Archive: Arts & Entertainment

SMART TALK
by Dr. Garrel S. Utter

CHAIR:  My colleague, Dr. Shirley Glibb, was recently elected chair of the Lengua Loco County PTA.  Though honored to serve, she objects to the title, which has sparked an informal, friendly debate here at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired.

"I'm not furniture!" she complained one evening in the Fowler Lounge.  "I have a daughter with a successful acting career, and she calls herself an actor.  So be it.  I'm the chairman."

Armed with a schooner of sarsaparilla, she was just getting warmed up.  "We don't have to emasculate the language to appease the gods of political correctness," she insisted.  Some of the men began paying close attention. 

"If I am to be a chair, then women shall be woes; human, hues; aldermen, alders; seamen, seas; foremen, fores; and corpsmen, corpses, or perhaps cores."

Dr. Glibb has no problem with the term mankind, or the evolution of man, or being the foreman of a jury.  I must admit, she has a point.

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v5i18

Aurora, New York – The Wells College Art Department is pleased to present the annual spring senior thesis exhibit featuring paintings, sculpture, and book arts by five Class of 2009 graduates. The show opens Monday, May 11 in the String Room Gallery, Main Building, and will run through May 25. The public is cordially invited to view the free exhibit. An opening reception on May 11 from 6:00-8:00 p.m. will offer an opportunity to meet the student artists and a chance to discuss their work; light refreshments will be served.

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SMART TALK
by Dr. Tilde Cedilla

BURNED UP:  Imagine the confusion of someone learning this amazing language.  We say our papers burned up in the fire, but the house burned down.  We're burned up when we're angry, and wish that so-and-so would come down so we could give him his comeuppance.

We can face up to a problem and face it down with the same result.  We can write down something, and the finished report is a writeup, but being written up is much worse than being written down.

At the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired, we treat only native speakers, so, thankfully, we don't have to explain this.  We have enough to do with the disorder of believing a lot is a single word.

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v5i17

April 28, 2009 (ITHACA, NY) The Hangar Theatre announced Tuesday that Rent will be the final production of their 2009 summer season.  The Hangar will be the first theatre in the Finger Lakes region to produce this smash musical since it closed on Broadway in September 2008.

The New York Times called Rent “…an exhilarating landmark.” It’s the story of a community of young artists struggling to make their mark in New York’s rapidly changing East Village of the 1990s.

SMART TALK
by Dr. Les Terse

BUNNY RABBIT:  Occasionally, the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired must endure the kind of perky patients who say, "Have a nice day" and "Keep a positive mental attitude."  They draw smiley faces on their correspondence.  We consider it a blessing to get them occasionally rather than constantly.

These people think some animals are just too cute to name only once.  Besides bunny rabbits, they gush over kitty cats, pussycats, and puppy dogs.  Baby chicks and baby kittens get insulted this way, as well.  Not that they mind, of course, but this practice teaches impressionable children to use redundancies, and they grow up sounding vacuous.

It's downright inhumane, if not to the animals, then to us.

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v5i16

The Kitchen Theatre Family Fare series continues in May with 'Voices: Those Who Wore The Shoe'. It will be offered to Kitchen Theatre audiences for a limited engagement of two performances only:  Saturday, May 16 and Sunday, May 17 at 1pm.

It was with great urgency that in 1934 the Federal Writers' Project sent hundreds of writers across the country to interview former slaves and record their personal histories.  Most of the former slaves were in their late 80's to early 100's, so it was imperative to collect their stories before they were lost to the historic record.   The FWP recorded over forty thousand pages of transcript from these extraordinary interviews.

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Aurora, New York – The Wells College choral ensembles, conducted by Professor of Music Crawford Thoburn and accompanied by Russell Posegate, will present “Music for Springtime” on Sunday afternoon, May 3. The concert will begin at 4:00 pm in Barler Recital Hall. Admission is free, and the public is cordially invited to attend.

The program will feature a wide variety of great choral literature from the 16th century to the present, sung by the three College ensembles. The Women's and Men's Ensembles will each present selections from their own repertoires, and the two groups will combine to perform works for mixed voices.