THOSE TWO WEEKS WENT BY REALLY FAST
FEBRUARY 9, 2017 KNOXMERCURY.COM V.
3 / N.3
DROCELLA MUGOREWERA, director of Bridge Refugee Services
NEWS
Alarmed by President Trump’s Agenda, Knoxvillians Get Organized
JACK NEELY
Hating the Architecture of Our Youth: the Old KUB Building
MUSIC
Composer Jennifer Higdon Returns for a Week-Long Residency at UT
DENNIS PERKINS
Getting an Old-Fashioned Sugar Rush at Phoenix Soda Fountain
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
Feb. 9, 2017 Volume 03 / Issue 03 knoxmercury.com “The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.” —Frederick Douglass
NEWS
12 Local Resistance
14 New World. New Life. New Hope.
COVER STORY
On Jan. 27, President Donald Trump issued an executive order putting a halt to U.S. acceptance of refugees for 120 days and banning all visitors from seven majority-Muslim nations from entering the country for 90 days or, in the case of Syrians, the foreseeable future. Protests swept major American cities and airports, including Knoxville. But who are Knoxville’s refugees, and why do they come here? S. Heather Duncan tells some of their stories, including Drocella Mugorewera’s escape from Rwanda to eventually become the director of Bridge Refugee Services.
Help Support Independent Journalism! Nobody said this would be easy. Turns out there’s a good reason why! But if you appreciate our effort to provide a locally owned media voice for Knoxville, consider pitching in. Find out how you can help: knoxmercury.com/donate.
Perplexed and alarmed by the election of President Donald Trump, Sarah Herron, a Maryville mother of two, did what any red-blooded American does these days: She started a Facebook page to voice her dissent, Indivisible East Tennessee. It’s part of a growing network of citizens who find themselves protesting for the first time. Thomas Fraser reports.
PRESS FORWARD
13 Modern Studio In our new series highlighting people working toward a better Knoxville, Coury Turczyn talks with Victor Agreda Jr. about Knoxville’s newest shared work space— which doubles as a performance venue for local indie theater troupes.
DEPARTMENTS
OPINION
A&E
4 Letter 6 Howdy
8 Scruffy Citizen
20 Program Notes: The Lonetones
24 Spotlights: The Slovene
44 ’Bye
10 Perspectives
21 Classical Music: Alan Sherrod
OUTDOORS
Start Here: Dumpster Dive, Public Affairs, and Local Life by Marissa Highfill
Finish There: At This Point by Stephanie Piper. Plus: Crooked Street Crossword by Ian Blackburn and Jack Neely, Spirit of the Staircase by Matthew Foltz-Gray, and Mulberry Place Cryptoquote by Joan Keuper.
Jack Neely recalls a curvier, streamlined KUB Building— before it got covered in green bricks.
Joe Sullivan expresses his appreciation for the Vols’ surprisingly effective team of freshmen b-ballers.
11 Possum City
Eleanor Scott tries to make the best of 70-degree weather in January, but can’t help feeling worried.
CALENDAR celebrate a new lineup and a new album, while prog-rocker Ryan Vowell unveils his own new band, Aelude.
previews Knoxville Opera’s performance of Puccini’s La Bohème.
22 Music: Alan Sherrod talks with acclaimed composer Jennifer Higdon about her one-week residency at UT.
23 Art Denise Stewart-Sanabria
explores KMA’s Virtual Views: Digital Art From the Thoma Foundation.
Independent Biennial art show and The Public Cinema’s screening of Tower.
40 Voice in the Wilderness
Kim Trevathan chats with author Ben Montgomery about his biography of a true Appalachian Trail pioneer, Grandma Gatewood.
FOOD & DRINK
42 Home Palate
Dennis Perkins experiences a full-on sugar high at the Phoenix Soda Fountain. February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 3
The Pagoda
Knoxville’s First Chinese Restaurant Chef Hoey M. Yow, nationally known culinary expert, knows the ancient secrets to real chop suey.
Opens November 11, 1932 At Popular Prices, 35 cents and 50 cents
The Pagoda is Knoxville’s only cafe to serve BOTH Chop Suey AND Chow Mein! (For those who want something more familiar, try our Fried Chicken and Filet Mignon) Public Notice: The Pagoda officially does not carry several popular varieties of gin, whiskey, and rum for our special customers.
LETTER CRITICAL RETHINKING
First of all, many thanks to George Dodds for his thoughtful, insightful observations about the built environment in the Knoxville area and the UT campus in particular [“Architecture Matters,” a monthly column]. We can do better than we too frequently do. This brings me to Dec. 15’s “Hall of Justice Revamp” report [news feature by Thomas Fraser]. The Dover Development concept is laudable in its inclusivity and its care for the historic property incorporated into it. That said, the presentation illustration included in the article represents a disappointingly dark, forbidding structure that I, for one, would very much regret seeing built in our much-loved downtown. By contrast, the Commercial and Investment Properties design offers us a light, airy structure, with a lively facade, characterized by a delightful interplay of light and shadow accomplished by deep set-backs and the stacks of broad balconies on the upper, residential floors of the building. Those balconies also provide a pleasing horizontal counterpoint to the overall verticality of the building. It’s true that it approaches inclusion of the historic structure less reverentially than the Dover proposal does, but it seems to me to honor the spirit of the existing courthouse, beautifully. (I regret not being able to view the Marble Alley proposal.) I very much hope that if the Dover proposal is approved, there will be a critical rethinking of the form in which it is presented. Nick Wyman Knoxville
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR GUIDELINES Currently home of The Bistro located in the oldest restaurant space in Knoxville. Carrying on the tradition of fine food and drink since 1817.
807 South Gay Street Knoxville, TN 37902 (865) 544-0537 www.thebistroatthebijou.com
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
• Letter submissions should include a verifiable name, address, and phone number. We do not print anonymous letters. • We much prefer letters that address issues that pertain specifically to Knoxville or to stories we’ve published. • We don’t publish letters about personal disputes or how you didn’t like your waiter at that restaurant. Send an email to: editor@knoxmercury.com Or message us at: facebook.com/knoxmercury
Delivering Fine Journalism Since 2015
EDITORIAL EDITOR Coury Turczyn coury@knoxmercury.com SENIOR EDITOR Matthew Everett matthew@knoxmercury.com CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Jack Neely jack@knoxhistoryproject.org STAFF WRITERS S. Heather Duncan heather@knoxmercury.com Thomas Fraser thomas@knoxmercury.com CONTRIBUTORS Chris Barrett Catherine Landis Ian Blackburn Dennis Perkins Hayley Brundige Stephanie Piper Patrice Cole Ryan Reed Eric Dawson Eleanor Scott George Dodds Alan Sherrod Lee Gardner Nathan Smith Mike Gibson April Snellings Carey Hodges Denise Stewart-Sanabria Nick Huinker Joe Sullivan Donna Johnson Kim Trevathan Tracy Jones Chris Wohlwend Rose Kennedy Angie Vicars Joan Keuper Carol Z. Shane INTERN Jeffery Chastain
DESIGN ART DIRECTOR Tricia Bateman tricia@knoxmercury.com GRAPHIC DESIGNER Charlie Finch CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS David Luttrell Shawn Poynter Justin Fee Tyler Oxendine CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATORS Matthew Foltz-Gray PHOTOGRAPHY INTERN Marissa Highfill
ADVERTISING PUBLISHER & DIRECTOR OF SALES Charlie Vogel charlie@knoxmercury.com SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Scott Hamstead scott@knoxmercury.com ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE Michael Tremoulis michael@knoxmercury.com
BUSINESS BUSINESS MANAGER Scott Dickey scott.dickey@knoxmercury.com
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 618 South Gay St., Suite L2, Knoxville, TN 37902 knoxmercury.com • 865-313-2059 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR & PRESS RELEASES editor@knoxmercury.com CALENDAR SUBMISSIONS calendar@knoxmercury.com SALES QUERIES sales@knoxmercury.com DISTRIBUTION distribution@knoxmercury.com
BOARD OF DIRECTORS Robin Easter Tommy Smith Melanie Faizer Joe Sullivan Jack Neely Coury Turczyn Charlie Vogel The Knoxville Mercury is an independent weekly news magazine devoted to informing and connecting Knoxville’s many different communities. It is a taxable, not-for-profit company governed by the Knoxville History Project, a non-profit organization devoted to exploring, disseminating, and celebrating Knoxville’s unique cultural heritage. It publishes 25,000 copies per week, available free of charge, limited to one copy per reader. © 2017 The Knoxville Mercury
FEB 1-19 CBT MAINSTAGE
Directed by
Kate Buckley
Katie Cunningham and Rishard Price; photo by Elizabeth Aaron
February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 5
HOWDY DUMPSTER highlights DIVE Weekly from our blog Read more at knoxmercury.com/blog HOWARD HOUSE LISTED FOR SALE The historic Howard House on North Broadway, whose owners sought to sell it for demolition in favor of a Walmart parking lot, is now being listed for sale by a real estate agent for the first time and at a much lower asking price: $575,000. The house at 2921 North Broadway was listed as potential office space for sale last week by George Brown with Wood Properties. REP. DUNCAN REJECTS TOWN HALL MEETING The congressman declined hundreds of requests to hold a town hall meeting in his district via a mass e-mailing that said such an event might open him up to complaints from “extremists, kooks and radicals.”
LOCAL LIFE | Photo by Marissa Highfill Remote Area Medical’s free clinic at the Jacob Building in Chilhowee Park (Feb. 4) helped over 1,100 patients who otherwise could not afford medical, dental, and vision care. This was a new record turnout compared to eight previous RAM clinics at the Jacob Building, Look for more photos at knoxmercury.com.
