By Loretta Humble/Around the Town
Some of you may have read about the trip that John Walker, Jo Ann Surls and I made to Tyler to see the one woman show, “O’Keeffe!” Carolyn Wickwire is that one woman, and she is marvelous. On a nearly bare stage with very few props, she BECOMES Georgia O’Keeffe. Well, actually, Georgia O’Keefe’s ghost, but a very healthy ghost. The three of us just fell in love with her and her husband/producer, Dennis West. We hung around after the play and wouldn’t let them go until they promised they would at least visit us in Malakoff and consider putting the play on here, maybe during the Cornbread Festival.
I’m happy to tell you that last Saturday they came to see us. Pat Isaacson, Jo Ann, and I met them at the Community Center let them take a look at it. They said they could work with it nicely. The Chamber of Commerce is going to work with the Malakoff Area Garden Club to sponsor the show, which we hope will raise enough funds to do some more work on the Bartlett House property. Pat had to go home to see about her husband Carl, who is recuperating, but the rest of us went and had lunch and talked about it, and it is all set! I am so happy about this I can hardly stand it!
Mark the date: April 12, at the Community Center, in the evening, after all the other Cornbread happenings are over. I think 7:30. Tickets will be $20, and are worth at least twice that. You will love it just like we did.
This is not an amateur performance, folks. This is Broadway quality. Carolyn Wickwire is an accomplished actor, the recipient of several awards in the Dallas area, though she only began her acting career at age 50. She has appeared in numerous films and television series. She has a small part right now in a big movie coming out soon, with some famous actors, but I forgot the name of it, and who the famous actors are. I’ll let you know before it comes out.
I’m thinking this is going to be a great addition to the Cornbread Festival, and maybe will attract us some more attention than usual. I hope we can build some other activities around it. I have some ideas which I will be telling you soon.
If you don’t remember who Georgia O’Keeffe is, she is the lady who painted the gigantic flowers, and also a lot of Southwest things that often involve bleached bones. Here is a little quote from one of the “O’Keeffe!” flyers.
Two forces shaped Georgia O’Keeffe as an artist and a woman: her passion quest to express her artistic voice, and her tumultuous 29-year love affair and marriage to the revolutionary photographer and champion of the Modern Art Movement, Alfred Stieglitz. In “O’Keeffe, Georgia—witty, irreverent, and decades ahead of her time—shares revealing scenes from her challenging life as she struggles to maintain her independence in the early decades of the 20th Century.
Here’s a quote from one reviewer of Ms. Wickwires’s performance as Georgia O’Keeffe:
“Dazzling…Impeccable…Ms.Wickwire is intriguing, fascinating, complicated, amusing, wry, and heartbreaking…It’s almost as if she’s channeling O’Keefe.” (Dallas Examiner)
Another fun thing is going on at Cedar Lake Nursing Home, and you can play with us if you’d like: We are all making valentines. All of us. Patients, staff, visitors, anybody we can buttonhole, and the ones we don’t give to our sweetheart, we are going to post on a huge board, and turn it into the world’s — OK, Malakoff’s — biggest valentine. We have a lot of material on hand to get creative with, but we’d like more, so anything you’ve got that you don’t need that could conceivably make or decorate a valentine, we’d appreciate you sharing it with us. But that’s just the start. We want you to make us a valentine. Use your own stuff, or come use our material. You could mail it to us, but time is getting short, plus we’d like to see you. If you are a teacher in Sunday School, or regular school, maybe your kids would like to make us some.
My friend John is coming down this week, and promises to join in the creativity at Cedar Lake and make me a valentine if I’ll make him one. You and your valentine could come out and join us. We are going to creative stuff available for anybody who wants to give it a try. My goal is to see if I can get the Fed Ex man to make one. And all the other delivery people who come in. Maybe if they don’t have time while they are there, maybe we can send them a little package of raw material home with them.
I went to Rotary today, mainly to tell them about “O’Keeffe!” and I got great response. But I also wanted to tell them about our Valentine Extravaganza at the nursing home, and ask for them to make us valentines. That was great too, because Teri Caswell was giving the program, and it was all about Valentine’s Day and how it originated. And she passed out tiny heart-shaped boxes of candy to each person there. So I saved that part of my speil till Teri had finished her talk, and had them all in the Valentine spirit. I got promises of a number valentines, plus Sybil Norris said she would email all the teachers, and suggest that they ask their classes if they would like to make the nursing home some valentines. Plus, I bummed a couple of those little candy boxes to make valentines out of.
Now may sound like we are going to have plenty of valentines, but that is not the case. We need one from YOU. Come on out and we’ll help you make it. This is going to be fun.