Richard Ø Jones
The "0" was added in college because I was born without a middle name. Long story.
The Autobiography of Richard O Jones... More or less true stories from my life and times. A work in progress...
More collected works indexed here. Newspaper work, poetry, allegedly humorous essays, etc., as I can collect them. There have been many formats over the years, and most of it exists only in analog, so who knows when I'll get to that...
More...
Sally Heller's Colorful Detritus
Keeping an 'institution' fresh year after year
Screaming Mimes make some noise
Joy Christiansen Erb: Revealing secrets in the living room
Watts Prophets leave a trail of poetry
Dawn Cooksey: Because it's therapy
Poll: Students optimistic despite money concerns
Hamilton High School senior Gabi Lindsay now works part-time at Walmart and is concerned that the economy will have an impact on her ability to get a job as a music teacher when she gets out of college.
I interviewed Hal Holbrook a couple of times and met him in person once as he was bringing his Mark Twain show through. It was the second interview in which I got on his nerves, but I handled it well, I think.
I asked him to tell me about the first time he did Mark Twain, and he gave me the terse “that’s all in the bio” response, but then he went ahead and told me the story anyway, taking about 20 minutes, talking about him and his first wife touring the West doing a program about great writers, living and working out of the back of their car doing two shows a day and so on.
When he was done, I said, “You see, Mr. Holbrook, in your bio, all that is covered in three sentences, but you gave me a real story.”
He chuckled and said, “I see what you mean,” and then we had a great chat for about another hour. He even gave me a 10-minute recitation of some politically charged material.
* * *
He was fresh out of Denison in Granville, Ohio, where his mentor had booked Holbrook and his first wife Ruby to perform an educational program, performing 307 shows in a tour of schools in the Southwest.
“We did two or three shows a day and traveled over 30 thousand miles at tremendous speeds to get from one show to the next,” he said in a phone interview.
Doing Mark Twain was only a small part of that show that gave an overview of literary history and included a lot of Shakespeare, and he had to put on the makeup in 45 seconds, he said, while Ruby would do the introduction.
When he started performing “Mark Twain Tonight!” as a solo show in 1954, it took him four hours to do the aging makeup in a pre show routine that he maintained for nearly 30 years. But around 15 years ago, he said that he was doing a play in New York and was getting ready to go on tour as Twain, and while waiting for his cue backstage one night, he explored his face.
“I got out my hand mirror and saw the wrinkles, the indentations and the sagging jowls,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘You idiot! You don’t need all that makeup anymore.’ ”
Holbrook still uses a prosthetic nose to give it the distinctive shape along with the wig, mustache and eye brows.
“Mark Twain Tonight!” has been a constantly evolving program as Holbrook continues to edit from the wealth of material Twain left, not only his novels, but newspaper columns, essays and personal letters, estimating that he has about 17 hours of material to draw from every night. He said he’s able to keep the show up-to-date and relevant to the news of the day without making contemporary references because little has changed since the late 19th century as far as human nature is concerned.
“If you’re careful and spend of lot of time working on it, you can string the material together so that the audience makes the connection,” he said, and said that lately he’s been weaving portions of Twain’s essay “The War Prayer” into the second act.
“Because of terrorism, a handful of people from God knows where they can knock down two towers and we are aware now that we cannot be safe behind two great oceans,” Holbrook said. “If we want to live in a world without wars, it may be that we have to learn how to live with other people.
“I don’t think that people, no matter what their political persuasion, would have a hard time accepting that.”
This story was originally published on May 8, 2009 in the Hamilton JournalNews.
It’s lunchtime in Somerville, Ohio, and Megan’s Grocery and Pizza, both the only grocery store in town and the only place to buy hot food, is bustling.
With a well-worn wooden floor, two tall racks of greeting cards by the front door and a massive display of Slim Jims on the counter, Megan’s looks as though it hasn’t changed much in the 25 years Randy McGaha has owned it, and except for the lottery paraphernalia, maybe even from the 25 years before that.
On front of the meat cooler, its top covered with individual servings of dry cereal and a pizza warmer with piles of foil-wrapped cheeseburgers, a hand-made starburst sign advertises $5.50 pizzas, cheese or pepperoni, every day. Somewhere behind it all, Randy McGaha hands out sandwiches and good-natured grief to the half-dozen men loitering in the cramped space between the cashier counter and the two aisles of groceries and soft drinks.
McGaha is a multi-tasker in the old-fashioned way, running the slicer, making and wrapping sandwiches, answering the phone, running the cash register, giving instructions to the kids helping him out, telling stories about Somerville and greeting every person who comes through the door by name. His wife Brigitte operates like a third hand, taking money and ducking into the back room occasionally to make a pizza, but mostly it seems like she’s just trying to stay on the fringe of the whirlwind her husband creates.
When he was a child, he said his grandfather had a small grocery in Dayton, Ky., but McGaha (pronounced muh-GAY-HAY) claims he didn’t know anything about the business when he gave up his job making false teeth to buy Sylvia’s Corner Market 25 years ago, changing the name to honor his new-born daughter.
“Now I have three daughters and two step-daughters,” he says.
“I just wanted something different,” he says, “and boy, did I get it. A lot of time; a lot of hours.
“It was doing pretty good when I got it, but there wasn’t any pizza or hot food or lottery in town, so I built it up.”
He grew up in Somerville, just a few doors away from Megan’s.
“It used to be one of the wildest towns there every was,” he says, “but it’s as safe as can be now. The town has slowed down, but not me. I guess it’s because there’s no competition.
“My mom still lives in the same house I grew up in,” he says. “I enjoyed it. I had a good childhood in this burg. We used to have a baseball team, played in Camden and Oxford leagues, out in Reily and Darrtown.”
Standing by the front door eating a lunch meat sandwhich, Alan Dunkelberger, third-generation owner of Dave Dunkelberger & Sons, another of the few remaining Somerville businesses, comments that McGaha is two days older then he is.
“You know how thick bicycle tires are?” he asks. “We rode around this town so much we kept wearing them out.”
A tall man in sunglasses tells McGaha, “Two packs,” and McGaha hands him Marlboros.
