Bottle story featured on 'Today'

NBC's Today show this morning will interview two people involved in the story of a message in a bottle that appeared in Thursday's St. Petersburg Times.

Lisa Ferguson's 7-year-old son Roger Clay put a message in a bottle and dropped it off Clearwater's Pier 60 in December 1984. Don Smith of Venetian Isles in St. Petersburg found the bottle last week in a canal behind his home.

Clay died five years ago in a motorcycle accident at age 21. The Times story told how Smith returned the bottle, and the message, to Roger's mother.

Ferguson and Smith said Today has scheduled an interview with them at the pier at 9:30 a.m.

In a blow to France's summer cultural season, the famed Avignon theater festival was canceled Thursday over concerns that a strike by performers would continue to disrupt the schedule.

Theater-lovers across the country responded with disappointment that the walkout over planned government reductions to performers' unemployment benefits had claimed its biggest casualty.

Organizers also canceled a renowned opera festival in Aix-en-Provence, also in southern France, after strikes brought down the curtain on many performances in their first few days.

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