PUBLIC AFFAIRS
2/10 MEETUP: KOOKFEST FRIDAY
4 p.m., U.S. Rep. Jimmy Duncan’s office (800 Market St, Suite 110). Free. As noted in this week’s news feature, Rep. Duncan declined to hold a townhall-style meeting with constituents concerned with reality TV star/President Donald Trump’s governance, dismissing them as “kooks.” But he did say he’ll “meet with anybody.” So here’s your opportunity to join other kooks to schedule one-on-one meetings with the rep.
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
2/11 TEDX UTK 2017
SATURDAY
9:30 a.m. & 1:30 p.m. (two sessions), Clarence Brown Lab Theatre (1714 Andy Holt Ave.). $10 per session. Interested in hearing some new ideas related to Technology, Entertainment, Design? This year’s TEDx at the University of Tennessee features some of Knoxville’s most interesting figures, including Colleen Cruze Bhatti and Earl Cruze of Cruze Farm, Renée Hoyos of Tennessee Clean Water Network, and Rachel Milford and Shelagh Leutwiler of Cattywampus Puppet Council. Info: tedxutk.com.
DOWNTOWN RALLY SUPPORTS IMMIGRANTS The winter of citizen discontent continued Wednesday, Feb. 1 with a march and rally that drew at least 1,000 people to downtown Knoxville to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order that temporarily banned the citizens of seven nations from entering the U.S. A sea of people of all ethnicities, religions, and backgrounds carried motley banners with myriad messages in support of refugees and immigrants, from Market Square to Howard Baker Jr. Courthouse and back again.
2/18 PANEL DISCUSSION: “WHAT’S FIT TO 2/21 EVA SCHLOSS: A STORY OF TRIUMPH PRINT” SATURDAY
1:30-3:30 p.m., Lawson McGhee Library (500 W. Church Ave.). Free. We’ve been puzzling over this question for years! Perhaps our comrades in the journalistic arts will have some answers: Brandon Hollingsworth, host of WUOT’s All Things Considered; Jay Quaintance, assistant news director at WATE; and Jack McElroy, editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel. Hosted by the League of Women Voters of Knoxville/Knox County.
TUESDAY
7 p.m., Knoxville Civic Auditorium (500 Howard Baker Jr. Ave. .). $35-$125. Our opportunities to hear first-hand what it was like to survive the Holocaust are becoming fewer. Eva Schloss, who made it out alive from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, has made it her life’s work to speak out against bigotry and violence, and serve as a reminder of what can happen. Don’t miss this opportunity.
A R EM AR K A BLE ROM A NCE B l a c k H i s t o r y M o n t h a n d Va l e n t i n e ’ s D ay b o t h o f f e r o c c a s i o n s t o c e l e b r at e J a m e s a n d E t h e l B e c k .
On Wed., Feb. 22, the Beck Cultural Exchange Center at 1927 Dandridge Ave. is hosting a sneakpeak screening of scholar Henry Louis Gates’ film, Africa’s Great Civilizations, at 5:30 p.m.
James Beck helped found Knoxville’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1919. Without children to pay for, the Becks saved enough money to begin investing in real estate, and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Beck was founded in honor of James and Ethel Beck, at what had been their comfortable home on Dandridge, just east of downtown.
Like his namesake, James Beck was a lifelong Republican, even serving as sergeant-at-arms at the 1940 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
The Becks were one of the most interesting couples in Knoxville histor y. A lthough many blacks struggled to make a living, especially during segregation, the Becks were exceptions. For many years they were a couple much admired and envied. James Garfield Beck, born in Alabama in 1881, was named for the Republican president who had championed public education for blacks, and who was assassinated earlier that year.
Ethel and James Beck, who were married for more than half a century, were leaders of Knoxville’s black community. Prosperous enough to be philanthropists, their work led indirectly to the establishment of the Beck Cultural Exchange Center.
Beck came to Knoxville in 1898 to attend Knoxville College, widely known for its opportunities in higher education for blacks. A star baseball player, Beck became KC’s first athletic director. After graduation he became a schoolteacher, and principal of Lonsdale’s Mitchell Chapel School, then head of the English department at Austin High, Knoxville’s black public school. He was known to be able to recite long poems. “Thanatopsis,” William Cullen Bryant’s meditation on death, was a favorite.
In 1913 Beck became Tennessee’s first black postal clerk, working at the Custom House downtown. The same year, he married Ethel Benson, who was from Morristown. Their lively marriage lasted more than half a century. She didn’t share James’s intellectual interests, but had an energetic interest in her community. She was at one time head of the Tennessee Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers. She vigorously supported the local “Colored Orphanage,” in Mechanicsville. In honor of her major contributions, the large facility was eventually renamed the Ethel Beck Home.
According to historian Robert Booker, who knew them both, Beck was such a partisan Republican that he didn’t even like to rent to Democrats—like Booker, who in the 1960s became Knoxville’s first black representative in the state legislature. But Beck abided being married to a Democrat, even one who, as Booker recalls, openly delighted in canceling out her husband’s vote in each election. They had a competitive relationship. James Beck had once been celebrated as an athlete, but it was Ethel Beck who became a national contender in the black women’s tennis circuits of the 1920s.
They lived near downtown, but in their retirement years moved into the house at 1927 Dandridge Avenue. Built in 1912 for a white family, it became the target of a cross burning in 1947 when Dr. E.F. Lennon, a well-known black physician, purchased the house. Lennon and his wife remained there for many years. James Beck died in early 1969. His wife Ethel died the following year. They had been married for 56 years. Ethel Beck’s favorite orphanage had closed back in the 1950s, and the sale of its property funded the establishment of another benefit of the black community. The Beck Cultural Exchange Center opened at the Becks’ former home in 1975. Much expanded in recent years, it serves as a museum of black history, a reference library, and a meeting place for community events. It’s open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more, see beckcenter.net.
Beck Cultural Exchange Center, author Robert Booker, Knox County Public Library Image courtesy of Reneé Kesler, Beck Cultural Exchange Center • beckcenter.net
Source
T h e K n ox v i l l e H i s to ry P r o j ec t, a n o n p r o fi t o r g a n iz at i o n d e vot e d to t h e p r o m ot i o n o f a n d ed u c at i o n a b o u t t h e h i s to ry o f K n ox v i l l e , p r e s en t s t h i s pag e e ac h w e e k to r a i s e awa r en e s s o f t h e t h em e s , p er s o n a l i t i e s , a n d s to r i e s o f o u r u n i q u e c i t y. L e a r n m o r e at
knoxvillehistoryproject.org
o r em a i l
jack@knoxhistoryproject.org
February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 7
The Curve Hating the architecture of our youth
T
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
starting to rediscover an appreciation for brick-colored brick, the KUB building was starting to look like a fashion victim. In the ’90s, I wrote an article proposing that it be torn down, for aesthetics’ sake. It was a forbidding design, claustrophobic-looking, with windows made to stay closed. Maybe KUB, which championed climate control, wanted to support the idea that you never open windows. Use the thermostat. Vincent found something to admire in its shade of green, even if it was one you don’t find in nature except in a neglected jar in the back of a refrigerator. My uncustomary call for demolition drew unexpected protests, and caused me to rethink my own aesthetics, and then to work on a theory. See, several readers loved the green old KUB building. All the ones I heard from were a decade or two younger than me. Some even told me they wanted to live there. For me, it was an awakening, a dawning of a realization that should have come to me earlier. We all hate the architecture of our youth. Preservationists are frequently perplexed by old men who admire antebellum and Victorian houses, but seem to viscerally hate buildings of the early 20th century. To them, craftsman style or art deco were not interesting and clever and historic, but embarrassing and old-fashioned and best left in the Dumpster. Their stodgy fathers and awkward uncles thought these things stylish, but since then we’ve moved on. That’s one big reason we tear down good buildings, or sometimes
Photo courtesy of the Tennessee Archive of Moving Images and Sound
BY JACK NEELY
Photo by Coury Turczyn
SCRUFFY CITIZEN
his winter several have noticed a bit of oddity in a surgical demolition project on the corner of Gay and Church. The greenish cube known as “the old KUB Building,” has been losing its skin for the last several weeks. As it did, it exposed, at the corner, curved steel beams in a shape you might expect to find in an ocean liner or maybe a World War II bomber, not in a square old office building. It’s an unusual tale. I’ll get to it here in a minute. The square KUB building as we’ve gotten used to it was mostly built in 1964. It awed onlookers in the Great Society days. When the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night played down the street at the Riviera, it looked new and shiny and amazing. I was surprised to run across an assessment of it by Bert Vincent, the News-Sentinel columnist who was the first newspaperman whose byline I looked for when I was a kid. As it was completed in 1964, he remarked on it in his Strolling column. It was “a very pretty building,” he wrote. He didn’t often comment on new architecture, but this building was half a block from the Sentinel’s offices. “Can’t say why it appeals to me. One reason might be the light green glazed brick. It is easy on the eyes. Not too fancy, yet not antique.” Easy on the eyes? Well, in 1964, maybe it was. You might have to remember the ties men wore to lunch at the S&W in those days to understand. Was that the last nice thing anybody ever said about the KUB Building? It’s obvious that some forms of modernism don’t age well, and by the ’70s and ’80s, as the city was
