Emily Paine Carter is columnist So Salem. You can contact her at 981-3430 or via e-mail.

Emily Paine Carter

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• Archive: Emily's previous columns

Here's an almost-spring bouquet of sundry topics, mostly musical:

We trust that the Salem High School forensics team is still basking in its glory of winning another national championship. Congratulations for your remarkable achievements!

Many things can go awry with music- / moviemaking: "there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip," as the line goes.

So we're delighted -- heck, I'm verily ecstatic -- that local band My Radio's latest success is finally official. Their song "Yeah Yeah Yeah" will be used in the upcoming Demi Moore / David Duchovny movie, "The Joneses"; I had trouble keeping the huge news "hush hush hush."

In our chat a few weeks ago, singer/songwriter/pianist J.P. Powell said it will play during a two-and-a-half-minute montage. With no dialogue to distract the audience, the song should be especially noticeable.

Prior columns have tracked J.P.'s goals and path from Salem to Boston and back. It's great that being part of a soundtrack lets just-the-music go "on tour" -- so we get to keep the guys at home in the Roanoke Valley.

To hear the song and peek at the movie, check out this paper's talented Tad Dickens' blog: blogs.roanoke.com/cutnscratch.

Thanks to Roanoke College President Mike Maxey for emphasizing (via e-mail) that the notable John Turbyfill also "is a son of Salem." As mentioned in a Feb. 10 column about snowy Salem scenes, the college recently dedicated its front quadrangle in his honor.

Although Greater Salem's hardworking Crobar Cane plays in town and on the road in several states, the band also has a pretty good following overseas.

Various Gladdens of Glenvar reported that Crobar has a distributor in Germany; its CDs continue selling there, and in Denmark, The Netherlands and Sweden.

Last -- and indeed least -- do study the accompanying photo.

You could probably guess that it's from back-in-the-day (April 1968, according to my notes on the back of the photo). This nicely coiffed, well-kempt group was setting off from Mary Baldwin College to see The Temptations at the Salem Civic Center. My sweet little mama had stood in line to get nine front-row seats for us souled-out shriekers.

And mercy, why were we so neatly attired for piling into a car -- with luggage, too (probably filled with hair curlers)? Such proper clothing for improperly loading ourselves into one lone Jeep! Recklessly, we gave no thought to travel safety: no seat-belts in that back-back section. (Pause here to repeat my mantra, "Kids, never do the things I did!")

Just look at our tidy clothing: dresses or skirted suits, stockings and heels! Soon concertgoers would trade such genteel garb for hippie skirts, tattered jeans and T-shirts. Unknowingly, these mostly college freshmen, these girls from "My Generation," were right on the cusp of Woodstock, of following the Grateful Dead, of such "long, strange trips."