I want to help others ‘think first’ before diving into a pool or lake to prevent these types of life-changing accidents. I know I’m in a very fortunate minority and hope my story inspires both adults and children to be more careful.
When I was a kid a growing up in Ontario, Canada, Lake Erie was so polluted, I never thought it would ever, EVER be turned around where they could start cleaning it out in my lifetime!
You don’t know when you are immersed in a book what the reaction to it will be, but I feel great about ‘The Lake of Dreams.’
One of my dreams was always to have a piano – a room with a piano overlooking the ocean or a lake.
We have the most beautiful planet – the Rockies, the purple fields of the United States, the Lake District, the Pyrenees, the turquoise seas of the tropics.
When I look at Lake Michigan each July, I imagine the men of the Indianapolis visible on the horizon; dark heads, struggling arms, a cry and whirl of a world being remade. I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness, accompanied by a desire to yell out that they will be rescued.
Lake Como has always been a magnet for the elite.
Charles Wyly was born Oct 13, 1933, in Lake Providence, La., and for a period lived with his family in a shack without electricity or plumbing.
After I graduated college, I moved to L.A. I started working for the Garry Marshall Theatre in Toluca Lake and did theater at the Hudson Theatre in Santa Monica. I paid my dues by working at every single restaurant in the Grove until they fired me. I worked an overnight shift at the Mondrian Hotel.
We go to Montana every year – that’s where my husband is from – Flathead Lake, Montana, which is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to in my life. It’s amazing that his entire family lives there. There’s waterskiing, jet skiing, and kayaking, and it’s just really fun.
The best largemouth bass fishing I’ve ever encountered was at Lake Huites, a vast impoundment on the outskirts of the Sierra Madre Occidentals in Sinaloa, Mexico.
I feel like Salt Lake is a home for me now and it’s become a home for my family.
My favorite bands were Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Uriah Heep, Grand Funk Railroad. If you listen to some of my early music, you can hear it.
Despite all the silver of Diana and Mercury, their images will be found on the lake. For the sculptor looking for new clay, he and his people will be flooded with gold.
On Memorial Day, I was out floating on Lake Norman and came across Denny Hamlin. We struck up a conversation, and one of the first things we were talking about was how much it helped him when he started racing the Cup car and how much it helped his Nationwide program.
The first time the Kirov ballet was seen in America was on Sept. 11, 1961. The ballet was ‘Swan Lake.’ The ballerina was Inna Zubkovskaya. The place was the old Met, on what must have been one of the hottest nights of the year, and there was no air-conditioning.
I hated Matthew Bourne’s ‘Swan Lake’ when it first turned up, and then when it was televised, and then when it returned.
What ‘War and Peace’ is to the novel and ‘Hamlet’ is to the theater, Swan Lake’ is to ballet – that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form.
We were having a sleepover when I was eight or nine, and we all got to stay up late and watch the original ‘Frankenstein.’ It was uncensored, so as a child, I saw the scene where he throws the little girl into the lake, and that freaked me out. Though not as much as when he hangs the hunchback.
‘Top Of The Lake’ is a great story with a beginning, and a middle and an end, about darkness – it’s like the heart of darkness. And everybody has got one. When I was reading it, I couldn’t put it down, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next.
My father was a great outdoorsman. From when I was about six we would spend countless hours together in the woods or on a lake. He taught me how to skin a rabbit and pluck a wild turkey. He showed me there is much more to nature than we can ever understand.
On my job I end up jumping out of planes. Last week I got in an 18-wheeler and drove down a runway onto a skid track. The week before that they put me in a car and sunk me to the bottom of a lake to see if I could escape without an oxygen tank.
The truth is, I can never die. For I will be in everything and see you in everything and watch over you. I am your reaction in the water of a mountain lake.
Capo, my first golden retriever, so loved to swim she once jumped off a cliff to get into Lake Superior.