even when the Tennessee Valley Authority changed everything in 1933, mutating it into the Knoxville Utilities Board, which distributes TVA power. After World War II, everything was going modern, and it seemed as if an electric utility that promoted the modern should join the jet age. KUB redesigned the exterior in 1951 with curved beams for a streamlined modernist look, with long rows of wraparound windows. However, the astonishing new facade just covered the Gay Street end. A few paces down Church, it was still the old building. It was like they tried to pull a short modernist sock over a long, old brick Victorian. I’m not sure what Bert Vincent thought of that one. But by the early ‘60s, it reportedly had maintenance issues associated with old buildings. Back then there weren’t tax credits for using historic buildings, or organizations advocating for them. And KUB needed a bigger building. So it was that just 13 years after that extraordinary makeover, KUB chose to increase the building in size, adding a fourth floor and a simpler fortress-like design. Now, the prolific advertising firm Tombras is moving in, creating one of the first new office spaces downtown in several years. Sanders Pace’s design presents a metal exterior, vertical windows, and sharp angles concealing those 1951 curves. It’s early 21st century modernism. We’ll like it. Our kids will hate it because we liked it. Our grandchildren will like it again. It will become fascinating. ◆
just reclothe them, hiding or stripping the old exterior. Seeing the remembered past we’ve left behind, still hanging around like a party guest who doesn’t want to go home, undermines some folks’ idea of progress. In condemning the KUB building, I was getting to be like those stubborn old men. I never saw the KUB building as an interesting artifact of history. It was from my own life, and I don’t think of my life as historic. It was just there, old-fashioned, like an unfortunate polyester tie, more embarrassing with each passing year. It was just there, old-fashioned, like an unfortunate polyester tie, more embarrassing with each passing year. Those curved corner pieces complicate the story. That odd old building had several earlier personae. For about 13 years before the major 1964 makeover, the KUB building was a sleek, curvaceous, gracefully modernist building. The front of it, at least. I don’t remember it. I first saw it in a discovered film taken from a moving car, showing the full length of Gay Street in the ‘50s. Nothing on the whole street surprised me so much. It looked cool, with a sort of wind-tunnel design, early ‘50s, pre-Jetsonian futurism. In the 1880s, it had been a long brick furniture store. It became home to Knoxville Railway and Light in 1916. Not just an office building, it was a center for promoting the new electrical arts. Thousands of East Tennesseans went there to behold wonderful new home appliances. This building remained our power center
February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 9
PERSPECTIVES
Rick’s Runts Barnes’ undersized UT basketball team is reminiscent of Rupp’s Runts at Kentucky a half century ago BY JOE SULLIVAN
I
n prior years, when Tennessee’s football season tanked as it did this year with devastating losses to South Carolina and Vanderbilt, I could look forward to the prospect of a basketball season that held more promise. But not this year. The Vols returned only one bona fide starter from a team that had a losing record last year both in the SEC and overall. Preseason prognostications had them pegged to finish next to last in the conference. And their preconference schedule was loaded with nationally ranked teams that figured to demolish them. True, Coach Rick Barnes had recruited six freshmen to replenish a depleted roster. But none of them was heralded. Indeed, they were all rated as three-star prospects on 247 Sports’ five-star scale, and even their sheer number was only enough to get Tennessee’s recruiting class ranked 48th in the land. By contrast, John Calipari landed four five-star prospects to earn Kentucky a number-two national ranking. Elsewhere in the SEC, both Bruce Pearl at Auburn and Ben Howland at Mississippi State brought in enough four- and five-star
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recruits for their classes to be ranked in the top 10. Four of Tennessee’s freshmen come from North Carolina, where Barnes hails. But it’s not as if he was snatching talent away from that state’s two deans of the sport, Mike Krzyzewski at Duke and Roy Williams at North Carolina. Both of them had recruiting classes ranked in the top 10 as well; but they both went out of state for all of their signees while disdaining what they considered to be inferior homegrown talent. The Vols’ two other freshmen are both from Tennessee, including the first Knoxvillian to get a UT basketball scholarship since the 1980s. Yet when Jordan Bowden graduated from Carter High School in 2015, he didn’t have a single major college offer. So he went to a basketball “finishing school” for a year in order to get one from Tennessee where he’s immediately become a starter. For all of these shortcomings, Tennessee’s early season performance far exceeded almost anyone’s expectations. With their one returning starter. Robert Hubbs, leading the way and freshmen playing a major role, they battled all four of their
nationally ranked preconference opponents on almost even terms. At a jamboree in Hawaii, they came back from a big deficit to take the lead against Wisconsin before finally succumbing. The next day they lost out in overtime to Oregon. In a road game at Chapel Hill, they held the lead against then number-four ranked North Carolina for most of the game before letting it slip away. Against now number-one ranked Gonzaga, they fell behind by 27-6 before making a huge comeback to tie the score only to lose out once again. The most exciting of the freshmen in the early going was a 6-foot 8-inch lefty, John Fulkerson, who defies the old canard about white men not being able to jump. His remarkable leaping ability and deft moves around the basket made him an instant fan favorite. But in a mid-December game against Tennessee Tech, Fulkerson crashed to the floor with an excruciating thud. A dislocated elbow required season-ending surgery, depriving the Vols of one of their prime weapons. Then, in early January, the team’s one other upper-classman, Detrick Mostella, who provided a spark coming off the bench for the past two seasons, was dismissed from the team for drug violations (though criminal charges against him have since been dropped). Without these two stalwarts, what had been rising hopes for a successful SEC portion of the season took a nosedive. But to Barnes’ great credit, his other freshmen have come to the fore and made Tennessee an SEC contender. During the team’s four-game winning streak in late January, freshmen accounted for more than half of the team’s total points and more than half of the total playing time. The streak included wins over the three SEC teams whose freshmen classes had been rated so much higher: Auburn, Mississippi State, and, most remarkably, Kentucky. Not in anybody’s memory, including that of UT’s director of basketball media relations Tom Satkowiak, have freshmen played or scored so much. Just as remarkably, none of the four freshmen who are now the mainstays are more than 6 feet 5 inches. Hubbs, who is also 6 feet 5 inches, remains the leading scorer, and a 6-foot-4-inch sophomore, Admiral Schofield, has stepped up to fill the hole left by the loss of Fulkerson.
Game after game, the rugged Schofield and the even more so 6-foot-5-imch freshman post player Grant Williams have more than held their own against opposing post players who are mostly at least 4 inches taller. The indomitable Williams, who has become the team’s leading rebounder as well as its second-leading scorer, is well on his way to surpassing the freshman accomplishments of any Tennessee post player since Bernard King in 1975. One has to look back even further and somewhere else to find a stellar team with no starters taller than 6 feet 5 inches. The quintessential one was Adolph Rupp’s 1966 Kentucky team that went through the regular season undefeated until losing its final game against guess who: Tennessee. Rupp’s Runts, as they were known, went on to the NCAA finals where, in one of college basketball’s classic games, the all-white Big Blue were upset by an all-black team from Texas Western. Rupp’s Runts were mostly juniors and seniors. So Rick’s Runts have several more seasons to rise to the same proportions. A blessing of their lack of stature is that none of them stand hardly any chance of being drafted into the NBA. (Again, by contrast, three of this year’s Kentucky freshmen are projected to be high draft choices and become one-and-doners.) The only problem with this scenario—and it’s a good one to have except for sentimental reasons—is that come next season, Barnes’ team won’t be runts any more. The return of Fulkerson and the recent emergence of 6-foot-10-inch sophomore Kyle Alexander, who’s spent most of the past two seasons riding the bench, will give the Vols a big-man presence. And Barnes’ lone recruit for next season, as of now, is also 6 feet 10 inches. When he was formerly the coach at Texas, Barnes was renowned for his prize recruits who went on to illustrious NBA careers: Kevin Durant, Lamarcus Aldridge, Tristan Thompson, Avery Bradley, D.J. Augustin, Cory Joseph, P.J. Tucker, and the list goes on. But I will give the veteran coach more credit for molding a Tennessee team that shows a lot of promise with a bunch of unheralded players whom the prime college programs overlooked. ◆
POSSUM CITY
Unprecedented The dawn of a new world BY ELEANOR SCOTT
I
Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Trees reduce water pollution, noise pollution, and heat from parking lots. Trees provide homes and food for wildlife, and reduce stress in city dwellers. Forests keep awful things from happening. Let’s be honest, though: At this point, can planting some trees offset the damage of our carbon dioxide-emitting and plastic garbage-dumping? We should have all turned down the thermostat and put on a sweater back in the 1970s like President Carter suggested. But sure, plant a tree. In fact, plant an oak tree that will grow big and beautiful and live for hundreds of years.
“Let’s have a snake parade!” they said. “No,” I said, “I definitely don’t want to.” “C’mon,” said my friend, “It might be fun.” The kids put a handful of live snakes into a blender with no lid. Oh, no. Too late, we started to run. The downpour of gore and squirming
snake parts caught us. A small severed head fell into the slack hood of my sweatshirt. I felt it cold and frantic against the nape of my neck. Pity overwhelmed horror. The crowd raised their delighted faces to the shower. Just as I suspected, I want no part in their snake parade. Down a long hallway of fire and explosions a girl without legs crawled toward me, her hair hiding her face. I felt afraid and wanted to run, but couldn’t move. What if that was my child? What would I want a stranger to do for her? I caught her and picked her up. She wrapped her arms around me and bit my chest. That’s what a monster would do, I thought, Maybe I made a mistake. But it’s also what a scared child might do—hold on with arms and teeth. So holding her with all my strength, I ran from the fire and noise. Dreams are not prophetic, but they can hold up a mirror and show you what you need to see. Long live the trees I planted today. Long live the limbless, helpless creatures. Sip slowly, friends, and some of us may make it by the skin of our teeth. ◆ Eleanor Scott is a freelance writer and columnist living in East Knoxville. Possum City tells small stories of wildlife and people thriving on the edges of the city. Cherry Street Wetland: An excellent place to spot a mermaid.
