Dec
07
A large trunk, a narrow coffee table and two chairs are on the otherwise empty stage. Occasionally a box of papers, or, in the background, a graveyard with looming tombstones or a child’s nursery with a chair that rocks by itself. And, of course, fog throughout.
These elements, plus two actors, set the scene. One is William Repoley, playing an actor playing a man who is playing the part of Arthur Kipps, who came to the actor to have his story told. The other, Peter Thomasson, as character Arthur Kipps — who plays every other character in the mini-production he and the actor are putting on — complete the cast of “The Woman in Black,” a play that does much with very little.
It’s opening night of Flat Rock Playhouse’s “The Woman in Black,” a play running through Nov. 1. The audience is a mix of all ages and you can hear murmurs of, “This is going to be so scary!” throughout the theater.
The screenplay, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from Susan Hill’s novel of the same name, is hard to follow at times — an actor playing an actor who suggests he plays the man who comes to the actor who could not act, but asks said actor to play his part in order for the story to be told. Yet that same man, who said he could not act, acts superbly as every other character in the play.
The play opens on a funny note — Arthur Kipps is attempting to read his story on stage next to a single light while the rest of the theater is immersed in darkness. The actor tells Kipps he is doing it all wrong.
“Draw on our emotions and our imagination!” the actor insists. “Have sympathy for your audience!”
The two decide to act out the story. The actor will play Kipps, and Kipps will play everyone else. The rest is left up to the imagination. Kipps, as a young solicitor, is sent to client Alice Drablow’s funeral. No one in Drablow’s town is willing to talk about her or her creepy-named home, Eel Marsh House, which is cut off from
the rest of the town during high tide.
As suspense builds, Kipps spots a woman with a wasted face at the funeral. He sees her, again, when he goes to Drablow’s estate to sort through her paperwork. While at the house, he hears horses and a carriage and a child’s scream.
Although he keeps repeating the mantra, “I do not believe in ghosts,” he can find no other explanation
for the events, which drag him into increasing terror as the play unfolds.
Near the end of the scenes at Eel Marsh House, Kipps is desperately pulling from quicksand a dog
named Spider, loaned to him by a friend from town to stave off the dread permeating the house. While chasing a noise, Spider got stuck in the marsh’s consuming trap. He finally pulls her free and sits back to catch his breath. He looks up to see the Woman in Black standing over him.
There is a flash of light — the woman vanishes, and he is left blubbering on the ground.
The stage is draped in darkness for most of the play — except for a flashlight weaving through the foggy air, or a spotlight on the actor playing Kipps, or a door, or a tomb, or a woman in black, who would appear with a flash of light and a shriek, followed by smothering darkness and silence.
There is a twist at the end, meant to leave the audience unsettled and worried, further blurring the lines between stage and story, actor and character, imagination and tangible, making it difficult to tell what’s what — and, therefore, what’s real.
As the audience left the Playhouse, some poked fun at one another. The veil between reality and imagination had lifted and it was back to real life. That was, until they stepped in the darkness outside and wondered what could be lurking.
Snappy dialogue keeps audience interested in ‘Lion in Winter’
Dec
07
It’s a war of words as the Hendersonville’s Little Theatre opens its second to last performance of the year, “The Lion in Winter,” tonight.
Taking the audience back to 1183, the play follows the bitter battle between King Henry II, played Bob Stacy, and his wife, Eleanor, played by Pat Perkerson, over which of their sons will be Henry’s heir to the throne.
Throw in Henry’s mistress, Alais, played by Paula Orr, whom Eleanor raised as her own daughter, and a snooty King Phillip of France, played by Dillon Pressley, for a little drama outside the family.
Then there’s Eleanor’s 10 years in prison for trying to incite a civil war against Henry — she is only let out once a year on Christmas Eve and she uses that 24 hours to try to buy her freedom. Add in the lands up for grabs and lots of scheming, and you have no idea who is going to come out the victor.
John (John Mark Lampley), fumbling and a bit slow, is Henry’s favorite. Eleanor favors raging Richard the Lionhearted (Garren Orr). Then there’s Geoffrey (James Denton), in line to become chancellor, who’d really rather be king himself and will offer deals to his mother, his father, John, Richard and even King Phillip, to get the crown.
The dialogue is snappy and witty, carrying the hefty plot along with some dirty humor. If you space out for even a moment (which is very likely, since the first act is a whole hour and 30 minutes, and the second half clocks in at 50 minutes), you’ll miss Eleanor’s punch lines.
After a particularly heated brawl of words between Henry and Eleanor, in which she tries to convince him that she slept with his father, Henry storms off the stage in a rage. Eleanor is left sitting on his fur bedspread.
“Well,” she says plaintively. “What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?”
Words aren’t the only weapons, though. There are daggers everywhere — but, fortunately, not a drop of blood.
“We all have knives,” Eleanor says. “It’s 1183, and we are barbaric. We are killers. We breed war. We carry it like syphilis.”
You can never quite tell whether Eleanor truly loves Henry or if she’s just saying that as a means to her end, to win what she most desires, freedom.
And Henry, with his mistress half his age whom he raised as a daughter, should be despicable, but does seem to love John — until John betrays him. When Henry catches all three of his sons in King Phillip’s room, trying to strike a deal, he roars with protest and tries to disown them all.
“Your sons are part of you,” Eleanor argues.
“I know,” Henry says. “Like warts and goiters, I’m having them removed.”
With all the drama, there never seems to be a clear path to victory for anyone. All the tangles make it a bit hard for the audience to stay focused, especially with such a long running time.
But the snappy dialogue offers a hook throughout, because you never really know what Eleanor is going to say next.
