The Arts and My Calendar: It’s a Year-Round Affair

Well, here we are with Halloween right around the corner, and by “right around the corner” what I mean is that it’s practically over already. At least, so goes the calendar for me.

Planning and writing a monthly magazine in advance means that by the time everybody else gets around to enjoying a seasonal event, it’s yesterday’s paper to me. This can generate a fuzzy sense of temporal displacement, and sometimes the been-there, done-that, left-out blues of a kid who sneaked downstairs and opened up all his presents first.

But not this month. This is our annual arts issue, which calls for us to scour the area’s colleges, museums and theatrical companies to garner the likely highlights of Orlando’s upcoming visual- and performing-arts season. I’m a sucker for the arts. If the arts came banging on my door at 3 a.m. to tell me their problems, I’d invite them in and crack open a bottle of wine.

This disposition goes back to my childhood, and the universal question: Am I going to get spanked right now, or not? I can pinpoint a moment. My mom is scolding my sisters and me. I can’t remember what we have done to warrant the correction; all I recall is her methodology. She draws herself up, gives us a stern, regal look, and quotes from King Lear: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”

She wasn’t an actress. She wasn’t a writer. She was just a well-educated, 1950s housewife who had the cookies ready when we came home from school and quoted liberally from Scripture or Shakespeare when the occasion for it arose.

All that registered at the time in my dirty T-shirt of a brain was that the longer she talked, the less chance I had of getting spanked. But of course, she left a mark. She did so by putting the moment in a heightened context, weaving something stylish and elevated into the fabric of everyday life. Which is as good a definition of art as any.

I stopped in one afternoon to the Lowndes Shakespeare Center in the process of pulling together the list you’ll find inside this magazine of the top 20 cultural events of the season.

Our photographer, Greg Johnston, was there as well, taking pictures of a group of middle-school students who were in the midst of a summer camp class in makeup artistry. As you’ll discover when you turn to it, we had decided to illustrate our cultural calendar story with photos of young people in the process of learning about the arts.

I scanned the faces of the kids, there in a mirrored makeup room at the Shakes. They all looked like hell: Their assignment that day was to make themselves up to look like zombies, of which Shakespeare’s plays have quite a few. I found myself wondering if their fleeting brush with his artistry would reverberate with them some day, as such a moment once did with me.

Michael McLeod
Editor in Chief
mmcleod@ohlmag.com