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The Institute for
the Humanities fall series will bring together an eclectic mix of
outstanding presenters. Stage performers, Hollywood actors, a western
novelist and a syndicated columnist will bring their perspectives on the
topic of “Home, Heritage and Heroes,” subjects increasingly important to
remember during our current unsettled times.
- Sunday,
Sept. 13, 4 p.m. – Syndicated columnist and author Sharon Randall:
Salado Civic Center; Reception following.
- Sun.,
Sept. 27, 3 p.m. -- Rescheduled Enoch Arden music/dramatic
presentation: Stagecoach Longhorn Conference Center; (Weekend of the
Chocolate Festival) Reception following.
-
Sun.,
Oct. 25, 2 p.m., -- Texas
author and screenwriter Stephen
Harrigan.
Concluding event of the Salado
Founder’s Day Festival;
Salado Civic
Center, 601 N. Main St.
Reception following
Title: "Historical Fact, Historical Fiction: a
Novelist Looks at Texas."
- Sun., Nov.
8, 4 p.m. – Inauguration of the Lee Marvin Memorial Lecture
featuring “The boys” from the movie The Big Red One
Stagecoach Longhorn Conference Center; Reception following.
Syndicated
columnist and author Sharon Randall
The fall series
begins in September with words of wisdom from award-winning writer,
Sharon Randall. Ms. Randall has been writing about these topics for the
past twenty seven years. Her lecture will be at 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 13,
at the Salado Civic Center on Main Street in downtown Salado. A
reception will follow.
She is a syndicated columnist for Scripps Howard News Service in
Washington, D.C. Her weekly column reaches six million readers
nationwide each week and is distributed to some 400 newspapers,
including the Killeen Daily Herald. It also appears quarterly in Carmel
Magazine. She receives thousands of letters and emails each year from
readers who connect with her stories.
Randall began her writing career with a personal column called “Bay
Window,” about “everyday people and ordinary things,” for The Monterey
County Herald in 1991. The column became extraordinarily popular and
was picked up for syndication by Scripps Howard in 1994.
A
collection of her columns, “Birdbaths and Paper Cranes,” was published
in 2001. It was selected by the Independent Book Sellers of America for
the prestigious “BookSense 76” list the following year.
Randall was born and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North and
South Carolina, but has lived for 35 years in California. Her career
began at The Monterey County Herald in 1982, starting in the newspaper’s
library and ending as a feature writer and syndicated columnist. In
between she was a reporter covering a wide variety of subjects and
stories which netted her numerous journalism awards and a Casey
Journalism Fellowship from the University of Maryland.
Her first husband died in 1998, following a lengthy battle with cancer
that she often wrote about in her columns. She remarried in 2005, and
now divides her time between the Monterey Peninsula and “Las Vegas of
All Places.”
As a winner of numerous professional awards, she proudly notes that she
has also “scrubbed a lot of toilets, washed a lot of towels and burned a
lot of cookies.” She credits her training as a writer to “15 years as a
reporter, some 30 years as a wife and a mother, and more than 50 years
as a daughter, a sister and a friend.”
Enoch Arden music/dramatic
presentation
The second program
in the series is the dramatic/musical presentation featuring two
performers from the University of Texas that was postponed last spring.
Dr. Robert Freeman, pianist and music professor, and Dr. Lucien Douglas,
narrator and drama professor, will present two musical monodramas that
address the subjects of heroes and home.
Take a Lord Tennyson epic poem, combine it with some Richard Strauss
music, add in performances by two prominent UT professors and you have a
unique addition to the fall lecture series. That musical/dramatic
presentation is also the concluding event in the Chocolate and Art
Festival Weekend, Sunday Sept. 27, in the Longhorn Conference Center at
the Stagecoach Inn in Salado. A reception will follow.
The production is Enoch Arden, a Monodrama, which tells a story
of a hero and coming home in a beautiful and heart-breaking way. It is
based on the epic poem written in 1864 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and set
to music by Richard Strauss. Numerous plays and movies have subsequently
been based on the poem, including the 1940 comedy, My Favorite Wife,
the 1960’s romantic
comedy, Move Over Darling, and more recently, the Tom Hanks film
Cast Away.
A second musical monodrama,
The History of Babar, will also be performed that is a much more
lighthearted look at home and heroes. It is based on the children’s
books about Babar the king of the elephants by Jean de Brunhoff and set
to music by Francis Poulenc.
