Page 59 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

simple trickster; he’s a poet and dreamer who needs to convince people of his magi-
cal powers. Hepburn is stringy and tomboyish, believably plain yet magnetically
beautiful. This is a fairy tale (the ugly duckling) dressed up as a bucolic comedy
and padded out with metaphysical falsies, but it is also genuinely appealing, in a
crude, good-spirited way, though N. Richard Nash, who wrote both the play and
the adaptation, aims too solidly at lower-middle-class tastes. once transformed,
the heroine rejects the poet for the deputy sheriff (Wendell Corey); if there were a
sequel, she might be suffering from the drought of his imagination. 21

A musical adaptation, 110 in the Shade (1963), played to packed houses; a remake
broadcast on HBo in 1982, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Tuesday Weld, was
less than memorable; and a Broadway revival featuring Woody Harrelson and
Jayne Atkinson in the lead roles opened and closed with little fanfare in 1999.
Still, The Rainmaker has perennial appeal and has been performed many times
since by innumerable school and community theater groups.

Sky king and the indian rainmaker

Sky King, America’s favorite flying cowboy, ruled the “clear blue Western skies”
over the Flying Crown Ranch in Arizona (although the opening credits showed
a high cirrostratus haze). With the help of his niece Penny, nephew Clipper, and
private airplane, the Songbird, Sky King solved mysteries, rescued those in need,
and fought villains—on radio from 1946 to 1954 and intermittently on television
on Saturday mornings from 1951 to 1962. In June 1948, as news of cloud seeding
at the General Electric Corporation reached the public (chapter 5), an episode
titled “The Rainmakers Magic” aired on radio. Eight years later, in 1956, the TV
episode “The Rainbird” revisited the topic, juxtaposing traditional and modern
methods of weather control.
During a devastating drought, Indian dancers, medicine men, and rainmak-
ers implore the heavens for rain. The chief and elders of the local tribe pres-
ent their elderly medicine man, Tai-Lam, with an ultimatum: bring rain in two
days or be replaced. Sky King, who is sympathetic, decides to help out behind
the scenes by seeking advice from the local weather bureau on when and where
to seed the clouds. Penny coordinates efforts, signaling Tai-Lam to begin shak-
ing his Kachina doll and droning his pitiful rainmaking chant, while Sky King
simultaneously seeds an “upper-level front” with silver iodide. A deluge follows,
placing both Penny and the tribe at risk, filling the dam to its brim, and threat-
ening to flood the valley. None of the protagonists, however, place the blame on

42 | StorieS of Control