Southeastern NEWS
Southeastern Louisiana University
Public Information Office
SLU 880, Hammond, LA 70402
504/549-2341/fax 504-549-2061
publicinfo@selu.edu
www.selu.edu/NewsEvents
Date: 10/3//97
Contact: Christina Chapple 52k
Editors: Photo accompanies release -- Please note local interest
POLITICAL SATIRE, ART AND EBOLA ON FANFARE WEEK THREE SCHEDULE
HAMMOND -- The eyebrow and roof-raising fun of The Capitol Steps, an art-filled
family Sunday in downtown Hammond, an up-and-coming young opera star, and a real-life
battle against a deadly disease all highlights of the third week of Fanfare, Southeastern Louisiana
University's October arts festival.
Art and All That Jazz's "Gallery Stroll" offers a perfect Sunday outing on Oct. 12. Several
downtown restaurants -- Cafe Ole, Coffee Rani and Mariner's Inn -- will open their doors at 11
a.m. for jazz brunches. (Reservations are recommended.) Regional artists will sell their work
under the trees beside the Chamber of Commerce from noon to 6 p.m. Almost 40 downtown
businesses will double as art galleries from 1-5 p.m. as they showcase the works of area artists.
The Leon Anderson Group will play jazz from a bandstand in the heart of town.
In addition to a visit by VanGo, the New Orleans Museum of Art's traveling exhibit, the
children's tent, also open from 1-5 p.m., will be filled with activities. Children can participate in
fun projects by Southeastern art majors and the Louisiana Arts and Science Center, flower pot
decoration and planting from Airport Garden Center and cooking decorating sponsored by
Albertson's and Carona's Bakery.
You cannot say that the Capitol Steps, who'll take to the Pottle Music Building
Auditorium stage at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 17, "sing the praises" of national politics, but the popular
political satire comedy troupe is definitely "in tune" with the foibles of public figures and
governmental institutions. The Capitol Steps' witty -- and sometimes audacious -- musical revue
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raises both eyebrows -- and the roof.
A huge hit at Fanfare 1996 and a national favorite through programs such as their annual
specials of National Public Radio, the Capitol Steps put new words to popular songs to skewer
politicians. Everyone in the cast is a consummate performer who can just put on a wig and
conjure up the famous and infamous.
Picture, for instance, a dour "Bob Dole" singing to "The Music of the Night" from
"Phantom of the Opera," "Put Republicans in office/And you might give power/To the loonies of
the right." Or "Bill Clinton," garbed like Elvis Presley, rocking out, "Return to center/Viewpoint
unknown." Members of Congress are characterized by "super, callous, mean and nasty right-
wing legislation," sung to a tune from 'Mary Poppins.'
Tickets for The Capitol Steps are $15 general admission, $10 senior citizens, SLU faculty
and staff and all students.
A recent graduate of the Metropolitan Opera Young Artist Program, American mezzo-
soprano Margaret Lattimore has been acclaimed for performances both at the Metropolitan Opera
and at theaters throughout the United States. Writing of her performance at the National Council
Auditions, New York Magazine critic, Peter G. Davis said: "I place my be on Margaret
Lattimore--a 25 year old mezzo-soprano ... with a beautifully textured burned-caramel voice, an
unclouded two-and-one-half octave range, an agile technique and an infectious musical sparkle,
all of which single her out as a very special talent. Remember the name."
Fanfare audiences can hear Lattimore at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 13, in the Pottle Music Building
Auditorium. Tickets are $8 general admission, $6 senior citizens, SLU faculty and staff and all
students. Her concert is presented by Fanfare in association with the Marilyn Horne Foundation.
The McLean Mix, the internationally-recognized husband-wife composer-performer duo,
present a fascinating blend of the tropical rainforests' wondrous sights and sounds and the latest
experimental computer and electronic music techniques. Barton and Priscilla McLean are
classically-trained composers who are now exploring ways of directly using the rainforests'
setting as the inspiration and source for their compositions. In a 7:30 p.m. concert, Oct. 14, in
Pottle Music Building Auditorium, they will present "Rainforest," a work based on the nocturnal
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impressions one receives in a tropical rainforest, inspired by actual recent expeditions by the
McLeans to rainforests in the Amazon, Puerto Rico, the Everglades, Australia, New Zealand,
Hawaii, and Borneo, where they lived with a former headhunter tribe.