“They don’t even have to tell me what kind,” he says. “I know what everybody smokes.”
As he goes back to his slicer, McGaha says, “Everybody who comes in here knows me. I could be in a bad mood or a good mood and nobody cares.”
Isolation
Somerville is not on the road to anywhere.
There is a state highway passing through, Ohio 744, but if you follow it east about seven miles, it ends in Jacksonburg, officially the smallest municipality in Butler County, and if you follow it north, it simply ends less than a mile out of town at the intersection of two county roads.
Somerville was laid out in 1831, presumably as a stopping place for travelers moving between Cincinnati and Ft. Wayne, Ind., in the valley along the winding Seven Mile Creek.
Like Camden, just across the Preble County border, Somerville took its name from a city in New Jersey, and for a time was a picturesque, vibrant little village.
“This town was known for being the most self-sufficient town in the county,” said Ruth Ann Felblinger, a lifelong resident who has recently turned to the elderly people of the town to compile an oral history while there are still some around to remember the its glory days as an apple pie slice of Americana. “We had a cannery and a butcher shop and a hat shop. You didn’t have to go anywhere unless you were wanting to visit someone.”
But as such things happen, with the building of US 127 in the mid-1950s as an express route from Hamilton to Eaton, Somerville was left with little but its past. Even its main access to US 27 went away when “the white bridge,” as it was known by the locals, fell into disrepair in the ensuing years and without funds to re-build, was demolished.
According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, Somerville’s population peaked in 1960, a few years after 127 cut it off from the world, at 478. Most recent estimates have the population at 321 in July, 2008.
The village now finds itself in a metaphorical crossroads, however. The declining population also means declining revenues, so residents fear that they may lose its incorporation and will have to be absorbed by Milford Township, which means higher taxes and more ordinances, unless they get some money coming in.
Money issues
“The community is really falling apart,” said Mayor Terri Smith, a young mother of six who’s just been on the job for a couple of months. “We’re trying to do whatever we can to keep things going, but we have a lot of financial problems and we need to do a lot more, a lot of pulling together to get the town back together.”
Smith, who grew up in Somerville, said there’s not an empty house in town, but there is a lot of property that could me made available for business.
“We’ve talked to a lot of companies about moving here, even if only to create a couple of part-time jobs,” Smith said. “We’ve looked at grants and other sources of revenue, but there’s not much we qualify for. We just keep hitting a brick wall.
“This town needs a lot of help,” she said. “We have a lot of ideas, but we’re short of resources.”
Earlier this year, a group of concerned residents and former residents banded together to create the Sommerville Beautification Committee as a vehicle to generate some civic pride, preserve the town’s history and heritage and to inspire some kind of rejuvenation.
“We want to make it so that when someone drives through they’ll say, this is a nice town,” said chairman Alan Dunkelberger. “We’re going to put some flowers out and make enough money to have some scholarships for the kids in town or help people in need.”
Linking to the past
Felblinger’s efforts to document town history is complemented by Charlie Johnson’s recent purchase of the former Methodist Church, which had to close when its membership declined to five and could no longer pay the bills. Although Johnson said he’d rather see someone come and open it up as a church again, he’s made it into an unofficial town museum, mostly to hold his own collection of Somerville memorabilia, newspaper clippings, old signs and photos.
One recent morning, Felblinger gathered some of her octo- and nonagenarian subjects in the old church to talk about Somerville’s heyday.
“The happiest days of my life were spent here in Somerville,” said Chic Rumpler, 92, who now lives in Oxford. “At one time, Somerville was the garden spot of the world. When God made this place he threw the mold away.”
They recalled when the one-lane bridge on Main Street was “the highlight of the town,” a showcase where women planted flowers in boxes along the rail and took turns watering them every day. It has since been replaced by a standard-issue two-lane concrete bridge.
The now-defunct white bridge (as opposed to the railroad black bridge) was also the site of the town swimming hole. There was a spot deep enough for daring young people to jump off the bridge, but at least one of them ended up paralyzed by missing the narrow target.
Prior to US 127 by-passing the town, there was a stoplight, but no one paid much attention to it, Rumpler said.
At one time, there was a Somerville High School, but it closed in 1934, Gladys Morrow said, and she ended up graduating from the McGuffey School in Oxford.
“We had lots of operettas to play in and there weren’t a lot of kids so we got to play basketball and softball,” she said. “We had one of the first gymnasiums in the county, but it was a matchbox. There were two rows of seats along the sides and a balcony.
“We lived in the greatest possible time,” she said.
Fighting a bad reputation
There was, admittedly, a dark side as Somerville had a reputation of being a rough town, for “fighting, drinking and carousing,” Rumpler said, but attributed most of the trouble to outsiders who would come up from Hamilton and down from Eaton on the weekends.
Up until 1962, when the town voted to go dry, there were three saloons in Somerville. One of them, the Fox Hole, particularly had a reputation for being rowdy.
“It was terrible on the weekends,” Rumpler said. “One guy came down from Michigan one night, said he heard this was a mean town and wanted to fight the meanest man in it.
“So I campaigned to get the town dry even thought I came from a drinking family,” he said, adding that the margin was two votes.
Jane Apfeld, who served as Somerville Postmaster for 25 years, said she moved here in 1948 when her husband William came back from World War II because they couldn’t find a house in Overpeck, where they were from.
“We looked all over and finally found a little place in Somerville,” she said. “I said I’d move into a home without a bathroom, but not without a furnace.
With a bathroom out back, her husband put in a shower and a wash bowl inside, “but it was several years before we got a commode in,” she said.
She recalled the town’s self-sufficiency and old-time values, where feminine hygiene products at Withrow’s store had to be wrapped in plain brown paper, and where there was even a shoe shop who would sew up the two baseballs owned by the Bulldogs whenever someone knocked the stitching loose.
There was never a movie theater in Somerville, but every Friday night there were free movies shown on the lawn of the school that the whole town would come out for.
Hoping for a rebound
For many, the final blow to Somerville’s town identity came in 1983 with the closing of Somerville Elementary, part of the Talawanda Local School District.
