Don't Panic! Starman Roadster launched

Copied from BUSINESS INSIDER Feb. 6, 2018

SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket — the company's biggest yet — into space on Tuesday. It carried Elon Musk's own midnight-cherry red Tesla Roadster. Soon after the launch, Musk tweeted out a live feed of the car, and its driver — a dummy named Starman (after the David Bowie song) — with Earth in the background.

It's not the only pop culture reference in this car. Right in the middle of the car, on the center screen, are the words "Don't Panic." It's a reference to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," the 1979 book that was first in a series by Douglas Adams about an accidental space traveler named Arthur Dent. In the story, the Guide itself has the words "Don't Panic" on its cover.

Musk, who first read "The Hitchhiker's Guide" as a teenager, has said that he loves the book. In a 2015 interview he said the spaceship from the book was his favorite from science fiction. "I'd have to say [my favorite] would be the one in 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' that's powered by the improbability drive," Musk said.

Historic Chaffin’s Barn Dinner Theatre 

Has New Owner 

 By Kelly Lapczynski

Staff Writer, Tullahoma News  

When the lights went down on the final show of Chaffin’s Barn Dinner Theatre’s 50th season on Dec. 30, it was a bittersweet moment for retiring owners John and Janie Chaffin.  

The season-capping musical “Glad Tidings” was the last production the couple would produce in the historic professional theater — Nashville’s first — that opened its doors in 1967. 

But, thanks to a careful sale of the property, the season’s last production was not the theater’s last. In fact, to see that it would continue, the Chaffins delayed their retirement for years. 

Chaffin's Barn

The theater, known affectionately as “the Barn,” had been quietly for sale before it was publicly placed on the market in early 2014; but fearing that the Nashville icon would be destroyed by commercial developers, the Chaffins waited for a buyer who would keep the theater alive. They found that buyer in Nashville businesswoman Norma Luther, who bought the 2.77-acre property at 8204 Highway 100 for $2.09 million with the intention of continuing the theater’s legacy. 

Norma Luther

“Miss Norma is a godsend for us,” said John Chaffin at a retirement event held Monday night in the couple’s honor. “Janie and I tried for four years to sell this place – we wanted to retire four years ago – and everybody wanted to buy it, but they didn’t want to keep it. They wanted to put something else here.”

“We were about to give up,” he said. “And out of the clear blue this lady fell out of the sky the first of December and suddenly, 30 days later, she owned it. She is going to be a fabulous person for this theater. She’s going to keep it going. She’s going to make it what it needs to be and what we hope it stays.” 

A standing room only crowd of more than 300 professional actors, technicians and longtime patrons were on hand Monday to celebrate what Luther called “the legacy of John and Janie Chaffin over the last 50 years.” 

John and Janie Chaffin (center front) with Chaffin's Barn alumni and friends 

Nashville’s first professional theater

When it opened in 1967, the Barn Dinner Theater was part of a Roanoke, Virginia-based franchise.

Looking to expand into Nashville, franchise owner Howard Douglass Wolfe — the “father of dinner theater” — took an interest in a remote property in rural Bellevue that belonged to Manchester-born Asberry Warden “A.W.” Chaffin. 

But Chaffin, who then ran a commercial construction company in Nashville, had another idea. Rather than sell, the retired World War II Army captain chose to buy into the franchise and build the theater himself. 

A. W. "Big John" Chaffin

A.W.’s son John would oversee the construction job – the company’s last – and on March 29, 1967 the Barn would open to a sold-out house.

That night’s production of Muriel Resnick’s “Any Wednesday” introduced professional theater to Nashville. 

Franchise creator Howard Wolfe and wife, A.W. Chaffin and wife Edna Lou and John P. Chaffin and wife Shirley at the 1967 opening.

At the time, the now nationally-recognized Nashville Children’s Theatre was operating as an amateur company and it would be more than a decade before the Tennessee Performing Arts Center (TPAC, 1980) and its resident production company, Nashville Repertory Theatre (then called Tennessee Repertory Theatre, 1985) would expand the Nashville performing arts scene. 

To cast professional actors, then, Chaffin set up a New York office in the Ed Sullivan Building, where the productions were also staged.

Once a show was on its feet, the actors took it on the road, traveling from one Barn franchise theater to the next — from New York to Texas, there were 27 in all — to perform. 

Each theater, built to Wolfe’s design, had living quarters upstairs to accommodate the traveling actors, complete with a kitchen, showers and bedrooms which doubled as dressing rooms. In the dinner hours before each performance, cast members would mingle with the audience, serving as waiters. Then, a half hour before “curtain,” they would rush upstairs to prepare for the show. 

