A Little Late But Nonetheless

There is a lot going on in Wheeling these days. This past week alone, I had the opportunity to take in a couple of delightful theatrical performances.

Friday night, Towngate Theatre's production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead opened. With Jeremy Richter and Vincent Marshall in the title roles, the show soared. Its expert pacing and wonderful supporting cast provided an entertaining evening worth seeing. The run continues through Saturday, May 7. Tickets are $12.50 and are available at the door or in advance by calling 304.242.7700.

Tuesday evening, Wheeling Park High School's Park Players presented the first of their two musicals this season: Little Shop of Horrors. The students put on a charming show and received a standing ovation from the audience for their efforts. The show continues through Friday, May 6, at the high school's Phyllis A. Beneke Theater at 7 pm each evening. Tickets are available at the door or in advance by calling 304.243.0417. Advance tickets are just $8.

The second musical of the Park Players season, Working, will be presented on Friday, May 20, and Saturday, May 21, at 7 pm at the Phyllis A. Beneke Theater. According to this Wikipedia article, "The musical is based on the Studs Terkel book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974), which has interviews with people from different regions and occupations."

May 20 also brings the final Wheeling Symphony Orchestra performance of the 2010-2011 season. This Masterworks IV program will feature soprano Lianne Coble singing Strauss's Vier Letzte Lieder, as well as Jean Sibelius' The Swan of Tuonela and Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1, in celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Mahler's death. The concert will be held in Wheeling's historic Capitol Theatre. Tickets are available through the WSO office at 304.232.6191.

The Wheeling Symphony recently won a $25,000 grant through Chase Community Giving on Facebook! Exciting things are happening!

Fun Things of the Day: Moore Monday Edition

Check out the fantastic folk art of Alan Moore and his daughters Isabella and Emma. They were recently featured in Southern Child magazine. You can check out the article here and then view more of their art on Alan's website, Isabella and Emma's website, the family site, at their etsy stores (folkartistalanmoore and lilsistersfolkart) and on facebook (Alan and Isabella & Emma).

Here are the two Alan Moore pieces that make my kitchen a bright and happy place:

"Four Orange Birds on an Orange Four"


















"I Think Mildred Loves Purple"

Swing Dance Stories

Back in college at the University of Florida, I choreographed for a little dance troupe called Bounce Me Brother. I got my start dancing as a member of the troupe. A couple of semesters, we performed with the Dancin' Gators, a student-run dance company. Now, three years later, the Florida Swing Dancing Club's enthusiastic hepcats are still shaking a wicked calf on the Phillips Center Stage. Here's a video of this year's beginner performance:

My senior year of school, my friend Weston and I joked about doing a routine to "Never Had a Friend Like Me" from Aladdin. This year, the advanced troupe actually did it!

I'm so proud of my swing babies and wish I could have been there to see them perform. Still, yay for youtube and facebook for bringing them to me here in West Virginia. Love you all!

Beauty & the Beast, Part Two

Well, the show has ended. Over two weekends and six performances, we played to over 600 people. (And now we've nearly all got colds, but they'll pass.) The magic and the memories of our beautiful show will remain.

Many thanks to our fantastic audience members, my talented fellow cast members (Pete, Dave, Erika, Lindsey, Austin, Alex, Clare, Abby & Maguire), our delightful stage manager Peggy and, of course, our phenomenal director Tim Thompson.

It has been a wonderful journey, and I look forward to working with all of you again.

Love, Micah

Beauty & the Beast

This month, I am returning to the community theatre stage as “Beauty” in Warren Graves’ adaptation of the classic fairy tale Beauty & the Beast. (Just in case you’re unfamiliar with the “original” tale and are stuck in the Disney-fied version, here’s the text of Marie Le Prince de Beaumont’s story: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7074.) Once again, I will appear opposite the magnificent Pete Fernbaugh, a.k.a. “Beast,” under the direction of the incomparable Tim Thompson. We all last collaborated on Towngate Theatre’s 2009 production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

I’d been craving the stage. In November, I worked wardrobe on the Wheeling Legally Blonde show. In December, I was the stage manager of a local production of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. Each time, I was reminded of how much I love being out there performing. Not just when the audience is there, but each night of rehearsal. Each night of discovering something new about the character or about the story. Learning lines and then bringing them from somewhere organic, somewhere real. Being the character rather than playing her. Getting to know the other actors and getting to know the crew. (There’s not much time for that in three rehearsals and two performances as in the case of The Nutcracker or a day spent ironing men’s shirts in preparation for an evening performance as was my experience on Legally Blonde.)

