Half-Pipe Mega Air

Saturday, Dec 15th: It was hellishly cold. The wind howling up Peak 8, blowing snow off the high mountain ridges in giant plumes of white. And of course I had forgotten my gloves. Note to self: extreme cold, metallic camera gear, and human epidermis are a satanic mix. Fortunately, the rock ‘n roll pumping out of the speakers on the lip of the half-pipe at Breckenridge during the U.S. Snowboard Grand Prix kept me from degenerating into a quivering ball of jelly, that, and the buzz of trying to freeze frame the human pretzel contortions of the pro snowboarders as they caught huge air so close it felt like I could reach out and touch them. The Flying Tomato, aka Shaun White, won the men’s competition (he’s the flaming red, long haired guy with his own Amex commercial, in which he follows a series of snowstorms from Utah to Canada to Japan to Norway, until finally getting a text msg that the surf’s up in Maui) while Gretchen Bleiler, the silver medalist at the 2006 Turin Olympics, took first on the women’s side. Read on …

JFK’s Daughter

Tuesday, Dec 4th: Caroline Kennedy, the only surviving child of JFK, was in Denver to talk about her book, A Family Christmas during the hectic run-up to the coming of Santa Claus. In 1999, her brother, JFK, Jr, died in a plane crash in the Atlantic Ocean off Martha’s Vineyard. A Family Christmas is a diverse, eclectic collection of Christmas themed poems, scriptural texts, lyrics, and prose from such literary heavy weights as e.e. cummings, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Dickens, and others. Oddball, quirky entries include Groucho Marx, Run DMC, and Claude Levi Strauss (RE: Strauss: What’s a French anthropologist doing in a Christmas book?). The book also includes Caroline’s “Letter to Santa”, written in 1962 at the White House when she was five years old in which she asks Santa for “…a pair of silver skates—and one of those horse wagons with lucky dips—and Susie Smart and Candy Fashion dolls and a real pet reindeer and a clock to tell time and a covered wagon & a farm and you decide anything else—And interesting planes or bumpy thing he can ride in or some noisy thing or something he can push or pull for John.” And then there was a PS: “I would like a basket for my bicycle.” Read on …