Lake City alum starring on Broadway

Put your hands together for Bill and Kathy Booth’s wunderkind son, Steve. Who opens on Broadway in the lead role in the rock musical “Glory Days” on May 6. Steve cut his teeth as a thespian on Sandra Seaton’s stage at Lake City High and has performed in a number of roles with the Coeur d’Alene Summer Theatre. Now, he’s getting a variety of write-ups for “Glory Days,” from the Washington Post to Playbill, from USA Today to Theatermania. Which provides this capsule about the play: “The show is about four high school buddies reuniting for the first time about a year after graduation. While they banded together for mutual support during high school, they find that they’ve now changed.” Nick Blaemire (music and lyrics) and James Gardiner (book) produced the play of 15 songs that runs for 85 minutes without a break. Ticket cost: $97.50. You can preview the music and hear brief interviews with Booth and the other cast members (Andrew C. Call, Adam Halpin and Jesse JP Johnson) on YouTube by searching for “Glory Days” and “Steven Booth.” In an e-mail exchange, Bill Booth reminded me that I once wrote that Junior was the CdA summer theater cast member “most likely to play Broadway.” Dang, I love it when I’m right.

Forgotten?

Tom Forbes, of the Palousitics blog down Moscow-Pullman way, is happy that Pullman Mayor Glenn Johnson (aka “The Voice of the Cougs”) survived a medical scare this week. And that Johnson didn’t rely on KXLY to get him to the right hospital. Seems KXLY initially reported that Johnson was in the ICU at “Gritman Memorial” in Pullman. Only Gritman Medical Center is in Moscow. After Tom called the station to say that the Pullman mayor was at Pullman Regional Hospital, KXLY changed the story to say he was at Gritman in Moscow. Eventually, KXLY got it right. The Money Times Web site nailed the hospital where Mayor Johnson was taken, but it published the wrong mug shot with the story. “They seem to have picked some random picture of a white guy with white hair to be Glenn Johnson,” commented April E. Coggins on the Palousitics site. I’d probably rub it in to KXLY more, but Palousitics is still peeved by the SR’s admitted mistake not to review the recent Elton John concert at WSU. All of which is captured in the Palousitics title of the Johnson post: “Pullman: The Land Spokane Forgot.”

Huckleberries

Coeur d’Alene High student Aaron Baldwin is another aspiring young thespian. One of the stars of the CHS’ “High School Musical” play last year, young Baldwin’s playing Gaston in the Christian Youth Theater/Spokane production of “Beauty and the Beast” at the Bing Crosby Theater/Spokane next month. And if you didn’t know that, his mother Baldwin has a fistful of small flyers in her purse to tell you … On his blog this week, Dennis Mansfield, ex-Idaho Family Forum founder and ex-congressional wannabe, makes a persuasive argument why Demo Larry LaRocco could beat Repub Lt. Gov. Jim Risch this fall in the U.S. Senate sweepstakes. He uses 1994 upset wins by the late Helen Chenoweth-Hage over GOP fave David Leroy in the primary election and then U.S. Rep. LaRocco in the general as his model … Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Sandpoint native who attended North Idaho College and UIdaho, and hubby, Todd, welcomed Baby No. 5, Trig Paxson Van Palin, into their home April 18.

Parting shot

Buddy David Bond, who globe trots for the Silver Valley Mining Journal, contends in his Wallace Street Journal column that we should quit whining about winter. And do what the Swiss do. When the Swiss are tired of winter, Bond pens, “they burn it down and then they blow it up in a splendid festival called Sechselauten – meaning in contemporary English, the Sixth Ringing Festival.” On the third Monday of April each year, Zurich sun worshippers “haul an effigy of Winter, which looks like a snowman and named appropriately the Boogg, into the old town square, parade and drink around it for far too many hours, then they set fire to the 100-foot-high pyre of straw and hay and wood he sits upon.” And if the fire doesn’t do its job in a timely manner? They blow the Boogg up. North Idaho should follow suit – after it renames Sechselauten and moves the date up at least a month.