By Bob Hicks

I’ve just posted this story at Oregon Arts Watch on last night’s opening show of Skinner/Kirk Dance Ensemble’s run at BodyVox Dance Center. Four good dances, including Josie Moseley’s splendid new Flying Over Emptiness. Pictured above: Eric Skinner and Daniel Kirk in Moseley’s new dance, a tribute to fellow choreographer Mary Oslund. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.

With Mrs. Scatter on the road eating fresh pineapple and downing margaritas with childhood friends, Mr. Scatter and the offspring have been batching it the last few days.

While that’s led to a somewhat more relaxed sense of structure (oh, my goodness: is it midnight already?), the basics have been covered: boys showered, sheets washed, fruit or vegetables shoved down reluctant teenager’s plant-averse throat, same reluctant teen’s homework swiped at (eek! it’s finals week!).

It’s also led to a more, well, scattered approach to Mr. Scatter’s schedule. While Friends of Scatter Barry Johnson and Marty Hughley have been dutifully hitting the theaters and discovering interesting things (Barry wrote about the Fertile Ground new-works festival’s Famished, Meshi Chavez and tEEth for OPB; Marty wrote about the fascinating-sounding The Tripping Point: An Exhibition of Fairytale Installations, also at Fertile Ground, for Oregon Live) Mr. Scatter’s been going with the flow.

This is how the flow went.

*

On his way to Mochitsuki on Sunday afternoon (one son was watching Jane Campion’s The Piano for his English class, with a welcome assist from Ms. Reality’s Netflix account; the other was home listening to Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King on CD), Mr. Scatter ran into actress Eleanor O’Brien, who was standing on a sidewalk outside the Tiffany Center with a stack of postcards for her new show, Girls’ Guide: Dominatrix for Dummies, which will run at Theater! Theatre! Feb. 10-26.

The circumstance excites and unnerves her, because it turns out to be a very big roll of the dice: she plunked down money to rent the hall right after quitting her day job. “I’ve waited tables for 20 years,” Eleanor said. “People come up to me acting like they know me, and I have to stop and think, did they see one of my shows, or did I serve them lunch?”

O’Brien is part of an illustrious show-biz family – her mother is Vana O’Brien, the longtime leading Portland stage performer, and Vana’s father was the stage and movie actor Van Heflin, who won a supporting-actor Oscar for 1941’s Johnny Eager – but bloodlines don’t pay the bills. The comically erotic Girls’ Guide grew out of Eleanor’s experiences as an actress in New York, trying to find a day job to make ends meet, and somehow finding herself a novice in the sex industry, catering to clients with a wish to be overwhelmed. The outcome, she said, was sometimes surprisingly tender. Confused on exactly how to proceed, she finally asked one client what he wanted. “He said, ‘I want to be wanted.’”

As he was leaving, Eleanor handed Mr. Scatter one of her postcards. “How does one train to become a professional dominatrix?” it asked in big red letters at the top.

Strenuously, Mr. Scatter imagines.

*

The same day, Mr. Scatter received a note from Charles Deemer, king of the hyperdrama, announcing the Smashwords release of his collected writings on the subject. Hyperdrama is a sort of exploded theatrical form, inspired partly by the world of physics and taking place in real space with several “stages” involved simultaneously in different aspects of the same moment in time: what might be happening with the offstage characters in The Seagull, for instance, while the onstage characters are speaking as Chekhov determined they would in his play? Deemer wrote the answer – or at least, his answer. Generally the audience is free to wander from one space to another, creating its own “timeline” out of a multiplicity of possibilities.

“I’ve put together what I hope is the clearest overview of hyperdrama, and my work in it, in a free ebook at Smashwords (all formats, including reading online),” Charles wrote. “I call it Hyperdrama: my obsession with a new theater form. I’m excited about getting this in the marketplace where young folks read because I still hope to inspire young theater artists/playwrights to look into this and moved the ball forward in an arena apart from computer games, that is, in live performance. Pissing against the wind but then I’ve got a lot of experience doing that ha ha.”

