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SPEAKING once again OF SHOWS--IT ABOUT MAKES ME GIDDY, the thought that I'm going to watch a show tonight that was last produced when the very first Native-American-WASP was settling into his life on the plantation...

(Pocahontas was born in 1595. She was one of twenty children of Chief Powhatan, who ruled a group of more than twenty Indian tribes in territory that is now the eastern state of Virginia.

In 1607, the Virginia Company in England sent colonists to settle the land that later became the United States of America. Of course, the Powhatan Indians just happened to be living in the area where the English colonists landed, and where they set up their colony of Jamestown.

The young Pocahontas, twelve at the time, often visited Jamestown, hanging around and flirting with the settlers. The colonists got to know her well and she became an important link between the colonists and her father.

In 1614, she married John Rolfe in the First Community Church of Jamestown. About nine months later--in 1615--Pocahontas and John had a son. They named him Thomas (She wanted Travis, but John overruled). The next year Pocahontas and her family sailed to England to meet the in-laws. It was an extended visit, and Pocahontas died while there; but Tommy grew up in England, and then returned to the USA-to-be at the age of twenty, in 1635.)

Dear Reader, it was a cold clear night in Virginia (pronounced at the time with four syllables), that night of the winter solstice in 1638. Thomas threw a log on the fire and then put on his heavy wool coat and muffler and strolled out onto the lawn with pipe in hand. He knew the moon was a full one tonight. He glanced up into the night sky, and...good merciful heavens! the moon was a strange copper-red!

...(to be continued)

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