I had no big plans for the Fourth until my friend Jennifer called yesterday morning and said, “Hey, you wanna go to a party at [famous local filmmaker]’s house?” So as not to invade this guy’s privacy, let’s call him, oh, Dicky Ledbetter. You’re probably familiar with his movies Stacker, Hazed and Contused and School of Jazz. Anyway, this sounded like a fine plan to me, so four of us made the drive out to the Ledbetter estate.


His pad was the sort of thing I'd probably come up with if someone dropped a few million in my lap. It's about 30 miles outside of town in the middle of the woods, and as you're driving in, it looks like your basic militia compound (and maybe it was once). I'm not sure how many buildings there were, but it was a sprawling maze of footpaths and Indiana Jones-style rickety swinging bridges. As we walked in, we were nearly plowed over by one of the many dune buggy-ish go-karts folks were driving around. The main party area was a cavernous two-story loft, the bottom half of which was the game room with pool, air hockey, foosball, vintage pinball and video games, a separate screening room and some kind of little padded nook that must have been the make-out room or something. Upstairs they had the burgers and hot dogs and whatnot, which you could chow down on while admiring Ledbetter's collection of gargantuan movie posters. I shot some hoops, played some darts, drank me some beers, then when it got dark we all gathered in a big field and watched some fireworks. Good times.