Month: July 2013

I wasn’t able to make it to the opening reception for Wade Wharton’s Sculpture Trail at the Huntsville Botanical Garden, but it’s open and the day that I finally got there, a few weeks after — the gentleman who gave me the map early that morning said there had already been a few guests that came just to see Wade’s artwork.  These are only a small fraction of what the Garden chose to exhibit:

The HBG wrote: Mr. Wharton’s whimsical artwork is made from ‘found’ metal pieces such as shovels, rototiller blades, springs, and tools. He welds them into objects such as dogs, cats, flowers, time machines, Jack and the Beanstalk and more, each with a little story about it. We have placed over 30 pieces of his artwork throughout the Garden for this exhibit.

There’s one right in the middle of the water, too, that the children on this fieldtrip were especially enamored with:

I went to lunch with Wade and some of his family that was in from out-of-town that day…so proud of him, always.  Fellow bottle tree lovers, he made one of the largest anywhere for this exhibit!

Monuments here, at Friendship Cemetery in Columbus Mississippi — this is the cemetery at which many credit the tradition of Memorial Day (there are other places in the country that also claim this) as citizens of Columbus decorated both Rebel and Yankee graves in 1866, when the region was still smarting from the war.  Inside, some really terrific monuments:

Among the more currently traditional, this scraped plot:

“My precious wife for 71 years 10 months 25 days.  Thank you G-d for her life.  Thank you Earline for giving me your all.”

Home:

The ribbon reads: ‘Meet Me In Heaven’

Scott Brown at Vulture:
…they perform a distillation of Williams’s core obsessions: truth and fakery, an inward-turned hatred of personal weakness crossed with a bottomless tortured empathy for weak and broken things, and, atop the heap, a fierce need to grasp the authentic via the theatrical. Williams wrote this play years after his “great” works were considered handsome antiques, and he revised it repeatedly, over a decade, like a prisoner digging an escape tunnel with a spoon. Director Gene David Kirk has selected two actors so marvelous at feigned insanity that another layer of ambiguity has been added: Where do the performers’ histrionics stop and the play’s inner life begin? This production is more of a sophisticated freak act than a dazzling illusion, but you come away feeling dreamy, cobwebby, as if you’ve just seen a show piped in from a hazier era…