Catching Up With Ann and Alan

Greetings from Columbus, with sincere thanks to all of you who haven’t given up on us. We love getting news of your lives and want you to know that our silence meant not distance, but distraction and, well, just over-overload from the incredibly crazy turns and complications life has presented recently--many successes, some near misses, some sadnesses, some exhaustion, and much to be grateful for.
Alan had to bring in 2005 by himself, unfortunately, since Ann was ill with the bronchitis she brought back from England as a souvenir, but he did it in Woods fashion: he leapt into action and, between keeping the humidifier filled and nursing Ann with bowls of hot soup and toast, he began planning the second Eileen Heckart Senior Playwriting Contest. Again, as it turned out, a remarkable outpouring: 459 entries. And they just got better. This time top honors went in a couple of categories to not one, but two plays, so tight was the judging. In the meantime, he found himself meeting with the neighborhood activitists, not wanting to let the energy dissipate that produced a clear plurality for John Kerry in Columbus even if Kerry did lose Ohio (apparently--but that’s another story--and you can find it at www.freepress.org/index2.php) and thus the election. After several months, Alan helped write the by laws and create the Uptown Progressives, part of a new Coalition of Democratic and Progressive organizations that is changing politics in Central Ohio. (And check out www.uptownprogressives.com and www.coalitioncentralohio.org/)
With both playwriting and political projects under way, he set out again for South Africa, working with a colleague to set up an exchange program between OSU and Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria.

Alan promotes international exchange with Tshwane's Allan Munro in a Johannesburg casino. It's hard work, but somebody's got to do it--
As soon as he was back in late February, Kate (now Kat) called to say she and Patrick Prentice, the Navy meteorologist stationed in Iceland whom she’d told us about meeting while he was on special assignment to the Persian Gulf, were now more than serious, they were engaged.

We were thrilled. They started speaking about a wedding in May. We were aghast, asking them to consider all a wedding entails. In truth, we didn’t tell them all the details--since we had yet to discover them ourselves. Mercifully, without prompting, and deeply tempered as joy was by the sadness of Patrick’s father, Robert, dying weeks before, they considered their own busy schedules and concluded September would be better.

By now Ann was into the 2005 University of Kentucky alumni award (for John Henry, sculptor)--this time she made it of fabric shapes in a box she constructed:
The certificate, in UK blue

The certificate reversed
The certificate reversed into brightly colored geometric shapes which echo Henry's work; see www.johnhenrysculptor.com/ for examples of his work
Ann was still churning out text and models for the second calligraphy book, which, based on her research in Siena, she had convinced Zaner-Bloser, should be on Formal Chancery. Meanwhile, Alan was fully engaged in rehearsals for the fiftieth anniversary of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind at Ohio State. Since it was to be an all undergraduate show, he cast 45 students, without regard to gender or ethnicity.

Thus it was that Matthew Harrison Brady was played by an African-American woman, the preacher was Chinese-American, and the townspeople were extremely diverse. And the crowd scenes worked so well that he was asked to give a workshop on crowd improvisational techniques at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Midwest Regional Festival in early 2006.
Alan gives notes
He also brought in local celebrities and dignitaries as the jury, putting them in the first row of the auditorium, so that the trial scenes could be played directly to the audience. And to top it all off, Jerome Lawrence’s niece, Deborah Robison, attended a performance in mid May to announce an endowment fund of over a million dollars to the Institute as a bequest from Jerry, and that the Institute will receive a portion of the royalties from Lawrence and Lee plays in perpetuity. A grand end to the academic year!

We had already arranged a June trip to Boston, Ann to study a formal chancery manuscript in the Houghton and Alan to resume earlier research in Harvard’s Theatre Collection. Alan had the playwriting contest in full swing and had just completed a workshop training new audio describers for VSAO (formerly Very Special Arts Ohio), Ann’s second book wasn’t finished, and she had agreed to make Kate’s wedding gown.
Help!
Boston was great fun, and research was fruitful--even though we hadn’t noticed that the Thursday of the week we’d planned to spend at Harvard was their spring Commencement. No getting near Cambridge that day! So we rented a car and drove to the North Shore, revisiting Alan’s boyhood hometown where we hadn’t been for some 38 years. The current owner of the house Alan’s parents were the first to own was home and invited us in--

Robin Davis and Alan in South Hamilton
and spent a wonderful four hours showing us changes and learning herself about the history of the neighborhood. We then returned to Columbus, to plan for The Wedding. It was clearly time to really get to work. Ann's books were finally finished by late June,

for more information, see www.zaner-bloser.com/html/hwgen.html