The Phenomenon In The Valley

I drove through the green rolling hills of the Ozarks in southern Missouri.  Farmhouses, small towns, livestock...typical rural scenery until the highway crested at the top of a hill and I gazed into the valley below.  There, I saw the Titanic.

Not the real Titanic, of course, whose wreckage is at the bottom of the ocean, but a half-scale replica of the Titanic, which is at the bottom of a valley in the Ozark Mountains.  This Titanic sits in water, complete with a replica of an iceberg.

The Titanic is surrounded by a town called Branson, Missouri, with 10,000 people and 36 live music theaters.  I had lived in Missouri for sixteen years, and I thought it was time to visit this town.

I was there on a Thursday in April.  The 36 theaters usually put on two shows a day (matinee and evening), and I had 62 shows to choose from.  Choosing which show to attend was difficult...not because there are so many, but because they are all wholesome family entertainment.

Some of the shows on that Thursday in April were: Hank Williams Revisited, the Baldknobbers Jubilee Show, Roy Rogers Jr, and the High Riders, Breakfast With Mark Twain, The Sons Of The Pioneers, The Texas Tenors, New Jersey Nights, The Johnny Cash Songbook.  As I drove around town, a number of intersections sported a statue of a pharaoh --- a reminder that Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was another choice.

Many of the theaters had been built by a performer specifically for their own performances: Jim Stafford performs at the Jim Stafford Theater; Shoji Tabuchi performs at the Shoji Tabuchi Theater; The Oak Ridge Boys perform at the Oak Ridge Boys Theater; Yakov  Smirnoff performs at the Yakov Smirnoff Theater; Andy Williams died in 2012, but the Andy Williams Moon River Theater is still going strong and featured A Musical Tribute To Frankie Valli.

I decided on a show at the New Shanghai Circus Theater, featuring some amazing acrobats.  This way I avoided anything syrupy or corny.

Besides the myriad shows, Branson had other forms of entertainment: Lost Canyon Mini-Golf, Dinosaur Canyon Mini-Golf, Pirates' Cove Mini-Golf, the Adventure Zipline, Parakeet Pete's Zipline, the world's largest toy museum, a branch of Stone Hill Winery. the Hollywood Wax Museum, Castle Rock Water Park, Ripley's Believe It Or Not, Talking Rock Cavern, and go-karts that drove down a vertical spiral rather than on a flat oval.

I could also have visited the Titanic, which is a museum built by John Joslyn, who led a 1987 expedition to the wreckage of the ship at the bottom of the ocean.

I skipped all these temptations, and went to the Veterans Memorial Museum.  There, I saw - shudder - Hermann Goering's sterling silver tea set and Eva Braun's hairbrush.

I only spent a day there, but clearly Branson is a phenomenon --- a phenomenon in a valley, in the Ozark Mountains, a few miles north of Arkansas.

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A 1-minute ad for the New Shanghai Circus on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ5qPHehXH4

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com