I collect old Coon Chicken Inn memorabilia. I collect black memorabilia, like old minstrel posters. It was a real place. There was one in Seattle, one in Portland, and one in Salt Lake City. They started in 1925, and then they went out of business around 1958.
My 2005 calendar we actually did a shoot in Lake Las Vegas. Since I had requests do some swimwear and athletic shots we tried them and they came out good so we inserted them into the new calendar.
I’m definitely writing my fears. It’s almost therapeutic to at least voice a terror, to say, ‘I’m worried that Lake Powell looks low and Lake Mead looks even lower.’
I often think that the last holiday is the greatest, but then some really stand out in my mind. One of the best was one my wife and I had in the Lake District. We stayed in a B&B and walked around the countryside for two weeks.
If you want me to perform in Silver Lake – where it looks like ‘Vice’ magazine threw up everywhere, where all the men are wearing V-necks to their belly buttons, salmon pants, and carrying a screenplay – I’ll do it, because they might appreciate a Banksy joke I can’t do anywhere else.
Oh, yes, I taught 13 and a half years. I taught English, first at a Catholic school and then at El Toro High School in Lake Forest, Calif.
My youngest brother and I went on a ten-day canoe trip in Bowron Provincial Park in British Columbia years ago. Believe it or not, we took only granola, thinking we’d be eating a lot of lake trout. Well, we neglected to bring along a net, and our fishing line was only 8-lb. test.
My mother and my sisters – five girls – were crazy about glamour and Hollywood movies. I styled myself on Veronica Lake and Marlene Dietrich.
My cottage is on Lake Huron and it’s always nice to have the chance to get away and hear the waves crashing while reading a good book.
I have these vivid – some fabulous, some not so fabulous – childhood memories of driving to Lake Tahoe.
Sometimes, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake.
I hadn’t really thought about this until ‘The Lake of Dreams,’ but I’ve set all my stories in places that are familiar to me. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters.
If you ever go to Temple Square in Salt Lake City, if you stay there long enough, you’ll see a homeless person standing in the middle of their nice, beautiful square, holding out a cup for change. And the Mormons don’t ever ask him to leave.
I don’t come from Lake Wobegon, and that world is not mine. It’s not that funny to me. It’s funny to other people, and I’m not judging it, but the world that I come from is not considered funny by other people as well. There’s so much pain in it.
‘The Lake of Dreams’ grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel.
Jayne Houdyshell and I – when I was 17 years old – did summer stock together at the Timber Lake Playhouse in Mt. Carroll, IL. She was the leading lady of the company, and I was an intern.
I write for a radio show that, no matter what, will go on the air Saturday at five o’clock central time. You learn to write toward that deadline, to let the adrenaline pick you up on Friday morning and carry you through, to cook up a monologue about Lake Wobegon and get to the theater on time.
I think I have lived in every part of L.A. except downtown. Everywhere from Topanga Canyon to Toluca Lake.
Once you become a professional, to get through a ballet like ‘Swan Lake’ – four acts as the lead, changing character – the perseverance is incredible. It takes a lot to make it through and keep the same energy throughout the entire performance.
I planned to stop in 2002 after the Salt Lake City Olympics. I felt able to remain competitive another four years, and I wanted to stop while I’m still at the top.
I guess because I came to it later in life, I realized, ‘Oh, going to a fashion show is like going to the opening of Degas at the Met or going to see Swan Lake.’
I have had so many great moments, but I would have to say that dancing the Swan in ‘Swan Lake’ was such a unique and passionate experience for me. It was such bloody hard work, even at that very early age, that I would not want to try to replicate it again now.
There are a lot of funny motels. There was one motel in the middle of nowhere: it was real plain, but it had a gigantic green monster, something like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, standing next to this lake.
No hidden talents, but I have a lot of hobbies. Acrylic painting – I got a whole set, and I light candles at night and sit there and paint and look out on Lake Michigan.
Growing up, some of my best memories are visiting my grandparents who had a house on a lake not too far from Waukesha.