“Death is a lark,” she says at one point. “It’s life that stinks.”
And, indeed, life in that castle certainly does seem to stink — there’s no one to trust, no one to love, and certainly no merriment on Christmas Day. When asked how she has passed her time in confinement the past 10 years, Eleanor answers pretty simply: “I plot and plan.”
All the plotting and planning never comes to any resolution, though. It just bottles up again, for further revisiting — maybe next Christmas Eve.
Tiny dancer
Dec
07
Sarah Jung stands along the side of the room, next to the stereo, her arms crossed, her eyes glazed. The need to be out on the floor radiates from her tiny body.
Her instructor, Hennadii Bespechnyi, notices Sarah’s stance. He nudges her and whispers playfully. She laughs and the tension is broken — for a moment.
On this Saturday in November, at least for the moment, it’s Sarah’s counterpart’s turn to practice the part of Young Clara in “The Nutcracker.”
“She’s all about, ‘I’d rather be dancing,’” says Sarah’s mom, Ruth Jung, who is usually watching from the sidelines. “She’ll dance anywhere you can do it.”
At 13, Sarah has already found her passion.
You can see it on her face as she watches, painfully still in her purple leotard as the classic ballet’s opening
music swells around her. Sophie Scott, her counterpart from Asheville, dons the black practice skirt, to dance around the rehearsal room and curtsy to the parents who are filling in for party guests during the rehearsal of “The Nutcracker’s” opening party scene.
Sarah, a home-school student from the Dana area, and Sophie, who turns 12 in January, share the part of Young Clara in the International Ballet Academy’s presentation of “The Nutcracker,” which takes the stage at the Peace Center in Greenville, S.C., Saturday and next Sunday. The two girls, the youngest solo dancers in “The Nutcracker,” will join other ballet dancers from IBA in the professional performance.
“I’m excited,” Sarah says.
It’s her first solo performance and Ruth Jung says IBA’s production of “The Nutcracker,” accompanied by the Greenville Symphony Orchestra, is one of the prettiest she’s ever seen.
Sarah will dance as Young Clara for the first half of the play on Sunday. She will dance in an ensemble with the Mirlitons during the second half of the play on Saturday.
Later in the rehearsal, Hennadii, who moved here from the Ukraine and became a U.S. citizen in August, lets Sarah join Sophie on the dance floor during the end of the first party scene. Now there are two Claras on the stage, searching for the nutcracker, breaking the nutcracker, crying over the nutcracker. But they’re not really crying — they’re dancers, not actresses — and you can see Sarah’s smile creeping out beneath her hands.
“It’s broken. Why are you laughing?” Hennadii says. “It’s like a broken computer with no warranty.” He carries on with this comparison, trying to illustrate his point. It makes the girls smile harder.
“Sarah, Sophie, cry!” directs Lena Forster, owner of the school, from the front of the room. “It’s your nutcracker!”
Every time Sarah moves across the floor, the fact that she loves to dance is evident. Though she’s one of the youngest girls in the class, it’s clear why she was put into a harder class — she keeps up with the older girls, if not perfectly, admirably.
Sarah’s face is set firmly in concentration, except in the moments she missteps, and then she smiles. It’s important to be perfect, but not so much that it takes the joy out of the movement — unless it’s a performance.
“One mistake and you’re on the floor,” Hennadii says.
As Sarah and Sophie dance with the older girls, one of them, Samantha Clauter, 16, helps the tiny dancers through the steps.
“One, two, three, four,” she says, looking back at the younger girls. “One, two, three, four.”
“Good job, Sarah!” another girl says.
A ballerina’s job
Sarah typically dances three to eight hours a day. She travels to Greer, S.C., for practice five days a week — soon to be six after she finishes a jazz class in Asheville. And when she’s not practicing, she’s prancing around the kitchen, knocking things off the counter, or doing splits while watching TV. She only takes a break a few weeks out of the year. One of them occurs for 10 days in the summer, when the International School of Ballet takes a trip to Kiev, Ukraine. Sarah dances only three or four days a week then.
“I’ve never had to force her to go to class, ever,” says her mother. “She’s always done her own bun. She’s learning to sew her own toe shoes.”
Toe shoes and buns are just small details in a ballerina’s job, though. The buns must be perfect — no fly-away strands. And each girl must learn to do her own makeup for performances, too.
A poster on the corkboard in the lobby of the International School of Ballet shows a girl in a pose, with the note, “It’s amazing what goes into making something effortless.”
Choices
Sarah is home-schooled. She has two brothers — one older, 15, and one younger, 9. In addition to ballet, Sarah used to love horseback riding. But Forster pointed out that if Sarah wanted to pursue riding seriously, it might affect her dancing. In horseback riding, you pull your thighs inward — in ballet, you keep them straight.
So Sarah had to choose which one she wanted to do seriously.
She had to make a similar decision with tap dancing.
“Tap goes against ballet,” her mom says. “Your knees need to be loose in tap. They need to be straight in ballet.”
Sarah chose ballet. Both times.
Sarah started dancing when she was 5 at a studio in Asheville. When she stopped showing growth there, her mom knew it was time to find a more challenging school.
Sarah enrolled in the International Ballet Academy in Greer three days a week about a year and a half ago. The school teaches anyone who wants to learn ballet and has about 150 students. You have to audition to land parts in the three productions a year.
Sarah danced in her first on-point performance in October, in the school’s fall performance of “Paquita.” “On point” means just that — dancing on toe points. This requires point shoes, which are hard at the tips and typically cost up to $80. The more Sarah dances on point, the more often she’ll need point shoes — an expense Ruth is not looking forward to.
