Tom Lyford here. Bona fide Baby Boomer. Born in 1946. Grew up in my central Maine hometown of Dover-Foxcroft, where I still reside today. Taught high school English for 34 years (one year in Belfast, ME; ten years in Mexico, ME; and twenty-three years at Foxcroft Academy, Dover-Foxcroft, ME), retiring in 2002. Since then I’ve been a library clerk at our local Thompson Free Library. Married Phyllis (Raymond) Lyford, my high school sweetheart, back in 1966.
They say you are what you eat. Hmmm. Likewise, I think you are what you consume in the way of food for thought, for the brain, for the heart, and for the spirit. That being said…
Here’s just a scratching of the surface of the Art that has sustained me:
Singer/Songwriters (Bob Dylan, Carle King; Leonard Cohen, Harry Chapin, David Mallett, Bill Morrisey, Greg Brown, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Randy Newman; David Bromberg; John Hiatt; Tracy Chapman; Rickie Lee Jones; Tom Waits)
Poetry (Bukowski; e.e, cummings; Edwin Arlington Robinson; Tony Hoagland; Joyce Suthpen; Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Leonard Cohen)
Classic Cinema (Casablanca; Failsafe; Blow-up; Flight of the Phoenix {the original}; Thunder Road; The Manchurian Candidate {the original} Paper Moon; On the Beach; North by Northwest)
Offbeat Cinema (Magnolia; Paris, Texas; The Milagro Beanfield War; Memento; Donnie Darko; Raising Arizona; Run Lola Run; Shaun of the Dead; Being John Malkovich, Birdman; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Boondock Saints; anything Quentin Tarentino)
Sappy Romcoms too, strangely enough (Love Actually, The Goodbye Girl; Ghost; There’s Something About Mary; About Time; Groundhog Day; )
My Guilty Cinema Pleasures (Blade Runner;Terminator I, II, and III; The X-Files; The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai; Fight Club; Mars Attacks!; Reefer Madness: The Musical; Apocalypse Now; Bubba Ho-tep; The Purple Rose of Cairo; Mama Mia {yes me, always the hopeless romantic}; Natural Born Killers)
Literature (Moby Dick; The Grapes of Wrath; Sometimes a Great Notion; the works of Ray Bradbury; the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; the works of Stephen King; the works of John LeCarre;)
Offbeat TV Humor (The Simpsons; Seinfeld)
Creative Television (the original The Twilight Zone; Breaking Bad; Call the Midwife;
Offbeat plays (Shepherd’s True West and A Fool for Love; The House of Blue Leaves; Ed Graczyk’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean)
What Defines Me
Seeing Everyday Life as One Offbeat Adventure After Another, Rooting for the underdogs of the world, Animals (especially cats and kittens), Meeting New Offbeat Unusual People,
I’ve published 7 books of poetry and 2 memoirs. Some of my poems and stories are likely to “creep” into this blog from time to time…
Damn, I’ll Still hafta come back to this, I see…
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