“When they took the school down, it took away a lot of the sense of community,” said Alan Dunkelberger, third generation owner of Dave Dunkelberger & Sons, a farm supply store (among other things) located on the dead end created by the demise of the white bridge.
“We’re hopefully on the rebound,” he said. “Some people from the outside look at Somerville in a different way, but if I fell down here right now, there’s any number of people that would run over here to see what’s wrong. If that little kid there was in trouble, we’d help him out.”
“It’s a nice community,” Felblinger said. “The town is safe. I wouldn’t want to raise my children anywhere else.”
Earlier this summer, the Beautification Committee organized a homecoming celebration in honor of the village’s 200th birthday, and Dunkelberger said that event went a long way in improving civic self-esteem.
They plan to follow-up by showing a free movie, like back in the old days, as a going-back-to-school treat for the children, which will also give the group an opportunity to hand out free pencils and school supplies.
“I’ve got a lot of attachment to this town,” said Mayor Smith. “I have 10 aunts and uncles who live here, so I’m not going to give up on it anytime soon.”
Go! Feature
"I write songs because I need to," said Yellow Springs singer/songwriter Dawn Cooksey. "I would write them even if I didn't play them for anyone."
It's therapy, she said, and she knows a little bit about that because she is a therapist and a licensed social worker. For a time, she worked for an agency in Hamilton, and through her contacts began performing for the Farmer's Market, which in turn led to her upcoming appearance at the Music Cafe on Tuesday, Dec. 23.
Born in Dayton, Cooksey lived several years in Austin, Texas, where she performed in the folk/alternative rock band Dik Dam Dyk. It was in the Austin open mic nights that she overcame her fear of performing her own songs.
"I didn't think anyone would care about my problems," she said. "I'd be a wreck for days before a gig, but I told myself I'd go every week until I'm not scared anymore.
"It took a long time."
Her songs tend to be sad, mad and everywhere in between, she said. "There have been a few exceptions, but I generally don't write when I'm happy and enjoying my life — which is most of the time.
"There are a few exceptions that blow me away, but happy songs tend to be kind of dorky anyway," she said.
She has a band, 68 South.
Having played Bob Cratchit for two years prior to taking over the helm as the director for the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park's production of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," Michael Evan Haney has been involved in what is now a Cincinnati tradition from the very beginning.
"It's really become a part of my life," he said. "I never thought I'd be involved in a play that would become a city-wide institution. When we started, we didn't even know there would be a second year, but even though it was not critically accepted, it was good in audience numbers."
Every year before rehearsals start, Haney goes back to the original novel and reads it — even though the adaptation uses nearly the same dialog word-for-word.
But he still looks forward to it every year with the goal of putting on a "crackerjack" performance.
"Other groups that do this often allow the quality to slide as the years go by," he said, "but that's just a sacrilege. Dickens is just a sacred as Shakespeare.
The key, he said, to keeping it real is to remember one thing.
"I wrote it at the top of my script: 'It's about Scrooge, stupid,'" Haney said. "The ones that are not successful are those that lose that focus."
For instance, some productions have made that into a lavish, show-stopping production number.
"But you have to remember Scrooge's involvement in the party," he said. "If he's not at the heart of it all, you're in trouble."
Local favorite Bruce Cromer will be humbugging as Ebenezer Scrooge for the fourth year.
"Bruce is a wonderful actor and his Scrooge is special because he never stops working on it," he said. "Each year, he finds something new and closer to the human soul of what Scrooge is.
"I call Scrooge 'the middle-age man's Hamlet' because he goes through just about every human emotion possible."
Also returning are Dale Hodges as the Ghost of Christmas Past/Mrs. Peake, Keith Jochim as Mr. Fezziwig/Ghost of Christmas Present, Todd Lawson as Young and Mature Scrooge, Gregory Procaccino as Jacob Marley/Old Joe, Andy Prosky as Bob Cratchit, Regina Pugh as Mrs. Cratchit, Wayne Pyle as Mr. Cupp/Percy, Tony Roach as Fred, Ron Simons as Mr. Sosser/Topper and Amy Warner as Mrs. Fezziwig/Patience.
"Almost everybody, from Scrooge on down, is a little richer this year and I see some nuances that I haven't seen before," Haney said. "It's like Shakespeare in that the text is so dense with so many levels that you can find all sorts of different ways to use them."
A lot of the production, however, remains exactly the same.
"It's a major decision to change anything," he said, "and you have to have meetings. We changed Marley's entrance a few years ago, and so had to change all the sound and technical cues."
how to go
WHAT: Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"
WHERE: Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park
WHEN: Through Dec. 30
COST: $31-$59
MORE INFO: www.cincyplay.com
The Great Gatsby meets the Bard of Avon as the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company updates the comedy "Twelfth Night" to the Roaring Twenties.
Directory Jeremy Dubin said he hit on the idea over the summer while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel of a man who re-invents himself so that he can work his way into the upper reaches of society.
"I was struck by the similarities between the characters," he said, "and of what comes out of trying to change your fundamental nature.
"And I felt that the scenes with the clowns Toby Belch and Feste have a vaudeville flavor that would work nicely in this kind of format."
The official synopsis:
After a shipwreck, Viola (Sara Clark) finds herself separated from her twin brother Sebastian and alone in the city of Illyria. Bereft at the loss of her brother and forced to make her own way in the world, she disguises herself as a man, "Cesario," and takes a job in the court of Duke Orsino (Rob Jansen). Orsino is hopelessly in love with the Lady Olivia (Kelly Mengelkoch), who has refused all of his previous advances. When Orsino sends "Cesario" to Olivia to plead his case one more time, Olivia falls instantly in love with "Cesario". Meanwhile, Viola has fallen in love with Orsino, but cannot express her desires without revealing her true identity. The classic love triangle becomes further complicated when Viola's twin brother, Sebastian (Kristopher Stoker), arrives in Illyria and is mistaken for "Cesario." As the romance unfolds, Olivia's drunken uncle, Sir Toby Belch (Matt Johnson), conspires with Olivia's servants Maria (Sherman Fracher), Feste (Christopher Guthrie) and Fabian (Billy Chace) to play a practical joke on Olivia's stuffy butler, Malvolio (Jim Hopkins).