Tack the price of dozens of toe shoes onto the two hour round trip to Greer five days a week and the school’s tuition — $1,845 a year — and Sarah’s love for ballet doesn’t just require a disciplined body and mind, it also requires a significant investment from her parents.
“My mom was like, ‘You have to get a job,’ ” says the older student, Clauter, during a discussion of point shoe expenses. She goes through a pair every couple of weeks. “And I was like, ‘With what time?’ ”
But, for Sarah’s mother, the expenses for her ballerina in training are worth it, just to see the joy Sarah gets out of it.
“When it’s in you, it’s in you,” her mom says.
“I just really love performing,” Sarah says simply.
Ruth Jung considers Sarah’s ballet training as the equivalent of a college education. If this is what Sarah wants to do with her life, her mom will help her make it happen.
Only a handful of ballet students have the skills, the build, the brain, the organization and the drive to become a professional ballerina, Forster says.
“Sarah’s got what it takes,” Forster says. “The rest is up to her.”
The Blue Ridge Parkway marks its 75th birthday
Nov
23
Janet Wimmer is painting every day for a year to celebrate. Chris Cates wrote a song about it.
It’s the Blue Ridge Parkway’s 75th anniversary, and fans of the beloved road are ready to celebrate.
The official celebrating starts this weekend and lasts until Sept. 12, 2010.
“We’re setting the stage for celebrating all year,” says Leesa Brandon, a Blue Ridge Parkway 75th coordinator.
Today, the celebration starts in Cherokee, where the Museum of the Cherokee Indian is hosting a three-hour tour of the Blue Ridge Parkway, complete with experienced guides and a boxed lunch. It costs $20 a person.
The festivities carry on Saturday at the Folk Art Center, at milepost 382, on the Parkway in Asheville, when a panel will discuss the scenic road’s history at 10 a.m. Carlton Abbott, the son of the Parkway’s first chief architect Stanley Abbott, will speak.
Topping off this weekend’s celebrations is Saturday night’s concert at the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium, 87 Haywood St., Asheville, headlined by folk legend Nanci Griffith. The concert also will feature a one-time-only collaboration of the Blue Ridge Bluegrass All-Stars — renowned musicians Doyle Lawson, Sammy Shelor, Bryan Sutton, Tim Surrett and Jim Van Cleve — showing their support for the Parkway.
The dramatic and colorful Warriors of AniKituhwa from Cherokee will also perform.
Grammy award-winning musician David Holt of Asheville will serve as the evening’s emcee. General tickets cost $35; patron tickets, which include premium seating and a reception in the Civic Center’s Banquet Hall before the concert, are $75 each.
So much to celebrate
Unofficial celebrations of the Blue Ridge Parkway’s 75th began in September for Virginia artist Janet Wimmer.
The retired art teacher’s home in Blue Ridge, Va., is a five-minute walk from the Parkway.
When she learned about the Blue Ridge Parkway’s 75th birthday, Wimmer decided to combine her goal of painting every day during her retirement with her love for the Parkway. She has fond childhood memories of visiting the Parkway with her parents.
“I just have such a love for it,” Wimmer says. “I needed to discipline myself. And it’s been wonderful for me.”
Instead of painting one whole piece a day, Wimmer works on five paintings at once. She starts with the backgrounds on Mondays and Tuesdays, then finishes them up Wednesdays through Saturdays. Some Fridays and Saturdays she’s in the studio from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., painting straight through. And every Sunday, she and her husband head up to the Parkway to take pictures.
“This is my motivation,” Wimmer says of the Parkway visits. “I want to be really good at what I do.”
In October, Western North Carolina musician Chris Cates premiered “America’s Favorite Drive,” a song he wrote with Hendersonville friend Craig Distil, at Flat Rock Wine Shoppe.
Cates’ latest album, “Carolina Songs,” includes songs inspired by the Parkway, 20 minutes from his childhood home in Morganton. As a student at Appalachian State University in Boone, Cates wrote hundreds of songs sitting along the Parkway.
Now he lives in Asheville, four miles from his muse. Says Cates: “It’s very dear to me and my creative process.”
Some history
The 469-mile Parkway connects Shenandoah National Park in Virginia with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. Its mission is to preserve the natural scenery and resources along its rural Southern Appalachian route, as well as provide recreational opportunities for the public and a glimpse into the cultural heritage of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Constructed as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression, the Blue Ridge Parkway was the first national rural parkway to be developed for the new American pastime: the leisure road trip.
For information about this weekend’s festivities, check out www.blueridgeparkway75.org. To check Wimmer’s progress or buy a painting, go to janetwimmer.blogspot.com.
Tickets for Saturday night’s concert are available at the Asheville Civic Center Box Office, 87 Haywood St., or at Ticketmaster.
Sweet success
Nov
23
Among serious gingerbread competitors, waiting to start your house until the last month is fairly risky. There’s big money and a national spotlight at stake. Past winners have wound up on “Good Morning America” and other network TV shows.
Yet that’s exactly what 9-year-old Lydia Gentry, a home-schooled student from Hendersonville, and her big sister, Courtney Gentry, 14, did.
Their last-minute efforts paid off Monday afternoon at the Grove Park Inn’s National Gingerbread House Competition.
Lydia won first place in the youth division (ages 9-12) by crafting a house with a shredded wheat thatched roof and pretty fondant rose bushes. This is Lydia’s second time winning first place — and last year, she had even less time. While she knew all year she’d want to participate in the contest again, she only started her house in October. And when she won in 2008, she only started two weeks before. Maybe the key for success is waiting till the last minute.
