Florida Today from Cocoa, Florida • Page 33

111111 1 mm 3B REACHING OUT INSIDE PEOPLE i Can you help? Brevard Hospice needs volunteers to assist with transportation needs of its patients. Call 253-2222. Widow's daughters overstepped, reader tells Dear Abby, 5D. Guests are rude to abandon party for TV, says Miss Manners, 5D. SECTION Robbyn Footlick, Newsfeatures editor, 242-3788, 9 p.m.

I I fl i i limn i i k. I "mil 1 I I jmmmmmm FRIDAY, October 14, 1994 Underwear character is still a-peeling ET TU, Of the many surprises we menfolk discover in our underwear every now and then, fruit is among the rarest. The last time underwear fruit happened to me, it was a ripe mango. But that 5 Henegar's MCT lease in dispute By Betty Morris FLORIDA TODAY Melbourne Civic Theatre, in a letter, has threatened legal ac; tion against its landlord the. Henegar Center over a dispute! about its lease.

MCT gave the Henegar boar4: seven days to respond but extendi ed the deadline when the original' certified letter was not delivered to Henegar board president Bri-i an Fisher. The letter an attachment concerning the days MCT wants to use the center, in the current season. "We just have conflicts with the lease and we're trying to work them out," MCT board president John Overstreet said. The MCT letter was signed by Overstreet and three officers vice president Bill Whitehead, secretary Mike Mellen and trea surer Rick Roach. The ongoing conflict between the community theater group 4T 4a 'I was years ago, during Richard Nixon Anyhow (aside from bananas), fruit images and underwear rarely grow on the same vine.

And even today, Sam Wright looks back on that aspect of his career with bewilderment. The corporation never fully explained the concept to him, even though he played purple grapes. Wright comes to Melbourne Sunday for v. -V-vva Avf i v- rv- I 77 1 xtA XjL BILLY COX PEOPLE Castle Rock Entertainment Kids Jam USA, a live family-entertainment gig at Brevard Community College's King Center. For this incarnation, Wright will assume the Sebastian The Crab persona he cultivated in the Disney film, "The Little Mermaid." But for 19 years, Wright made anywhere from 120-140 television commercials for Fruit of the Loom underwear.

And he didn't even wear Fruit of the Looms. He wore skimpy bikini briefs. "My wife is European," he says from a hotel room in Tampa. "She said (cotton underwear) made me look like an old man." Anyhow, Fruit of the Loom's logo was initially a cornucopia swollen with an apple, green grapes, purple grapes, and their green leaves. Wright was the purple grape cluster.

And he had to pretend Fruit of the Looms never found them that were great. "Our job was to get more people excited about wearing Fruit of the Loom," Wright says. "As fruit, we knew the waistband was stretcha-ble, because we lived there." Even though fruit don't occur every day in men's underwear THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION' offers rich, dark images to who operates a black market, and Tim Robbins is a young banker match its vivid emotions. Morgan Freeman, left, plays a prisoner who is sentenced to life for the murder of his wife and her lover. 'Shawshank' packs an emotional wallop By Jack Garner Gannett News Service Now showing and the arts center surfaced again about two weeks ago when the MCT board charged: Direct interference by the Henegar Center executive director Jeanne Leeberg in the operations of MCT; Inability of MCT to schedule use of the facilities within the terms of its lease with the Henegar Center; Clarification of the definition of subletting "as it pertains to MCT fundraising Continuing evidence that eviction of MCT is a goal of certain members of the Henegar Center.

Under the current lease, MCT, which is the major tenant of the Henegar Center, has 120 days for performances and is prohibited from subletting to other perform ing arts groups. MCT, the community theater group, leases use of the Henegar Center, which has 62 other ten: ants who use the facility once a month or less. Tenants range from the Brevard County Parks and Recreation South Sector offices to the Brevard Doll Collectors club, which meets there. The Henegar Center, which If you like prison movies, you will feel right at home when the cell door clangs shut in "The Shawshank Redemption." 'Shawshank Redemption' opens today at the Merritt South and Roxy 10 theaters. Rating: (strong profanity, violence), Darabont knew what he wanted and he appears to have gotten it.