"'Twelfth Night' has so many story elements that resonate with the Roaring Twenties," Dubin said. "Women were becoming more independent, dressing in a more masculine fashion, and taking work outside the home, just as Viola is forced to do.
"Prohibition created a black market in bootleg alcohol that led to a lot of outrageous behavior, a perfect opportunity for Shakespeare's drunken rascal Sir Toby Belch to make mischief. And the birth of jazz created a free-wheeling atmosphere where the desire for true love was often at odds with the social mandate to be the life of the party."
While it's become common practice to put Shakespeare's stories in more contemporary environments, Dubin points out that it seems Shakespeare did the same thing in his day, with plays like "Julius Caesar" making topical references to things that Caesar would not have known about — a striking clock, for instance.
"He worked within a certain visual vocabulary, using his contemporary references to place a character's social status to make it relatable to his audience," he said. "We have our visual vocabulary, too, and these plays are not museum pieces, but relevant, living theater."
The danger, then, comes when the production distracts from the script, to become cute or irrelevant to the action.
"It's a trial and error process," Dubin said. "We're careful not to force things into the text that aren't there. You want to make sure that you don't make it something it's not."
The Hotel Café in Los Angeles has become an influential venue — “the place that breaks artists” — featuring the country’s up-and-coming singer/songwriters.
“The stellar songwriters that grew The Hotel Café scene into community and camaraderie are the focus,” said spokesperson Patrice Fehlen, and the Hotel Cafe Tour, stopping next week at Bogart’s, follows the same formula.
“There are no headliners, the band is shared and spontaneous collaborations between artists are encouraged,” she said. “With a revolving cast of songwriters jumping on and off the bus, each evening is unique, creating a feeling of 'these people in this place will never happen again.’”
Now in its fourth year, Over the Hotel Café Tour will feature an all female line-up for the first time. Nineteen female songwriters, both established musicians and hot rising stars such have embarked on this 34-city tour, featuring a different line-up on each stop.
“One bus, one band, and a bunch of girlfriends on the road,” Fehlen said.
Cincinnati’s stop features Rachael Yamagata, Meiko, Thao Nguyen, Jaymay and Alice Russell.
“It’s almost like a talent show,” Jaymay said. “The band gets all of our songs in advance, so we go out and do three songs, let someone else play for a while, go back and do two more.”
how to go
- WHAT: The Hotel Cafe Tour
- WHERE: Bogart’s, 2621 Vine St., Cincinnati
- WHEN: 8 p.m. Monday, Nov. 3
- COST: $13.50
- MORE INFO: (513) 562-4949; www.bogarts.com
Go! feature
Cincinnati singer/songwriter Ellie Fabe is still finding her way back into the scene, making her second appearance at the Music Cafe at the Fitton Center on Tuesday, Oct. 28.
“I have two kids, and that can check you out for a while,” she said. “But they’re a little older, 10 and 14, so I’m just now checking back in.”
Admitting that it’s hard to negotiate her way this time around — there was no MySpace.com when she first started playing her songs — Fabe said her strategy is just to play as much as she can, especially in performer-friendly venues like the Music Cafe.
“Sometimes you find yourself in uncharted territory at open mic nights,” she said. “But I’ve been writing regardless of whether or not I’m playing out, so you start to get into this ‘if a tree falls in the forest’ thing.
“So for now, I’m just trying to stay next to myself and not get too far out ahead.”
Part of that includes recording. Although she’s recorded some demos of her work, she’s not sure what to do with it all other than post it on MySpace.
“I’d love to make a record, but I don’t see that as something that will catapult you to the top,” she said.
Fabe, who is also a working visual artist, said her songs, laden with girl-longing themes, seem to be especially popular among teenage girls.
“My work is a little self-confessional,” she said, “writing about what’s going on with me — although a lot of it is fictional. I also like words that just go together well.”
Also performing at the Music Cafe will be Christian pop artist Kevin Stokely, Debbie Silverman and Mitch Lieberman playing novelty and parody tunes, singer/songwriters Myron Gabbard and Brent Burch, and folk/rock/country band Diamond Blue.
NASHVILLE — Butler County native and Nashville guitarist Tim Baumgartner is a little nervous about his apperance on “The Late Show” with David Letterman, airing Friday, Oct. 17.
Except for a couple of music videos in which the camera has “breezed by,” this will be Baurmgartner’s first performance on national television.
Baumgartner takes two solos on “Butte America USA,” a song performed by country singer Tim Montana. The first, he said, he emulates the solo played by the studio musician on the record, but the second one is all his and he’s out front and center.
Montana is just one of several musicians that Baumgartner slings his guitar for. In fact, the Letterman appearance marked his 210th gig of the year, no small feat in a city overflowing with pickers.
Baumgartner said that his first musical gigs were playing in a family band at Queen of Peace Church that included his siblings and his mother, Celeste Baumgartner, a frequent Journal-News contributor, on mandolin.
Like many other guitar players from Hamilton, Baumgartner took his first lessons at Mehas Music with Dave Sams, now the resident guitar teacher at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts.
While a student at Badin High School, class of 1985, he played in a couple of different rock bands, including Risk and Scimitar, both of which played a lot of original music.
He got his first taste of professional work at Kings Island at the encouragement of his mother.
"It was the best thing she could have done for me," he said. "I had spent my summers baling hay and making maybe $300 the whole summer. At Kings Island, I was making $300 a week playing 30 minute shows with one-hour breaks, and we were treated royally."
After a year at the prestigious Berklee School of Music in Boston, Baumgartner finished his education at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music where he studied jazz guitar performance. He continued his theme park career in the meantime, not only at Kings Island and at Bush Gardens in Florida before moving to Nashville in 1992.
Tim Montana first approached him last summer to go on tour in (where else?) the state of Montana, which included a gig in Choteau, where David Letterman owns a vacation ranch.
He and one of the other band members were playing cards on the bus outside the venue after a sound check when Letterman came knocking on the bus door, wanting to meet Montana. Apparently, he was impressed enough to offer the band a slot on "The Late Show."
