By Loretta Humble/Around the Town
Response to “O’Keeffe!” the one-woman play we’re bringing to Malakoff’s Community Center April 12, has been overwhelmingly encouraging. We are already getting ticket orders online. By the time you read this paper tickets will be available for purchase all over town, and I suspect quite a number will have already been snatched up. There were only 120 available to start with, and there are a whole lot more people than that who want to see this play.
When Jo Ann Surls and I saw this play in Tyler, we had two reasons to try to bring it to Malakoff: One was that we wanted everybody we love to see this play, because it is so excellent. The second reason is that we need to raise money to aid in our continuing struggle to restore the Bartlett House property. It is a very good cause. I will be talking a lot about that in coming weeks. I hope some of you will join in a conversation with me about it, and help us figure out new ways to get on with that project.
But today I want to tell you about one wonderful, generous response to our project. It is Cheryl Hicks’ gift of the painting, which she has named, “Beans, Greens, and Cornbread.”
As I’ve told you, we chose the evening of the Cornbread Festival to schedule the play, not because, as far as we know, Georgia O’Keeffe ever had anything to do with cornbread, but because we thought each event would create publicity for the other one.
But once we set the date, we started looking for connections. Did she ever paint corn? She probably never painted cornbread, but did she ever cook it? Well, she did paint cornstalks. You can see one of them on our various pages, or you can Google Georgia O’Keeffe corn paintings, and see them. Beautiful, but not what everybody in East Texas would immediately name as corn stalks. And, we discovered, she did cook a lot, and in fact there is a lovely cookbook of her recipes, called “A Painter’s Kitchen.” You can get a used copy from Amazon.com for less than $5. It tells how to cook corn on the cob, but no cornbread.
So I got to wondering, “If O’Keeffe had painted cornbread, what would it have looked like?” My next thought was, “How can I get some really wonderful artist to channel O’Keeffe and show us?” And then I thought, “Of all the artists I know personally, who would really know how to do it?” I knew immediately it was Cheryl Hicks.
But why would she want to do it? We have zero budget for promotion as we have determined every penny made is going into restoring the Bartlett House grounds. But who knows, why not try her? I caught Cheryl taking a lunch break at 211 Gallery in Athens, and shamelessly hinted how great it would be if some wonderfully creative artist would take on this challenge. “Okay,” she said, simple as that, “I’ll see what I can do tomorrow.” Or maybe she said this afternoon. Because at noon the next day I got a message that said, “I’ve mailed you cornbread.” You can see the result. It is totally, fantastically wonderful. We posted it on the top of our event page, and a local art teacher said, “I’ve never seen that one. Amazing! ”
“You haven’t seen it before because Cheryl just painted it two days ago,” I told her. It fooled a very fine art teacher. It is that good. But the most wonderful thing about it is the generosity of this noted artist, who sells her paintings for big bucks, who just sat down and did this out of love for our project. I can’t tell you how much I love this whole thing.
And I haven’t even started telling you about the love and generosity that has gone into what restoration has been done to the Bartlett House. I’ll save that for later. You may look at it and think not that much has been done, but when you hear how few people have really worked on it, and see where it started, I think you will be impressed. Maybe you will want to help. I hope so.