“You just kinda have to want to do it,” Lydia says. And while she obviously has architectural skills galore, she wants to be a teacher — and most likely won’t be teaching gingerbread house construction.
Is winning the second time as sweet as the first?
“It wasn’t as exciting as last year,” Lydia admits. She’s unsure if she wants to enter again next year — or if she ever wants to go after the grand prize.
Her sister Courtney snagged second place in the teen category (ages 13-17) with her Dutch-style windmill and tulips.
One of the blades from her windmill broke the night before the contest, and she had to spend several hours setting a new one with frosting and noodles.
She didn’t seem too frazzled by it, though. Courtney started the windmill in October, working separately from her sister. Neither sister helped the other.
So why a windmill?
Courtney shrugs. “I don’t know. I just thought it was a neat idea.”
And when the windmill is done circulating around the Grove Park Inn and returns to Courtney’s possession, she figures she’ll probably destroy it. Why not? She just created it for fun.
Remarkably, the grand prize winner had a similar story — about her preparation time.
Jodie Stowe, from the foothills town of Polkville, started her gingerbread house a mere three weeks before it was due. (Some adult winners spend the better part of a year on their creations.)
“I always wait till the last minute,” she says.
Except this time, last minute was even extreme for Stowe. She made changes to her gingerbread creation 15 minutes before it was due at the Grove Park Inn.
“I wrote ‘love’ on it, and it did not look right,” Stowe says, indicating the sugary envelope decorating the platform on which her golden birdcage nested. So minutes before the Nov. 16 8 a.m. deadline, she was erasing the offending letters.
Another local winner, Rachel Malmin, 8, of Brevard placed third in the child’s division for her gingerbread creation of a zoo gift shop with zoo animals — a giraffe, lion, elephant and more — looming outside.
The contest
The two Gentry girls got involved in gingerbread creations when their mom, Michelle, found a how-to online.
Courtney’s windmill is put together with noodles, gingerbread, fondant and frosting. To create the tulips sprinkling the ground around her windmill, she cut out six petals and glued them to a noodle with frosting. The grass is coconut.
Stowe’s was a bit more complicated, though. The golden wires making up her birdcage required the help of a woodworker — that is, her husband. He made a mold for her to put gum paste in, so when she formed the wires, they were all the same size.
“I made birds last year,” she says, “but they weren’t quite as good.” She placed in the top 10 last year.
There are birds inside her cage this year, too — two turtle doves.
This year’s contest judged more than 200 entries from 20 states. Gingerbread creations ranged from houses — some yellow brick, some stone, some log — to libraries (like the first-place winner in the adult category, Ann Bailey of Cary) to tree houses to general stores to scenes from Star Wars.
The prizes
First, second and third place prizes were awarded in these categories: child, ages 5-8; youth, ages 9-12; teen, ages 13-17; and adult, for ages 18 and over. Then, there is an overall grand prize winner. The creations are judged on appearance, originality and creativity, difficulty, precision and consistency of theme. Cash prizes range from $25 to $3,000.
For first place in the youth category, Lydia received a $250 cash prize; Courtney won $300; and Stowe won $3,000, a two-night stay on the Club floor of the Grove Park Inn and a prize package from judge Chef Nicholas Lodge for a free two-day class at his International Sugar Art Collection School in Atlanta.
All of the entries in the National Gingerbread House Competition will be on display at the Grove Park Inn Resort & Spa from now through Jan. 3. The public is invited to view the displays any Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Groups and bus charters are asked to call ahead for reservations.
Guests at the resort and those dining at one of the award winning restaurants on the property may view the displays at any time. Additionally, a group of entries will be placed on display at the Grove Arcade in downtown Asheville.
Breast painting 101 with Gypsy
Nov
23
To get things rolling, Lizz “Gypsy” Hundley asks the group of women gathered after hours in a shop on Main Street in downtown Hendersonville to name round objects.
Sunflower, plate, sun, earth, fireworks, wheel, ball, CD, ring, rose, candle, mouth, eye. Each woman chooses one of the objects as the foundation for her breast painting.
Welcome to Breast Painting 101, Gypsy style. It’s a new art form, cultivated by Gypsy and a friend in Atlanta, to raise awareness and money to support women battling breast cancer.
It’s not about being risque. There’s nothing sexual about it. It’s about celebrating life.
Proceeds from the class, which costs the participants $20 each, will go to Bares It All and Beyond, a nonprofit fundraising group founded by Hendersonville photographer Robin Reed. The women also had the option to leave their final artwork, which will be auctioned off at a later date, with all proceeds going to Bares It All.
“Hey, honey,” Reed and Gypsy warmly greeted each woman arriving to participate in the paint-by-boob event.
The process
Now that it’s time to raise their shirts and begin breast painting, a few of the women are feeling a bit awkward, even shy. Elizabeth Shepherd, 32, sips wine for courage.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed about, sisters,” Gypsy says. “We’re all one.”
Gypsy starts with a blank canvas, paper plate and three squirtable colors. To demonstrate, she chooses turquoise, purple and pink.
She layers the colors, darkest on the bottom, lightest on the top, squirting in squiggling lines, crisscrossing colors.
Then comes the breast-painting part. She lifts her shirt, raises the paint palette to her chest and smooshes the plate on her breast. Next, she brings the canvas up to her breast and makes the mammary imprint.
“Do not mush it around,” Gypsy instructs. “Don’t move the paint once you got it on there. Don’t move the canvas, either.”
Once you have the breast imprint, use a paint brush to create art around it, Gypsy says. She has one rule in her class: You must maintain the breast imprint.
“Don’t cover the image of the breast,” Gypsy says.
“So I shouldn’t do a peace sign?” asks Reed, 47, director of Bares It All.