“He was just the nicest guy you could imagine,” Baumgartner said. “The people there treat him like one of their own.”
In New York at the theater, however, it’s a different story. While the band and the stage crew were all very friendly, he said, Letterman was kept isolated.
Although “The Late Show” normally tapes the same day as the broadcast, the Friday shows are sometimes taped earlier in the week. Other guests tonight, Oct. 17, include comedian Tina Fey, who has been making headlines for her impersonation of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
“All in all, I think the performance came off great,” he wrote on his MySpace.com blog. “However... the TV mix won’t lie. Any tuning or intonation glitchs that are buried in the live stage volume will come out clear on the TV mix. So... I am biting my nails until I see it.”
Go! feature
The exhibition is set up like a family’s living room, with furniture emblazoned with photographs and text.
“The images are mostly of people and the text comes from interviews I did with people with eating disorders and people who are close to people with eating disorders,” said Joy Christiansen Erb, assistant professor of photography at Youngstown State University whose “Family Gathering: A Look into the World of Eating Disorders,” opening next week at Miami University’s Hiestand Gallery, investigate the psychological and emotional effects of eating disorders.
“Eating disorders are often talked about in the media, but at the personal level, it’s often kept quiet,” she said, so her art makes an attempt to move the conversation from the tube to the living room.
“I first thought about how secretive eating disorders are,” she said. “They live in the home. So I created a desk to represent the mind and had things tucked away in the drawers so when you pulled them open and re-arranged things on the desk you could see more images and text.”
After that, she moved on to chairs to represent a counseling session. Facing each other, one chair expressed a professional, educating voice while the other had “a needy, raw” voice, she said.
She created the room of furniture for a traveling exhibition called “Share Your Voice” in 2005.
Her goal, she said, is to “help people, especially students, talk about their eating disorders and open up that dialogue.”
how to go
- WHAT: “Family Gathering,” an installation by Joy Christiansen Erb
- WHERE: Hiestand Gallery, Miami University, Oxford
- WHEN: Oct. 21-Nov. 5
- COST: No charge
- MORE INFO: (513) 529-1883
It started out as a choice between acting lessons or violin lessons when Natalie Stovall was 4 years old. Because her mother had fiddled with a violin while carrying the child, music won out.
“I’m not even sure I understood what the instrument was at the time,” Stovall said, “but I had a lot of fun in class.
Practicing, however, was another matter.
“I liked the attention and I liked being on stage,” she said. “That was a big deal, but she couldn’t get me to practice until she figured out that if she took me to a park, people would gather around me to listen, and then I’d practice all day.”
She loved playing so much that her teachers sometimes chastised her for smiling too much during recitals. Music, after all, is serious business, Stovall learned, until she discovered the other side of the instrument, the fiddling side.
“You could play fast and you could play two strings at once and you could make it up as you go,” she said. “I continued classical training up until I was 16, just to work on technique, but I was really a fiddler by then.
When she was 10, she auditioned for a job performing in Opryland park when they asked her to sing something. She didn’t sing, she told them. Sing anything, they said. She sang “Happy Birthday” and got a job singing as well as playing fiddle, and taking voice lessons.
Stovall ended up studying at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she played in orchestras and formed her first band, taking them home to Nashville with her to play around there during the summers. The drummer in that band is still with her today, but it took her 27 different musicians to create the lineup, now together for two years, that will perform with her on Saturday at the Fitton Center.
TRENTON, OHIO — Many children aspire to be authors. Some actually are.
Sydney Smith, daughter of Susan and Davis Smith of Trenton, has been writing and making her own books since she was 3 years old, according to her mother.
“I’ve always been interested in writing and drawing,” said Sydney Smith, who recently turned 9. “I got the idea for the book when I thought of a character’s name and made a comic book of the things that happened to her.”
Her mother said, “She came downstairs one day with a shorter version of this, but it was a real story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and a message, so I told her she should work on it some more.”
So Sydney Smith went back upstairs and for three days used her advanced knowledge of paper doll-making techniques along with a set of stickers and craft paper for making scrapbooks to create a 24-page picture book titled “Mary Jonathy: A Bad School Day.” Susan Smith served as her editor and did all the advance work to bring down the cost of publishing it through Author House, a contract publisher located in Bloomington, Ind. Although they wouldn’t say exactly how much it cost, they said the sales of the book — now approaching 100 — have covered the cost and they’re now in the black.
And Sydney Smith is enjoying the fruits of the writing life, giving readings at Border’s Books in Mason, which has “Mary Jonathy” in stock.
“I was a little nervous,” Sydney said of her first reading. “But when I saw all the kids on the floor, I said, 'I know I can do this.’ They seemed to like it.”
She will also have a booth at the Pyramid Hill Arts Fair on Sept. 27-28, her mother said.
She’s still thinking about her next book, Sydney said.
Although Mindy Smith spent some time in Cincinnati — and joined her first band while there — one gets a sense that it was not exactly a memorable part of the native Long Islander’s life. For one thing, she was recovering from the death of her mother, her musical idol and inspiration.
“She had the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard,” said Smith, who was 19 when her mother died of cancer. “She had the ability to touch people, to move mountains with her voice. If I learned anything from her, it’s to put all of your emotion into your performance.”
So she found herself enrolled at Cincinnati Bible College.
“I went there because I had some friends who went there,” she said. “I was a lousy student, but I needed to get out of New York. I tried to do a band-thing, but that only lasted about two months. It was fun, but...”
After dropping out, she re joined her father, who had relocated to Nashville, and that’s where she found her voice and her instrument.
“That was my version of college,” she said, “learning how to write. I started out singing them a capella, but realized I needed to learn how to play guitar to accompany myself. But I felt like that’s what I was meant to do: Write original songs.”
Smith got to work on her career, going to songwriters showcases and open mics nearly every night. Winning the Tin Pan South writer’s contest in 2000 led to a staff position at Yellow Dog Music. The company allowed her to earn a living writing songs for others while she made demos and generated a buzz that earned her an appearance with Lee Ann Womack at South By Southwest and as the only unsigned artist on the Dolly Parton tribute CD, “Just Because I’m a Woman.” She was singled out by Parton herself for that project.
