Wonderful Day In The Neighborhood

Thursday was a good day!
Got a call from my friend Dave Whitehead and he said we could replace the brake pads on the front wheels of our Tahoe on Friday, he called back a bit later and asked if today would work around noon? Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth... I accepted, then he said, "my wife says you have to bring some magic!" I heard her laughing in the background thru the phone...
I arrived at Dave's and we took care of the brakes, Dave showing me how to do it and I did the second one, all went well. Then into the warm house we went, the boys, Trevor and Trenton excited because Dave's mom "Carrot" had arrived from Port Townsend bearing gifts of many kinds for them!
Soon I was performing card tricks, amazing Dave's wife Ronda, she really doesn't like magic because it frustrates her, Dave has mentioned this to me on several occasions. But Ronda was trooper and had fun being baffled along with the rest of the small gathering.
I ended the magic fest with the egg bag. I used Trenton in the magical mystery and his mouth turned into a great big "O" of surprise when his hand reached into the bag on the third try and found the egg! Now that's what I'm talking about!
I got home around two thirty, Joan was alone as Katie was at a friends, going to spend the night! She and Katie had been out getting their nails done. A good time for the two of them. We are going to a wedding this Saturday, so it was really nice to have them done.
My wife and I chose to go to a movie. We headed to Auburn and watched "The Great Debaters." Starring Denzel Washington and Forrest Whitaker. The movie was really good. A true story of a group of black students and their teacher from an all black college in Texas, in 1935. The debater's from Wiley college broke thru the race barrier of the time by becoming an elite debate team. (Denzel Washington,Jurnee Smollet,Nate Parker, & Denzel Whitaker, yes, Forrest's son) They were so good that they finally were able to debate at some white, er, Anglo Saxon colleges. They eventually took on Harvard and beat them. The movie is a bit hard to watch because of the "race" tensions, but it is one of those movies that needs to be watched. Kind of like Schindlers list. If we don't learn from the past, we are going to repeat it.
One thing is clear from the beginning of "The Great Debaters." Denzel Washington, who directed as well as stars in the film, knew that for it to inspire, motivate, educate, shame and grip, first of all it had to entertain. So he turns the tale of how tiny black Wiley College, of Marshall, Tex., out-argued the white national debate champion in 1935 into a stunner, almost a jubilee of emotion and suspense by the old standards of Hollywood melodrama.