“But that’s so you,” says Lynne Strickland, 50, who works at WTZQ radio and likes to paint for fun.
Smiling but firm, Gypsy’s rule is upheld.
The painting
Everybody’s sipping on something.
“I’m all flushed,” says Shepherd, who works for Habitat for Humanity.
She liked the idea of the class — her personal way of showing support for a friend and co-worker who struggled to overcome breast cancer a few years ago. But she’s nervous, so she brought her friends Kate Bowling, 34, and Leslie Lauer, 32, for support.
Shepherd watches from the sidelines as Strickland strips off her shirt. Nearby, Bowling stands topless as she peruses her imprints.
Lauer finishes her breast imprints so quickly, Shepherd misses watching her for inspiration and technique.
The only one who hasn’t made the paint dip yet, Shepherd finally wanders over to the corner and does her imprints with her back to the rest of the room. She calls for Lauer to bring her more baby wipes to clean off the paint. (The baby wipes are gone by the end of the class.)
Shepherd creates pansies out of her imprints, which are purple and gold. She paints stems with green acrylic paints. Now she’s pleased with her finished product and proud of herself for going through with it.
“You know what I figured out from this experience?” Shepherd says. “I can do anything I want.”
The journey
“We see the journey from when the woman thinks she has a lump to the diagnosis to the treatment to the financial end,” says Debbie Connor, the co-director of Bares It All. “To be able to finally sit down and express herself, at the end of that journey ….”
And that expression can be posing naked for a Bares It All calendar, breast painting to help raise money for someone else or as self-indulgent as buying a nice pair of shoes, Connor says.
“Shoes make you feel better than everything,” she says. Because no matter what you look like, hair or no hair, breasts or no breasts, you can always show off a new pair of shoes.
And though Bares It All has helped scores of local women stay positive through their struggles with breast cancer, the organization has faced its share of naysayers.
When they put out a nude calendar for fundraising a few years ago, some negativity flowed in — all from other women. While 95 percent of comments might be positive, it’s those few harsh comments that are really painful, Connor says.
“I don’t really understand,” she says. “Do you understand it, Robin?”
“They take it to a sexual level,” Reed says. “It’s defined us since puberty.”
But it’s not sexual when you’ve been diagnosed with breast cancer, Connor says: “You go into survival mode. It’s no longer a sexual affiliation. It’s, ‘I’m a mother, I’m a wife, this is my reason to live. I’m happy to be alive. My breasts no longer mean anything to me.’ ”
Strickland reflects on that sentiment in her painting. She paints, “I am not defined by my body parts” into her abstract artwork.
“It’s a shame people can’t understand what we’re doing here,” Gypsy says.
When Sally Hart, 45, told her sons she was coming to the class, they grunted out protests.
“I don’t wanna see my mom’s boobs!”
Strickland laughs at Hart’s sons’ protests. “It was all fine and good when you wanted to eat from them, right?” Strickland says.
She brought her daughter, Kaitlyn, along. Kaitlyn, 13, is in another room, working on homework, away from the merriment of the class. (And a potentially thoroughly embarrassing Mom Moment.)
Where it all began
The atmosphere is light. The women have the option to do the breast imprint in private, but Gypsy says no one in any of her classes has opted to do that. She’s taught a few classes for art galleries and private parties in Atlanta. The goal is always to raise money for breast cancer. The private classes have attracted up to 20 participants. Most of her public classes range from three to 10 breast painters.
On this weeknight in November, Bares It All has eight participants including Reed, Connor and Gypsy.
This is the first time Gypsy’s done this class outside of Atlanta. It all started when Connor chased Gypsy, 43, down at the Black Rose.
“‘You’re a hippie and I think you’re cool,’” Connor recalls telling Gypsy the night she found her playing guitar with a bunch of friends. “She’s been my hippie ever since. She’s our pet hippie.”
“Hippie” is probably a good word to describe Gypsy, with her paint-splattered pants, long blonde hair held back by a bandana and artwork covered in phrases like “Let your light shine.”
The team is working on its next endeavor already, with Gypsy painting mannequins to be sold at Delton and David at 7 p.m. on Dec. 5. (an event complete with hors d’oeuvres and music, of course). As for the breast painting, half the proceeds from the class go to Bares It All, to help someone pay their medical bills.
“You gotta give back to get,” Gypsy says simply.
Ghost busting
Nov
03
BREVARD — It was a dark and stormy night. No, really. The sky poured, the leaves shuddered and the wind swept around the reportedly haunted, 1940s home in Brevard.
The home, normally occupied solely by Adelaide Kersh, is milling with activity. Tammy Hopkins, executive director of the Transylvania Arts Council, and volunteer Debbie McCandless are setting up the hors d’oeuvres for the evening — Rice Krispie eyeballs, chicken wings, cheese and crackers, tea sandwiches, chips and salsa, wine and punch — while Lisa Landis, more commonly known as Glolady (pronounced Glow Lady), sets up her camera. Music act, the Guerilla Divas, flit about, glitter floating in their wake.
This is all set-up for the paranormal investigation the Transylvania Arts Council hosted as a pre-Halloween fundraiser. The investigation, to be led by Joshua P. Warren, a ghost-hunter from Asheville, peers into the history of the old house, a history loaded with possible murder and hoards of sadness.
Adelaide’s never seen a ghost, though. Her late husband, Earl, was the one who spotted specters: two evil-looking men in overalls, walking slowly down the hall to his bed. She says her daughter Jenny probably has seen “Mid.”
“I personally have not seen anything,” says Jenny, aka Jennifer Merrell, Miss Medulla Oblongata, or the Rhine Maiden. “However, when you go around the corner, you always see something out of the corner of your eye. None of my friends would come over. They were spooked by the house.”