She’s still on the road for her 2007 album “Long Island Shores,” her second, playing solo acoustic sets.
“That’s really the way I like to do things,” she said. “That’s how I started out, so I’m quite comfortable out there alone.”
HAMILTON — “Musicianaries” Gary and Julie Tussey have both been making music since they were children.
She’s a little bit pop and rock with three self-released solo CDs to her credit. He’s a little bit country and blues. Together they’ve hit upon a sound that has landed them a national distribution deal for their next record, “Dance!”
The Tusseys have been together as a couple for 13 years, but it wasn’t until about two years ago that they joined forces in their music ministry to perform as a duo, inspired by an enigmatic encounter after a gig.
“He always played piano with the floating left-hand technique like Jerry Lee Lewis,” Julie said.
“Then about two years ago, I was playing in a church, a guy came up to me after and said, ‘The Lord is using the guitar now,’” Gary said. “I think he meant it like a smart aleck, but I took it as a challenge,” and he retired to his studio to study.
For the next six months, even his wife didn’t really know what he was up to except that she’d hear him playing endless scales.
Then one day, he came to her with a riff he had written, and she immediately started writing lyrics to it, and they kept writing until they had their first duo disc in the can, a self-produced and self-marketed project they called “Hillbilly Praise.”
When they started on the second set, the music became more “rhythm ’n’ blues meets gospel,” they said, or what they decided to call “Christian blues.”
“‘Hillbilly Praise’ was more praise-and-worship, but for the next CD we tried to tell more life stories,” Gary said.
While there are still details to be worked out in regard to post-production on the music, the Tusseys hope that “Dance!” will be released in time for the Christmas season.
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.
Journal-News Mothers Day Feature
PROLOGUE — This Mother’s Day, a Seven Mile nurse will have a very proud daughter and mother helping her celebrate a milestone.
After 37 years of constant setbacks, health concerns and general life frustrations, Terri Sweeney will graduate from Miami University’s Hamilton campus today, May 11, as a registered nurse.
When she was 19 years old, Sweeney was in an automobile accident that kept her in and out of surgery for the next 15 years — and still occasionally feeling the pain. Then 12 years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and endured chemotherapy and a double mastectomy.
“Most women would have given up a long time ago, but she kept going,” said her mother, Juanita Mayes. “For her to have become so strong is really good.”
“She’s my hero,” said Sweeney’s daughter Lisa Back. “I’ve always said when I was little that I wanted to be just like my mom.”
So even though Back doesn’t think she has the right stuff for nursing, she still pursued the medical field and works second shift registering emergency room patients at Mercy Hospital in Fairfield.
“Pretty much everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from my mom,” she said.
Mayes believes that her daughter’s story is an inspiring one and hopes that other women will heed the lessons she’s learned.
“She’s exceptionally brave and has always been encouraging to other women,” she said.
THE STORY:
Terri Sweeney has always been a sensitive soul, even as a toddler.
“When she was a little girl riding around on her tricycle, she would fall, and with every little scratch, she screamed so loud every neighbor on the block would come running out,” said her mother, Juanita Mayes.
“If you sympathized with her, she’d never stop crying.”
But eventually, she learned not only to toughen up, but to use the pain she experienced to help others.
“Dogs, animals, anybody that had anything wrong, she would pick them up, bring them home and take care of them,” Mayes said.
When she was a teenager, she had what she called her “Marcus Welby bag,” named after the TV doctor.
“When somebody would get sick in the family or getting ready to have a baby, I’d put my overnight stuff in and spend some time with them, helping them get through whatever it was,” she said. “That’s when my light clicked on, when somebody needed help.
“I’ve always wanted to be a nurse. I felt it in my heart that I was a nurse.”
Life and its hardships got in the way, for a while. But today, May 11, Sweeney will finally achieve her registered nurse status at the age of 56 at a special graduation ceremony from Miami University’s Hamilton campus.
“She tried many times to get into nursing, but things would come up, and she’d have to drop her plans. It’s taken a lot of determination,” her mother said.
When she was 19 years old in 1971, she was a passenger in a car that struck a metal utility pole, just in front of where she was sitting.
“The engine was on my feet,” she said. “I was trapped.”
Her body was nearly shattered with a broken back, broken leg, broken foot and a broken jaw with several teeth missing.
They kept Sweeney in a Cincinnati hospital for more than 30 days because she couldn’t be moved.
For the next 15 years, the injuries, the subsequent surgeries, the pain and the pain killers all kept her from going to school, but the idea of becoming a nurse was always on her mind. Instead she worked at all kinds of jobs, from waitressing to driving a forklift in a warehouse. From time to time, she would make steps toward school, taking self-study courses or college prerequisites, but something always seemed to get in the way.
She married, had a daughter, got divorced and met Stan Sweeney, who worked for the Middletown Fire Department and whom she married in 1986 — hobbling to the ceremony on crutches because of surgery on her knee.
At the time, she said, she had been accepted at Bethesda
Hospital’s nursing school, but lost her financial aid and decided instead to focus on raising her daughter and stepdaughter.
Then in 1996, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and endured chemotherapy and a double mastectomy.
Two things came of the experience. Her back pain went away, which she attributes to an unusual side effect of the chemotherapy.
And it helped put her back on track to pursue her dream of becoming a nurse.
“The whole time I was going through chemo, I thought there was something I was supposed to learn or do,” she said. “I felt like everything happens for a reason and that I should give it back.”
At age 46, she gained her licensed practical nurse designation from Butler Tech in 1998.
Part of the inspiration, she said, were some of the nurses who cared for her.
“It was a great help to me to have a nurse take care of me who had been through it herself,” Sweeney said. “They tell you that 90 percent of your recovery is your attitude. So when I saw how much that helped me, I figured I could help others, too.”
With her body still recovering from the cancer and the chemotherapy, she found work on an as-needed basis for the flexibility, but also found herself taking care of Stan, who had a stroke and triple-bypass open heart surgery.