Photo by Eleanor Scott
n early January, the thermometer read 67 degrees, 20 degrees above the average high. Daffodils poked out of the mud. The kids ran through the yard barefoot. The weather forecast predicted 60-degree temperatures for the foreseeable future. The warmth felt good, but I knew it was wrong. “What is happening!” I shouted at the sky. “You know what’s happening,” my neighbor responded. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports 2016 was the hottest year for the world on record, breaking the record set by 2015, which broke the record set by 2014—part of a pattern of increasing global temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the result of human greed and stupidity. This unprecedented winter follows the tree-killing drought of last summer. What will next summer bring? A smart parasite sips slowly, prolongs the life of its host. A rash one eats its host up quickly head to tail, and starves later. We are swallowing natural resources in enormous gulps. We are fouling our nest. Now is a good time to plant a tree. The ground is soft. Trees are dormant. You can plop them into their new beds before they wake up and begin their spring growth spurts. Along Fifth Avenue, the city’s urban forestry division has dug holes for new street trees, part of a program to increase the city’s tree canopy. The benefits of trees are many to air-breathing, water-drinking people.
Now is a good time to go swimming. The oldest winter bathing club in America is the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, in which members wearing ordinary swimsuits jump into the icy Atlantic every Sunday from November to April. It’s 32 degrees in New York now, and snowing. Knoxville’s winter bathing would be less shocking, but still challenging and invigorating. Like the Castalian Spring at Delphi, the deep, clear Fort Dickerson quarry lake invites a pilgrimage. The quarry lake will be empty and quiet for a ritual January plunge, sloughing off the old year, emerging from the water reborn. Meanwhile, the snakes are confused. I found one lying dead in the snow during our only snowfall. After the snow melted, so many small soggy bodies littered the sidewalks it seemed to have rained snakes over the weekend. The snakes reminded me of a dream I had just before the new year, in which a group of young adults invited me to their playhouse:
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Photo by Thomas Fraser
Local Resistance Alarmed by President Trump’s agenda, and a lack of response from representatives, Knoxvillians get organized BY THOMAS FRASER
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he calls herself an accidental activist. Perplexed and alarmed by the election of President Donald Trump, Sarah Herron, a Maryville mother of two, did what any red-blooded American does these days: She started a Facebook page to voice her dissent. “I was honestly just frustrated by calling my representatives, and not feeling like I was being heard, just blown off,” she says by telephone last week. “I’ve never been involved in politics before. But the election of Donald Trump is very frightening to me.” So she started a public Facebook page called Indivisible East Tennessee based on an existing platform for activism she heard about on the Rachel Maddow Show. Within a few days, 150 people had liked the page, which early this week had 1,800 likes and followers. The site, which Herron bills as nonpartisan and has received support from both sides of the aisle, features various “calls to action” providing phone numbers, contacts, and talking points for issues ranging from the immigration restrictions proposed by Trump to the controversial nomination of Betsy DeVos for education secretary. The latter issue prompted a
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virtual multi-pronged digital assault on U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander. His testy statement of support for DeVos generated more than 7,000 comments on his Facebook page. Herron also sends out a weekly newsletter aggregating activist information and political news throughout the 2nd Congressional District. “I think I’m a community organizer now, accidentally,” she says with a chuckle. She is not alone on the digital activism front: Hannah Houser started “Love Trumps Hate Knoxville” soon after Trump’s election. That Facebook page now has more than 11,000 followers, and, like Indivisible East Tennessee, serves as a clearinghouse for local calls to action. There is an organic overlap with other activist sites and organizers, but its clarion calls helped bring some 300 people downtown to Sen. Lamar Alexander’s office Jan. 30 for an anti-DeVos protest. Two days later, about 1,000 people rallied on Market Square in support of immigrants. Those numbers pale compared to a local march that coincided with the Jan. 23 Women’s March on Washington: An estimated 4,000 people flooded downtown in solidarity with the national march. That’s likely the largest activist
political rally in Knoxville since the Vietnam War, and indicates the depths of concern in some circles about the Trump agenda. “We started as a way to connect marginalized communities together,” Houser says in the midst of chanting and a sea of signs Feb. 1. The march in protest of Trump’s proposed ban on travel to the U.S. from seven predominantly Islamic nations was organized and sponsored by Bridge Refugee Services and Allies of Knoxville’s Immigrant Neighbors—within four days—but was publicized and promoted on local activist social media sites such as Love Trumps Hate and Indivisible East Tennessee. “The focus has been on changes we can make locally,” Houser says. “I think we’ve set a good example of inclusion and connectivity, as well.” The grassroots dissent provides an opportunity on the political front, but the challenge will be coordinating disparate groups and sustaining momentum. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Gloria Johnson, a Democrat and former member of the Tennessee Legislature who unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Republican Eddie Smith for his 13th District state House seat in November. Her social-activist focus is now on preservation of the Affordable Care Act targeted by the Trump administration and many Congressional and Senate Republicans. “It’s great from my perspective because so many people want to get involved,” Johnson says, but urged others “to make sure we are being effective in coordinating and not step on each other’s toes.” Johnson and Herron—both of whom say concerns about the Trump agenda cross party lines—say their efforts have largely been a one-way street. Johnson describes her efforts to recruit U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Maryville Republican, to a local town hall meeting during the February recess as “frustrating.” She says he declined a constituent meeting. Alexander seemed to soften his tone as DeVos neared her successful confirmation on Tuesday—she needed a tiebreaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence after some GOP defections led to a 50-50 tie in the Senate. A social media post this week from his Senate office showed video of Alexander answering the telephone in his
office; multiple calls to his Washington office were still met with busy signals. “Tennesseans with whom I have talked feel passionately for and against Betsy DeVos, and I have welcomed their comments. I am voting for her because she will implement the new law fixing No Child Left Behind the way Congress wrote it: to reverse the trend toward a national school board and restore local control of public schools,” he said in an e-mailed comment relayed by spokesperson Ashton Davies. Opponents of DeVos and other nominees—namely Scott Pruitt to head the EPA—have kept phones and nerves jangling in Washington. Most say their interactions with Senate staffers have been cordial, but U.S. Rep. John J. Duncan Jr., a Republican in office since 1988, minced no words in declining to take part in a town hall meeting as requested by hundreds of East Tennesseans in his district via emails and letters, saying such an event might open him up to opposing opinions from “extremists, kooks and radicals.” He also said some of those opposed to the agenda of President Donald Trump are “sore losers.” “Also, I do not intend to give more publicity to those on the far left who have so much hatred, anger and frustration in them,” he wrote. Duncan spoke to and had a question-and-answer session with the Knoxville Tea Party in June 2010 in Fountain City Park. Duncan spokesperson Don Walker didn’t immediately respond to a request for additional comment or examples of specific “hateful, very angry emails” referenced by Duncan. “I don’t know who those people are,” Herron says, again noting her desire to keep her activism nonpartisan. They are certainly not members of the Bible study groups she has met with, she says. Johnson says such an attitude is a disservice to his district, and, speaking of both Duncan and Alexander: “You don’t represent your base, you represent everyone in your district.” In response to Duncan’s refusal to meet with community groups in a town hall meeting, Indivisible East Tennessee announced on Facebook the “Kookfest Call to Action” for this Friday at Duncan’s office in downtown Knoxville where attendees will set personal appointments to meet with their representative. ◆
CATEGORY: ARTS & CULTURE
Modern Studio
VICTOR AGREDA co-founder, Modern Studio
A new multi-purpose community space that also provides a home for Knoxville’s indie theater troupes
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reative cooperatives—work spaces housing several different “makers” or businesses—have been sprouting in Knoxville for a few years now, from the artists at Vacuum Shop Studios to the workshop leaders at the Central Collective. Our newest entry is Modern Studio in Happy Holler. Co-founders Victor Agreda Jr. and Burke Brewer raised $7,500 via a crowdfunding campaign over the summer that allowed them to put a security deposit on the old Colonial Cleaners building at 109 West Anderson Ave. After a thorough rehab by developers Fox and Fogarty, the space opened last month with a concert by singer/songwriter Daje Morris; music booker Kent Oglesby has lined up a full slate of musicians this month, ranging from country duo Count This Penny to marimba composer Dr. Andy Harnsberger. Once the office areas are built out, Modern Studio will not only provide a base for the partners’ respective businesses—Superpixel Studios and Modern Seamstress—but also a new home for other businesses, performance artists, educators, and community groups. Most notably, it will be the performance space for theater productions organized by Carolyn Corley’s Knoxville Performing Arts Exchange, a collective of small, local theater troupes. On Feb. 16, the Marble City Opera will be hosting a chocolate and wine party, with pairings provided by Holly Hambright of Holly’s Eventful Catering.
When you say Modern Studio is a “community space,” what do you mean? In thinking about the revenue model, our purpose was not to be fabulously
wealthy off of this endeavor. We wanted to make it accessible, and we feel very strongly that our location provides some accessibility to folks in communities that may be under-served. So we’re looking at things like classes, in particular, to teach people things that are life skills—maybe it’s a generation removed from some life skills that they had before, even something as simple as sewing a button.
When you asked for suggestions during your crowdfunding campaign, what needs were raised by your donors?
Like Burke, Carolyn, and I, they needed physical space. You would think that some of these needs would be served already—a lot of churches have spare rooms or rooms used for AA and other meetings, even performance spaces sometimes. But what’s really problematic is having to move around when space becomes available. One of the things we found that’s very important is consistency—that’s what we heard a lot: People wanted a consistent space that they knew they could rely on. That was a big factor in the theater aspect—they typically have to fit in whatever space they can find. And we said, what if we had a flexible space that allowed you to do what you need to do, and do it consistently so you’re not having to constantly move around?
How will Modern Studio be supporting local theater groups?
