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~ The hopes, dreams and random projects of author Stephen Roth

A Place for My Stuff

Tag Archives: lagrange

Blue Light Special

24 Friday Jun 2016

Posted by ghosteye3 in growing up, humor, my life, observations, stephen roth, Uncategorized

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1980s, georgia, growing up, lagrange, midnight oil, u2

Police lights

Kids who grow up in the city don’t know how good they have it.

Provided you have transportation and a little disposable income, you can choose a different activity for every single day of the year if you live in a large metropolitan area. In the city, there are museums, aquariums, zoos, amusement parks, professional sports, shopping centers and even dinosaur-themed restaurants from which to choose. In the city, there is no excuse to ever be bored, even though my son might sometimes disagree with me.

For kids who live in smaller towns, it’s different. Sometimes you have to make your own fun. Sometimes, that fun may be ill-advised.

I was luckier than most. I grew up in a mid-sized town called LaGrange that had a four-year college, a large recreational lake, golf courses, tennis courts and about 10 months of good weather each year. When I was in high school in the late 1980s, they opened up a six-screen cinema in my town, which was a social and cultural game-changer for me and my peers. I saw my first R-rated movie in that theater (Fatal Attraction with Michael Douglas and Glenn Close), even though my friends and I were under-aged. The new Cineplex brought a little bit of big-city daring and decadence to the town of LaGrange, Georgia.

Still, it could get boring at times. We had to make our own fun. My friend Jason and I swore off drinking for our high school careers, and we didn’t quite have enough nerve to swing though the school parking, where a lot of our classmates hung out on Friday and Saturday nights. Some evenings, we just drove around town in Jason’s Volkswagen Jetta, blasting U2 on the tape deck and somehow hoping that Bono’s words would inspire us to drive into the high school parking lot and talk to the cool kids.

One night, just to try something different, we grabbed a flashlight, a roll of duct tape, and a large, blue plastic cup from Jason’s house. Our hope was that, by taping the cup over the flashlight, and turning the light off and on rapidly, we could simulate the kind of pulsing blue light that police officers mounted on the dashboards of their patrol cars. To test our experiment, I stood on the side of the street and watched Jason whiz by in the Jetta a few times, his right arm holding the flashlight over the dash and turning it on and off just as fast as he could. Sure enough, it looked a lot like a police light.

When you are a pair of bored 18-year-olds who suddenly have invented your own police light, your next move is obvious. We hit the road on a warm Saturday night, patrolling the unlit rural routes that wound around and across West Point Lake. At about 10 o’clock that night, we pulled behind a red Chevrolet pick-up that was going about 10 miles above the speed limit. Jason turned the volume down on the Midnight Oil album we’d been listening to. Riding shotgun, I turned on the blue light and held it to the windshield, my thumb doing double-time over the switch to create the perfect effect. I might have even been whistling siren noises at the time.

After a quarter mile or so, the truck slowed and stopped on the gravel shoulder. Jason and I stared at each other in amazement. Did we just pull this guy over? What do we do now?

Jason gave it half a second of thought, then stomped the accelerator. The red pick-up was a blur as we sped by. Jason did not slow down until we entered the city limits. Along the way, I looked nervously in the side-view mirror, expecting to see the Chevy’s headlights cresting the hill behind us, its driver furious at being snookered by a pair of skinny, wanna-be cops in a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta.

Fortunately, we got away. Jason and I took the blue light out on the road a couple more times that summer, but we made only half-hearted attempts at enforcing the county’s traffic code. My friend and I were just a few weeks away from going to college in different parts of the country. Neither of us wanted any trouble when we were so close to our first tastes of freedom.

I sometimes think about that summer and how we might have been charged with a felony if we’d been caught using a flashlight and a plastic cup to transform Jason’s Jetta into a Georgia patrol car. If that happened today, of course, we’d be on the six o’clock news, and all over social media. Our lives would be ruined, at least for a while.

That’s why I feel for the kids growing up in the smaller towns, and maybe even the kids in the cities, too. The tolerance level for teen-aged mistakes is a lot lower these days, and the amount of public shaming is at an all-time high. One act of stupidity, and a kid could be in serious trouble. And who hasn’t done something stupid when they’re young and bored and aching for a little bit of adventure, like pretending to be a patrol officer for a night?

Georgia on My Mind

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by ghosteye3 in A Plot for Pridemore, my life

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atlanta, barnes & noble, columbus, fiction, foxtale book shoppe, georgia, lagrange, lagrange memorial library, mercer university press, plot for pridemore, Stephen Roth, woodstock

One thing I have learned in my three-plus months as a published author: sometimes things don’t work out exactly as you had planned.