Maybe I had romanticized the experience a bit, having been away for over a year, but the rush is still there. I love having someplace to go each night, something to do, knowing that we’re working toward an end-product that will (hopefully) be simply breathtaking.

Last night was tough. I have this laughing problem, and while it’s improving, as it usually does over the course of rehearsals, there are still moments where I wish I could stop laughing and I simply don’t. There were missed lines (though not because of the laughing), botched blocking, forgotten cues. We started late, we ran late. A bunch of my lines all sounded the same, and I wasn’t speaking loudly enough. But at nine o’clock, I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to stay and work it out. Instead, I went home and couldn’t sleep because I kept saying those lines all the same every time I rehearsed them.

We open next Friday. Between now and then, we have seven run-throughs to work out the bugs. I know, I know—in live theatre, there’s no way to work out all of the bugs. There’s always that chance of the unexpected happening. There’s always a chance that Charlie Brown will say “abstinence” instead of “abstention” and Lucy will burst into uncontrollable laughter on opening night. (Yep, it happened.) But that’s part of what makes it so exciting.

Beauty & the Beast runs Friday, January 21-Sunday, January 23, and Thursday, January 27-Saturday, January 29 at Oglebay Institute’s Towngate Theatre in Wheeling, WV. Shows are at 7 pm (21, 22, 27-29) and 2 pm (23). Tickets are available at 304.242.7700.

Love Your Neighbor

In March of 2008, I spent a week working in Tucson, AZ, on the US-Mexico (AZ-Sonora) border with a group of students from the Presbyterian & Disciples of Christ Student Center at the University of Florida and an organization in Tucson called Humane Borders, which, among other things, provides water in the desert (see Isaiah 49:10). Our activities included clean-up of an abandoned migrant camp, painting water barrels (this helps keep the water cooler, even under the blistering desert sun), cleaning a storage shack with No More Deaths (another migrant relief organization) just south of the border, and sitting in on a court hearing. It was a really humbling experience all around, seeing how little people have and what they are willing to risk for a better life for their families. In court, there were men who had crossed the border and been caught multiple times but had nothing to go back to and so had nothing to do but try again to cross. (I'm not defending the illegality of their actions, but it's important to understand that these people aren't just doing this because they feel like it; it's a last resort kind of thing. They don't think there are any other options left, and there may not be. So many misconceptions run rampant in everyday American discourse, and so much is overlooked--so many people are overlooked because everyone's too busy with the politics of it.)

[Incidentally, during the trip, I was reading Art Spiegelman's Maus books, which are the story of his parents' experiences in World War II concentration camps and his own coping with that as a child and then as an adult. (They're graphic novels, and I highly recommend them both. You can find them in a one-volume set here.) Anyway, I ended up writing my weekly reflection for that lit class on the parallels between the treatment of Jews as depicted in Maus and the treatment of Mexicans and Central Americans on the border today.]

A while ago, a friend of mine asked what I think about. I told him about Tucson. Since then, I've realized that the real answer to what I think about has less to do with illegal migration specifically and more to do with the general lack of love in our society. We're so focused on doing what's best for ourselves as individuals that we lose sight of the fact that love is necessarily based in community.

(A lot of this is inspired by - and some of it stolen from - the writings of Shane Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution and Jesus for President. He wrote it a lot better than I can so if you're not satisfied with what's here - and I daresay you won't be - read his books. Read them anyway.)