And, as children, she and her sisters always tripped on the same step on the stairs, even though there was nothing odd about that step. There is a town rumor, though, that the first owner of the house, Miriam “Mid” Silversteen, was “helped” to fall down the stairs by her husband, Alfred Weiss (also now deceased). Could that be why the step tripped Jennifer and her sisters up?
Jennifer is a member of the Guerilla Divas (pronounced DIVE-uh, not dee-vuh) — a threesome with a penchant for cross-dressing and smart satire based on Kurt Weill’s Nazi-era underground cabaret. Tonight, she and the two other Divas, Kathy Kitahata and Karen Palmer, are performing as “The Three Migraines” — based on the three Muses, of course, prior to Warren’s presentation.
Twenty minutes before the guests start arriving, Warren appears with his crew — UNCA engineering student Chris Sorrells, wife Lauren Warren and Shelly Wright. Tammy greets him and immediately sweeps him around the house, checking out the rooms, so Warren can get a feel for the house.
“They really felt something in the blue room,” Tammy says as they return from the initial sweep. That’s Jennifer’s old room. When they moved into the home, it was the room that she was drawn to, Jennifer says. It felt different than the rest of the house.
“Can you feel it?” Tammy asks.
One morning, Jennifer remembers hearing angels singing. And it wasn’t Christmas Day.
Investigating the house
The 20 guests settle into seats with chicken wings and cheese as the Guerilla Divas perform “The Saga of Jenny.” Then they leave the piano in a flurry of blue sparkles and pink taffeta dresses as Joshua P. Warren, dressed in black, except for his pink glasses, steps to the front of the room. He has a badge on that says, “L.E.M.U.R.,” the name of the company he heads. (That is, the League of Energy Materialization and Unexplained phenomena Research. LEMUPR just doesn’t flow as smoothly.)
“Sometimes you just walk into a house and you just get a feeling,” says Warren, who is 33. “There are some rooms in this house that give you that feeling.”
The house carries a weight that Adelaide and Jennifer say has permeated the house for as long as they’ve lived there.
“We’ve done everything to make it happy,” Jennifer says. “Wiccan, Christian, Feng Shui, crystals, smudging.”
Warren divides the crowd up into the four rooms that gave him the most “feeling:” the basement, the attic, the blue room (Jennifer’s) and the late Mid’s former bedroom. He sends the groups off with a tool for each room — night goggles ($3,000 each — they allow you to see the “invisible infrared zone”), electromagnetic detectors (to pick up waves of energy) and strobe lights.
But, he says, “the most valuable ghost detective is the human brain. Don’t be afraid of the imagination.”
What’s more, Warren cautions, “I feel it is ethical to warn you” that seeing a ghost can sometimes be a terrifying experience, one that lasts well after you leave the haunted premises. He hopes no one will be mad at him if something spooky is later spotted in one of their own homes.
With that in mind, the patchwork mix of teens, middle-aged women and the elderly set off to feel out cold spots, watch beeping electromagnetic sensors, and say, “Flash!” every time they took a picture at the highest shutter speed. (This was so those around you could close your eyes and maintain their night vision.) The flash would bring out orbs.
“Orbs” are actually what brought Lisa Landis, or as she is more often known, Glolady, into this business. She’s been taking photos of these “orbs” her whole life. Once, she even snapped one that, when zoomed in on, closely resembled her then yet-unborn son’s face. She noted the similarities years later when her son was about 6.
“Many people try to claim orbs are bugs,” Glolady says. “They try to dispute it. But they are ancient geometric shapes — pentagons.”
She wears a miniature pentagon charm around her neck.
“I never thought it was paranormal,” she says. “Until I was reading cards in Pasadena. I’ve always sensed it, but never had it explained before.”
About the same time, Glolady claims she predicted Hurricane Katrina, and left Florida. She questioned why she had been given this gift if no one listened. But then she found her answer:
“Out of tragedy, people come together in love.”
Glolady’s other claim to fame is as inventor of “Glowbutts,” the glowing underwear of the ’80s.
Goose bumps
The group spends three hours seeking out ghosts in dark rooms.
One of Warren’s sensors lets off blinking lights in the attic, indicating electromagnetic activity.
When asked why it was so “hopping” in the attic, Jennifer shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “This was our hideout. This is where my sister made out with boys.”
Adelaide always felt deeply depressed when she entered the attic, though, like a huge weight pressed on her shoulders. She attributed it to the antiques lining the walls. When her mother died, she inherited centuries’ worth of items.
“So then all these weird things started,” Adelaide says. “Did it come with the antiques or did I inherit a house with ghosts?”
The basement is also a focal point for activity. Warren harps on the fact that a professional photographer on the tour captured a face in the mist. “A professional photographer,” he keeps repeating.
And when Warren takes a video camera to record Adelaide’s old rocking horse in the attic, it moves — just slightly — when Chris asks for a sign.
“Dude, whenever I ask something to happen, it does,” Chris says. “It’s creepy.”
In Jennifer’s blue room, a girl sits in a rocking chair Adelaide’s mother had owned. Something tugs on the bottom of her shirt. She yelps.
When the group gathers back together, Warren explains why there might be so much activity in the attic and basement when both Jennifer and Adelaide claim nothing had happened there.
“The house is a capacitor,” he says. “It’s a big condenser.”
The energy, he says, would logically gather in the polar opposites of the house.
Despite long stretches of sitting and waiting, the crowd remains lively, though some drop off from the tour as the 11 p.m. deadline approaches.