As she gained her strength, she worked in hospitals and long-term care units, but realized that being an LPN was too limiting for her ambition, so in August 2006, she started taking the classes needed for the Miami University nursing program on the Hamilton campus, working two or three 12-hour shifts a week in Mount Airy while taking classes and frequently driving to Dayton for clinics.
“Even if she didn’t feel good, she still got up to go to work or class and only missed one class,” her mother said. “She hasn’t stopped for a minute these last two years.”
Sweeney said she feels like she can be a good nurse because of the experiences she’s had.
“I know what it feels like to be the patient, what it feels like to be laying there sick and waiting for somebody to come and do something,” she said. “ Somebody’s got to be there for people.”
Sweeney said she especially feels the calling when she is caring for women.
“I’ve taken care of a lot of women who were newly diagnosed with breast cancer and they’re thinking this is it, this is a death sentence or they’re going to be sick the rest of their life,” she said.
“When you tell them that you’ve been through it, their attitude does this big turn-around,” she said. And so at an age when her colleagues are finding a way out of the profession, she has other ideas.
Last week, she said one of her patients, a young man, expressed some shock when he found out she was graduating from college.
“You should be retiring,” he said.
She told him, “I’m just getting started.”
HAMILTON — The paper can’t be as old as it looks. The poem was written just last week by a student at Talawanda High School, but already it’s creased and wrinkled and showing the wear and tear of continued admiration.
Amde Hamilton, one of the Watts Prophets, reads from it:
“You know that’s pretty bold coming to our school
Even though you’re so old, but it’s cool that you’re here.
It shows that you have no fear.
It shows that you care.
And let me tell you, that’s rare.”
And it’s cool that after 40 years of working with young people, helping them express themselves through words written and spoken, that the Watts Prophets would still be moved enough by the words of a teenager that they carry something like this around to share.
The Watts Prophets — Hamilton, Richard Dedeaux and Otis O’Solomon — first came together in 1967 at the Watts Writers Workshop in Los Angeles, which was created by screenwriter Budd Schulberg (“On the Waterfront”) from the ashes of the riots two years earlier.
“When we first came down there, Watts was called ‘Charcoal Valley’ because it was so burned up,” said Prophet Richard Dedeaux, “and there was still a lot of tension.”
Because so much of what was going on at the Watts Writers Workshop was for the theater and performing arts, the Prophets got the idea of making poetry more performance-oriented, thus becoming one of the early practitioners of what evolved into hip hop.
“We were the ones to take poetry from the podium to the stage,” Dedeaux said. “At that time they’d just stand up at the podium and read their poetry. We decided to add a little drama to it and take the paper away.”
“Each poem became a complete play with a beginning a middle and an end,” Hamilton added, “with call and response, add music and a rhythm section.”
“We did a performance at a talent show at the Inner City Cultural Center, which is similar to the Watts Writers Workshop but located in another part of town,” O’Solomon said.
“They had singers, dancers, comedians and musicians, but never had any poets before and we came out with poetry and won second place,” Hamilton said.
While getting the award, someone asked them what their name was.
“We said ‘Watts Fire’ or something like that,” Hamilton said. But one of the young women in their group at the time shouted out that they were the Watts Prophets, and that name stuck through the years.
Their early success found them performing in Los Angeles-area clubs, opening for Earth Wind and Fire, the Fifth Dimension, Richard Pryor and other popular acts.
“A lot of college students would come through and a lot of them would ask us to come and perform there during the day,” O’Solomon said, and thus began the educational wing of the Watts Prophets.
A few years ago, a request from U.C.L.A. resulted in a change in the way they present themselves in communities around the nation. Rather than come in, conduct a few classes, do a show and then move on to the next city, they decided to create a “hip hop poetry choir” during their residencies and hope that they would continue beyond the Prophets’ stay.
“They scatted, chanted, hummed, sang, danced, painted, whatever creative way they can present their poetry,” Hamilton said. “We bring the community to the university and the university to the community. Some last; some fade out.”
But when they came to the Booker T. Washington Center last week for the first time, they discovered a hip hop education program already in place: The BTW Hip Hop Institute.
Even so, the center’s executive director Kelly Dukes said she was excited about the chance to have her 45 students work with hip hop pioneers like the Prophets.
“Part of the focus of the Hip Hop Institute is to teach them about hip hop history, to teach them something about music, so to have some of the founding members has really hit home for our students,” she said. “They have really helped them clean up their performance skills and to pay more attention to their writing technique.”
There are about 45 students regularly attending the group, the the Watts Prophets sessions helped narrow down the number to a select few who will join students at other sites from the residency — Talawanda High School, the Middletown Community Center and all three branches of the University — for a show at Hall Auditorium for the Miami University Performing Arts Series.
There, the students will practice “the three Ps” — posture, presence and projection — that are the heart of the Prophets’ technique.
“Those three things empowers them,” Hamilton said, “and we require 100 percent participation, so everyone gets involved. Once we’re through with them, they handle the whole show.”
But there is more for them to teach than just technique.
“We teach them to believe in themselves,” Hamilton said, “that they can change this horrible world that we have here right now.”
“When they respect themselves, they respect others,” Dedeaux added.
“We get them thinking about being the replacement generation, they’ve got to replace the group that went before them and they can change things and turn things around,” Hamilton said. “So it’s a combination of things.”
And as in most learning situations, the teachers are sometimes the students, too.
“We learn to listen more, to get more involved,” Dedeaux said. “We realize how intelligent they are. They have solutions to a lot of problems if you listen to them.”
Photos by Nick Daggy
Go! feature
“bare: The Musical” is, according to director Jason Bruffy, “sort of an epic story, but it deals with high school students in a Catholic boarding school.”
Peter and Jason, students hiding their relationship from their peers, are publicly exposed after they begin experimenting with “designer” drugs in the club scene and exploring their feelings further, and with others.
“It’s about whether or not they can accept their relationship, or whether the church can or the world can,” Bruffy said.
“bare” has been an underground hit for the last several years, making its Los Angeles debut in October 2000, then finding its way to New York and Chicago.
