Editorial

Norris Park band shell nearly ready for duty

Monday, August 1, 2011

Renovation work appears to be almost completed on the Norris Park band shell, and that's good, because it's booked Friday night for the first of two free Hot Summer Nights sponsored by McCook National Bank.

The Bel Airs will bring an "authentic but eclectic bluesy-country-soul-and-rock-n-roll sound influenced by the likes of Wilson Pickett, Slim Harpo, Howlin' Wolf and Johnny Cash" to Norris Park at 7 p.m. Friday.

If none of those sounds are your cup of tea, perhaps you'll want to come back a week later to enjoy the popular big-band sound of the Bobby Layne Orchestra, with music bridging the generations from the 1930s to today.

The band shell is an important part of community events throughout the year, but especially the Hot Summer Nights series and Heritage Days later next month.

We're happy the structure has been preserved, although we wish the idea of building a completely new structure would have been explored more openly -- the $170,000 spent to restore the nearly century-old wooden structure might have been enough to build a quality modern structure that wouldn't have required constant upkeep.

But as then-City Manager Kurt Fritsch said in 2008, "it's not about the economics, but about the love of a building."

McCook residents will be able to love their Norris Park band shell for many years to come.


Traditional cowboy musician Rex Rideout was one of the performers who graced the Norris Park band shell stage in 2010, as well as the Fox Theatre in 2008, but sharp-eyed movie-goers might have caught his big-screen debut as the fiddle player in a bar scene in the new "Cowboys and Aliens," movie, starring Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig, which opened Friday.

We've waited in vain for someone to draw a parallel between the plot of the movie and the 1884 story of cowboys who supposedly witnessed a UFO crash near Benkelman, Nebraska, so we'll be the first to try.

On second thought ... there isn't much of a parallel.

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