Despite the theatrical lingo, though, there is no curtain at the Barn. Instead, since 1967, actors have appeared on set as the patented “Magic Stage” descends, elevator-style, from its second floor home to the first floor audience. 

The First 50 Years

  

When the franchise operation fell apart just two years after Chaffin’s investment in it, the Barn Dinner Theatre was still Nashville’s only professional theater. So, in 1969, Chaffin and his wife, Edna Lou (“Puny”) moved the production company to Nashville and continued the tradition of casting and housing out-of-town actors in professional shows. 

During the Barn’s early years, actors would come fresh off Broadway or Off-Broadway performances to appear at the Barn. Even Hollywood actors would perform there, if not in front of a theater audience.

In a memorable scene from director Robert Altman’s influential 1975 film “Nashville,” actress Gwen Welles – as would-be singer Sueleen Gay – descends on Barn’s “Magic Stage” to perform for an all-male audience, only to find that the entertainment she was hired to provide had nothing to do with her voice. 

A captured image of Welles in Altman's "Nashville." 

Within a year of Altman’s visit, John Chaffin purchased the business from his father, allowing A.W. to retire in 1976. John’s production company, Professional Artists Productions, Inc. (PAPI) would continue to send actors on the road to dinner theaters throughout the southeast until, one by one, those theaters began to close. 

By 1979, the dinner theater circuit had all but dried up; so John and his then wife, Dianne, decided to sell the business to an investor, Highland Inns. 

Highland Inns, later known as Advantage Corporation, ran the theater for a short time before handing the reins to manager Ken Tanner in 1984. But the business Tanner inherited was troubled. Under Advantage, the Barn had become part of a package deal that included under-performing theaters on the circuit. Though the Barn itself was reportedly doing well, Tanner was forced to close the business in the summer of 1985. In 1986, John and Dianne would reclaim the theater and open it once more under the name that would signify their return: Chaffin’s Barn Dinner Theatre. 

The Barn re-opened with the 1986 production of "The Odd Couple"

Over the next 30 years, fewer out-of-state actors would be hired to perform in Nashville. Instead, the Barn would become a sort of proving ground for regional talent, launching scores of actors to “Nashville favorite” status both at the Barn and at the handful of professional theaters that now call the city home. 

Though today’s actors rarely wait tables before their performance, many of Nashville’s favorite actors can still be found waiting tables at the Barn when they are between performance contracts.

Over the course of its 50 years, Chaffin’s Barn has delighted millions of theatergoers. Today, it has the distinction of being the second oldest dinner theater in the nation. Only its one-time franchise sister, the Barn Dinner Theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina, opened in 1964, is older. 

Both still make use of the patented “Magic Stage.” 

A Family Business

Former Nashville newspaper reporter Wendell Melvin, a longtime neighbor and friend of the family, noted Monday that the success of the theatre rested on John Chaffin’s endless talents. “He was involved in so many things that if we gave him titles, he’d have as many titles as a silent movie,” he said. 

It’s undoubtedly true. Not only has Chaffin, 73, been the Barn’s owner and financial operator, but over the years he could also be found filling myriad roles in service to the theatre and its restaurant. Depending on the day, Chaffin could be found in the scene shop building sets, behind a keyboard writing plays, in the theatre directing actors, in the kitchen preparing the evening meal or in the theatre’s tucked-away darkroom developing and printing the photos he took to promote each show. 

The 1974 cast of "Not Now, Darling" included Dianne Chaffin, right of center in fur

As the Barn’s resident handyman, Chaffin could also be found making last-minute electrical or plumbing repairs; but to the family of actors and staff that Chaffin jokingly called “dependents,” the favorite place to find him was in his second floor office, signing checks.

“The Barn has always, from its beginning, been a family,” said Chaffin. “We are quite close. They don’t mind asking for money.”

“This place is all about family,” agreed longtime patron Nelda Sturgeon. “It’s a very dear and special place to so many people.”

Sturgeon attended her first Barn show at age 13 as the daughter of the Barn’s first season ticket holder. Through 41 years, her father, Bob Lee, never missed a production at the Barn. After his death in 2008 at age 90, he was memorialized in the theatre’s lobby. 

“When my father passed, I could come back here and this is where we felt like he was,” said Sturgeon. “They kept his memory alive.”

