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Film! Intrigue! Death! Murder! Booze!

That's right.

Booze. And Death. And Film.

Booze- because we are holding this month's event at the Iron Door!

Death- because that's what we do.

Film- because it is one of the most important media formats of our time.

Join us this Friday evening down in the Iron Door for an evening of mysteries, mirages, and murders real and reproduced as we explore the relationship between death and one of our favorite distractions - the magnificent world of moving pictures.

Friday, May 20th

7:30pm

$15

The Iron Door at the Holbrooke Hotel

212 West Main Street

Grass Valley, CA 95945

We would also like to thank everyone who gave to our GoFundMe campaign. Without your support we would not be bale to hold this month's event at the Holbrooke.

Thank you!

A Lovely Corpse Recap

It was a dark and stormy night...

No seriously, it really was. We had a great time anyway. There were cookies.

Our Death & Beauty event "A Lovely Corpse" on Sunday, March 20th was indeed, quite lovely. Even though it was incredibly dark and pouring rain, a few new faces braved the storm from Sacramento to join the audience. They drank our Kool-Aid, and we're pretty sure they liked it.

Either PFP Art Director Skye Beren has threatened them quietly, or they're into us.

Tim not only managed to make the subject of a mortician's wardrobe riveting and delivered some serious slides FINALLY, he took enough tasteful backside shots to possibly release his own beefcake calendar come 2017. (GOALS. WE HAVE THEM.)

Resident PFP mortician Tim Lilyquist really DOES put the "fun" in....sorry. We know better.

In anticipation of Tim being slideless, he was, as usual, gifted with some creative ones we made for him. Boy did we look stupid when he busted out the best slides EVER. We think someone helped him. We would like them to help us too.

No. No we don't know better. We're liars that don't know better.

 Posy-Filled Pockets, at your service. These faces are our helpful, informative faces. These are the faces we make when we're ad libbing our intro because Rachel has been busy planning shows two months ahead of time while neglecting the current one, and Tim's business picks up just enough to keep him locked up behind mortuary doors until the day before a show. Don't worry. We totally know what we're doing.

Did you see we had cookies? There were cookies.

Rachel and Tim, your impeccably dressed, hand clutching hosts. 

Special Guest Marci Bennett from San Francisco's Odd Salon spoke on the Glamorization of Expiration. "Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse." James Dean did not actually say that.

Marci Bennett explains shows us horrific auto accidents and heroin addicts. For fashion.

 Courtney Williams entertained us with Fatal Fashions. Arsenic-laced formal wear, anyone? For those keeping score at home, at least two PFP participants were wearing items on her list.

Courtney discussing her fatal fashion topic further with audience member and soap maven Normal Vincent of Outlaw Soaps

Despite the horrible weather, our third evening event was the best one yet, and the presentations just keep getting better and better. Tim had slides! The next two months are big shows for us. In April we'll be focusing on the subject of suicide education and local resources, and in May we'll be making our big venue move to the Iron Door, under the historic Holbrooke Hotel, which we're hoping will be our new home for the evening events. (Workshops will remain at The Chapel of the Angels Mortuary.) 

Keep an eye on our Facebook page as well as our Happenings page here on the blog for presentation announcements and upcoming shenanigans! 

Rachel, Marci and Tim enjoy Skye Bergen's trip around the world with corpses all dressed up for the party.

Come to our next event! We have cookies.  

Sometimes there are cookies. You'll never know unless you show up.

An Gorta Mor by guest blogger Shannon Haire

It takes a lot of suffering to be ranked among one of history’s worst tragedies and biggest losses of life.

Photo by Shannon Haire - Used with Permission

The famine that hit Ireland in 1845 has that unfortunate distinction. ‘An Gorta Mor’ (the Great Hunger) decimated the Irish population and over a five year period 1.5 million people starved to death or died of hunger-related causes. Another two million fled Ireland in order to escape that fate, and the native population hasn’t recovered since. It is estimated that there are more Irish people spread throughout the world than there are in Ireland itself, and that has been the case ever since the Great Famine began.

