Everyone with a sprinkle of stardust in their veins (and maybe, these days, a political ax to grind) has a fanciful, imaginary Oscar acceptance speech at least halfway composed in their heads.
My daughter, age 17, recently confessed to me that she’s had her speech percolating for years, and it has always ended on the sweetest note imaginable: a shout-out to all her friends and family, watching the ceremony back home at the Vashon Theatre.
You see, for our family, the Hollywood Oscars and the Vashon Oscars are inseparable — we’ve been trouping to the theater for years now, dressed to the nines in some hilarious fashion or another, to watch the show.
Leslie McMichael and Marty Schafer, maestros of the show and hardworking head honchos of the Vashon Film Society, have put on the Vashon Oscars for the past 18 years, complete with limo rides, red carpet, paparazzi gauntlet, yummy catered dinner and a live broadcast of the awards ceremony. But most important to our family, by far, has been the celebrity look-alike contest that takes place during commercial breaks.
We think of ourselves as the Meryl Streeps of that contest, always in contention for the big prizes.
We’ve been robbed a couple of times, most notably in 2012, when we spent hours prepping our ensemble attire for the intricately costumed “Hugo,” only to lose to a goofy equine get-up thrown together by some fans of “War Horse.” It still rankles, as does our 2014 snub after appearing as “Captain Phillips and the Vashon Pirates.” I mean, c’mon, my husband looks almost exactly like Tom Hanks!
But our kids won big in 2013, the year of “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Lincoln,” with their stunningly edgy joint appearance as Osama Bin Laden and Honest Abe. They took home the prize again last year, as frontiersman Hugo Glass and his ursine nemesis, from “The Revenant.” I thrift-shopped for days for those costumes, finally resorting to using black and red Sharpies to transform a raccoon mask into the terrifying visage of a ravenous bear.
Vashon Oscar Night was the only time of the year I ever got crafty as a mom.
But it all ended on Sunday night when Vashon Film Society presented its 2017 edition of Oscar Night. At the party, my almost-grown twins tap-danced across the stage in homage to what so bizarrely turned out not to be the best picture, “La La Land.” But there’s something else I can’t believe actually happened, even though it was announced long before the night began. After almost two decades of putting on the show, Marty and Leslie decided it was time to lower the curtain on their long-running act.
Which brings me to my own Oscar speech, where I thank Leslie and Marty for everything they’ve done for our town and for my own family. Be forewarned: The music will start long before I am finished with my speech, and I will stubbornly refuse to leave the stage until I’m done. And I might even cry.
Marty and Leslie, I have deep gratitude for your unceasing championing of our historic, single-screen movie theater. Thank you for putting on a homespun, campy Oscar night that celebrated all things cinematic, but more than that, all things Vashon — our sense of play, of community, of the ridiculous.
Thank you for schlepping around to local businesses year after year to ask for donations of prizes to be given on Oscar night, and thank you to those businesses for saying yes. Thank you for decorating the theater so splendidly and dressing up in your own inimitable, purple-haired and begloved style.
My hat is eternally off to you for throwing an annual party that was not only a ton of fun, but that also raised thousands of dollars for college scholarships for island teens interested in pursuing the arts.
Thank you, also, for curating the film society’s fabulous monthly series of independent films. I’ll be in the audience of your presentation of the important Oscar-nominated documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” on March 1 and 2, and I hope many others are there as well.
Most of all, may God bless you for that miracle moment when our local theater was saved, way back in the aughts. It’s true — current owners Eileen and Gordon Wolcott first found out that the theater was for sale in 2001, when they were sitting in their West Seattle home, fatefully, watching a local news broadcast that included a story about Vashon’s funky Oscar party. And thank you, too, to the Wolcotts, who have worked almost every day and night since they bought the theater to keep the doors open, the popcorn popping and the silver screen illuminated, for all of us.
Leslie, Marty and the Wolcotts — you’ve created memories for our town that are more golden than any Tinseltown statuette. Thank you so much for sustaining a beautiful place where families can go and sit in the dark and dream together.
— Elizabeth Shepherd is the director of youth programs at Seattle’s film arts organization, Northwest Film Forum. She is also a former Beachcomber arts editor.