Carolyn Corley started the Knoxville Performing Arts Exchange, and it’s sort of a holding company, if you will—it’s more of an umbrella so that other groups can work with her for
Photos by Jeffery Chastain
BY COURY TURCZYN
MODERN STUDIO marketing support, production support. She’s been doing this for a number of years, and she works in Tennessee Stage Company a lot, so we’ll be working with Yellow Rose, Tiger Lily, and a few smaller groups here in town to do events. We actually had the New Play Festival with the Tennessee Stage Company here, and that was more of a meet-and-greet to talk about the new plays that are coming out. But that’s our idea—to work with as many small groups as we can and try to give them a home.
You’re also booking music—is there a particular niche you’re aiming to fill?
Actually, no. One of the interesting things is that we’re very lucky to be working with Kent Oglesby who dealt with a lot of the Secret Shows. I call him kind of a “music whisperer”—he’s really got his finger on the pulse of what’s going on right now in the world of music. What we’ve started booking is mostly acoustic acts because we don’t have our full sound equipment built out yet, and as we go further down the line we’ll be booking bigger and bigger sounds over time. So my attitude is, let’s put as many things in here as possible.
Where would you like to see Modern Studio this time next year?
109 W. Anderson Ave. 865-323-2425, modernstudio.org
PROGRAMS
Live music, performing arts and theater, daytime co-working and maker space, special events rental, community outreach.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
Modern Studio exists due to the financial contributions of nearly 70 community members who supported its mission to provide a financially stable and accessible home for the performing arts. Modern Studio accepts contributions of all amounts. Stay tuned for additional crowd-funding campaigns.
Really, our focus and our business model is to be using the space about 80 percent of the time. There’s a phrase I love, “Use every part of the buffalo.” And we really would like to see every night something going on here. During the day, we have a full complement of co-workers, and by doing that we actually enable ourselves to do things like rent the space out for pennies on the dollar to community groups that couldn’t afford it otherwise. ◆ February 9, 2017
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Photos by Tricia Bateman
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n Jan. 27, President Donald Trump issued an executive order putting a halt to U.S. acceptance of refugees for 120 days and banning all visitors from seven majority-Muslim nations from entering the country for 90 days or, in the case of Syrians, the foreseeable future. A federal judge last week halted the order, but the Trump administration appealed. A federal appeals court was scheduled to hear arguments Tuesday. Even permanent residents with green cards were initially blocked from returning to the U.S.. Protests swept major American cities and airports, including Knoxville. Those banned from travel to the U.S. for 90 days include those with passports from Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. Trump insists the move is needed to prevent terrorists from entering the U.S., but no fatal terrorist action within the U.S. since 2001 has been perpetrated by a person with a passport from one of these countries; in fact, Washington lifted sanctions on Sudan just weeks ago for cooperation on combating terrorism. Countries where the vast majority of foreign terrorists originated, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, were not on Trump’s banned list. In the last few months, the Mercury has been interviewing refugees who have resettled in our city. We think it’s a good idea to get to know who these folks, our neighbors, really are: where they’re from, what kind of lives they left behind, and what they are contributing to our community today. Some of them came here from war-torn countries like Iraq and Sudan that are now part of the Trump administration travel ban; some were persecuted by extremists like the ones the Trump administration aims to shut out. They all talk about the American dream, and how they’re living it. While many Americans think of the American dream as the possibility for professional and economic advancement above their parents’ standard of living—wealth, a nice house, respect in the community— many refugees defi ne it differently: Their American dream really is the chance to have enough to eat, clean water to drink, and the ability to live in safety. Here are just some of the stories of local refugees and their journeys to seek these basic necessities of life. —S. Heather Duncan
Drocella Mugorewera was a refugee herself, arriving in Knoxville in 2008 with nothing. Now she is the director of the agency that helped her resettle here: Bridge Refugee Services. those of their children.” “Working with refugees and immigrants is a blessing,” Mugorewera says. “America is a nation of immigrants.” The 53-year-old has a dignified, reserved manner that is often abruptly breached by a bright smile. She is confident that the more Americans actually get to know the immigrants in their community, the more they will recognize the common dreams and aspirations of humanity. “The way to get out of fear is to get engaged in actions,” she says. “Actions will cure fear.” She is that rare person who lives her own advice.
Restoring What Was Stolen Drocella Mugorewera introduces fellow refugees to new lives in Knoxville BY S. HEATHER DUNCAN
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he crowd at a recent Market Square vigil in support of refugees and immigrants stood silently, but a hundred signs spoke for them: “Welcome” written in many languages, simple pictures of the Statue of Liberty, and placards that read “Build Bridges Not Walls.” Appropriately, the event was spearheaded by Bridge Refugee Services, a nonprofit that uses donations and federal funds to help refugees establish lives in East Tennessee. Drocella Mugorewera, the tiny African-born woman who runs Bridge, was in the background, beaming as she gripped letters that the group of more than 1,000 protesters would soon deliver to their elected representatives at the Howard H. Baker Jr. United States Courthouse. Eventually, people handed around a megaphone to direct the crowd in reciting together the words on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Mugorewera wasn’t holding the megaphone. She’s not a yeller. But she won’t be silent, either—that’s why she came to this country. When the Rwandan refugee first
arrived in Knoxville in 2008, she was no longer in hiding, no longer hunted, no longer had to weigh her words. She could at last speak her mind. She just had no one to speak it to yet. The former national leader had been forced to leave behind her husband and five children. Arriving by plane with almost nothing, she had to figure out the American system of health care, government aid, and public transportation while looking for a job. She did, with help from Bridge. Mugorewera had no idea that nine years later, she’d be running it. Until President Donald Trump froze U.S. acceptance of refugees two weeks ago, Bridge was projected to resettle 245 people in Knoxville, including Syrians, during fiscal 2017. About 66 have arrived since the fiscal year began in October, Mugorewera says. However, during his first week in office, Trump followed though on campaign promises by issuing executive orders to stop refugee resettlement for 120 days, ban all visitors from seven majority-Muslim
countries for 90 days, and ban Syrians from the U.S. indefinitely. He proposes to cut the number of refugees the U.S. will accept this year by more than half of the targets set by former President Barack Obama. Mugorewera says Bridge has received an avalanche of support since Trump’s announcements, including several local businesses holding successful fund-raisers for the agency. Mugorewera and Susan Speraw, the chairperson of the Bridge board, wrote an open letter to the community early last week asking supporters to sign a petition and lobby their elected officials to rescind the refugee order. The letter states that the order “will seriously impede our resettlement program, affecting more than 400 refugees who were resettled in Knoxville and Chattanooga during the past year” and hundreds more who remain dependent on Bridge for ongoing guidance. “United we must stand, in the face of this executive order,” the letter states. “We cannot allow irrational fears in the president’s office to guide decisions being made about people who are fleeing to save their lives and
GROWING UP RWANDAN
Drocella Mugorewera grew up the fifth of nine children in Byumba, Rwanda. Her father was a carpenter and her mother supervised workers on the family farm, where they raised cattle and grew vegetables. Her mother instilled a strong work ethic. When the kids came home from school to eat lunch, they were expected to squeeze in time to clean the yard, fetch water, or take food to the farm workers before heading back to lessons. “It encouraged me to be hardworking and loving people,” Mugorewera says. “My mom always said, ‘Do good. You’ll find kindness ahead.’” Mugorewera received a scholarship to attend college in the U.S.S.R., and she earned a degree in agronomy. While she was away, her mother died. Mugorewera returned to Rwanda upon graduation and started working for the Ministry of Environment and Tourism. But shortly afterward, her life—like the lives of everyone in her country—was brutally interrupted by the Rwandan civil war and subsequent genocide as the ethnic Hutu and Tutsi tribes fought for power. During four months in 1994, members of the Hutu ethnic majority massacred at least 800,000 Tutsis, the tribe that had been the ruling minority. Through military action, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front was able to gain control of the country, leading to reprisals and an exodus of mostly-Hutu people to refugee camps in neighboring countries. February 9, 2017
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Mugorewera prefers not to identify her tribe. (In fact, it’s now illegal to discuss ethnicity in Rwanda.) “I’m Rwandan,” she says. “And now I’m American.” Mugorewera lost her sister and brother-in-law during the war, and afterward adopted their three young daughters. She doesn’t like to talk about what she saw. “Every family lost siblings and relatives, and sometimes you do not know where they are buried,” she says. “I fled to Congo. But I had to go back. I said, ‘I have to be part of building my country.’” She was soon working on policy in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, then agriculture. Rwanda’s economy is dominated by farming, but farmers’ seeds had been mostly destroyed or eaten during the war. “We had to research and collaborate with neighboring countries to get more seeds and recover the seed systems,” she says. “Extensionists [like cooperative extension agents in the U.S.] had fled or were killed. We had to reorganize farmers.” Over and above this work, Mugorewera was to play a more direct role in rebuilding Rwanda. A coalition government was formed to run the country until general elections. Mugorewera was appointed to the Rwandan Transitional Parliament by the Christian Democratic Party in 2000, and was thus able to play a role in writing the new constitution. It makes no reference to ethnicity and requires that women hold at least 30 percent of government authority positions at the local and national levels. When it comes to women’s equality, the Rwandan government is now generally recognized as more progressive than America’s. Those gender requirements “are one of the things I’m proudest of in contributing to the constitutional process,” Mugorewera says. In the years that followed, she held top positions in the government ministries dealing with the environment and forestry, then became Minister of Lands and Environment. Mugorewera made headlines internationally when Rwanda outlawed plastic bags in an effort to clean up its cities, and she publicly equated protecting the environment with protecting democracy. Expressing her convictions led her to fall from favor with the ruling party, 16
KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
At a meet-and-greet event sponsored by Bridge Refugee Services, a refugee teen (left) spoke to a group of her peers. Participants also did an exercise where they wrote the challenges that refugees face on balloons and tried to keep them up in the air—one of the lessons being that it’s easier to do so with more people.