Photo by Chmee2

Ireland is a mecca for memorials, historical places, and public sculpture, but few are as somber and potent as the Famine Memorial on the banks of the River Liffey in Dublin. The memorial sculpture was created by Rowan Gillespie and unveiled in 1997. It consists of emaciated men, women, and children trudging along the banks of the river, with various expressions of sadness, despair, and resignation. The horrifying bronze sculptures also include a starving dog walking behind the people. It is one of the most photographed public art pieces in all of Ireland.

Photo by Eric Jones

These statues are a permanent memorial to the many people who suffered and fled the Great Famine. It was built on the departure site of the Perseverance, one of the first famine ships to leave the area in 1846. The ship's captain was a seventy-four year old man who quit his office job to transport hundreds of starving people from Dublin to America. All passengers arrived safely on that maiden voyage and the Perseverance was one of the first of thousands of ships to make that desperate crossing. 

Photo by Shannon Haire - Used with Permisson

Rowan Gillespie’s haunting sculptures are a stark reminder of the tragic loss of life and home that the Irish people suffered and his vision captures the utter despair that millions of families were feeling during the great famine. These eerie memorial statues make it impossible to walk the banks of the river without feeling the desolate ghosts of the dead. In the water there is a replicated famine boat that doubles as one of the many famine museums located throughout Ireland. The ‘Jeanie Johnston’ is a is a fitting backdrop to the darkness of Gillespie’s pieces, and both ensure that those who visit the area will forever remember one of the biggest tragedies in Irish history.

Shannon Haire is an Irish history blogger and author. Her newly released book, Petticoats, Patriots, and Partition, is available on Amazon.com. She blogs regularly about Irish history, politics, and current events on her increasingly popular blog,  Choosing the Green - Roghnú Glas

From the Atlas Obscura Files

St. Francis Dam on Atlas Obscura

In 1928, the second-greatest loss-of-life disaster in California took 600 lives and then slipped gently into obscurity.

William Mulholland was the self-taught engineer who was responsible for the Los Angeles Water infrastructure and the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. St. Francis Dam was a storage reservoir that was part of the much-disputed aqueduct, located in the San Francisquito Canyon about 40 miles north of Los Angeles proper.

Mulholland and his assistant inspected the dam and signed off on it on March 12, 1928. The dam had begun to show signs of stress, and there were a number of temperature and contraction cracks appearing, with a small amount of seeping occurring under the abutments. Concerned, Mulholland went out personally to take a look, and deemed the cracks to be of average levels and amounts for a dam of this size. 12 hours later, he was proven horribly wrong.

Two minutes before midnight on the very day Mulholland decided it was safe, St. Francis Dam collapsed. As transformers blew and 12.4 billion gallons of water barreled down the canyon, no one between the eastern canyon's drought-ridden hills and the Pacific Ocean had any idea that an inland tsunami was about to wash them away.

The dam keeper's cottage was probably first to go. Then the waters destroyed Powerhouse 2 and everyone inside. Emptying into the Santa Clara riverbed, the deadly wall of water headed for more populated ground, wiping out parts of modern-day Valencia and Newhall, crossing what is now Interstate 5 and completely washing away the town of Castaic Junction. The flood laid devastation to three more communities, Fillmore, Santa Paula, and Bardsdale, before dumping the bodies it had claimed on its journey into the Pacific. The flood waters had traveled 57 miles in 5 hours and 27 minutes.

Needless to say, Mulholland resigned, taking full responsibility, and the dam was not rebuilt. Ruins included the remains of the center of the structure, which earned the title "Tombstone". A few months after the catastrophe, an 18-year old named Lercy Parker perished when he fell from the Tombstone after a friend threw a dead rattlesnake at him as a prank. The Tombstone was demolished, and while ruins still remain, it is no more than a pile of unidentifiable rubble in a remote part of the canyon.