Biblically, we are called to care for one another. The Lord's Prayer, a prayer I've known since I was seven years old and getting ready to make my first confession, says "Give us this day our daily bread." (Matthew 6:11; emphasis added) It doesn't say "Give me this day my daily bread." It is a request on behalf of the group, for all of us, not just for myself. And yet, we overlook that, it seems. We are so worried about where our next meal is going to come from (or perhaps more accurately, the money for our next vacation) that we forget about our neighbors who are starving. And I don't just mean the people who live next door to me. They're doing just fine. But what about the families who visit the food pantry at my church? When do I think about them except when the pastor's wife announces food pantry pick-up hours or the bulletin asks for donations of egg noodles?

What does this have to do with illegal migration? We met a woman in Arizona, just this side of Mexico, who said we shouldn't put water in the desert because it will encourage "them" (migrants) to come. So what? For the record, the most water is put out in the summer months, but the most migrants come in the early part of the year. It's not a causal relationship. Migrants have been journeying across the desert of the southwest since long before Humane Borders started placing water barrels. If someone is wandering the desert in search of a better life, in search of a way to improve the plight of their family, they should not have to die of thirst in the process. In a truly Christian nation, a nation living after the teachings of Jesus Christ, the one who said that the greatest commandment is to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind" and that the second greatest commandment is to "love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:36-39), there would be no question of providing water. "When I was thirsty, you gave me to drink."

(This flag marks the location of water barrels. It flies 30 feet in the air, bringing hope to those in search of renewal.)

Living that kind of love would turn upside down the whole way this country functions. Yes, it may be difficult and uncomfortable to change how relate to the world around us, to our neighbors, to ourselves. We can do so much if we choose to follow those two great commandments and stop thinking only of ourselves. We do not live in a vacuum. We do not live or love alone.


Love is patient.
Love is kind.
Love is not jealous.
Love does not brag.
Love is not arrogant.
Love does not act unbecomingly.
Love does not seek its own.
Love is not provoked.
Love does not take into account a wrong suffered.
Love does not rejoice in unrighteousness.
Love rejoices with the truth.
Love bears all things.
Love believes all things.
Love hopes all things.
Love endures all things.
Love never fails.

(from 1 Corinthians 13)

"Currently Homeless"

Near where I live, just a few blocks away, a river flows past a peaceful waterfront park. I used to go there for lunch every day. Probably will today. Last night, I was sprawled by the water on the concrete ledge where boats dock, reading and journaling and breathing in the scent of spring, watching the river rush by (murky and brown but still beautiful). As I scribbled, lost in my thoughts, I could hear a family somewhere behind me, looking at the river. I was only vaguely aware of their approach until I heard, "Look, it's a homeless girl. Hey, look, Jacob, it's a little homeless girl." I looked up. They--three adults and two children--walked nearer, and one said, "Do you mind if we push you in?" (Please, don't.) "Aren't you afraid to sit there?" (Not really. No.) "But she has a cute sweater so she must be 'currently homeless.'" It was the adults who spoke. After a minute or two, they went on their merry way, and I returned to my journal.

This wouldn't have been so disturbing had I known the people. (I think I have friends who might joke about pushing me into the river.) I didn't know them, though, and for all they knew, I could have been a homeless girl. If I were, I think I'd have felt mocked and dehumanized and humiliated. As it was, I felt that way a bit. My journal entry was derailed into a diatribe on this unsettling experience. They were speaking as though I were nothing more than a thing discarded by society, trash worthy only of mockery. As though they somehow were more significant than I by virtue of their having a home, a roof.

I was drawn back to Sonora, Mexico, and the Arizona desert, a place teeming with life but shadowed by death and prejudice and injustice. A place where a man may be stripped of his dignity without understanding why, when he is simply trying to make a better life for his family, and this is the only way he knows how because no one has ever shown him another way. The un-love of it all is infuriating.

Sitting there, writing about their words and the memories they invoked, the clouds that had been receding the whole time I'd been out by the water, slid back behind me entirely, and all I could see was this brilliantly blue sky, lit by the setting sun. Then, all I could think of was the glory of God and his love for us to give us that sky and that sun, to fill us with joy when we are downtrodden by the hurtful words of others. He loves me, and that is bigger than anything else.

"I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness."
Jeremiah 31:3