March 19, 2010 Temec­ula The­ater, Temec­ula, Cal­i­for­nia
Moon­al­ice poster by Chris Shaw

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, for thou­sands of years Temec­ula has been home to a small, but influ­en­tial clan of Moon­al­ice. For rea­sons no mod­ern Moon­al­ice can appre­ci­ate, the ancient Temec­ula Moon­al­ices loved both hemp AND red wine. They loved hemp and wine so much they decided to cross breed them. True to Moon­al­ice tra­di­tion, the hope was that cross breed­ing would save a whole lot of effort for a tribe didn’t want to work hard. Unfor­tu­nately, the exper­i­ment was only par­tially suc­cess­ful. The wine was great — it had just a hint of rope in the fin­ish — but the hemp was a dis­as­ter. By the time the tribe got done with the crush, the hemp tasted like last week’s gym socks.

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, the sec­ond post office in the state of Cal­i­for­nia was right here in Temec­ula. You might rea­son­ably ask, “Hey Chubby, how come the 2nd post office in Cal­i­for­nia was right here in Temec­ula?” And I would answer, the post office sup­ported the mail order busi­ness of Temec­ula Moonalice’s Coast-to-Coast Hemp Cat­a­log, which burst onto the scene on April 22, 1859. With hemp prod­ucts rang­ing from paper to fab­ric to rope to enter­tain­ment, the cat­a­log pros­pered for about six hours, until 4:20 that first after­noon, when the employ­ees con­sumed so much inven­tory that they decided that Cal­i­for­nia was not ready for mail order.

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, Temec­ula was home to Erle Stan­ley Gard­ner, cre­ator of Perry Mason. Gard­ner appar­ently wrote 100 Perry Mason nov­els here, includ­ing the never-published Case of the Mys­te­ri­ous Moon­al­ice Munchies, wherein Della Street buys some spe­cial brown­ies at a Moon­al­ice bake sale and shares them with Perry and Lieu­tenant Tragg. Alone among Mason thrillers, this one had no mur­ders. Della, Perry, and Tragg spend the entire book dri­ving around LA look­ing for a donut shop.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, on this day in 1915, astronomers took the first photo of Pluto, but did not rec­og­nize it as a planet. Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, they rec­og­nized it as Mickey Mouse’s dog.

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