Deemer also has a new paperback out from Round Bend Press – his collection Eight Oregon Plays – and a new novel coming soon from the same publisher, with the intriguing title Sodom, Gomorrah and Jones (sounds like the Devil’s law firm). And this is where the flow gets interesting, because Eleanor O’Brien’s mother Vana starred as the no-nonsense tavern owner Stella in the 1984 premiere of Deemer’s best-known play, Christmas at the Juniper Tavern, which is one of the plays included in Eight Oregon Plays. Coincidence for Dummies!

“Ah, in search of a young Turk group of actors to take hyperdrama and run with it,” Deemer added. “I don’t know if you saw my design for a hyperdrama theater but it’s easy to explain. Think 3 concentric circles. Outer circle, audience area. Middle circle, wider, actors’ playing area. Inner circle, thin, screens behind the playing area where images can be projected to set the scene. So now you can go anywhere in an instant.

“Yes, this makes for less of ‘a living movie’ and a more abstract theater environment but it has advantages: now clearly, purely, this is an actors’ form of theater (as it should be). And best, it’s a permanent space so you can build an audience. My Chekhov hyperdrama could be performed here easily — which is a hell of a lot easier than finding a country home on a lake!”

*

Notes kept arriving. Mr. Scatter received one from Richard Maviks, who owns a tiny art gallery in Northwest Portland called, perhaps wryly, Gigantic. His new show opening First Thursday is called Mother of God, and features works by five woman artists on the subject of women in religious stories. “There are four little pieces from what the artist is calling the Domestic Madonna series,” Maviks writes. “In keeping with the Domestic Madonna theme, that same artist also made dish towels, styled a little like Jewish prayer shawls, with a woman’s prayer in Yiddish against the evil eye silk-screened on. Another one of the artists is doing a triptych on Adam’s three wives – Lilith, the little-known and unnamed second wife, and Eve.”

This seems interesting because, barely a blip in human time after religious subjects dominated the world of art, religion can hardly buy a ticket to the art-world show anymore, and therefore anyone who commits to the subject is committing an act of obstinacy or bravery or both, which deserves at least a little attention. And it seems coincidental because at the time Maviks sent his note I happened to be reading a 2004 review by John Updike of an exhibition of El Greco paintings at the Met, a show made up largely of religious paintings by a revered artist who didn’t entirely float Updike’s boat. “Soaring operatic concoctions like … The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (1608-13) are in their way stupendous,” Updike wrote, “though the vapid expressions of the pointy noses of his long-necked females give their cosmic occasions a flavor of Watteauesque fete.” Updike added: “His art has the slickness of any art that doesn’t subject itself to a constant reality check.” Mother of God, that was not a compliment.

*

So it’s gone. The flow has moved through a lot of music on radio and CD, among it Schubert, Copland, operatic highlights from La Boheme and Turandot, and the Met broadcast of Tosca. Mr. Scatter spent Tuesday evening listening to Portland Opera young artist Lindsay Ohse singing art songs by Mozart, Poulenc and Rachmaninoff, with superb piano accompaniment by Robert Ainsley. We’ve taken time out for that hifalutin soap opera Downton Abbey (things are looking bad on the reproductive front for Matthew, and Lady Mary might have to actually marry that crass commoner press lord to keep the story of the dead Turk in her bed hushed up) and the BBC’s 21^st-century version of Sherlock Holmes, in which Dr. Watson is played by Martin Freeman, the actor who also played the sweetly naked stand-in for a movie sex scene in Love, Actually and will soon be ridiculously famous for starring as Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s two-film version of The Hobbit. For those roles we affectionately refer to Freeman around Art Scatter World Headquarters as Porn Star Hobbit.

Which gives Tolkien for Dummies a whole new twist.

When we talk about culture here at Art Scatter, we like to think it’s almost as wide as life. It could be historical, or political, or social, or personal, or purely aesthetic. It might be Madame Butterfly, Puccini’s opera about a fatal clash of moral sensibilities, which returns to the Portland Opera stage beginning Friday. Or it might be Mochitsuki, the city’s annual celebration of the Japanese new year, which I took in on Sunday afternoon.

Japan has officially recognized the Gregorian-calendar dating system since 1873, which makes the official Japanese new year January 1. But traditionally the nation’s new year has followed the Chinese lunar calendar, and a sturdy tradition can outwit official proclamation for a good long time.