PlotForPridemore (2)I was originally slated to speak about A Plot for Pridemore at the Georgia Literary Festival in Augusta on the weekend of November 7-9. Last week, I learned that the festival had been canceled for this year. This sent me scrambling to set up new gigs to fill up my weekend visit to Georgia.

Thanks to some understanding folks who were willing to work with me on just a few weeks’ notice, I have been able to pull together a few appearances in the Peach State:

At 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 8, I will sign books and possibly do a reading from Pridemore at FoxTale Book Shoppe in Woodstock. FoxTale is one of the top independent bookstores in the Atlanta area, and has hosted many Mercer University Press authors over the years. I am thrilled that FoxTale is willing to fit me into its schedule on such short notice.

At 1 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 9, I will be signing books at the Barnes & Noble in Columbus. This will not be a formal author appearance, but I will be in the bookstore’s coffee shop to meet with people and chat.

Finally, at 6 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 10, I will be speaking and signing books at the LaGrange Memorial Library as part of its “Author Talk” series. This is especially meaningful because it is the first author event I have done in my hometown of LaGrange. I am really looking forward to catching up with friends I haven’t seen in a few years.

So that’s the plan for my trip to Georgia next month. If you happen to be around those parts on that particular weekend, or know someone who is, I would appreciate some company at any of my scheduled appearances. Can’t wait to get down there!

Book Review: The Harrowing

08 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by ghosteye3 in book review, fiction

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a plot for pridemore, book review, georgia, kenneth barber, kenneth w. barber, lagrange, suspense thriller, the harrowing

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The author of this book, Kenneth W. Barber, was a classmate of mine at LaGrange High School in Georgia. Back then, we knew him as Kenny. He was a funny, all-around good guy who worked with me on the high school newspaper, The Granger Blues. So even back then he was interested in writing. None of us had any idea of the dark, fantastical images that were lurking inside his head, however.

Now we know. The Harrowing is an apt title this suspense thriller that contains many vivid moments of gut-wrenching gore and nightmarish violence. This is Kenneth’s first book, but he already displays a knack for the genre as well as an uncommon talent for scene-setting and description. When private investigator Zoe Flynn notices a distant, darkly cloaked figure everywhere she goes, you can envision the cruel, demented grin hidden just beneath the figure’s black hat. Here’s how the writer describes it:

Across the rain-shrouded street a figure stood, watching. It was impossible to determine if it was a man or a woman. The clothing was all black and the brim of a large, black fedora obscured the face. A long, black trench coat wrapped the stranger in a veil of indistinctness. The rain had slacked to a misting wall of moisture that danced with wisps of fog and obscured the mysterious face to a wraith-like state.

At 265 pages, Harrowing is a fast-paced, entertaining journey. I had a hard time putting the book down as I tried to figure out what kinds of creatures were tormenting poor Zoe and her family, and why they were doing it. The battle being waged over the detective has many unexpected turns and takes a deeper look at human existence and spirituality than many horror novels. I found The Harrowing to be an engaging, thought-provoking first novel by a promising author. I’m looking forward to Mr. Barber’s next book.

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Thru-hiking. Truck-driving. Miles.

Jolie and Piper's Writing

Deidra Alexander's Blog

I have people to kill, lives to ruin, plagues to bring, and worlds to destroy. I am not the Angel of Death. I'm a fiction writer.

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Writing. Exploring. Learning.

Five More Minutes.....

I am a mother of five active, sometimes aggravating children that drive me crazy, provide me with lots of entertainment and remind me constantly about the value of love and family. I am married to my best friend. He makes me laugh every day (usually at myself). I love to eat, run, write, read and then eat again, run again…you get it. I am a children's author, having published four books with MeeGenuis (The Halloween Costume, When Santa Was Small, The Baseball Game, and The Great Adventure Brothers). I have had several pieces of writing published on Adoptive Families, Adoption Today, Brain Child, Scary Mommy, and Ten To Twenty Parenting. I am also a child psychologist, however I honestly think that I may have learned more from my parents and my children than I ever did in any book I read in graduate school. This blog is a place where I can gather my thoughts and my stories and share them with others. My writing is usually about kids and trying to see the world through their eyes, a few about parenting, adoption (one of my children is adopted) and some other random thoughts thrown in… I hope you enjoy them! So grab a cup of coffee, or a glass of wine, depending on what time of day it is (or what kind of day it is) and take a few minutes to sit back, relax and read. Please add your comments or opinions, I know you must have something to say, and I would love to hear it. Thanks for stopping by. Anne Cavanaugh-Sawan

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