Arts - period ended 1.1.2006

Arts/Theater/Raised-a-Quaker/Dench, Judi/First lady of theatre/Sydney Morning Herald/Sydney/Australia/Oceania/18-Dec-05//… If there is a moral quality to Dench's work, it is interesting to speculate about its source. Brought up as a strict Quaker, she says of her faith, "It's essential to my life and work", without elaborating. But she also sends up any tendency she might have to treat theatre as a quasi-religious event.

"When we were doing Arbuzov's The Promise, I said to Ian McKellen we should keep three seats empty and imagine we were playing to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Ian rather wittily said, 'Surely we'll only need one seat rather than three?' ….

Arts/Television/Peace Activities/Lierwood, Mina/Reality check: locals got their 15 minutes of TV fame/Pioneer Press/St. Paul/MN/USA/29-Dec-05//Minneapolis peace activist Mina Leierwood, a 39-year-old Quaker art teacher, switches places with Cheri Patrick, a homemaker from a military family in Kentucky, on an episode of ABC's "Wife Swap."

Arts/Music/Meetinghouse/Jingle-bell walk: Thousands pack Canyon Road/Santa Fe New Mexican/Santa Fe/NM/USA/25-Dec-05//The Taylors made their way down the road, cups of hot chocolate in their hands, until the scene at The Quaker Meeting House stopped them. People had crowded around a campfire and were singing Christmas carols. There the couple sang Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with the rest of the crowd.

Arts/Music/Meetinghouse/Earnest Alexander goes 'Live'/The Wichita Eagle/Wichita/KS/USA/15-Dec-05//... Earnest Alexander, the Wichita-based gospel singer, has a new CD. It's his first-ever live CD, recorded last August at a Quaker church in southern California. ...

Arts/Film/Obituary/2005: Lost lives that touched our own/Hollywood Reporter/Hollywood/CA/USA/30-Dec-05//Mary Jackson, 95, an actress who played Emily Baldwin on "The Waltons." Emily was her older sister Mamie's partner in brewing bootleg whisky to which they referred as "the Recipe." After a film debut in "Friendly Persuasion" (1956, the story of a Quaker family in 19th century Indiana), Jackson's big-screen roles included a nun in "Airport" (1970) and Jane Fonda's mother in "Fun With Dick and Jane" (1977). She took character roles in dozens of American television series, including "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (1956), "My Three Sons" (1961), "Barnaby Jones" (three roles, 1973-77), "Hill Street Blues" (1987) and "L.A. Law" (1989).

Arts/Dance/Tharp, Twyla/Tharp energetically ignores boundaries/Toronto Star/Toronto/Ontario/Canada/16-Dec-05//…. "How," Thomson was queried, "do you write American music?" to which the veteran composer famously replied, "It's simple. First you be an American and then you write any kind of music you like."

In dance terms, Twyla Tharp has become an embodiment of Virgil Thomson's reply. Born in 1941 in Portland, Ind. into a Quaker family of farmers and entrepreneurs, she grew up in southern California, watching movies at her parents' drive-in theatre and studying a whole range of musical instruments and dance techniques, completing her formal education by majoring in art history at New York's Barnard College. ….