Dr. Robert Freeman, the pianist, has spoken to the Institute before on
the effects of music on the brain. He is the Ragan Regents Professor of
Fine Arts (musicology) at the University of Texas and is also former
dean of the College of Fine Arts. A Steinway artist since the mid
1970’s, he is also an accomplished pianist and has performed and
recorded with orchestras and colleagues throughout the U.S., Canada, and
Europe. He also chairs the board of the Institute for Music and Brain
Science at Harvard-Massachusetts General Hospital.
The narrator is Dr. Lucien Douglas, a professional actor with a 30 year
career in theatre, film and television. His work has received critical
acclaim in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Backstage, and Women's
Wear Daily. He has played more than 100 roles, including a featured role
on Broadway with Zoe Caldwell and Dame Judith Anderson in Medea.
He is currently an Associate Professor of Acting & Directing at the
University of Texas at Austin where he received the 2000 Texas
Excellence Teaching Award for the UT College of Fine Arts. He holds a
Ph.D. in Theatre from Michigan State University.
Texas
author
and screenwriter Stephen Harrigan
The third lecture in the fall
series is also part of the Salado Founder’s Day Festival the weekend of
Oct. 23-25. Author and screenwriter Stephen Harrigan is the perfect
conclusion to the Founder’s Day Festivities.
He wrote the historical novel, The Gates of the Alamo, as well as
several other Texas-based historical books and screenplays.
The Gates of the Alamo,
was a New York Times bestseller and
notable book, and which received a
number of awards, including the TCU Texas Book Award, the Western
Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and
the Spur Award for the Best Novel of the West from
the
Western Writers of America.
He has written three
other novels, including his accalimed Challenger Park, about the
U.S.
space program. New York
Times Book Review called Challenger Park “a fine, absorbing
achievement, probably the best science-factual novel about the
space-faring worlds of Houston and Cape Canaveral in the nearly
half-century since the first astronauts were chosen.”
Harrigan began his career as a journalist. For many years, he
was a staff writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly, and his
articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of other publications
including The Atlantic,
Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Life, and
Slate, among others. Many of his magazine pieces have been
collected in the essay collections
A Natural State
(1988) and
Comanche Midnight
(1995). His other non-fiction books include
Water and Light: A Diver’s Journey to a
Coral Reef
He is also a prolific
screenwriter, principally in the field of made-for-television movies.
Among the movies he has written are The Last of His Tribe (HBO),
Among the many
movies Harrigan has written for television are HBO’s award-winning
The Last of His Tribe,
starring Jon Voight and Graham Greene, and
King of Texas,
a western retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear for TNT.
Also for TNT, he wrote
Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder
(CBS),
His screenplay for the television
production,
The Colt,
was an adaptation of a short story by the Nobel-prize winning author
Mikhail Sholokhov, which aired on The Hallmark Channel. For that
screenplay, Harrigan was nominated for a Writers Guild Award and the
Humanitas Prize.
Harrigan was
born in Oklahoma City in 1948
and has lived in Texas since
the age of five, growing up in Abilene
and Corpus Christi. A 1971 graduate of
the University of Texas,
Harrigan is on the faculty of UT’s James
A.
Michener
Center
for Writers, in Austin.
Inauguration of the Lee Marvin Memorial Lecture
The final weekend in the fall lecture series features the inauguration
of the Lee Marvin Memorial Lecture. The Institute is delighted and
excited to host Marvin’s costars from one of his last major films,
The Big Red One. That event will be held in the Longhorn Conference
Center of the Salado Stagecoach Inn Salado at 4 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 8.
Marvin, and his wife, Pam, were friends and major supporters of the
Institute. When he died, Pam established the Lee Marvin Lectureship in
his memory. That lecture was to be held from time to time, and be given
by someone connected to the film industry who shared his passion and
commitment to that industry.
For a variety of reasons that lecture has never been held, but that will
change this year, as it appropriately concludes the series, “Heroes,
Heritage, and Home,” which could describe Marvin’s body of work.
The movie, The Big Red One, is the story of the First Infantry
Division during World War Two. Marvin’s character is a sergeant and
platoon leader to his “boys,” actors Mark Hamill, Robert DeCicco, Robert
Carridine, Perry Lang, and Kelly Ward. All are expected to attend,
pending unexpected filming and production conflicts along with Pam
Marvin.
As was portrayed in the movie, these actors became very close to Lee
Marvin and continued their friendship with him after it was completed.
Since his death, they have stayed close to his widow, Pam, as well. They
will be in Salado to pay homage to their mentor and friend. They will
show portions of the movie and discuss its production and impact on
their lives.
The movie was re-cut, re-mastered and re-released in 2005, to great
acclaim. The new version with added scenes once again received rave
reviews.
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