One lady, who would not give her name says her fascination with the mysterious Brown Mountain Lights in the North Carolina foothills that brought her there.
“Warren is credible,” she says. “I personally have never experienced it, but I believe in the possibility.”
Others are drawn to the event because they have experienced what they believe to be paranormal activity in their own homes. Like Anne Durant, 47, who came up from Savannah for the weekend to stay at a friend’s house in Brevard.
As the paranormal investigation winds down, one of Warren’s comments looms. Would the spirits in this house be upset with visiting guests? Some left wondering.
“The house can get over it,” Jennifer says.
The mood is light as the evening closes. Someone asks if they’ll find a ghost hitchhiking home with them.
“Yeah, take a ghost home,” Adelaide says with a laugh. “We’ve got plenty to spare. They seem to be sweet.”
Who you gonna call? Ghost hunter.
Nov
03
BREVARD — The knocking on the walls really gave Joshua P. Warren the creeps. He’d asked the spirit to give him some sort of indication he was not alone. The rapping came immediately after his request and kept up throughout the night as Warren lay in bed, in the darkness of “America’s most haunted bedroom.”
The rapping wouldn’t stop. When he finally got up to investigate, something tore his electromagnetic transmitter out of his hand, smashing it to the floor. It still has a battle scar to prove it.
Warren, a paranormal investigator from Asheville, had already seen a lot — luminous 3-D forms, faces in the mist. And felt a lot — cold spots, hair standing on the back of his neck. But nothing had ever driven him to the point of longing to flee a scene as much as that night in February 2008 at Myrtles Plantation, a bed and breakfast near Baton Rouge, La., reportedly one of the nation’s most haunted homes.
The cold, heavy dread, the chills up and down his spine: It was the scariest thing he’d ever felt.
“If I woke up and that thing — whatever was knocking — was standing over me … I had made the decision to run,” he said.
Warren, 33, wrote the book, “How to Hunt Ghosts.” He owns more than 60 electromagnetic sensors. He has wrangled “possessed” snakes, been featured on the Discovery Channel and National Geographic as a local Brown Mountain Lights expert (he believes they are a natural phenomenon), and gotten kidnapped by the Church of Satan (yes, there is such a thing; and no, Warren does not think they do actual magic).
Warren investigated four rooms of a reputed haunted home in Brevard for the Transylvania Arts Council last Friday. He measured electromagnetic activity and gathered data during the pre-Halloween event.
“I consider myself a data collector,” Warren said.
“This is really ghost-hunting — sitting down and waiting,” said Lauren Warren, Joshua’s wife. She’s been there for the snake-wrangling escapade and plenty of other investigations, “whether I like it or not,” she says.
Chris Sorrells, a UNCA engineering student who’s been helping Warren the past two years, has been a self-described ghost-buster since he was a young boy.
“Everything we do is measured through quantitative data,” Chris said. Quantitative data includes temperature fluctuations, electromagnetic readings and photographic evidence.
“It’s always a mind-body relationship,” Warren said. “We manifest these things with our minds. Activity is a combination of special characteristics in the environment and the power of people’s minds.”
Wait — does that mean that paranormal activity — or ghosts — doesn’t actually happen? Or do we make the specters appear?
“That’s why it’s so controversial,” Warren said. He cites the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle — that by observing something, the observer affects what is being observed.
Ghoulish work
How exactly does someone become a ghost hunter?
For Warren, the journey began 20 years ago when he wrote his first science fiction novel. He followed that up by writing articles for the Asheville Citizen-Times. He started investigating haunted places, wondering if any of it was real. He attended UNCA for a while but found out school wasn’t for him — that’s when he began his own business.
But there’s a deeper emotional connection behind it all. He is haunted by the sudden disappearance of a great-uncle he never knew, who vanished one day, mid-conversation — and this was never explained. And if you look at the FBI Web site, Warren says, you’ll see thousands of people every year just … go missing.
Warren believes in magic, aliens, human ghosts, pet ghosts and alternate universes.
“All these things are matters of interpretation,” he said. “If a little green man appears in the room, some might say, ‘Oh, look, a leprechaun!’ Someone else might say, ‘Oh, look, an alien!’ I try to give people benefit of doubt.”
That’s what drew him to this career path, actually. It’s about the human connection for him. “It’s about both collecting data and relishing the human experience,” he said. It’s about helping people understand the experiences they are having.
“Don’t be afraid of the imagination,” Warren said. “At least in my experience, your imagination is something to value.”
Except maybe not when you’re alone in the “most haunted bedroom in America.”
If you’re experiencing paranormal activity this Halloween, or any other time, you can seek out Warren at www.joshuapwarren.com. His company, Shadowbox Enterprises, hosts haunted pub crawls and walking and trolley tours in Asheville. For more information, go to HauntedAsheville.com.
The power of color: Do you have the Wow Factor?
Oct
28
Published in the Hendersonville Times-News Oct. 14, 2009.
Tiffany Ervin held up a yellow-gold — or possibly, mustard-bronze — sweater. She held it snug under her chin and turned to the ladies in front of her.
“See, look what this does to my skin!” she said. “It makes it yellow.”
Jacqui Perry, owner of Arden-based Luminous You and a personal style and image consultant, nodded in agreement. Very few people could actually pull off that color, she said. Her eyes panned the room. She couldn’t spot anyone among the small group of women at Elite Repeats who could.
Most Caucasian Americans have “cool” skin tones — and that shade of gold just doesn’t jive with “cool.”
“Never underestimate the power of color,” Perry, 45, told the women attending her “Creating Your Personal and Professional WOW Factor” workshop, sponsored by Elite Repeats, a designer consignment store off Four Seasons Boulevard, owned by Ervin.