“It’s a little outside the norm of what musical theater is today,” Bruffy said, “drawing from influences like 'Rent’ and 'Spring Awakening.’”
Bruffy said one reason Know Theatre decided to do “bare” was because it gave them a chance to reach out to the regional college programs.
“We have some solid programs at CCM, Wright State University and Northern Kentucky University, so we went on a little bit of a search,” he said. “There’s a cast of 15, which is pretty big for us, and 12 of them are students or recent graduates.”
To fill out the adult roles, Bruffy not only pulled from the Know regulars but also wrote the Know’s first Equity contract by landing a guest artist appearance from Cincinnati resident Pamela Myers, whose resume includes a Tony nomination for the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.” She has appeared on such iconic TV shows as “St. Elsewhere” and in stage classics from “Gypsy” to “Sweeney Todd.”
- WHAT: “bare: The Musical”
- WHERE: Know Theatre of Cincinnati, 1120 Jackson St., Cincinnati
- WHEN: April 3-May 4
- COST: $12-$22
- MORE INFO: (513) 300-5669; www.knowtheatre.com
photo by Deogracias Lerma
Gary Mullen had long been a rabid fan of Freddie Mercury and Queen when his mum pulled a fast one on him.
“I was always singing their songs when I was a kid, using my bed as a stage and a hairbrush for a microphone,” the Scotsman said. “Freddie was my hero: larger than life, super-confident, but also with a dark and insecure side.
“He was also very tongue-in-cheek with what he did and never really took himself seriously.”
Mullen played in a few bands and such in high school, but believed he’d had enough of that when it came time to raise his family and took a job with Compaq as a computer salesman, but continued to wow local karaoke audience with his Mercury impersonation.
Then with the consent of the missus, his mother put in an application for him to be on the British television show “Stars In Their Eyes,” a contest in which people impersonate famous singers.
“She knew I wouldn’t do it myself,” he said, “so when they called to tell me I would be in the show, I was incredibly sarcastic with they guy because I thought someone was having me on.”
But compete he did and when he won the Grand Final in 2000, “No one was more surprised than me,” he said.
He also found an opportunity to really make his dreams of being a rock star come true and put together a band “to re-create the Queen experience.”
“For some, it’s a nostalgia trip,” he said, “but the fans keep getting younger and I see people bringing their children and grandchildren. Sometimes I feel like one of the boy bands up there on the stage.”
Since 2002, “A Night of Queen” has been touring the United Kingdom and Europe virtually non-stop, and this year makes its first swing through the United States with rousing renditions of Queen’s greatest hits, such as “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “We Are the Champions,” “Somebody to Love” and “Another One Bites the Dust.”
“Like Freddie, we give it 140 percent every night,” Mullen said. “Otherwise, you’re cheating the fans if they're not deaf and blind by song four.”
- WHAT: “One Night of Queen” by Gary Mullen and the Works
- WHERE: Procter & Gamble Hall, Aronoff Center for the Arts, 650 Walnut, Cincinnati
- WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday, March 22
- COST: $30-$40
- MORE INFO: (513) 621-2787; www.cincinnatiarts.org
When it comes time to decide what to put on the stages at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, producing artistic director Ed Stern says he doesn’t pick plays, he designs seasons.
“I could just pick 10 plays that I’d be really excited about, but it would be a terrible season,” he said. “When we put together a season, we want to celebrate the breadth and range of theater.
“If people want the same-old same-old every time, well, that’s what television is for.”
The Playhouse’s 2008-09 lineup includes one world premiere and six regional premieres as well as the return of one of the most popular shows in Shelterhouse Theatre history.
At the Marx Theatre, the larger of the two houses:
• A new musical version of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” with music, lyrics and book by Paul Gordon, who scored a Tony nomination for the lyrics to “Jane Eyre” in 2000. Audio excerpts from “Emma” are on-line at www.myspace.com/emmathemusical. Opening night: Sept. 4.
• John Kolvenbach’s “Love Song,” a quirky comedy about a man in a self-imposed exile that celebrates the rich rewards of embracing life and love. Opening night: Oct. 23.
• Cincinnati playwright Joseph McDonough scores his second New American Play Prize for “The Travels of Angelica,” the story of a writer on the run in Colonial America. Opening night: Jan. 22.
• Larry Shue’s classic comedy, “The Foreigner,” the story of a shy man who pretends to be from another country to avoid speaking to the locals while on a vacation. Opening night: March 12.
• A new adaptation of “Dr. Jeklyll and Mr. Hyde” by Jeffrey Hatcher (“Murderers,” “A Picasso,” “The Turn of the Screw”). Opening night: April 23.
The Thompson Shelterhouse season:
• Julia Cho’s “Durango,” the story of a road trip made by a Korean immigrant and his two teenage sons. Opening night: Sept. 25.
• A revival of “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” the love-happy musical revue, with book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro and music by Jimmy Roberts, first presented by the Playhouse in 2000. Opening night: Nov. 6.
• “Blackbird,” by Scottish playwright David Harrower, billed as “a cat-and-mouse tale of volatile emotion and sexual intrigue.” Opening night: Feb. 12.
• Arlene Hutton’s “Last Train to Nibroc,” a World War II-era love story between May, a young woman who dreams of doing missionary work, and Raleigh, a soldier with ambitions of becoming a writer, that takes place on a cross-country train. Opening night: April 2.
• “Marry Me A Little,” a new story that recycles songs edited out of popular Stephen Sondheim musicals. Opening night: May 14.
Ticket Packages:
Subscriptions to the 2008-2009 Playhouse season are available now in a variety of packages. Prices range from $111.50 to $304 for the f
• Ten-Show Season: $312.50 to $564.50
• Five-show Robert S. Marx Season: $111.50 to $304
• Five-show Thompson Shelterhouse Season: $202 to $318
• “Build Your Own” package: $164 to $490.50 for four to nine shows
• Discounts available for senior citizens, young professionals and full-time educators.
• The Baby Sitter Rebate Series: Receive $100 at the end of the season to help cover the cost of baby sitters.
INFO: (513) 421-3888; www.cincyplay.com
