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| March 2010 |
| Billie Silvey |
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| Pirates! |
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| “Ahoy, matey. Avast me hearties.” Pirates have a language and culture all their own, but it’s become a part of our popular culture. We find it in everything from books and movies to children’s birthday parties and theme restaurants.
When our children were young, we loved to go to the Jolly Roger Restaurant in Inglewood. It was a warm and welcoming place with a big roaring fire and exotic cheeseburgers with pineapple slices and teriyaki sauce. But the big attraction for the kids were the paper menus shaped like pirate hats that they could actually wear. |
| In addition to being entertainment, pirates are a part of history, from Caribbean pirates preying on Spanish treasure ships and the pirates from the Barbary Coast of Africa who threatened European shipping in the Mediterranean during the Golden Age of Piracy to today’s Somali pirates threatening shipping lanes in the Straits of Malacca. Desperate people pushed to extremes resort to desperate measures, as seen in works ranging from scholarly papers to classic fiction like Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood. How do you feel about pirates? I hope you'll write me with your experiences and reactions to the website at b.silvey@sbcglobal.net. Next month's website will be about Gardens. |
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Now that our children are grown, we’ve enjoyed the movies based on the attraction and starring Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow (top). Even granddaughter Katyana loves a pirate, (right) her friend Fernando in his Jack Sparrow costume at his birthday party. She especially enjoyed dressing as a British soldier (far right) to fight the brigands and save the town at the Pirates Dinner Theater in Orange County. |
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| Pirates of the Caribbean was a favorite attraction at Disneyland for adults and children alike, and we used to love eating at the Blue Bayou Restaurant overlooking the bayou at the beginning of the ride--with its twinkling fireflies, moss-draped trees and soft banjo music broken only occasionally by the screams of delighted tourists taking that first drop. On the ride, I enjoyed the narration with its menacing “Dead men tell no tales” and the atmospheric set up for the main attraction before you glided past the pirate ship with its cannons roaring and then entered the town under attack. Personally, I could have done without some of its more cartoony aspects, which tended to break the romantic spell. |
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