Tickets for The McLean Mix are $8 general admission, $6 senior citizens, SLU faculty
and staff and all students.
Nancy and Jerry Jaax, veterinarians and colonels at the United States Army Medical
Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, USAMRIID, played major roles in a real life
nightmare depicted in Richard Preston's New York Times bestseller, "The Hot Zone." The book
describes how a potentially disastrous virus entered the United States in 1989 with a group of
Asian monkeys and was contained by U.S. Army personnel in Reston, Va., near Washington,
D.C. A strain of the virus, called Ebola, which has spread through bodily fluids and even through
the air, wiped out 55 African villages in 1976, killing nine out of 10 of the people it infected.
Nancy Jaax, chief of pathology, routinely deals with deadly viruses on Bio-Level 4, "the
hot zone," of the USAMRIID building at Fort Detrick. Her husband, Jerry, chief of the
Veterinary Medicine Division for the army, headed a group of Army personnel who entered a
monkey house in Reston, Val, where the infected monkeys were kept, after the virus that was
killing them was identified as Ebola.
With humor and savvy, the Jaax's lecture, "Lethal Viruses, Ebola and 'The Hot Zone,'"
educates their audience about Ebola and describes their own harrowing experiences. The lecture
is scheduled for 7:30 p.m., Oct. 15, in Pottle Music Building Auditorium. Tickets are $8 general
admission, $6 senior citizens, SLU faculty and staff and all students.
They will sign copies of "The Hot Zone" in the Pottle lobby an hour before their
performance.
Also during Fanfare's Week Three:
Retired University of New Orleans English professor Kenneth Holditch has spent
years researching and writing about the literary legacy of the Crescent City, delving into the
works of authors such as Anne Rice, John Kennedy Toole, William Faulkner and Lillian
Hellman. His Fanfare lecture at 2 p.m., Oct. 13 in the Music Recital Hall will expand upon "Lust
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and Languor in the Big Easy: the Literary Mystique of New Orleans."
Clark Hall Gallery's Fanfare exhibit, "Art and the Environment," an exhibition of
artworks created by Louisiana artists in response to man's inability to live in harmony with
nature, will open with a reception from 4-6 p.m. Oct. 13, in the gallery and at Sims Memorial
Library.
The exhibit features more than 50 artists, including Southeastern's own Gail Hood,
Barbara Tardo, Ron Kennedy, and Gary Keown. Also showing their works are Angel Arvello,
Jenny Authement, Adelle Badeaux, Sarah Biondo, Jacqueline Bishop, Shelia Bonser, Rancy
Boyd-Snee, Sydney Byrd, Rob Carpenter, Dana Chapman, Emery Clark, Bobbye Cook, Geeta
Dave, Paul Dean, Peggy Desjardins, Eric Ehlenberger, Adam Farrington, Reah Gary, and Dana
Inzinna.
Also, Linda Jeffers, Theresa Knowles, William Lewis, Deb Lillie, Gai Lovett, Shirley
Masinter, Sam McCarty, A.J. Meek, Omar Muhammad, Rick Olivier, Jeff Prentice, Stephen
Redmond, Gail Roberts, Gloria Ross, Elizabeth Shannon, Starr Stephens-Owen, Allison Stewart,
Alexander Stolin, Kate Trepagnier, Denise Tullier-Holly, Lisa Unterbrink, Karen Wallsten,
Robert Warrens, Mary Brooks Weiss, Terry Weldon, Kevin Wilson and Jesslyn Zurik.
The works will be displayed in the gallery and at Sims Memorial Library. Gallery hours
are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., weekdays.
