Private Screening By Local Director

WAITSBURG - By all accounts, the life of Ginny Ruffner is extraordinary.

She is a celebrated glass artist known for her lamp-work­ing technique. She uses a gas torch to melt rods and tubes of clear and colored glass, then paints them. The results are groundbreaking, some would say "other-wordly," making her one of the most important female glass artists in the country. She once dated Northwest author Tom Robbins and is said to have inspired a character in his novel "Skinny Legs And All." Earlier this year, she collaborated with legendary singer (and photographer) Graham Nash on a bronze sculpture at the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle. But perhaps most intriguingly, the 58-year-old Ruffner is the survivor of a near-fatal car accident she suffered at age 39. Physicians were certain she'd never walk or talk again, and here she is, getting around with the use of a cane and seeming no more affected than the victim of a stroke.

Ruffner's inspiring recovery and equally inspiring pursuit of art come to life in a new documentary by Waitsburg's own movie maker Karen Stanton.

Stanton, a longtime commercial audiovisual artist who splits her time between Waitsburg and Seattle with her hus­band and wine columnist Paul Gregutt, will bring her 90-min­ute story about Ruffner home to the Plaza Theater at 5 p.m. on Thursday Aug. 19.

This private screening is a rare chance for Waitsburgers to enjoy the vision and creation of one of its own artists. And it's one of those opportunities to get a glimpse of the ever-improving movie theater. The film, titled "Ginny Ruffner: A Not So Still Life" and produced by ShadowCatcher Entertainment, already won the Golden Space Needle Award at the Seattle International Film Festival this June and is await­ing a possible nationwide release.

ShadowCatcher is per­haps best known for produc­ing "Smoke Signals," a filmbased on the writing of Native American author Sherman Alexie, and for "Outsourc­ing,"

a comedy about the manager of a Seattle-based customer call center whose job along with those of all his colleagues is sent to India.

Stanton, who worked on the documentary for a year and a half, takes you by the hand and into Ruffner's kaleidoscope life, mind and entourage - from her childhood in South Carolina to her emergence as a world-renowned artist.

It bears witness to Ruffner's determination after an acci­dent put her into a coma for five weeks and onto a challeng­ing period of rehabilitation. "At first, she could only use her thumb," said Stanton, who took almost a year to follow Ruffner and even visited her family in the Carolinas to explore her roots. "She taught herself how to walk again."

After filming from February to December last year, Stan­ton went into the studio with editor Cindy Sangster from December to June for a six- to seven-days-a-week schedule she could only describe as "intense."

But it was the only way she could meet Seattle Interna­tional Film Festival Artistic Director Carl Spence's request to show it at McCaw Hall on June 11. It showed at the Kirkland Performing Arts Center on June 12.

In making the documentary, Stanton said she feels that a good movie should be "like a good conversation."

Her goal, she said, is to connect the audience in "an au­thentic way" to the subject. "It's about being in her world, which is vast," Stanton said. "She's a wickedly smart Southern belle. She has an amazing way of being with people."

The movie is much like Ruffner, she said. "It's light-hearted and sweet."

"Ginny Ruffner: A Not So Still Life" is Stanton's first foray into full-fledged docu­mentaries. A graduate of Holy Names in Spokane, she went right from high school into the accounting department at Paisley Productions in L.A. and "learned about Holly­wood

from the financial side out." She became an appren­tice film maker while there. Then she went to work for Kaye Smith Studios in Seattle, a company founded in 1973 by Danny Kaye and Lester Smith at which she learned to direct when film making in Seattle was still considered the Wild West. She worked on everything from Rainier Beer commercials (not unknown to residents of the Touchet Valley, where some of them were filmed) to spots for the likes of Nordstrom, Ed­die Bauer, Boeing and Weyerhaeuser. But most of her projects have been one week to two months long. Making a feature-length film was something new to Stanton. "They gave me full artistic license," she said about her backers, ShadowCatcher's David Skinner and Tom Gorai. In shooting the documentary, Stanton said she used the same technique as she has in previous film projects "letting the camera be with the person so they can (relax and) be themselves. Then I edit it so it's easy to receive by the viewer. I make it accessible." Stanton said she is proud to show the movie in Waitsburg, where she comes to recharge her creative battery at the couple's cottage, and where she can connect to everything that's lost in the city, quiet starlit nights and perhaps most of all - time to have a good conversation.

"You're inspired by where you live," she said.