Whooping Llama

Here’s a story I recently had published in the Coal Valley News, the Boone County weekly I’m interning at this summer.

It’s a story as old as rock and roll. A bunch of friends get together, plug up some guitar amps and start messing around. Before too long, a band is born.

That’s exactly the way it worked out for members of When All Hope Fades, a local Christian metalcore band. Guitarist Shane Holstein and drummer Tyler Bunting met through their mutual friend Chris Adkins after Adkins transferred from Scott High (where Tyler goes) to Lincoln County High (which Shane attends).

According to the band’s MySpace page, Adkins, Holstein, and Bassist Nolan Graley were all a part of another Christian metal group called “The Darkest Vision.” Bunting joined for a while, later leaving to start another band called “Amidst the Throne.”

Both bands eventually broke up, leading to the formation of When All Hope Fades. Though the musicians had known and played with each other for about two years, this current musical incarnation is only about two months old.

Recently joining the fray is 18-year-old vocalist Justin Kimbler, a fresh Scott High graduate. The band had been searching for a front man for some time, and decided on Kimbler the night before Bunting and Holstein’s interview with the Coal Valley News.

Watching the video of his audition on MySpace, it’s easy to see why the guys of When All Hope Fades took to Kimbler. His guttural screams are almost superhuman. The longer one listens, the more one wonders how his vocal chords don’t spontaneously combust.

Bunting is a wonder in his own right. The meek 16-year-old would draw comparisons to Bleeker from the hit movie Juno before he would John Bonham or Keith Moon, but behind a drum set he produces heavy, spitfire rhythms that could fit anywhere in the rock spectrum.

When All Hope Fades will play their first gig as a band on July 1^st at a private party. The guys also hope to make their way into the recording studio sometime soon. They insist that visions of the big time aren’t occupying their minds at the moment, however. “That comes later. Right now we’re just having fun,” says Bunting.

You can contact members of When All Hope Fades by visiting their MySpace page, www.myspace.com/whenallhopefades304.

Here’s a story I recently had published in the Coal Valley News, the Boone County weekly I’m interning at this summer.

At its May 13^th meeting, the Danville Town Council unanimously voted to give the town’s five maintenance workers a $1/hour raise, effective immediately, to offset rising fuel costs.

Mayor Mark McClure suggested the raise, saying the workers “do a good job for us and we need to help them out.”

Building manager Bill Cook echoes McClure, especially in regards to the town’s two full-time maintenance workers, David and Terry Clark. “They’re honest and the community loves them,” Cook said of the brothers. “They have a work ethic that anybody would be proud of. I couldn’t ask for two finer people.

The town of Danville will also be hiring two part-time employees this summer to supplement its existing workforce. The additional workers will help cut weeds, mow grass, repair sidewalks and roads, and perform what Cook calls “general maintenance” for the town.

Here’s a story I recently had published in the Coal Valley News, the Boone County weekly I’m interning at this summer.

For the last ten years, Sam Massey has made her living answering phone calls—not as a receptionist for some law firm or business office, but as a dispatcher for the Boone County 911 Emergency Center. Every day, and multiple times a day, Sam answers calls from folks in desperate need of help, often in situations where someone’s life hangs in the balance.

One can imagine she’d need a short vacation every now and then, and in April she took one to her camp in Hinton. Work, however, would not stay at work. On April 10^th, Sam’s phone rang with another emergency.

Her 74-year-old grandmother, Cannissa Coon, was ill.

“They called and told us that they were taking her out to the hospital and probably five or six minutes later they called back, saying she was getting worse,” says Massey. “They called back again and said she was unconscious, and then they called back and said she wasn’t breathing.”

It was then that Massey’s dispatcher training came to her aide. Just as she had countless times before, she walked a caller through the steps of CPR…only this time the caller was her uncle Scott, and the patient was her grandmother.

“You take these calls in, but whenever it’s your family you’ve got to really keep your emotions under control and do the best you can to make things turn out good,” Massey said. “It is different whenever it’s your family but like I was telling the people at work, all the training that I have kicked in and I could see everything I was supposed to do”

Under Sam’s guidance, Scott and another of Cannissa’s granddaughters performed CPR until an ambulance arrived and its crew took over. By this point, Coon had been unconscious for twelve minutes.

The paramedics moved to intubate her but just before they did, she drew a breath. Coon was flown by helicopter to HOSPITAL, where she was put on a ventilator. After five days she was taken off the machine and made a miraculous recovery, thanks in part to the actions of her son and granddaughters.

“At the hospital they said if it wasn’t for me and my uncle and my cousin that was there helping him, that she would probably be dead,” Massey said.

Coon concurs. Though she’s now “doing great”, she admits that “if my son hadn’t come in when he did and my granddaughter wouldn’t have been here, I don’t know what would have happened. I just know, between the kids and the good Lord, I lived.”

I had to write this screenplay back in the fall for a class I took. It’s been sitting around on my thumb drive ever since, so I figured…what the heck, I’ll post the thing. So, for your reading enjoyment, I present to you One Last Time. It’s a western, with an honest-to-God, Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood-style anti-hero with a heart of gold, named after a Protestant theologian. There are guns, there are horses, there are prostitutes…and they’re all wrapped up in a handy little PDF file.

One Last Time (PDF, 77.8kb)

NOTE: The middle part is in treatment (as in, I just tell you what goes on without any dialogue or camera shots or anything) because Dr. Weiss said it could be…so there.

NOTE #2: If any Hollywood execs or enterprising indie filmmakers out there want to make this thing, lemme know.