Month: April 2011

If I had a helicopter: Magic City Art Connection, Mullet Toss, Sandestin Wine Festival, Vidalia Onion Festival, Jazz Fest, Double Decker Art Festival, and the National Cornbread Festival.




In Alabama:
***Panoply in Huntsville has been canceled due to the storm damage.

Magic City Art Connection, Birmingham
Blessing of the Fleet, Bayou La Batre
Pepper Jelly Festival, Thomaston
Battle of Selma Reenactment, Selma
Interstate Mullet Toss, Orange Beach
Alabama International Film Festival and TroyFest, Troy
Sacred Harp Singing, Mabsen Methodist, Ozark
Lebanese Food Festival, Birmingham
Bob Sykes BBQ and Blues Festival, Bessemer
CityFest, Auburn
Geneva Festival on the Rivers, Geneva

In Florida:
Sandestin Wine Festival, Destin
World of Nations Celebration, Jacksonville
Crawfish Festival, Pensacola
SunFest, West Palm Beach
Shrimp Festival, Fernandina Beach
Fun Fest, Navarre Beach
Suwannee River Jam, Live Oak

In Georgia:
Vidalia Onion Festival, Vidalia
Slotin Folk Art Auction, Buford
Antebellum Trail Pilgrimage, Various Towns
Pine Tree Festival, Swainsboro
Crawfish Festival, Woodbine
Celebrate Clayton, Clayton
Americana Festival, Athens
Sacred Heart Garden Festival, Augusta
Tour of Hidden Gardens, Savannah

In Louisiana:
Jazz Fest, New Orleans
Tomato Festival, Chalmette
Festival International de Louisiane, Lafayette
Etouffee Festival, Arnaudville
Fest for All, Baton Rouge
Spring Arts Festival, Minden
Contraband Days Festival, Lake Charles

In Mississippi:
Double Decker Arts Festival, Oxford
Southern Heritage Pilgrimage, Aberdeen
Natchez Trace Festival, Kosciusko
Dudie Burger Festival, Tupelo
Lynch Street Cultural Arts Festival, Jackson
Swinging Bridge Festival, Byram
Home and Garden Tour, Corinth

In Tennessee:
World’s Biggest Fish Fry, Paris
National Cornbread Festival, South Pittsburg
Ramp Festival, Cosby
Main Street Festival, Franklin
Spring Tour of Homes, Brownsville

Gwen Magee joined the ancestors last night.

She was an incredible quilter.

This one was made in 2007 and is called ‘Five Years Hard Labor’ — it’s in the permanent collection of the Mississippi Museum of Art (which I visited last week and can’t even begin to say how wonderful it is).

From her obit that went over the AP:
…Her works were displayed or collected by the Smithsonian Institution and in the Mississippi Museum of Art and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of African-American History.


Friends say Magee was working on a commissioned piece at the time of her death — a quilt about the Freedom Riders for a museum in Montgomery, Ala. It was unfinished.

She was a recipient of the 2011 Governor’s Award for Excellence.

This is her website; she has many images of her quilts here (nice slideshow) along with some of her comments.  MPB’s interview with her here.

Gwen had so much more to do.  Her pieces are *powerful*.  Some political.  Always interesting.  Strong, strong, strong.

Thank you for your calls, texts, emails, FB messages…I’m responding now but want to let everyone know we are fine. Just wowed by all the sweet thoughts and prayers!  A tornado passed about two miles from our home but we were okay, save the loss of a giant tulip tree in the backyard — took the boys downstairs and they were blissfully unaware anything was going on.

My hometown, Cullman AL, was greatly damaged.  Still waiting to hear from Huntsville friends.  I spent today bringing food to another friend who lives in Arab, where the power may not be back for four or five more days.  I was admittedly a little nervous driving up there — so many downed trees everywhere, and in some places power lines were criss-crossed on the surface of the road and we were all having to drive over those.

I took one picture.  An Otelco truck had traffic stopped today on the road to Arab, right here, and I snapped this pic of a trailer that has been absolutely flattened.  Flattened and flipped upside down.

Prayed for the people that called this home while the utility truck had traffic stopped.  I had a feeling everyone in front and behind me was doing the very same.

Lots of time for prayer on this trip today.