The film offers rich, dark images to match its vivid emotions. And every character is memorably delineated, from the Bible-thumping warden (Bob Gunton) to a sideburned young punk who brings new life to the prison in the 1950s (Gil Bellows). The sprawling, stone prison is itself a key character, and an evocative, out-of-use juvenile fortress in Ohio stands in wonderfully for the Maine prison. "The Shawshank Redemption" is adapted "Right. The only thing I could figure was, it meant the best products come directly off the loom.

Fruit of the loom. I guess." Tough work. Wearing costumes made of anything from styrofoam to fiberglass to plastic, Wright and his colleagues sometimes went for 16 hours without sitting down, and attempting to stay in character. He remembers F. Murray Abraham, the original leaf, "just from a novella by Stephen King's Different shaking in a corner, shaking like a leaf.

"My own character was so full of juice, so I'd You will be on familiar turf as writer-director Frank Darabont offers filmgoers the sadistic warden, the worldly wise veteran prisoners, the frightened newcomers, the con-artist convict who runs a black market out of his cell, the ominous rapists waiting in the showers, the brutal guards. Prisons thrive on regimentation and so do prison movies. Heck, "The Shawshank Redemption" includes an aged lifer running the musty prison library, and he even takes care of a sickly bird! All they failed to do was cast Burt Lancaster in the role. But Darabont's daring scheme for "The Shawshank Redemption" is not to ignore the cliches. Instead, he embraces them enthusiastically and then moves well beyond them.

In adopting Stephen King's novella, Darabont enriches his characters with finely tuned touches and colorful traits. He's populated his story with fascinating people and then he found some of the day's best actors to play them. have to be incredibly overbearing in gracious- They're led by Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins, and both have never been better. And to play the caretaker of the books and the bird, Darabont gave James Whitmore his first movie role in eight years, and the 73-year-old actor proves he's not ready for a pasture, even if it's fertilized with Miracle-Gro. Darabont's other trick is to weave an immensely clever plot through the prison.

At first, its intricacies are barely discernible. But, by film's end, it packs an emotional wallop. All in all, "The Shawshank Redemption" is the best prison movie since Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were behind bars. That might explain why Darabont fought hard for the right to make his directorial debut with this screenplay. ness and enthusiasm all the time." Wright's voice suddenly turns saccharine, a-gush in an involved flashback.

"I mean," he continues, Seasons collection and it as unlike a typical King story as anything he's ever written. Robbins plays Andy Defresne, a young, up-and-coming Maine banker, sentenced to life in prison after his wife and her lover are murdered. Andy proclaims his innocence, but so does everyone else in gothic Shawshank Prison. Andy eventually befriends "Red" Redding, a veteran prisoner who operates the facility's thriving black market. He's played with wit, restraint and relentless attention to detail by Morgan Freeman, an actor with keen insight into human behavior.

He manages to get even better with every outing. voice settling to normal, "it's just as challenging to play an underwear grape as it is to play Shakespeare." Next role: "Bare-fruit in the OK, WE GIVE UP: In the Sept. 13 issue of Weekly World News, virtually lost amid a blizzard of shockers like "Co-workers' Flatu lence Is Hazardous to Your "The Day It Rained Meat," "A Corpse Came Back To Life And Beat the Hell Out of "Make Me if Deaf Again: Nagging Wife Drives Hubby Bonkers After $50,000 Operation To Restore His 'Pulp Fiction' weaves tale of black humor, fear f' 't I I and "Another Fed-Up Wife Cuts Off Her Husband's comes the following item with a compelling Brevard connection: "Florida Fisherman Catches Human Corpse!" In this Page 43 chiller, we learn how one Andy Watson of Melbourne, was trolling off Cancun in the Gulf of Mexico when he i was designed to be a regional theater, has an annual operating budget of about $180,000 a year, Leeberg said. MCT pays $46,000 a year. Last spring MCT protested its lease and rent agreement with the Henegar Center, withholding rent for a period in a dispute over how many performance dates the lease allows.

