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Thursday, December 4, 2008
MAGAZINE
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Three years, three husbands.
And here’s the amazing part – all three have the name Bob Cratchit.
No. It isn’t one of those role reversal situations where the husband takes the wife’s name. Let’s just say when it comes to names, Mrs. Cratchit is very picky about her choice of husbands.
Louisiana will kick into full gear for the Christmas season this coming week. Dazzling lights, glittering decorations and festive music will be found in every corner of the state. Allow plenty of time to get to a festival or event safely. And don’t worry if you miss something, there’s more to come throughout December. Claire Jones, official harpist to His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, will perform in a holiday harp concert with Baton Rouge harpist Melissa Stockstill at 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 5, in the sanctuary of Bethany World Prayer Center South, Fieldstone Drive off Industriplex Boulevard. Colin Douglas is a 60-something true crime writer. When he witnesses the execution of a man about whom he has written, it dredges up old memories of his boyhood in Baton Rouge. Something happened in 1959 when he was 15, something terrible and he can’t remember it all. He’s long since left Louisiana, but now he feels compelled to go back, not only in distance, but in time. Baton Rouge author Malcolm Shuman is a man with an unusual profession: he’s a contract archaeologist. In regards to an earlier column about Revolutionary War soldier John Warren, a review of the book about him was given and his burial in Mississippi was noted. Douglas Keister loves to meander through cemeteries. He’s a photographer, and he snaps pictures while he’s ambling among the tombstones. His affection for cemetery exploration led to Stories in Stone (2006. Scott Woltz hasn’t given it much thought until now. Until someone poses the question. And it was only fate that someone would. Judas? At Christmas? “Gosh,” he said. “You know, it really didn’t occur to me.” Nov. 30-Dec. 6, 2008 The exhibit Deck the Walls, featuring works from four Louisiana photographers, will open Friday, Dec. 5, in the Community Gallery at the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, 427 Laurel St. The Louisiana Sinfonietta, under the direction of Dinos Constantinides, will perform its third concert of the 2008-2009 season at 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 7, in the LSU School of Music Recital Hall. Always magical, Christmas at the Biltmore in Asheville, N.C., is one of America’s premier holiday events. In keeping with traditions that started when George W. Vanderbilt first welcomed friends and family to his estate on Christmas Eve 1895, the Biltmore continues its lavish presentations now through Jan. 4, 2009. This is an important Louisiana story. Important to the state’s history, its culture, its art community. Especially its art community. For Xavier Gonzalez once was an art instructor at Newcomb College on the Tulane University campus in New Orleans. A November sky casts a soft light across the Port Hudson landscape. Tucked amid the green of the pines, hardwood trees are turning burnished gold and rust. Time stands still on the Civil War battle ground. Sunday, Nov. 23, 1862, was a quiet day at Port Hudson. Soldiers spent time writing in diaries and letters home. Thanksgiving starts the holiday season in Louisiana, and there will be plenty to do and see in the weeks to come. Fortunately, the state enjoys pleasant weather during most of December, making this a perfect time for getting out and visiting all areas of the state. Choral Christmas, featuring the Baton Rouge Symphony Chorus, will be at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 6, at First Baptist Church, 529 Convention St. Interest in doing research in the Family History Centers continues, and here is a detailed description of what is available for researchers. A charitable group has suggested that this Christmas, everyone should take a break from traditional gifts and instead make a donation to a charity in the name of the person to whom you wish to give. It’s a noble idea, but it hardly seems practical. Christmas has been, is and will always be, a children’s holiday at heart. Not that adults don’t enjoy giving and receiving and celebrating, but children are the focus and rightly so. The title of this short story collection gives away its focus. It’s a paraphrase of “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it,” from St. Matthew in the New Testament. Holiday travel is expected to decline about 1.4 percent compared to last year, but the Travel Industry Association reports tradition will keep holiday travel strong. A man stood in the audience the night before. No one caught his name, and Rod Parker could only guess that he wasn’t a student. But none of that mattered, because the moment was stilled by what he had to say. Rosemary Goodell, Ross Jahnke and Marcus McAllister will be the featured artists beginning Sunday, Nov. 30, at Baton Rouge Gallery, 1442 City Park Ave. The show will run through Dec. 30, and a First Wednesday opening reception will be 7-9 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 3. Consider it the calm before the storm, that last weekend before Thanksgiving arrives and the Christmas rush is officially on. Elizabethan Gallery owner Liz Walker thinks the best way to spend that Friday night, Nov. 21, is at the Mid City Merchants Association’s annual fall art hop, White Light Night. So, Will was