The Foreign Film series continues at 3:30 p.m., Oct. 14, in the Music Recital Hall with
"Manon des Sources," a sequel to the acclaimed French film "Jean de Florette." Ten years have
passed since the tragic events of "Jean de Florette" and Manon, Jean's daughter, seeks revenge on
the village that destroyed her father. Diverting the course of the stream that provides the village
with water, Manon condemns the village to die of drought. This disaster reminds the community
of the crime ten years before.
Lucienne Bond Simon is a professional calligrapher who teaches art to first, second
and third graders at Hammond Eastside School where she was named "Teacher of the Year" in
1996-1997. As an active proponent of arts education, she lectures and conducts workshops
throughout the country, especially at national art education conferences. In response to proposed
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cuts in funding to the arts in Louisiana she created the arts advocacy primer, "Dear Governor
Foster," which is illustrated by several of her Hammond Eastside Primary School students. The
advocacy piece has received great acclaim throughout the United States and will soon be featured
on the Kennedy Center's website, "ArtsEdge."
In "The Big A or the Arts Educator," scheduled for 2 p.m. Oct. 14 in the Music Recital
Hall, she focuses on contributions art teachers can make by being community activists and arts
advocates.
Week Three's contribution to the Special Films series is Billy Bob Thornton's"Sling
Blade." The film, which will be shown at 7 p.m., Oct. 15, at University Cinema on North Oak
St., is a southern gothic tale about a man named Karl, who's just been released from an asylum --
some 25 years after he committed a gruesome crime. He returns to the southern town of his
youth, where his quiet, gentle manner and simple charm land him a job and lead him to an
unlikely friendship with a young boy and his widowed mother. When the mother's abusive
boyfriend appears, however, this simple man is thrust into a combustible dilemma that has
powerful, moving consequences for all.
Tony Caramia, a member of the faculty of the Eastman School of Music, is "one of the
world's experts on ragtime and novelty piano -- he's astounding," says his fellow pianist,
Southeastern's Willis Delony. At 2 p.m., Oct. 16, in Pottle Music Building Auditorium, Caramia
will perform a 100th birthday salute to ragtime, "100 Years of Nimble-Fingered Syncopations."
That evening, he will team up with Delony for a two-piano concert, "Eighteen Feet of Jazz Piano
and the Great American Songbook."
"I was a guest at Tony's school last year and we had such a good time with a similar
concert that I wanted to bring him down here and do it again," said Delony. He said that he and
Caramia will both play solo pieces during the first half of the free 7:30 p.m. concert in Pottle
Music Building Auditorium before joining forces on a Duke Ellington piece and works such as
"Killer Joe," "Some Day My Prince Will Come" and "a wonderful Cole Porter tune called 'I
Love You.'"
Amite will join the Fanfare celebration with "Downtown Debut," an evening designed,
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says Amite Main Street director Sheilah Ellzey, as "an introduction of the arts in a large rural
community." An opening reception, featuring music by Ruby Thompson, is scheduled for 5-6
p.m. at the First Guaranty Bank building in downtown Amite. From 6-9 p.m., visitors can tour
downtown to view cultural displays in the six block historic district and enjoy performing artists
in downtown restaurants. For additional information about Downtown Debut, call Ellzey at 504-
748-9850.
Children can enjoy a Saturday morning, Oct. 18, at the Hammond branch of the
Tangipahoa Parish Library, where children's services coordinator Karen Plauche will foster their
love for reading and books through stories, songs and films. "Storytime with Miss Karen" begins
at 10:30 a.m.
For a Fanfare brochure and ticket order form or for additional information about Fanfare
events, call the SLU Public Information Office, 504-549-2341, or send e-mail to
publicinfo@selu.edu. Fanfare information is also available on the World Wide Web at
www.selu.edu/NewsEvents/fanfare/opening.htm. Fanfare tickets are available at the Fanfare box
office, 504-549-2323, at Gate 1 of the SLU University Center on University Ave. from 10 a.m. to
4 p.m., weekdays.
- SLU -
This press release is available on the World Wide Web:
www.selu.edu/NewsEvents/PublicInfoOffice/newsf97.htm