MCT asked for more days for the same rent. It also demanded that other community theater groups not permitted to perform in the Henegar Center. At that time, Peter Feller, a member of the Henegar Center advisory board, said that he and attorney Jim Reinman negotiated the MCT lease in May 1993. "The lease was negotiated quite fairly with good intentions on both sides," Feller said. While the writing of certain agreements may be nebulous, the intention was obvious, he said.

However, since then the group that negotiated for MCT has left and current management of MCT does not want to agree to all the things originally agreed to in the lease, Feller said. New Henegar Center board president Yvonne Bixby said the latest flareup from MCT has eased for the moment because she promised an MCT board member that she is looking into the problem. She was installed in office Monday. Outgoing Henegar Center president Fisher said he received three similar letters during his term of office. See HENEGAR, Next Page Now showing "Pulp Fiction" opens today at the Roxy 10, Merritt South and United Artists theaters.

Rating: (strong violence, profanity, drug use, hooked something with a portentious tug to it. "They determined the body was a man who had fallen off his boat and been lost near the island of Cozumel about three days before, Watson told WWN. "The whole incident ruined my vacation." Florida Today found critical omissions in the the WWN story, such as: What kind of lures was he using? How strong was the test line? What's By Jack Garner Gannett News Service Mia, the gangster's moll, lies immobile on the apartment floor, a victim of a drug overdose. Vincent Vega, one of the gangster's hit men, has been assigned to baby-sit the girl. And now she's dying.

Frantic, he has taken Mia to a friend's apartment. And together, they're trying to figure out how to use adrenalin to revive her. The friend fills a hypodermic needle, but says it has to be driven hard into the chest, to get through the rib cage. As Vincent takes aim with a needle big enough to drug a horse, the hyperactivity in the room freezes, and the tension is palatable. And then WHOMP! Vincent rams the needle home.

It's a classic Quentin Taranti-no moment in "Pulp Fiction," the latest work from the young renegade writer-director who's be- a comparable tussle? Marlin? Tarpon? 1 Unfortunately, there are no listings in the phone book Melbourne, Sebastian, Cocoa or any other Brevard locale for Andy Watson The receptionist munchkin at WWNs Lantana come the current enfant terrible of Hollywood. Like the ear-cutting scene in "Reservoir Dogs," it's the outrageous moment when the film's black humor and fear collide, setting off intense sparks. The scene also is a rich metaphor for Tarantino's contribution to the films of the '90s. In "Pulp Fiction," Tarantino delivers another of his distinctive shots of adrenalin to the movies. Like Mia the moll, we in the audience sit bolt upright.

We've been brought vividly to life. See PULP, Next Page office wasn't any help, either. 1 So manifest for us, Andy. It's an incredible story. As Mr.

Spock might say, "I can hardly believe my ears." Billy Cox's column runs every Friday. He 'PULP FICTION' interweaves characters through a trio of tales. John Travolta, center, plays a mob hitman, along with Samuel Johnson as his Bible-quoting partner, left, and Harvey Keitel, the mob's clean-up specialist. can be reached at 242-3774, or Florida Today, P.O. Box 419000, Melbourne, FL 32941-9000.

Coming up Today's TV Carmen Abramo Today's tip You can use an old denture brush as a sturdy tool for scrubbing small areas, such as window and door tracks. Today's trivia According to the book 52 Ways to Live a Long and Healthy Life by Laura Lewis, honey is the only food that does not spoil. I I (jp Spends free time: Working around the yard. Can't live without: Food. Most exciting time: Traveling and going on cruises.

Dream vacation: A trip to Hawaii. Most admires: "My wife, Victoria." Downtown festival: The second annual Downtown Melbourne Art and Crafts Festival, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Oct. 22 and 23, features 75 artists and booths, more than $1,000 in cash prizes and a "Kid's Korner." Call 724-1741.

"Unsolved Mysteries" moves to a new night with a report on a father searching for the son who escaped from an adult care facility in 1991. Also: an update on a fugitive wanted in Idaho for kidnapping and robbery. Robert Stack hosts at 8 p.m. on NBC. More on TV, 3D.

5 Lives In: Cocoa. Retired from: Sheetmetal worker at Westinghouse in Lester, Pa. Club Involvement: Member of Seasider Seniors at the Freedom 7 Center..