Now, thanks to Luther, the Chaffin legacy will also be kept alive in the venerable theatre. Before inviting the Chaffins to speak, Luther presented the couple with a plaque that would forever honor them, marking the table where they would be granted lifetime seating at the theatre. 

“I’ve always said that I don’t think there’s anything you can enjoy for 50 years,” said John Chaffin after hundreds lifted their glasses in a unified toast to him. “But this has been one hell of a good ride.” 

A City Remembers

Presenting the Chaffins with a proclamation in their honor Monday, Nashville Metro Council member Sheri Weiner and former member Charlie Tygard announced, “The Chaffins have built a Nashville legend, as the backbone of professional and local theater in Nashville and Middle Tennessee.”

“During the past 50 years, over three million people have made the trek to the ‘big red barn’ in Bellevue, witnessing some of the best shows to be produced in Music City.”

The Barn’s legacy of “launching careers for actors who have gained critical and audience acclaim all over the country” was later evident as Luther shared a few of the more than 1,000 memories that had been posted online by renowned actors nationwide following the sale’s announcement, including well-wishes from two-time Tony Award winner Cherry Jones, who began her career at the Barn. 

In addition to the Barn’s long theatrical heritage, council members recognized the Chaffins’ substantial history of community involvement and “giving back.” 

Married in 2002, John and Janie Chaffin will celebrate their 15th anniversary in July. After a half century of making theatrical memories, Janie said in a letter to patrons, the couple now looks forward to “making new memories of our own.” 

Janie and John Chaffin

  

The Next 50 Years 

“I am honored and humbled and unbelievably grateful to have this opportunity to move forward to what I like to call ‘The Next 50 Years’,” said Luther at the event. “While the task of following in John and Janie’s shoes is a little daunting to say the least, I think you’ll have a lot of fun with what we’re planning in years to come.” 

Luther has announced plans to continue to operate the business under the name Chaffin’s Barn Dinner Theatre and to retain its 18 payroll employees, its stable of devoted contract actors, and its Artistic Director Martha Wilkinson, a 28-year veteran of the company. 

Chaffin’s Barn Dinner Theatre offers performances Thursday through Saturday each week, with at least one Sunday matinee per run. 

Tickets, which include parking, dinner and a show, are $60 per person. Group rates are available. 

The current production, Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple” runs through February 12. 

For information about the 2017 season, visit http://www.dinnertheatre.com. 

For reservations, call 615-646-9977.

Sandy Hook, Aurora, Virgina Tech, Columbine

This is all I want to say about that:

Believing that Gun Control means that the government is going to come and take away all your guns and prevent you from ever having more is like believing that Birth Control means that the government is going to come and take away all your children and prevent you from ever having more. No dictionary in the world makes "control" and "eradication" synonymous.  Hunters in particular should understand this, as they claim to "control" deer populations, but they are never intent on eradicating the entire population.  (The taking of innocent life here is a separate issue.)

Believing that non-projectile weapons are just as dangerous as guns is exactly the kind of madness that makes the rest of us want those guns taken out of your hands. To kill with a knife, a box-cutter, a baseball bat, etc., you have to get within PHYSICAL PROXIMITY of the victim; you can't stand at a cowardly and protective distance. You HAVE to fight with your own body. You HAVE to give the opponent a chance to fight back. And while you do that you give others the chance to either overpower you or get very far away from you. There is no way in hell you'd actually KILL 26 people with your knife. I'm sorry. I don't buy it. Yes, you'd still be a crazy person in need of serious mental help, but your damage would be limited.

In fact, if you believe that you can stand at the average distance between a shooter and his victim, throw your knife -- disarming yourself, manage to hit and kill your victim, and then retrieve and throw your knife with fatal results 25 more times, you actually SHOULD be getting mental help.

Not that the health system is much help there, but that too is another issue.

No, when you want to do that kind of damage and wield the control of an indefensible weapon, the one you reach for is a gun. Pure and simple. You don't think there should be SOME control on that? The only other weapon I've heard mentioned this week which allows a killer the same degree of devastation (or more) with a comparable or better degree of personal safety is a bomb. Funny, I don't hear you telling us we have a right to tote those around.

And don't tell me that's because bombs aren't mentioned in the Second Amendment. Neither are semi-automatic weapons. And, friend, until you can show me specifically and to the letter that that gun you ARE toting is in service to a "well-regulated" anything, neither is yours.

There are a lot of things that need to change to stop these shootings. A lot of things. Better discovery of mental illness and better support from a less greedy health care system are high on that list. However, there also needs to be some discipline and understanding among gun owners and gun supporters that "control" is not a four-letter word.

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