This year’s Mochitsuki took place, curiously but practically, at the Scottish Rite Center, a spacious building that offers lots of room to roam. As I walked in I discovered an overflowing crowd of celebrants, from the very old to the newly born, wandering through three levels of displays, performances, dining and activities. The variety was invigorating: everything from bento-making classes for kids to tea ceremonies for all comers. Calligraphy, origami, ikebana, tastes of sake, a table with contemporary Japanese art that seemed inspired by, or loosely affiliated with, manga. Lots and lots of food, from ramune soft drinks and vegetable curry to chow mein and (from a Hawaiian booth) Spam musubi. Booths with information about Japanese-American societies. Tables with books on the history of Japanese life in the United States, including the infamous internment camps for American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. The Consulate General of Japan and the Portland Japanese Garden had booths.

The crowd was predominantly, although far from exclusively, Asian-American, and it had a genuine family feel. People tended to know one another, and greeted one another familiarly, and it struck me that in a city with a relatively small Asian population, one good reason for gatherings like Mochitsuki is that the pressure of constantly being a “minority” is off and you can simply relax and have a good time.

Almost immediately I ran into my friend the photographer Motoya Nakamura, who was snapping away at a busy table surrounded by kids making teru teru bozu dolls, which look a lot like hanging Halloween ghosts, from various craft supplies. The table was organized by Oya No Kai, the parent support group for Portland public schools’ Japanese magnet program. Motoya had spent the previous day photographing felines at a fancy-cat show, and this was a considerably livelier event. As he shot the activity, Motoya was smiling widely. So were the kids.

Mochitsuki has its roots in the making of mochi, a sticky rice cake (samples were being handed out; very tasty). Here’s how artist Valerie Otani has described the very first Portland Mochitsuki, which took place in 1996 in the basement of the Oregon Buddhist Temple:

Despite the low ceilings, community members were able to take turns at swinging the heavy wooden mallet (kine) and pound the steamed sweet rice cradled in a basin (usu) made from a carved tree trunk. Older men stepped up and, with the stroke of the kine, reminded us of the athletic young men they had once been. Elders shared stories, Portland Taiko played drums and the room was so crowded that people waiting outside could only enter when someone left. It was clear that Mochitsuki was a powerful way of drawing the community together. The symbolism of creating a cohesive dough from many separate grains of rice was an inspiration.

On Sunday, a succession of ceremonial strikers kept the mochi mallet pounding. The drums were pounding, too, in the upstairs performance hall, where Portland Taiko and its student group, Tanuki Taiko, were among the day’s performers. (I was here partly because I serve on Portland Taiko’s board.) The drum rhythms are elemental but also surprisingly complex: this is a sophisticated performance genre, with strong elements of dance, mime and storytelling as well as music, and it has the almost inevitable attraction of pumping up an audience’s level of enthusiasm. When drummer Toru Watanabe executed some exacting backflips that carried him from one edge of the stage to the other, the crowd roared.

I also caught a performance by Robert Kikuchi-Yngojo, of the San Francisco storytelling duo Eth-Noh-Tec, who was dressed in the barest hint of a dragon costume to tell a tale of a boy on a quest, a god who can answer great questions, and a dragon who would dearly like to earn his wings. Like all good storytellers, Kikuchi-Yngojo dealt mainly in the stirring of the imagination. His eye-rolls and broad gestures would be at home on a kabuki or commedia stage, and his drolleries had young and old laughing in recognition of human nature. There was something both jarring and wryly fitting about seeing an Asian-American actor pretending to be a dragon in a Scottish-American social hall in front of a drop that was painted with a scene of medieval warriors in suits of armor: you could imagine a dragon swooping down on the scene from a nearby mountain. Of course, anyone who knows anything about dragons knows that Asian dragons are vastly more benevolent than their diabolical European cousins.

I regret to report that Pinkerton, Madame Butterfly’s faithless and cowardly husband in Puccini’s opera, is very much the European sort of dragon.

Hal Holbrook’s back in town on Saturday, riding the horse of his magnificent one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!, and even as Holbrook noses up on 87 years old it’s bound to be a helluva show.