Mugorewera says. She left government for consulting work in 2006. “Democracy is not good there,” she says. “I’m not a ‘yes’ person. I like to exercise my right to free debate.” For a year she continued speaking out, while the government began to consider her an enemy. “I did try to endure,” she says. “Then I had direct threats on my life.” As she left for an international conference on strategies to protect the Nile River, she says, “something happened, and I had to choose between life and death.” She stayed after the Ugandan conference and applied for protection through the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. She had nothing except the clothes she had packed for a three-day trip, her Bible, and her crucifix. She says there was no chance to talk to her family before deciding to flee. She hid in Kenya for almost nine months, awaiting approval to go somewhere farther away. She was too much of a public figure to be safe in that part of Africa. The U.N. connected her with the U.S. Embassy. During this time, she sent messages to her family through friends to let them know she was safe, but they were unable to talk. Her husband began making
arrangements to follow her through a program that reunites refugee families. But to bring the children in the long run, he would have to leave them first. The youngest was 13. Mugorewera arrived in Knoxville in March 2008, and her husband followed in June. (A banker in Rwanda, he repeated much of his education here and now works for an accounting firm.) They had to decide whether to send the kids to Kenya to stay with a person they barely knew. “My husband was hesitating to send them there,” she recalls. “It was not easy. You have five children—who do you trust?” On top of that, some of those children weren’t technically hers, although she had raised them from infancy, and the U.N. waffled on whether to let them join Mugorewera. By then, at least, she could talk to them on the phone and encourage them. “As a parent, it’s a feeling like you abandoned your children,” she says, her voice cracking. She looks at her lap. “I told them, ‘I’m sorry for abandoning you.’ They say, ‘Don’t worry. You did the right thing.’” Indeed, almost two years after their separation, Mugorewera was reunited with her children in Knoxville. They have all graduated from Catholic High School.
“One of my dreams was for my children to graduate from college, and they are now,” she says, her face glowing. Her youngest finishes in May. Her son is working on his MBA at the University of Tennessee, and a daughter is planning to pursue a master’s degree in international business. Her other children have careers as a flight attendant, a nurse, and a human resources manager. Mugorewera has been proud to be able to help make these options possible for her children, even if it meant losing some options for herself. Americans who think refugees want to move here just to have a better lifestyle don’t understand what they give up. “Imagine being able to go to any country but your home,” says Mugorewera, blinking away tears. “I wish I could have been there when my father died.” Despite these regrets, Mugorewera thrives by focusing relentlessly on what she can do, not what she can’t. “They took away my country. Now I have a new country. And I learn from it,” she says. “I restore what was stolen from me.”
BECOMING AMERICAN
When Mugorewera arrived in Knoxville, Bridge prepared her way. Her case manager met her at the airport along with members of Northside Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), who welcomed her and took to her to an apartment. Churches in town often sponsor new arrivals, regardless of their religious affiliation, providing furniture, clothing, and help navigating schools and other government systems. The Rev. Frits Haverkamp at Northside Christian explains that the church felt called to work with Bridge because Jesus was a refugee and it is important for Christians to “engage our faith in the civic world.” Church coordinators had to be flexible, because they don’t learn who is arriving until a day or so beforehand, and they had to take a leap of faith as they co-signed on Mugorewera’s apartment lease. “It’s a little like yoga. It makes
Photo courtesy of Bridge Refugee Services
you stretch,” Haverkamp says. “There’s a sense that we’re risking. It’s a kind of dangerous journey. It’s really an act of trust.” Haverkamp says the church received blessings in exchange: Long-term relationships with Mugorewera’s family, and the example of their courage and faith. “I don’t think I ever heard her complain,” he says of Mugorewera. “She had such a belief that things were going to get better.” As soon as she’d slept, “The first thing I say is, ‘I need to go to church,’” Mugorewera recalls. Being unable to worship the entire time she was in hiding made the entire experience that much harder. “They took me to the Catholic church for confession and communion. It was like taking a shower,” she recalls. One of the first phone numbers she learned was the church bus driver’s. That led to an early step in finding a role for herself in America. “When I started to ride with them, they said there were some other international church members they were having trouble communicating with, and I could help,” she says. Mugorewera speaks Kinyarwanda, English, French, Russian—and Kirundi, the language spoken by many Burundian refugees who attend Holy Ghost Catholic Church with her. The two churches provided her with a community. “When you go to a new country, you do not have a friend. You do not know the culture,” she says. “It helped me to know I have someone to help me navigate the system. That was very significant for me.” Mugorewera’s apartment on the north side of town was within walking distance of a library, which quickly became one of her favorite things about the United States. “When I was saying I needed Internet, some people think that’s a luxury, but it’s not,” she says. “I’m cut off from all my family and friends. It’s the only way I can communicate with them.” Bridge helped Mugorewera find a job with Goodwill—but in Farragut. She relied on church friends to give her rides to and from work and pick up her kids from school. Carol Lougheed was one of them. Lougheed recalls being bothered that such an educated woman had to work at Goodwill for minimum wage. “I think people are afraid of what they don’t know, so when someone
Above: a blanket-making event sponsored by Bridge Refugee Services. Right: At another Bridge event, greetings were written on cards to be placed in welcome baskets for newly arrived refugees. looks, speaks, or acts different, their fear level goes up, especially in Tennessee. These people in Tennessee are gracious people, but they’re slow to open their hearts unless someone they know introduces that outsider to them,” Lougheed says. “Drocella was easy to introduce around because she has a very vibrant personality. She wants the rest of the refugees who come here have the same opportunities: People to welcome them and look after them like they’re family.” Lougheed has seen Mugorewera translate for new families in the church as well as for established immigrants during times of stress. Mugorewera has shared African prayer dance and other worship traditions with her new congregation and led talks about Africa’s struggle for clean water. When Habitat for Humanity volunteers built a house for Mugorewera’s family, she used the opportunity to educate volunteers, including University of Tennessee football players, about Africa and refugee systems. “I think by sharing her struggles, and Africa’s struggles—why people need to come here—I think it has helped with understanding,” Lougheed says. Mugorewera was promoted to a supervisory position at Goodwill, then got a job working with seniors and disabled people. Bridge provided her a car, which expanded her options. But she badly wanted to return to her field of expertise. Many refugees experience great frustration and sadness at
being unable to use their professional training in America because of certifications, degrees, or English proficiency. They find themselves stuck with menial work when they know they could offer more. Mugorewera had to find someone in the Ukraine to track down her college transcript so she could apply for a job at the UT Extension Service. She didn’t get that one, but when a church member noticed her language skills it opened the door to a more challenging job as a multicultural and refugee manager at Cherokee Health. Cherokee is a federally-funded clinic that provides many refugees with medical and behavioral care and case management. Lynn Goan, who worked with Mugorewera at Cherokee, says, “We have to key in on what are the roadblocks, and she has very good instinct about that. She was amazing, speaking so many different languages, and having such good instincts about people and their situations and their abilities, the things that are challenging to them.” Many refugees were missing appointments because of their poor understanding of English. Mugorewera started helping them learn the process and recognized communica-
tion failures that were risking people’s health, like patients who were unable to read medicine labels. (The clinic started adding pictograms to make it clearer when and how often to take medicine.) “She has touched hundreds and hundreds of lives,” Goan says. Even after Mugorewera left the job, new Cherokee employees are taught her methods for working effectively with refugees. While working at Cherokee, Mugorewera attained U.S. citizenship. She was asked to represent the refugee community on a panel interviewing candidates to be Bridge’s next executive director. But the first round of candidates all dropped out. She thought: Why shouldn’t I apply? Mugorewera has now been running Bridge for more than a year. Her own experience as a refugee gives her insights that have led to new Bridge programs, for example focusing on helping professionals re-enter their fields and creating support groups among new refugees and established arrivals. “It’s not easy to be forced to leave your country, but also I take this as an opportunity,” Mugorewera says. “With 20 more years of active life, I can motivate people and change the world.” Her ability to bring together local government, church, and business leaders to network and brainstorm has created an infectious energy that is doubly important now that she must shepherd the organization through a disturbing, difficult time created by Trump’s refugee policy. Many Bridge clients left behind family members they had hoped would be able to follow them, and they are in need of consolation and comfort. But she believes they will get it. As Mugorewera surveyed the sea of protesters outside the City-County Building last Wednesday, she was satisfied but not surprised. “I expected this,” she said. “This is Tennesseans. This is who we are.” ◆
GET INVOLVED
Bridge Refugee Services needs volunteers, sponsors, and employers to help resettle refugees in Knoxville and Chattanooga. Learn more at: bridgerefugees.org or call 865-540-1311
@KNOXMERCURY.COM
Learn about the current vetting process refugees go through in order to resettle in the United States. February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 17
Meet Some of Knoxville’s Refugees
Age: 35 Native Country: Sudan Arrived in Knoxville: August 2016
I
dris Yasir’s description of his childhood is a blur of dodging and running. He is from the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, a region ethnically and culturally linked to neighboring South Sudan, which after many years of civil war broke away to form its own country in 2011. Inhabitants of the Nuba Mountains remain ruled by the same Arab-dominated central government that has been charged with war crimes for its 2008 attacks on Darfur, in Western Sudan. The Nuba Mountains are so isolated by geography and war that international organizations have been unable to determine whether genocide is happening there, too. Under the 28-year rule of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the Sudanese government has heavily bombed Nuba towns as it seeks to uproot those rebelling against the discrimination, starvation, and Sharia law being imposed on the residents, who are a mix of Muslim, Christian, and traditional African faiths. Amid the shooting and bombs, Yasir, his brother, and two sisters were never able to go to school. When he was 12 or 13, the family fled to a packed refugee camp, periodically getting kicked out of it by the government and then returning. “I don’t even know how to tell you how hard it was,” he says through an interpreter. They tried to escape through the mountains, failing once, but managed to get out and find sporadic work in other cities within their region of Sudan. Racism against blacks was extreme.
