Dinner and “creature feature” will raise funds for science fiction panel at Readers and Writers Festival

Creature Features from the 1950s will be the theme of a Dinner and a Movie series launched by a collaboration of the Virginia Kidd Agency and Arrowhead SF Foundation with the Columns Museum. The first movie and dinner event will be a fundraiser for the science fiction panel at the Milford Readers and Writers Festival.

In that first movie, “The Thing from Another World,” from 1951, scientists at an Arctic research station discover a spacecraft buried in the ice. Upon further investigation, they also find the frozen pilot and wonder, should they thaw him out?

The event will be in the Foundation Room of the Columns Museum at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, August 24. The cost is $35 per person and includes:

- One complimentary beverage for cocktail hour. Soft drinks and wine will be offered too.

-Introductory discussion before the film

-Dinner, including smoked barbeque grilled by Will Reeve

-Dessert, including homemade German chocolate cake by Dr. Lillian Longendorfer, with coffee or tea

For the past four years, all science fiction programs at the Milford Readers & Writers Festival have depended on the time, energy, and funds raised by Dr. Lillian Longendorfer, author and owner of the Golden Fish Gallery; the Virginia Kidd Agency, housed in Milford since 1965; and the Arrowhead SF Foundation, which is dedicated to the preservation of the Kidd house and its programs that keep the history of science fiction in Milford alive.

Thanks to the Columns Museum, this first event will be co-hosted by the Kidd Agency as a fundraiser for the science fiction programs for this year’s Milford Readers & Writers Festival. This film was chosen because of its tie-in to the Kidd Agency, which represents the Campbell Estate, including the novella “Who Goes There?”--the inspiration for this classic film.

Christine Cohen, of the Kidd Agency, will be the “guest lecturer” for this series, which will also include such science fiction films as “The Brain that Wouldn’t Die” (Sept. 28), Attack of the Crab Monsters (Oct. 26) and the museum’s traditional showing of Wasp Woman (Nov. 23), in the months to come.