Guest Post by Scott Ryan
In July 1986, my mother opened her birthday present from my father. It was a VHS video camera. After she opened it, and pretended not to be disappointed that it wasn’t a diamond necklace, I took her camera and never gave it back.
The first thing I did was make a video of me as a magician. I made the local neighbor girl disappear with some slick editing. Later that year, I wrote my first script. It was a banger called “God, The Devil and Me.” I played all three roles, of course. Then I forced my family and friends to watch the movie.
That was forty years ago.
Today, I am still making movies, but this time I’m trying to force people of Snoqualmie, North Bend, and the patrons of Twedes Cafe to watch. And I sure am hoping the audience won’t disappear.
Over the Real Twin Peaks event this year, I came to town to achieve one of my lifelong goals— no, it wasn’t finding a parking spot on North Bend Way—it was to work as a busboy at Twedes Cafe. I had watched “Twin Peaks” when it aired in 1990 and was always fascinated that it was filmed in a real town, and the TV’s Double R Diner was based on a real restaurant.
Over the years, I have traveled to this area many times and always felt welcomed. It was my dream to live here. To work here. To be here. Those of you who get to live amongst the mountains, the falls and the damn good pie have no idea what a solace this area can be to an outsider.
I had been lobbying Rachel Bennett and Max Spears, the owners of Twedes Cafe, for a couple of years to see if they would let me moonlight as a busboy, a fry cook, a pie maker, or anything that they needed. In February 2026, they finally gave in and agreed to let me come aboard.
I came to town all the way from sunny Florida for a six-day stint as the oldest busboy this side of Snoqualmie River. I poured the coffee, sat the customers, bussed the tables, sliced the pie, and iced the knees. Man, were my legs tired. Why was I doing this the same year I became AARP certified? All of my co-workers were around eighteen years old. They could move faster, bend further, but they didn’t know more Taylor Swift songs than I did. So I won there. Or did I lose? I’m not sure.
While in my real life I am an author and a publisher, my heart has always been with that teenager who made his first movie. I’ve been making films, shorts, and documentaries my entire life. So when the opportunity came to work at Twedes, what else could I do but film it? The fact that I also was working a full schedule made it hard to get a lot of footage, but I got enough to edit together a 45-minute documentary entitled “The Double R Dream.”
The film will debut at the North Bend Theatre on August 13th at 7 PM. Tickets are on sale now. It will be preceded by Brian Kursar’s Short Film tribute to Pat Cokewell, a previous Twedes Cafe owner. After the screening, Steven Miller will host a live Q&A panel with Bennet, Spears, and me. The evening is part of the “We Live Inside a Dream” weekend that plays several David Lynch feature films alongside my documentary. I can’t believe I am living in a world where I can write that sentence and it’s true. What if I am dreaming? But I can’t be because it says it is happening right here in this article.
Maybe it all goes back to that first video I made in 1986. Maybe I really am a magician, and this opportunity is my greatest trick. Hope you attend the event and we can pull a rabbit out of a Double R hat together.
~Scott Ryan is the author of “Always Music in the Air: The Sounds of Twin Peaks,” “Moonlighting: An Oral History,” and “The Road to David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.” He is the co-president of Tucker DS Press and a busboy at Twedes Cafe.
[Photo Credits. Poster by Becca Moore. “Help Wanted” by Steven Miller. “Author Photo” by Faye Murman]
