Tim Kelly – Sunset Observer #35, by Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture | @MDWorld

October 8, 2014 Whitney Farmer 0 Comments

@farmer_whitney (Twitter/FLICKR) or farmerwhitney (Instagram) and Facebook

Whitney Farmer graduated from McLane High School, Class of 1982, but occasionally dated the ‘81s.

Tim had plans to make me a starlet in a slasher film. He was way ahead of his time.

This was before the “Friday the 13th” movie and then franchise would be spawned. Another friend would do his first SFX job on that set. He said that the key to movie gore isn’t the color…It’s the texture.

The problem that Tim encountered in his Svengali dream, however, was that I was scared of boys. I hid it well behind my cheerleading outfit, but it was the reason that I was secretly grateful that my parents wouldn’t allow me to date until I was 16.

Tim had organized a film shoot downtown at that hotel that always reminded everyone of the movie “Logan’s Run”. His plan was to try for an R rating by doing a languid shot of a guy named Alan and I making out on the concrete beside the pool in our bathing suits. His hand would move out of camera range and suggest that he was doing the wrong thing in my bathing suit before we rolled together like a burrito into the pool. And CUT. Later, I think Tim planned for us both to die badly on film because we had acted so badly and needed to be punished.

He approached me about his plan and I declined. But for whatever reason, he chose to reject my rejection. On the morning of the shoot, he called me from a payphone at the hotel to try one more time to get me there. The logistics of getting even a willing starlet across town on short notice when she has no car and is in fact too young to drive never slowed him down. He had a remarkable capacity for recruiting the Many to the Few – or to the One – to commit shenanigans.

I can’t remember who was selected as my understudy. She is probably famous now. And in this I am content because it took eons for me to get over my fear of boys. It started happening just about when they started becoming men, ironically at the time when I should have been on high alert.

I would kiss. But inside it was more like daring myself to do something scary, like open a closet door in a dark room. You do it fast with a lot of noise and with your jaw clenched. No one will ever know you are chicken. My worst tell in this poker game between the sexes was that I would giggle. A boy, ensconced in confidence, would tease me and I would have nothing to say. So drawing a blank, I would giggle. I wished I had a finishing move like Bruce Lee. Or at least his “Game of Death” yellow onesie.

Back then, school dances were bizarre. Of all the rules of conduct that were laid down, did no one in the administration see what was happening on the dance floor as soon as a slow song was put on the record player by the DeeJay?!? The way we would press against each other then is stunning to me. The only off-limits area was a girl’s Levi 501-shielded backside. If her partner dropped his hands too low, multiple flags would be thrown on the field. But no one in authority seemed to care about what was happening all over the front zone. Now, if a guy in a club in L.A. tried to cover that much surface area on a woman, he would be escorted out by two Samoan security guards and be glad he lived to tell the tale.

Tim instinctively knew that hormones were a catalyst in entertainment, taking dormant elements and causing them to frantically react. The same formula worked with humor, and his artistic choices continue to be excavated and chronicled. Our resident ‘narc’ who everyone knew was an undercover cop was named Popejoy. And by coincidence, so was Tim’s little pet pig. He was ruthless in using any means necessary to remain free of mature behavior. Except when it was the perfect decision to make as a young man with integrity and promise.

I remember seeing him for the first time as Drum Major for the Highlanders. He looked like a warrior. And in Fresno heat and dust, dressed like a Royal Scotsman in battle regalia, Tim looked like a natural. It was Fresno that was out of place in that vignette.

I didn’t hear about his death because I was living in British Columbia in the Chilcotin, on a lake about 10 kilometers from Kleena Kleene, population 13. I went there the first time in September after graduation, and it was the first time I had been in a place where it was possible to encounter no sights or sounds of human life.

I would sleep with my window open at night on the second floor of the lodge because I mistakenly thought that it was too high for grizzlies to get in. I would hear the flocks of geese settle in for the night on the lake before it began to freeze and they flew south before the snow, and I would hear wolves in the distance.

There was a party line that the whole valley shared, maybe 400 square kilometers. Each location had its own designated combination of short and long rings, and the phones had levers on them that you would crank accordingly to call your party of choice. The hunting lodge where I was at was two short rings and one long one, if I remember right.

One night, the operator from Williams Lake put a call through from Fresno. I came in from the moonlit hockey game we were playing on the frozen lake, and it was my mother telling me that one of the girls who had been on my cheerleading squad had been shot and killed. A few months later, another call was cranked into the valley by the Williams Lake station operator. I heard the voice of an unfamiliar child telling me that he had gotten an ATV from Santa at Christmas.  I only learned that it was my nephew Johnny when my Mom got on the line to wish me Merry Christmas. Johnny had been too young to speak when I had left Fresno.

In all the things I remember, I can’t remember how I found about Tim’s death. And I have decided that I am very glad about that.

Photo of Tim Kelly, from our yearbook, swiped by me from a posting by James Acomb on the McLane High School Group Page on Facebook. Apologies but thanks…

NEXT WEEK: Arno Strasser