Back in Richmond...
In time for Oscars, and "A Thing Of Beauty" at the Firehouse

That's the graphic for the current offering on the boards at the Firehouse Theatre Project, designed by a good friend of the company, Jason Smith, who creates all the theater's print collateral.

Amie and me are just returned to Colonial Ave after an arduous and at times harrowing, while also surreal and comic, journey into Mississippi. This was one of the most trying experiences I've ever witnessed any family go through and such circumstances bring out everything in stark relief.

I'll give an impressionistic overview of the Mississippi pilgrimage; but seems to me, adapted into a screenplay, and in capable hands, an adaptation of the week's Deep South drama and trauma could make for Oscar material.

The event fills the criteria of a film: the story must have an identifiable rising action and conclusion and involve a singluar important moment in the lives of the people. The period is bracketed by a death and a funeral and self-contained in a car trip, a hotel, a funeral home, a church and a few residences. Perhaps art is a way to make some sense of the whole thing; except this happened to quite real people in actual time and I was there as not a journalist, but a mourner. And though a part of the family through marriage, and affected by their shared tragedy, I was also something of an outside observer, though my origins are in Richmond. Virginia isn't the "South" despite the accident of Civil War history.

A map in the Bypass restaurant next to the Rose Hills Best Western showed the Southeast that begins at the North Carolina border. The Old Dominion is a Mid-Atlantic state; with Delaware, Maryland and sometimes Pennsylvania. And a journey of 15 hours by car demonstrates that Mississippi is a different part of the world, one that is both familiar and possessing idiosyncratic characters and aspects -- for good and otherwise.

We got home, unpacked and sorted out in time to collapse in front of the television to watch the 80th Cinematic Run for the Gold. I enjoyed the memorable past moments montages but learned that many of these came out of the scenes culled for Oscar's launch onto YouTube. I hope they put the opening animation up, which was enjoyable, and I want to pick out the classic film elements that flashed by. I've seen none of the major winners and hope they arrive at the Byrd soon.

But one place in Richmond you can go to see some great performances is at the Firehouse Theatre Project where Sam Shepard's The Late Henry Moss is on the boards. The Times-Dispatch review calls the show "a thing of beauty" and you can't ask for better than that. Morrie Piersol directs Bill Patton, Jen Meharg, Jeff Clevenger and Scott Wichmann, on sets designed by Maury Hancock. We've not yet seen the show, which opened while we were out of town, but I'm anxious to.

Right now, billion-eyed audience, while we are glad to be home, the pile of work with which both Amie and I must now contend is daunting.

More in the coming days about this and that.

A Man and A Megaphone: brought to you by the number nine

AmieO art for "Dictation" our collaborative effort
at Plant Zero Art Center's Project Space as part of her ongoing
exhibit. That's the Hollywood Cemetery pyramid, used on

the cover of my book, True Richmond Stories.



Billion-eyed audience, here is my breathless attempt to catch you up on the meanderings and maunderings of Team AOK.

Hell, it's a blog. I can stop and start when I want. It don't have to make no sense, do it?

So the past few days during lunch hours Amie and I have been rehearsing the "Dictation" piece which involves me reading, a three-cornered hat, a megaphone we've had around the house since it was purchased when the (now defunct) Showcase interior imbellishments company moved out of the Pohlig Box Factory Building. I'll read not one but two selections out of TRS, as the kids on the skreet call the slender volume, while Amie...well. You'll just have to come and see us do the thing which we will do. One performance and one performance only!

I have to say, though it has come at a rock'em sock'em week at the magazine, and Amie's been dodging and weaving to avoid a relapse of Seasonal Creeping Crud Disorder (SCCD) that last week flattened her like road kill, it's fun. Today we went to Plant Zero to see about suspending the megaphone so I don't have to hold it and it'll become part of the exhibit.

Ah, white walls and art and artists coming and going and the thrum of Plant Zero's HVAC and the slender deco retro hall lights that make me feel like I'm on a big zeppelin. I enjoy being around studios and all that creative force. Like walking around the VCU campus, too, and oh, the air is redolent of youth and vitality, I want to breathe it in. Same with creative spaces where pockets of energy are palpable. We ran into Heide Trepanier, which is always great, and I presented her with the indeterminate European, Art Basel, who smokes his filterless cigarette between his middle and ring finger.

So it was fun, and sculptor/maker David Bruce was enlisted to install the megaphone. Ah, I thought--fantasized--about how it'd be for Amie and me to have grants and underwriting to go to places and do this, and drink coffee in curious places, and visit cluttered apartments and leave chilly rainy streets for brunches in places only the locals go to. And she would record our adventures with her disc cam, and we'd just be hanging out. Kind of like this, taken back in March, at the Empire Diner in Chelsea.


Seems a quaint notion, I guess, and a bit selfish, too. But you know, I'm not fit for anything else, with my bad back and all.

Number Nine, Number Nine

So Style Weekly's big fat hairy 25h Anniversary issue came out Wednesday. So I'm reading around in it and rolling in the memories when I get to the 24 Arts Legends compiled by Brandon Reynolds, and I'm perusing the list and lo! There I am, at #9, between arts benefactor Frances Lewis and that Quirky broad, Kathy Emerson. Not a bad rocking chair position, you ask me.

Spinning Into Butter

Opens tonight in a production by the Firehouse Theatre Project. It's directed by our own house guy, Morrie Piersol, and features the oh-so-wonderful Katie McCall, Fred Iacovo--with whom I acted many years ago in a repertory comedy troupe called Richmond: Out of Stock, and he had a pre-road rage character named Angry Man; the incredible "rich, deep, authoritative" Melissa Johnston-Price and veteran Robert Albertia, the sagacious and funny Stephen Moore and, both earnest and persuasive, Anthony Santiago and Matt Polson.

I'll be there, but now must dash to go to the thing before the other thing.

Oll be back.