No "Doubt" at The Hickory Community Theatre

Wow. The world may be filled with doubt but there is absolutely NO doubt about the Hickory Community Theatre. And there can be no doubt about the actor and actresses who played the roles of the characters in the screen play or about the director, Pamela Livingstone, or about the writer, John Patrick Shanley, or about the 100 or so residents of Hickory who showed up to watch this magnificent performance in downtown Hickory at the "Fireman's Kitchen".

After the performance was completed, about forty or fifty of us spectators remained in the "Kitchen" (really an intimate cabaret) as the actor and actresses changed into civvies and came back out on the stage, set down and engaged in a discussion about the play, the characters, the actors, the audience and the feelings involved. This went on for about thirty more minutes. Two couples in the audience, when we all were asked, said they had seen the movie. Both agreed the movie was "great" but this play, one said was "stunning". The other couple said they loved the movie but what they saw tonight was "devastating". (If you haven't seen the movie or the play, those are both compliments.) I made the photo from our seat at a small table for four before the play began, and we watched it unfold from this distance. The best seat in the place? No doubt.

Hickory Airport and Musuem

Amazingly nice airport for a general aviation field. Runways of 4,400 (01/19) and 6,400 feet (06/24) should be more than ample for current needs and permit a substantial growth into the immediate future.

The interior of the terminal is very well appointed and appears more than adequate. It has a restaurant, "Froggy Pete's - Where Life is Always Delicious" that serves from 0800 to 1600 Monday through Saturday (824-324-7800).
A small "waiting room" is well laid out. No baggage claim area but then there are no commercial flights here either.

The airport has a museum that looks interesting although small. There is a lot of emphasis about military flights during World War II. It is open Saturdays from 1000 to 1700 and Sundays from 1300 to 1700. Otherwise by appointment. 828-323-1963.
There is a static display of ancient military jet aircraft right outside the museum on the edge of the flight line. You can wander around and look at the old airplanes and there are a lot of interesting views, including one that startled me. I glanced to my right and suddenly
for a second I was back on a flight line in Vietnam! A chilly wind easily blew that feeling away. But it was a chilling feeling too. Funny how young I felt for a moment. . . .

Doctors

Doctors? Oh yes. Well, what can I say? We've all seemed to have had run-ins with them lately, and it is like meeting another species of being. Most of them are pretty up to date technologically, but professionally they seem not yet to have ventured out of the gothic house in which they learned their expensive tricks.

White smocks and stetheys and rubber gloves they may brandish boldly, but most of them might be more at home in a grass skirt and a nose-bone while waving feathers in the air, shaking cans full of rattling things and blowing smoke at their patient’s ailments.

Of course I speak from a quarter century of teaching college students principles of management, a science so arcane that practitioners in fields like medicine, religion or education have not yet even heard of it, and would either charge it a fee, burn it at a stake, or send it to the corner of their room if they even knew about it.

But it’s sadly true that, at least in America under our pharmaceutically insured get-rich-quick schemes for the great medical corporations, the word “doctor” refers not to a professional teacher who examines people and helps them achieve and enjoy a healthy life, but to a very high priced hit-man who sees you as a disease that needs to be eradicated or destroyed.

Once “treated” the patient is then left to die on his own - or perhaps live on for a while - who knows, because the “doctor” will never follow up to see what happened. “Control”, the fifth function of management you know, is only used by doctors in relation to their retirement accounts or if one of their patients fails to pay.

More than this I dare not say because one of my children IS a doctor, and one of my grandchildren may well be one too within the next few years. But then, what do they know?