—
We were close enough to the tornado (the one that stayed on the ground from Tuscaloosa up to Georgia) that debris from where it had already touched down fell in our yard — we have pieces of someone’s roofing insulation, and this chewed-up strip of siding fell onto our neighbor’s yard.

Since many of you celebrate Easter, I asked Av this morning if on one of his (ten! he’s only taken me three times!) Israel trips he had taken pics there of things that might be interesting.  In 1994, he went as part of the Birmingham Interfaith Mission to Israel, which was coordinated by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

This is from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, traditionally the site of Calvary — and currently the object of a dispute among different Christian groups as to who is actually in charge there…

The Garden Tomb where Jesus was laid to rest after the crucifixion:

The Church of All Nations, which is on the Mount of Olives, and contains a stone that is said to be the place where Jesus prayed before he was arrested:

Here are three pictures from a baptism in the Jordan, in northern Israel. Former Birmingham police chief Johnnie Johnson co-officiated, and the woman being baptized was an 80-something year old Sunday School teacher from Texas who was on the trip.

—
Other things:

While going through his old prints from one of his trips to Israel, Av found this image of a home in Northern Israel that used bicycles as part of its fencing:

I forgot to take a pic of the table before both nights’ seders this year!  Here’s a pic of Shugie helping Papa along the first night, though:

The second night was at our home.  We all gathered in the living room for the first half of the seder before moving to the table for supper and the second half.  We started doing the first half that way last year, when it occurred to me that if the idea was to go through the seder as free people, in comfort, that we’d surely all be more comfortable there than at the dining room table for hours.  That’s a tradition we are going to keep!

For supper, I made chicken piccata, barbecue brisket, potato salad, vegetable cole slaw, deviled eggs, roasted sweet potato fries, and for dessert — chocolate baby bites cakes and espresso sorbet. Yummm!

—
We observe Passover, but whatever holiday you celebrate, I hope it is happy, hopeful, and sweet!  xoxoxo!

Last month, we had lunch at Huggin’ Molly’s in Abbeville — it was fabulous.  From this article in East Alabama Living:

The restaurant is named after a local legend… “Huggin’ Molly was supposedly seven feet tall and as big around as a bale of cotton,” remembers Jimmy. “She’d walk the streets of Abbeville at night. If she saw you, she’d chase you down, give you a huge hug and scream in your ear.”

If you know Great Southern Wood (YellaWood) and the Yella Fella from commercials, the owner, Jimmy Rane, is behind so much of what makes Abbeville so special and unique.  He purchases old buildings, fixes them up, then puts them to use.  That’s what he’s done here with Huggin’ Molly’s.

A *fantastic* soda fountain:

Shugie couldn’t resist sitting at that beautiful marble bar.  The boys had grilled cheese sandwiches with different sides, I had a fried green tomato sandwich, and Av had fish.  We tried an order of fried cheese biscuits which were so good — and we brought those home for a snack later.

They had an original To Kill A Mockingbird movie poster in our dining area, too:

This is more of downtown Abbeville.  That great Southern Oil Company building, bottom-right?  It looks like an old fillin’ station, but it’s really an office building for GSW.

…and these vintage signs are just retro perfection:

The South Carolina State Museum is putting on an exhibit now through January of 2012 called ‘Uncommon Folk‘ — they describe the exhibit:
The world of folk and traditional art is explored with art from the State Museum’s collection that have rarely, if ever, been seen on exhibit including baskets, pottery, native American earthenware and nontraditional sculptures and art by self-taught and outsider artists.


Artifacts include:
–Part of L.C. Carson’s “concrete city,” including three recently-conserved sculptures of the Roman Colosseum, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Central American Temple
–a wild west town made of coat hangers
–silhouettes made by Carew Rice and his grandson Clay
–turkey calls and decoys
–Lowcountry shrimp nets
–a flat bottom boat by Willie DeReef, the last of the Gullah boat makers
–whimsical metal “whirligigs”
–paintings and drawings
–metal toys such as a windmill, truck and tractor
–wood carvings by Dan Robert Miller

South Carolina aired a documentary on it also:

—
The Slotin Folk Art catalog came in the mail this week; the sale, with 1000 lots, is April 30-May 1.