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
Photos by Tricia Bateman
Photo by Heather Duncan
Idris Yasir
Yasir’s father and uncle encouraged him to leave when he was old enough, so he went to Egypt. Life wasn’t much better there. Yasir says he worked 16-hour days in a warehouse. “You work all the time just to have enough to eat,” he says. “Sometimes they don’t pay you, and you have to be quiet or you get sent back (to Sudan).” He married another Sudanese refugee and they had children, who attended a segregated school for refugees. But racism was so bad there, the kids could be attacked on the way to school, Yasir says. “If you take your family and sit in the park, some Egyptian would come and hit you because they know you aren’t from here,” Yasir says. Yasir applied for refugee status with the U.N., a dangerous effort because of an agreement Egypt had with the Sudanese government. “If they knew I was trying to leave, they’d send me back to Sudan,” he says. Even so, he told U.N. officials, “I’ll go anywhere just to get out of Egypt.” He was told the process would take 10 years, and was shocked when he learned after three years that his family had been accepted by the U.S. Yasir and his wife are settling into Knoxville with their four children, ages 3 through 11. He has been amazed that they were provided with an apartment, food, and furniture, as well as other help. “It’s really different here,” he says. “Always there, you feel one day they will kill you. But here, you know you are safe.” Yasir is working nights at a factory in Maryville and taking English classes. However, Yasir has no car and relies on a friend for a ride to work. His friend got sick and quit his job at the same factory. “Right now I’m worrying,” Yasir says. “If my friend stops driving me, I lose my job.” Yasir’s short-term goal is to get a car, but in the long run, he wants himself and his children to earn college degrees. “I always say, because this country support you, you want to work for a good future to help this country too.”
Abeer Alfadhli Age: 44 Native country: Iraq Arrived in Knoxville: 2012
I
n her ordinary life—the one before U.S. bombers and suicide bombers turned everything upside down— Abeer Alfadhli was a high school English teacher and an interpreter for Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Trade. Her husband worked with refugees for the United Nations and owned a factory that made plastic bags. They lived with their two children on the same street in Baghdad with both their extended families. Every Friday night they all gathered for big family dinners, just like many Americans do on Sunday. Then came the U.S. war against Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the chaos and internal strife that followed. Alfadhli had to give up working. She feared to leave the house, concerned she would be targeted for her education and her Western ways The factory shut down. Then bombings led the U.N. to transfer her husband to Jordan. Like many moms whose husbands must move for work in the middle of a school year, Alfadhli wanted her kids, aged 8 and 12, to be able to finish their grade before leaving. “Education is very important to me,” she says intently, leaning forward, her eyes sharp. So she stayed behind with them, until members of a Shiite militia knocked on her door and threatened to throw her children into the Tigris River. It was not an empty threat. Bodies bearing signs of torture were being pulled from the river regularly, sometimes hundreds at a time. So she and the kids fled in 2006 to
her husband in Jordan, where they lived for six years. Her husband became executive director of the Jordan branch of a Los Angeles-based organization called No More Victims, which brought Iraqis injured by U.S. troops to the U.S. for medical treatment. Alfadhli volunteered to help, teaching the prospective patients English and finding them places to stay while they received care in the U.S. But Alfadhli, who eventually separated from her husband, decided to apply to the U.S. for refugee status. “I was thinking of my kids and their future,” she says. “If we stayed there, they would get no college, and maybe one day they would kick us out.” Given a choice among four cities where she knew people, Alfadhli picked Knoxville. “When we came from the airport I saw the city on the river and the green, and I thought, “It’s like Baghdad,” she says. Immediately she applied for work at the Dollar General near her house on Sutherland Avenue. When placed on the night shift, she switched to a job in the warehouse at Goodwill, rapidly rising to a supervisory position. “I tell people, ‘It’s okay to start at zero,’” she says. “When they see you are a good worker, it will change.” Alfadhli started volunteering as an interpreter and English teacher at Bridge Refugee Services soon after her arrival. She remains an interpreter for Bridge as well as for the Foreign Language Academy. Later, she approached the Muslim Community of Knoxville for support in offering ESL classes to Arabic speakers, and she now teaches about 20 students weekly in a volunteered house on Magnolia Avenue. Alfadhli’s long-term goal is to start her own nonprofit to pick up where Bridge leaves off, helping refugees who have established themselves but still need help understanding American laws and working toward citizenship. She has developed a network of lawyers and banks to which she takes refugees for legal and banking services. She also works with Knox County Schools on helping high school juniors and seniors get their transcripts from abroad or work out credit for their previous schooling, as her own son had to do when he arrived at age 17. (He is now a senior in nuclear engineering at UT. Her daughter is about to finish her high school degree at home.) Alfadhli will soon begin teaching monthly classes for Iraqi
refugee parents and their children who attend West Hills Elementary School. Although she is a Sunni Muslim whose family was threatened by Shiite Muslims, she doesn’t lump together everyone in that branch of Islam. “I help everybody. Sometimes Shia knock on my door at 2 a.m. to go to the emergency room, and I go,” she says. “It’s not their fault in my mind. We are one community. We are all American now.”
Jose Calabres
Age: 37 Native Country: Venezuela Arrived in Knoxville: December 2015
J
ose Calabres sometimes feels guilty about being in America while his dad and other Venezuelans are suffering. “I never imagined I would leave my country,” says the artist and writer. “I always think you have to fight for your people, for your rights. But in Venezuela, it’s like fighting the sea. And it’s not about you—it’s about your family.” Calabres, son of a nationally-famous sculptor, is a dissident graphic designer, musician, and journalist who spoke out against government corruption in his country. Ironically, that started while he was working for the government, as audio-visual editor-in-chief for his state’s governor. He didn’t mean to become politically active when he started his own blog consisting mostly of jokes. But then politics and human rights started to creep in, as corruption under longtime president Hugo Chavez started to sour so many aspects of people’s lives. He left government in 2011 after he was told his daughter would be kidnapped unless he stopped writing. “So I did for two years,” he says. “But things got worse.” The governor he had worked for became an assistant to Chavez. The man’s successor, a previous head of Venezuelan intelligence services, was Rangel Silva, who has been recognized
by the U.S. as “materially assisting” the narco-terrorism activities of the longtime Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC). Calabres started writing again. He was active in his hometown’s 2014 street protests against the government, posting videos of them on social networks. He says the government sent two killers to his business, where they tied him up, along with his father and wife, threatening them while the police stood by. Two months later he says he found his home ransacked, and police told him if he’d been there he would have been killed. That was it. Calabres and his family hid with a relative in another state for a month before coming to the U.S. on a tourist visa to visit his mother, who had been living with his grandmother in the Knoxville area for 18 years. His father, who couldn’t get a visa, had to remain behind, and Calabres now sends him half his salary and food packages. He and his wife, Roxana Marquez, also an artist, and his daughter arrived just after Christmas in 2015. He wept as he was reunited with his mother for the first time in almost half his life. But the move still felt risky. “When I took the plane, I was a little afraid,” he recalls. “The U.S. is fierce with illegal people trying to come in. I thought that probably people would be uncomfortable with me.” But when he arrived at the airport, he saw that his family had the only luggage wrapped in plastic and chains. He marveled that other people didn’t expect all their possessions to be stolen. It was a shock: “Look at this! This is a secure country!” he says. After arriving, the Calabres family applied for asylum and were granted it on a temporary basis while still awaiting their immigration interview. Calabres’ daughter is in fourth grade at A.L. Lotts Elementary School. Calabres helped A.L. Lotts students put together a production of The Nutcracker there. He had more time that first year, when he was working as a graphic designer from home, but he has since taken a job with Jewelry Television. He nevertheless hopes to be able to make time to direct a production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute at A.L. Lotts. Calabres isn’t used to having any
free time. He says he and his wife used to work from 6 a.m. to midnight seven days a week just to earn enough money for food, as Venezuela’s shortages grew outrageous. “We’d say, ‘Okay, we win the fight today. We eat today,’” he says. “The American dream is that you can live. “It’s a very wonderful thing that you can eat every day and that you can drink clean water.” Calabres published a short novel in Venezuela and is now writing his second, about immigrants. He has been interviewing other immigrants about what leads them to sacrifice their professions and relationships in order to leave. “I know a guy who crossed the desert—twice. I ask why,” Calabres says. “It’s love. People look for better things for their family, their kids. Everything is about love.”