A couple of weeks ago I chatted on the phone for about an hour with him (Holbrook, not Twain, although it’s sometimes hard to tell them apart), and today two resulting stories have seen the light of print.

This one – As Twain, Holbrook’s made his mark – is in Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian, and is partly about Holbrook’s deepening attachment to Twain’s more politically acerbic side.

This one – Hal Holbrook on jackasses and Mark Twain’s wound – is on the online culture journal Oregon Arts Watch and ranges a little more broadly, dropping in on John Updike and Lewis Leary and the enduring controversies over The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Holbrook’s been at this game in one form or another since the late 1940s, and he’s really quite amazing at it. Just for fun I looked up a review of Mark Twain Tonight! that I wrote for The Oregonian in 1991. Here are excerpts:

Where does Hal Holbrook leave off and Mark Twain begin? After 36 years of Holbrook’s solo show Mark Twain Tonight! it gets harder and harder to tell. But one thing’s sure: No humorist alive who’s working in the American language is more deeply and dryly funny.

On Friday night, 2,700 people packed Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall as tight as a sardine can. Holbrook (or was it Twain?) provided the salt.

Holbrook’s one-night stand was accompanied by the usual appurtenances: a lectern, a library table, a padded armchair, a pitcher of water, a clutter of books. He strode blithely through the usual fog of cigar smoke, wearing the usual Kentucky-colonel creamy white suit. And as usual, he lit a firecracker string of laughter under his audience.

“Civiliiizzay-shun,” Holbrook exclaims at one point, turning the word into an impossible contortion that is part wonderment, part delight and part sneer.

It was part of Twain’s genius as an entertainer that he could make the most cynically corrosive observations about human nature and phrase them in such a way that his readers and listeners would both recognize and delight in them. To a young country both innocent and destructive, prudish and bursting with desire, he became an avuncular and smilingly savage bearer of self-knowledge.

Sin and salvation — the twin excesses of America — are the twin pillars of Twain’s comedy.

“When I was a young man wavering between the pulpit and the penitentiary …” he might begin. Or again: “That old Presbyterian religion laid on me like an anvil sometimes …”

Holbrook … played Twain’s favorite themes lightly. Stiff-shouldered and shuffle-stepped, with that roiling rasp that is a cadenced, musically scraping sound, he reminisced about young Sam Clemens’ wandering days in Nevada and California and the Sandwich Islands.

His apparent rambling – always with a point somewhere around the bend and always delivered with devastating timing – covered the life-saving pleasures of habits (bad ones), the fate of young missionaries who are et by apologetic cannibals, the reason that Irishmen don’t fall on dogs and the impossibilities of the political beast.

“Teddy Roosevelt, the great hunter,” he says. Pause. “and conservationist.”

“Shot a bear!” Holbrook shakes his head in bafflement. “When he could have stayed home and shot a senator!”

*

Photo: Mark Twain receiving an honorary doctorate degree from Oxford University. Wikimedia Commons

By Bob Hicks

The national political season is getting good and nasty these days, and we here at Art Scatter World Headquarters are pretty pumped about it: blood sports do that to us.

We’re especially excited about the literary possibilities. In  recent days we’ve added some astute veteran political observers to our stable of correspondents, all of whom know their way around a well-turned phrase. First came Eugene Field, with his commentary on the viciousness of the infighting during the South Carolina primary campaign: “The truth about the cat and pup is this: they ate each other up!” Then we succeeded in persuading the Scottish poet William Miller, famed for breaking the Wee Willie Winkie scandal, to comment on Newt’s unusual nighttime frolics (”upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown”).

Now we’re extremely proud to be able to bring you the commentary of the legendary George Washington Plunkitt, whose plainspoken eloquence on the subject of practical politics captivated the nation in the best-selling Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. Plunkitt made a fortune in the political game, boasting, among other things, “of his record in filling four public offices in one year and drawing salaries from three of them at the same time.”

Following is his first dispatch to Art Scatter. Don’t ask us what we had to guarantee Mr. Plunkitt to get him to write for us. You don’t want to know.

