Because, like most people, I don't live in LA or NYC, movies, TV shows and books are never set in places where I've lived. I've never been able to watch a movie and think \"Yeah, I know that place.\" Of course I never knew that was something I was missing, either. But, I just discovered that this guy, James Fenimore Cooper, wrote this book, \"The Last Of The Mohicans\", in 1825 and it's set in the area north of Albany NY, specifically at Fort William Henry on the south end of Lake George. I grew up in that area, and worked every summer either in Lake George village, or for the ice company that delivered all up and down the lake. Fort William Henry is still there, looking out over the lake, mildly entertaining tourists from NYC and Montreal.<\/p>\n
I haven't read the book, but we did watch the 1992 movie adaptation of it last weekend. And I was able to sit there, thinking \"Hey, half the streets in the area are named after the six people sitting at that table!\" and \"I used to ride my bike from Fort Edward to Fort William Henry - takes about an hour!\" \"That's my<\/i> place!\" Imagine my surprise! <\/p>\n
Looking at the scenery in the movie, I also thought \"Hey... those mountains, those shrubs, they all look familiar, but something about them is not quite right...<\/i>\" And that's because it was filmed, not in the Adirondacks where the story is set, but in my current home state of NC. So, I'm watching NC scenery (\"Hey, they're at Table Rock! We sat right on that boulder!\") standing in for upstate NY locations. Two for one!<\/p>\n
Yeah yeah, so I'm 21 years late.<\/p>\n
Now that I know the story, I'm baffled as to why:<\/p>\n
We had to read a lot of Dickens, Joyce and Shakespeare, innumerable British poets, Johnny Tremain<\/i>, The Scarlet Letter<\/i>, The Good Earth<\/i> but nothing set in the area. We studied the US revolution, US in the 1800s, the Chinese<\/i> revolution, US civics, etc., but I don't remember ever hearing about the French and Indian wars. Or maybe I was asleep that month. I did a lot of sleeping in high school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Because, like most people, I don't live in LA or NYC, movies, TV shows and books are never set in places where I've lived. I've never been able to watch a movie and think \"Yeah, I know that place.\" Of course I never knew that was something I was missing, either. But, I just discovered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19275"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19288,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19275\/revisions\/19288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}