Perry made serious eye contact with the women in the audience. She locked eyes with one and delivered the heart of her workshop’s message.
“Wearing the wrong color can make you look old and gray, tired and gray, sad and gray. Wearing the right color can make you look vibrant, youthful.”
But what is the right color? And how on earth does a woman figure that out?
The only way to really find out, Perry said, is to get a color consultation, so an expert can determine your season. Are you a “summer,” “winter,” “spring,” or “autumn?”
An evolving evaluation
Color technology has changed in the past 20 years.
Back in the ’80s, your “season” was based on eye color, hair color and skin tone. Today, experts have determined the only true factor is skin color since you can change the shade of your hair and eyes, provided you have the necessary disposable income.
So forget those other things you may have heard about finding your colors, concentrate on skin tone.
“If you are born with cool skin, you’ll die with cool skin,” Perry said. Your cool skin may get sallow with age and it may get tanned in the summer, but it’s still cool skin.
Perry is a “cool.” You can tell by her shiny magenta jacket and bright lipstick. Her blonde hair is swept across her forehead.
The “cool” seasons are winter and summer. Spring and autumn are considered “warm” colors.
To figure out which colors go with which seasons, beauty experts consulted artists who imparted their wisdom: The colors of the seasons are the colors you see when you look outside the window in the winter, summer, spring and autumn.
If your summer colors are fuchsia and jade, for instance, winter waters down those shades. “Winter is where the pastels go,” Perry said.
And spring is “a rebirth season. Everything has a yellow tint.” That tint matures into the colors of fall, still tinted yellow. That’s why spring and fall are “warm.”
Your tools
Knowing your season and, therefore, your colors, is the first step to bringing out what Perry calls your “personal WOW factor.”
Some people think you need to buy a whole new wardrobe, but it can really be less costly. Many women can weed through their closets and work with what they’ve already got.
“We wear 20 percent of our wardrobes 80 percent of the time,” Perry said. “You can create style through your existing wardrobe. Many people are sitting on a gold mine in their closets.”
She demonstrates with a mannequin she calls Josie, who goes with Perry on all her presentations. Josie wore a simple black dress with cape sleeves that Perry transformed from “day wear” to “professional evening wear” to “club wear” by adding a cardigan (day wear), a suit jacket (recycled from an old suit; royal blue) and cheetah print scarf (professional wear), and then just a cheetah print scarf worn as a shawl (club wear). By simply adding a chunky necklace, she created evening wear.
It’s important to remember not to follow fashion trends blindly, Perry noted. Not everyone looks good in the season’s current styles.
Black is the exception, she said. You can always look good in black. Just pairing it with a color that looks great on you will work in any season.
Perry’s outfit during Tuesday night’s workshop demonstrated that. She wore black slacks and a black ribbed turtleneck to go with her magenta jacket. She also wore that cheetah print scarf before she put it on Josie.
Your face
Knowing what makes you look more vibrant is also the first step to taking years off your face. Perry has no qualms about plastic surgery, but it’s essential to get your colors done first, because the colors will reflect on your face.
“Wrong colors make all the ‘hot spots’ show up,” Perry said. “Hot spots” are lines, wrinkles and age spots — virtually everything that ages you.
She pulled Dulcie Fusillo out of the audience to demonstrate the power of color. Perry used swatches she called “skin tones” — four shades of pink. She flipped through the pink tones.
With the help of the ladies watching, Perry deemed Fusillo a “cool,” but didn’t determine which season, since that would require more steps.
To find out their seasons, the participants will have to go to a private consultation. That’s when Perry goes through all the steps and give her clients a “color wallet,” which contains fabric samples they are instructed to take shopping to find the right shades for their season. Her consulting sessions last an hour and a half and cost $105.
Fusillo, who like the other women at the work shop paid $10 to attend, was shocked to find out she was a “cool.”
“I always thought I was a warm,” she said.
Because of her red hair, she had been labelled an “autumn” in past forays into color. Her favorite color, a pale pink, washed out her face, Perry noted. By contrast, the bright fuchsia Perry suggested brought out her eyes.
It all comes down to your skin tone.
The pudding
While Perry couldn’t offer any specifics on do-it-yourself methods for determining your season, she did say you can look at the underside of your forearm and look for traces of pink or gold. If you are cool, you will have a pink undertone. If you are warm, your skin will appear more golden.
But, she said, it’s really only the trained eye that can tell. Perry’s own eyes were trained through years of beauty pageants (she was Miss Asheville) and 19 years performing aboard cruise ships.
When she moved back to Asheville a few years ago, she took classes at the Impression Strategies Institute in Norfolk, Va.
Knowing your season is the first step to style, she told the Elite Repeats group as she wrapped up the session.
Still reeling from the revelation that, despite what she was told 20 years ago, she is really a “cool,” Fusillo was glad to be correctly recategorized.
“It makes your life easier,” Fusillo said.
Perry flashed a professional smile: “The proof is in the pudding.”
Perry’s tips
As far as standard fashion tips go, Perry laid down a few laws:
• “Lipstick is a woman’s power tool.” But be careful with those shiny lipsticks that “are popular with the young kids. They make us look a mess.”
• “If you have uncontrollable eyebrows, you need to get them done.” Untamed eyebrows can add years to a face.
• “It’s better to look pink than yellow.” Yellow is jaundiced; pink is lively.
• “Get rid of the dated eyewear.” Most people look best in “squoval” glasses – that is, slightly round, slightly square.
• “Dragon nails are a no-no.” Get rid of those long fingernails.
• “Yellow teeth are very aging.” Lipstick can make your teeth look whiter … or dingier.