Plunkitt on the uproar over Newt and Fannie Mae:

“Everybody is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There’s all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I’ve made a big fortune out of the game, and I’m gettin’ richer every day, but I’ve not gone in for dishonest graft – blackmailin’ gamblers, saloonkeepers, disorderly people, etc. – and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics.

“There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”

Plunkitt explains Mitt’s tax returns and the lobbying victories that allow him to pay a modest 15 percent tax rate on long-term capital gains and dividends:

“The books are always all right. The money in the city treasury is all right. Everything is all right. All they can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft. Now, let me tell you that’s never goin’ to hurt Tammany with the people. Every good man looks after his friends, and any man who doesn’t isn’t likely to be popular. If I have a good thing to hand out in private life, I give it to a friend – Why shouldn’t I do the same in public life?”

Plunkitt on why so many of the 99 percent vote in the interests of the 1 percent:

“The Wall Street banker thinks it shameful to raise a department clerk’s salary from $1500 to $1800 a year, but every man who draws a salary himself says: ‘That’s all right. I wish it was me.’ And he feels very much like votin’ the Tammany ticket on election day, just out of sympathy.”

Plunkitt explains why Obama sounds as dry as Woodrow Wilson and Newt only plays around with history:

“Some young men think they can learn how to be successful in politics from books, and they cram their heads with all sorts of college rot. They couldn’t make a bigger mistake. Now, understand me I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ against colleges. I guess they’ll have to exist as long as there’s book-worms, and I suppose they do some good in a certain way, but they don’t count in politics. In fact, a young man who has gone through the college course is handicapped at the outset. He may succeed in politics, but the chances are 100 to 1 against him.”

Plunkitt explains why the debates are really nothing but a sideshow:

“Another mistake: some young men think that the best way to prepare for the political game is to practice speakin’ and becomin’ orators. That’s all wrong. We’ve got some orators in Tammany Hall, but they’re chiefly ornamental. … The men who rule have practiced keepin’ their tongues still, not exercisin’ them. So you want to drop the orator idea unless you mean to go into politics just to perform the skyrocket act.”

Plunkitt explains why civil service rules and public-employee unions are bad for the nation:

“This civil service law is the biggest fraud of the age. It is the curse of the nation. There can’t be no real patriotism while it lasts. How are you goin’ to interest our young men in their country if you have no offices to give them when they work for their party? Just look at things in this city today. There are ten thousand good offices, but we can’t get at more than a few hundred of them. How are we goin’ to provide for the thousands of men who worked for the Tammany ticket? It can’t be done. These men were full of patriotism a short time ago. They expected to be servin’ their city, but when we tell them that we can’t place them, do you think their patriotism is goin’ to last? Not much. They say: What’s the use of workin’ for your country anyhow? There’s nothin’ in the game.” And what can they do? I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what I do know. I know more than one young man in past years who worked for the ticket and was just overflowin’ with patriotism, but when he was knocked out by the civil service humbug he got to hate his country and became an Anarchist.”

Plunkitt explains why the Ron Pauls and Ralph Naders always lose:

“The fact is that a reformer can’t last in politics. He can make a show for a while, but he always comes down like a rocket. Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry-goods or the drug business. You’ve got to be trained up to it or you’re sure to fail. Suppose a man who knew nothing about the grocery trade suddenly went into the business and tried to conduct it according to his own ideas. Wouldn’t he make a mess of it? He might make a splurge for a while, as long as his money lasted, but his store would soon be empty. It’s just the same with a reformer. He hasn’t been brought up in the difficult business of politics and he makes a mess of it every time.”

Plunkitt explains what Obama must do to win again in 2012:

“There’s only one way to hold a district: you must study human nature and act accordin’. You can’t study human nature in books. Books is a hindrance more than anything else. If you have been to college, so much the worse for you. You’ll have to unlearn all you learned before you can get right down to human nature, and unlearnin’ takes a lot of time. Some men can never forget what they learned at college. Such men may get to be district leaders by a fluke, but they never last.

“To learn real human nature you have to go among the people, see them and be seen. … I know every man, woman, and child in the Fifteenth District, except them that’s been born this summer – and I know some of them, too. I know what they like and what they don’t like, what they are strong at and what they are weak in, and I reach them by approachin’ at the right side.”

