When I was doing some reading on the life of Ernest Hemingway (more on his Arkansas connection in a future blog), I found out that one of his long-time friends was a man named Evan
Shipman. Since I have friends and relatives with that name, I was intrigued. So with the help of the ever-present Google search engine, I learned
a lot about Evan
Shipman, including the fact that he wrote a literary piece entitled "
Mazeppa". The only other experience I had with the word "
Mazeppa" was back in the last century while I was in college at the University of Arkansas in
Fayetteville, when us twenty-somethings used to watch a week-end, late-night television show out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, that we referred to as "
Mazeppa". So I continued my "wild goose (translate Google) chase" for more on this word "
Mazeppa". That led me to this quote by John
Wooley of the Tulsa World that said "If you were of a certain age in the early "70s, and you were living in or around Tulsa, Oklahoma, the name "
Mazeppa" symbolized
something almost magical, a shared experience of a place and time..." Wow---he hit the nail on the head! Continuing on my hunting expedition, I found out that LOTS of people identify with that "shared experience", so much so, that there has been a movement to keep the memory alive by reproducing copies of
Mazeppa's old shows, and selling them through the wonders of---you guessed it---the Internet. Go to
www.Mazeppa.com on-line store if you want to know more. Let's see, where would I like to go "wild goose chasing" next? Let me rephrase that for any animal rights readers who do not believe in hunting down wild animals: Where will my next surfing expedition take me??????