trying to decide whether to write or not write when Gustav came along and made a mess of everything. Now, that probably made Anne happy, because Will was forced to remain in Stratford a few weeks longer than planned. The exhibit Prey by artist George Marks will open with a 6-9 p.m. reception Friday, Nov. 21, at Ann Connelly Fine Art’s Goodwood Village location, 711 Jefferson Highway. This exhibit is showing in conjunction with Mid City Merchants’ White Light Night. Think of the kid whose eyes can’t help but be attracted to the shine and sparkle on his first visit to Tiger Stadium. That sparkle, it’s contagious, isn’t it? It has a way of floating around the stadium and into the kid’s eyes, especially with those first four notes. By 1826, Baton Rouge was a small town of about 1,500. It had been incorporated only nine years and was not yet the capital of the state of Louisiana. Hodges Gardens State Park in the Sabine Parish wilderness area can be described as a gardener’s dream, with 900 acres of wild and cultivated beauty. Joining with the Louisiana Crafts Guild and Gallery One Eleven in Leesville, the park will present its first show, “Art in the Park” from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 22 It’s not often you encounter a character with narcolepsy in literature. Narcolepsy is a neural disorder that causes its sufferers to suddenly fall asleep, and an attack can be triggered by stress, laughter, anger, anything. Playing the bad guy isn’t so bad, that is, if you can label Lady Augusta Bracknell a bad guy. And you really can’t, because there aren’t any bad guys or good guys in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest. There’s just, well, the nice and the snobby. Emotions are running high this month. Elections, football, Thanksgiving — it could all play out with a soundtrack of Russian music. That’s right, Russian. Several musical performances are scheduled this week at LSU: Hamiruge: The LSU Percussion Ensemble will perform a concert at 4 p.m. today, Nov. 16, in the LSU School of Music Recital Hall. A press notice arrived last week from Spencer County, Indiana, with two faces on its letterhead — Abraham Lincoln and Santa Claus. The somewhat unusual pairing is perfectly reasonable to Spender residents. A flatboat trip in celebration of Lincoln’s bicentennial recently landed in Baton Rouge. Last week, I listened to two Baton Rouge couples as they talked about trips taken far beyond the borders of Louisiana. One couple (the husband on an LSU sabbatical) spent months in Spain, where they absorbed the history and timeless traditions of the country. One sentence has a way of telling a picture’s story. The fog, the water, the sky. Morris Taft Thomas could see it all, not in the actual sentence but the images it conjured. For he, too, spent time on False River in childhood. That’s not saying he grew up poor on a plantation; he didn’t. He was a student at Southern Laboratory School; his dad worked for Exxon. Tickets are on sale for the Baton Rouge Ballet Theatre’s production of The Nutcracker, A Tale from the Bayou, which returns to the Baton Rouge River Center Theatre Dec. 20 and 21. There will be 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. performances on both days. This production features world-class guest stars, award-winning local dancers and a unique southern Louisiana take on the holiday. Veterans, along with active and retired military and their families, will be honored at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans on Veterans Day, Tuesday, Nov. 11, with daylong programs and free admission. The Louisiana Creole Research Association (LA Creole) is a New Orleans-based, non-profit genealogy and family research organization with more than 200 members across the nation. Take a little bit of Issac Asimov’s Foundations Series, add a dollop of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, season with some of Kevin Brockmeister’s The Brief History of the Dead and liberally add some of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. That’s a recipe for first-time novelist Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World. It’s not exact. Last year, Denham Springs writer Elaine Grant published Make-Believe Mom, a novel about a woman veterinarian who relocates to the town of Little Lobo, Mont., from South Carolina. There the woman vet meets a widowed rancher with a large family. A romance ensues and the two get married. It had all the elements of a typical romance novel. No one is comparing Robert Grayson to Emperor Joseph II. Remember the emperor? He’s the one who said, “Too many notes, my dear Mozart.” The scene was depicted in the 1984 film Amadeus. But it wasn’t fiction. It’s the emperor’s actual commentary on Mozart’s first Viennese opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Experience always pays off, even when it comes in the form of a singing waiter. Richard Hobson probably never thought much about it when he took the job in college. Pssst. Hey you. Yeah, you. Come over here. I have something to tell you. A secret. Don’t look at me; just listen. What I look like, who I am, you don’t need to know that. All you need to know is what I’m about to say. Think of it as confession minus the priest and the Hail Marys. Think of it as a way of sharing a piece of me without actually having to share myself. The exhibit Add, Subtract and Multiply: Paintings by Liz Noble will open Monday, Nov. 10, at Foster Hall Gallery on the LSU campus. The show will run through Friday, Nov. 21, closing with a 6-8 p.m. reception on that day. |
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