delight
Eighty fans gathered to honor a 100-year-old silent comedy
She isn't the biggest Keaton fan. Her mother is.
About 80 Buster Keaton fans gathered in Cottage Grove, Oregon, last weekend to mark the centennial of The General, the 1926 silent comedy he filmed in the timber town after Southern communities turned down his cameras. They wore porkpie hats, learned the Charleston to a Eugene jazz band, and call themselves Damfinos, after Keaton's stock reply when stumped: "damfino," as in damned if I know. The weekend included a lookalike contest, won by 37-year-old Liz Bartholomew of Portland, who is not the family's biggest Keaton fan. Her mother is. "So to me, Buster Keaton means a way to get closer to my mom," she said. The group ended at the Row River, where in July 1926 more than 4,000 people watched a real locomotive crash off a burning trestle. It was the most expensive shot of the silent era. The often chatty Damfinos went quiet on the rocky shore, holding up old stills against the water.
