Happy Groundhog Day. Like Bill Murray's 1993 movie of that name, the items in today's column follow a "been there, done that" theme:
CINDERELLA — Last week, someone broke into student Lindsay Pearce's car at Modesto Junior College. The 18-year-old feared the thief had stolen an absolute necessity: her glass slippers.
Glass slippers?
Indeed, the budding actress stars in the title role in "Cinderella," staged by the Tri-Valley Repertory group at Livermore's Bankhead Theater and concludes Sunday.
She began an immediate search for a replacement pair. Not exactly the kind of thing you find at Payless Shoe Source.
No luck shoe shopping, but it turned out that she didn't need it. She had an old pair — albeit smaller, less comfortable and made of plastic — and wore them during the first act of the Jan. 29 performance. During the intermission, though, she needed to see if she could dance in the tighter-fitting pair.
"The second act opens with the ballroom dance," Pearce said. "I was onstage practicing in them. They were creaking."
As she rehearsed a waltz, another cast member came to her carrying the missing glass slippers. (No, it wasn't handsome prince.)
"She said, 'Are these yours?' " Pearce said.
Turns out she'd never taken them from the theater in the first place.
She put them on. They fit. You know the rest of the story.
AGING GRACEFULLY — A couple of weeks ago, I made note of Oakdale resident Vera Piccetti's 107th birthday. Is she the oldest person in Stanislaus County? Glad I didn't make that claim.
I received a call last week about Angie Hatton, who will turn 108 in July. She was born July 30, 1902, in Sumrall, Miss., roughly seven months before Piccetti.
To put Hatton's longevity into perspective, consider that she came into the world a decade before the Titanic sank and was almost 4 years old when the San Francisco earthquake struck in 1906. She's outlived her husband and four of their 10 children.
Besides her surviving children, Hatton has 21 grandchildren, 30 great-grandchildren and eight great-great-grandchildren and sees them all regularly, granddaughter Kari Hatton-Bettencourt said.
Hatton still lives at home in Modesto, her health is excellent and she is being tracked by a UCLA program that monitors the so-called super centenarians, those who live to 110 and beyond.
PSST! HEY, KID ... — The Gallo Center for the Arts came up with an ingenious way to fill seats in tough economic times. For some shows, seniors 60 and older and students with a driver's license or other valid ID can purchase discounted tickets at the box office on the day of the performance. None of these tickets will cost more than $20.
This, of course, could create a "shoulder-tap" in reverse. Instead of kids trying to recruit an adult to buy them alcohol outside of a convenience store, will we now see adults lurking outside the Gallo Center?
"Psst! Hey, kid! Can I get you to buy me a couple of tickets to see Righteous Brother Bill Medley?"
HISTORY IN THE REMAKING — Last week, The Bee's Joan Barnett Lee photographed 5-month-old Landon Holt, who received his first haircut courtesy of 88-year-old barber Bob Coon of Riverbank. Coon is Landon's great-great-grandfather, and Landon became the 17th boy in the family to get his first pruning from Coon during his 62 years behind the chair. (Little Landon, of course, passed on the hot-towel shave.) The photo package appeared on Page B-1 of Friday's Bee and on modbee.com.
Saturday, the Holt family got a call asking them to bring Landon back to the barbershop for a do-over. A crew from Channel 13 in Sacramento had Coon and Landon repeat the shearing, which then was shown on the station's newscast that evening and misled viewers to believe they were seeing the original moment.
Sorry, it was a rerun.
Jeff Jardine's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in Local News. He can be reached at 578-2383 or jjardine@modbee.com
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