones film came out. It's lost some of its impact over thirty years, and the fact that I do have it on VHS so I can watch it when i wnat, but it was a potent film when it first came out. Back then, watching it whenever you wanted was only beginning with the slow rise of VCRs, you saw it when it first came out, maybe if it hit the rep houses, and then you were dependent on if it appeared on TV.
We should have made a big deal of this at the Fringe.
June 12th is always and forever also Anne Frank's birthday. This year I will get Miep Gies book about Anne, Miep Gies being one of the people who helped to hid the Franks, and then of course, kept the diary safe until Otto Frank came home safely.
Another event that I had to look up actually happened on June 12th, too. Back in 1971, the Whole Earth Catalog had their "Demise Party", having decided to shut down operation (of course, that didn't last long, they produced more Catalogs for decades, and of course in 1974 started printing the CoEvolution Quarterly that I read for most of its life. Significant about the Demise Party is that some guy named Fred Moore ended up with the money that the Catalog had offered up for some project (and the attendees could not reach a decision about where the money should go). When I read the Rolling Stone article about the Demise Party "The Last Twelve Hours of the Whole Earth" (Rolling Stone, July 8, 1971) around 1976, Fred Moore was just a name in the article. But some years later, he reached a certain level of fame by helping to start the Homebrew Computer Club, that was very important in the early days of home computers. And Fred Moore apparently walked through Montreal in June or July of 1964 as part of the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo Peace Walk, an event made famous because when they hit the Deep South they ran into segregation, and the Peace Walk was not segregated.
That July 8th issue of Rolling Stone is also important, since on page 8 it carries a short article announcing that The Fillmore is closing at the end of June, rather than later in the year.