*

ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

• Thomas Nast. “The Tammany Tiger Loose—’What are you going to do about it?’,” published in Harper’s Weekly in November 1871, just before election day. Wikimedia Commons.
• George Washington Plunkitt, ca. 1915. Wikimedia Commons.

By Bob Hicks

I’ve just put up this post at Oregon Arts Watch about two extraordinary feats of endurance: Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton’s star-crossed quest in 1914-17 to trek 1,800 miles across the Antarctic continent, and Lawrence Howard’s captivating three-hour solo telling of the tale at Portland Story Theater. Give it a read, and the next time you think of grumbling about a little Portland rain, think of Shackleton and his men. Still a few tickets available, I’m told, for Howard’s Friday-night performance Jan. 27.

Photo: Lifeboat James Caird launches from Elephant Island, April 24, 1916. Probably by expedition photographer Frank Hurley. Wikimedia Commons

Seeing it as our duty to help sort out this most perplexing of civic seasons, we here at Art Scatter World Headquarters have hired our first political correspondent. He’s a veteran newspaperman named Eugene Field, and we’re proud to add him to our mix.

Here is Mr. Field’s first dispatch, filed from the late 19th century on the morning after Newt Gingrich’s tooth-ripping victory over Mitt Romney in Saturday’s South Carolina GOP primary election. Well done, Mr. Field! We look forward to your continuing reports:

THE DUEL

Something’s Got a Hold on Me. Etta James, that incredible American voice, died today from cancer at age 73, and although she urged us to “Don’t Cry Baby,” a few collective tears are going to tumble down.

Etta touched on blues and country and rhythm & blues and soul – pretty much most of the traditional popular song forms – and distinguished herself in all of them. She lived hard, on purpose, and sometimes fell over the edge, then scrambled back and added a little more of the scrape and grit she’d landed in to her already astonishing sound. “My mother always wanted me to be a jazz singer, but I always wanted to be raunchy,” she wrote in her memoir.

She was a walking, talking myth: She thought her daddy might have been the pool hustler Minnesota Fats, though she didn’t know for sure, and apparently, neither did he. She seemed to sing from some vital contradiction in the American spirit: how could a voice be at once so smudged and raw and pure? Johnny Otis, who died on Tuesday at age 90, discovered her, but no one could hold on to her. Dementia caught up with her in her final years. It couldn’t hold on, either. Today, Etta’s free.

At Last.

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Photo: Louis Ramirez, 2000, Flickr/Wikimedia Commons; Etta in San Jose.

By Bob Hicks

Over at Oregon Arts Watch I’ve posted Ready, aim, fire: on Portland stages, a shot in the dark. It’s an account of my weekend adventures viewing the premieres of Joseph Fisher’s (I Am Still) the Duchess of Malfi at Artists Rep and Jason Wells’s The North Plan at Portland Center Stage, plus Allison Moore’s Collapse at Third Rail Rep. Guns were blazin’. Regimes were toppled. A sex addict helped save the day. I even managed to introduce the Victorian poet and critic John Addington Symonds into the mix. Well, why not?

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Jake Street, Vin Shambry and Chris Murray in “(I Am Still) the Duchess of Malfi.” Photo: Owen Carey

A  gathering at 2 p.m. Sunday, January 22, in the studios of Oregon Ballet Theatre (818 Southeast Sixth Avenue, Portland) will remember Mark Goldweber, who was company ballet master from 1988 until 1997, when he returned to the Joffrey Ballet, where he had been a dancer, to take up the same position.  Goldweber, who was ballet master for Salt Lake City’s Ballet West when he died on December 9, was a superb dancer as well as ballet master. He set high standards for OBT that are still in place today.

Performance video will be shown, not only of Goldweber dancing, but also of ballets on which he had a real influence: his love of Romanov history as well as 19th century classicism was an integral part of James Canfield’s Nutcracker, and it was he who lovingly staged the company’s first production of Giselle. Speakers will include, among others, Carol Shults, former OBT dancers Daniel Kirk and Katarina Svetlova Thompson; Josie Moseley, and yours truly.  Since space is limited, please RSVP to Carol Shults at carolshults@comcast.net