Cedric Twizere Age: 21 Native Country: Rwanda Arrived in Knoxville: 2013
C
edric Twizere is a 21-year-old Pellissippi State Community College student and a Rwandan citizen—although he has never been to Rwanda. He was born in a refugee camp in Goma, Congo, where his family fled after the 1994 civil war and genocide in their home country. Rwanda’s two ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi, took turns killing each other as each got the upper hand. Twizere’s father was a private in the Hutu-controlled army, so when his mother tried to return to Rwanda in 1997, she received death threats, Twizere says. His family moved around Congo until his father died when Twizere was 8. After a brief stint in Kenya, where his mother was unable to make a living, she moved with Twizere and his sister to Zambia. There, she was able to open a grocery store. But there was no hope for an
education, or even work, for her children; the youth unemployment rate (ages 15 to 24) in Zambia hovers around 25 percent. His mother applied for refugee status with the U.N. for herself and her children around 2009. It took three years for them to be approved. “We went to interview after interview,” he says. “I lost hope because it took so long. You never know what country you’ll go to.” In 2012, they learned they would move to the United States. Then they underwent six months of medical exams and shots. “We didn’t find out we were coming until the day before,” Twizere says. “I didn’t believe it was real until we got here.” They spent their first night in New York after missing their connecting flight to Knoxville. “I saw snow,” he says. “The air was so cold. I felt like I had on nothing. I will never forget that day.” When he and his family arrived in Knoxville, it was March and the trees were bare. “I had never seen that before,” Twizere says. “I thought maybe they looked like that all the time.” It was a barren prospect. In this new city, Twizere’s family knew only the people at Cedar Springs Presbyterian Church, who sponsored them through Bridge Refugee Services. Twizere rode the bus to take English and G.E.D. classes, and did not let it bother him when some locals were rude to him about his accent. The slight-framed 17-year-old worked in maintenance at Custom Foods of America—hot, hard physical labor— but it enabled him to save money for a car. Then he could get a better job caring for people with mental disabilities, while also studying accounting. He will finish at Pellissippi State University in May and transfer to the University of Tennessee. “Even if the first job was hard, I could not have gotten a job in Zambia,” Twizere says quietly. “In Africa, I never would have thought I would learn to drive. I never would have thought I’d have a car. I never would have thought I’d go to college. College is so exciting. For me, it was like living a dream.” ◆
@KNOXMERCURY.COM
Read the full-length versions of these stories on our website. February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 19
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P rogram Notes
A ‘Dumb’ New Era The Lonetones regain momentum with a new lineup and their first new album in four years
F
or a band that’s been around, in various forms, for 15 years, the Lonetones didn’t have a lot of momentum when they started working on their new album. Dumbing It All Down, set for official release on Feb. 18, is the group’s first recording since 2012, and the third Lonetones record in a row with an almost completely different lineup. “We’re not very mindful of schedules—rules about releasing things,” says guitarist/singer/songwriter Steph Gunnoe. Gunnoe and her husband, Sean McCollough, are the core of the local folk/pop/rock band. They write all the Lonetones songs, and McCollough produces their albums. (Their musical partnership predates the Lonetones— they began playing together as an acoustic duo in 2000, shortly after they first met.) Both of them work full-time. A few years ago, not long
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Classical: La Bohéme
KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
after the band released its 2012 album Modern Victims, Gunnoe and McCollough bought an old house in South Knoxville and started making major renovations. Then the band’s original bassist, Maria Williams, decided to take a break. And then Steve Corrigan, the Lonetones’ drummer since 2008, quit. By the time Gunnoe and McCollough started work on the material for Dumbing It All Down, they were effectively starting from scratch. “This is the longest stint in between records since the band started,” McCollough says. But the delays and adjustments have been worth it. The home renovations McCollough and Gunnoe recently finished included a deluxe new home studio on the property—“It’s a much nicer space, a space you want to do creative things in,” McCollough says. Besides that, the new Lonetones lineup
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Music: Jennifer Higdon
is the band’s most accomplished, with ex-Black Lillies/Everybodyfields drummer Jamie Cook and the tag-team bass duo of Vince Ilagan (formerly of Justin Townes Earle’s band) and Bryn Davies (who’s played with Guy Clark and Jack White). Cellist Cecilia Miller rounds out the lineup, and local jazz vet Will Boyd contributed saxophone to several tracks. Dumbing It All Down may have taken a while to get made, but none of the disruption that preceded it is evident. The differences in McCollough and Gunnoe’s styles as songwriters—she tends toward the lyrical and introspective, while he demonstrates more straightforward classic-rock chops—feel less abrupt here than they have on previous Lonetones’ albums. “She’ll start with 15 pages of journals, all laid out on a table, and I usually just write it in my head,” McCollough says. But you can hear the distinction starting to blur on Dumbing It All Down; on the new record, McCollough and Gunnoe sound less like two distinct songwriters than partners, with each adding another perspective to the others’ imaginative vision. Despite all the turbulence in getting the record finished, Gunnoe and McCollough sound perfectly content with where the Lonetones fit in their lives. “We play music sporadically,” McCollough says. “It’s not the only thing that connects us. It’s a big thing and a thing we enjoy very much, but it’s not the only thing.” The Lonetones will play a CD release show at Open Chord Music (8502 Kingston Pike) on Saturday, Feb. 18, at 8 p.m. Admission is $5/$10 for a copy of the CD. All ages. (While it’s the Lonetones’ big show, they’re playing first—North Carolina indie-folk band Bombadil headlines.) Visit thelonetones.com or openchordmusic.com for info. —Matthew Everett
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Clean Slate EX-MOBILITY CHIEF GUITARIST TESTS HIS NEW BAND’S ONGOING EVOLUTION Mobility Chief, one of Knoxville’s most dynamic prog acts, pulled the plug in June 2015. There was no animosity, only the inevitable creative tensions of a democratic rock band. Now, guitarist Ryan Vowell has seized the opportunity of a clean slate, re-evaluating a backlog of riffs and soundscapes that never blossomed with his former bandmates. First, he ventured into post-metal territory by collaborating with drummer Brad Hebert and playing two shows last year. Now Vowell is taking a broader approach with his new project, Aelude. The band’s earliest material leans toward angular, atmospheric post-rock, but Vowell hopes to avoid pigeonholing himself. He envisions Aelude as an evolving “collective” designed to continuously reinterpret his shapeshifting experiments. “There are also several electronic and acoustic ideas I want to explore—just waiting for the right personnel,” he says. “A cellist or other string player and/or someone familiar with controllerism would be a welcome addition at this point. I don’t want Aelude to be confined to one sound, hence the name.” While Vowell expects listeners to detect traces of Mobility Chief’s fluid, fusion-inspired sound, he emphasizes that the songs he’s revisiting never meshed with his old band’s “organic approach.” The first version of Aelude—a “quasi-reunion of Mobility Chief,” Vowell says, reuniting him with bassist Graham Waldrip—debuted onstage with a warm-up gig last week at the North Knoxville community art gallery Purple Polilla. But a more intimidating test comes Friday night at Preservation Pub, an ideal space to showcase Aelude at its pivotal infancy. “Once the songs evolve, then we can focus on recording,” he says. “We aren’t short on material. At this point, our focus is playing out to anyone who will give us the opportunity.” Aelude plays with Atlanta prog-pop band Chew at Preservation Pub (28 Market Square) on Friday, Feb. 10, at 10 p.m. Admission is $5. 21 and up. Visit scruffycity.com or facebook.com/ aelude. —Ryan Reed
Art: Virtual Views
Classical
Stage Drama Knoxville Opera restores the drama to Puccini’s romantic masterpiece BY ALAN SHERROD
D
espite the stereotypical images that have traditionally surrounded opera and opera singers, the changing reality of opera over the last 30 years or so has been something quite different. While music remains opera’s absolute top priority, opera companies and their audiences have embraced changes not just in the physical productions, such as live HD broadcasts, but also in the qualities they demand from singers. Among those demands are that performers recognize that opera is, at its heart, theater, and that in addition to being gifted singers, they must also be believable actors. One beneficiary of opera’s evolving priorities has certainly been Puccini’s La Bohème, a romantic story about a group of poor young artists and intellectuals in Paris in the 1830s. In many of the earlier 20th-century productions, even in the largest opera houses of the world, the casting of the two romantic leads—the poet Rodolfo and his neighbor, Mimi—resulted in two notable singers chosen solely for their voices, often lacking much physical dramatic ability or the ability to sell believable
romantic characters. Those days appear to be over. In this weekend’s Knoxville Opera production of La Bohème, soprano Jessica Rose Cambio and tenor Richard Troxell take on the roles of Mimi and Rodolfo, and they intend to make their with the portrayals believable. Although the pair had never worked together before, both understand the importance of fi nding that chemistry. “I think we got a sense of each other right away, that this was going to work well,” Troxell says. “You have to be open to it. If you aren’t open to it, you’re going to be fighting such a force, especially in a romantic opera like La Bohème.” “Richard is very open and flexible and personable, but that doesn’t always happen,” Cambio says. “The chemistry with Richard has been solid because we had such a good dialogue from the very beginning. And laughing is really, really important.” Cambio is making her fi rst appearance with Knoxville Opera, but she comes to the company with some recent laudable credits. Last year, in the September production of the
Opera is, at its heart, theater— in addition to being gifted singers, performers must also be believable actors.
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resurrected New York City Opera, she sang the role of Nedda in Pagliacci. “Cambio sang Nedda with a full-bodied Italianate soprano while also navigating the character’s repugnant pride and endearing longing,” wrote a reviewer for WQXR , New York’s classical-music radio station. “Cambio sings with agile coloratura and mostly shimmering sound,” wrote Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times. Troxell, who appeared in the 1999 Knoxville Opera production of The Barber of Seville, has had a diverse career that has included everything from fi lmed opera (a 1996 production of Madame Butterfly) to the role of Borsa in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2016 production of Rigoletto. Julia Lima, in the role of the feisty Musetta, makes her third appearance with Knoxville Opera. Craig Verm, in his KO debut, will sing the role of the painter Marcello, Musetta’s on-and-off lover. At the helm is stage director Brian Deedrick, who is directing all three of Knoxville Opera’s productions this season. Brian Salesky, Knoxville Opera’s executive director, will conduct the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. ◆
WHAT
Knoxville Opera: La Bohème
Live Music | Dancing | Spirits | Food & Fun! 865-525-6101 • KNOXART.ORG
SELECTED FRIDAYS @ 6:00 - 8:30pm
February 10th
with Wallace Coleman Band
February 24th
“Fat Friday Mardi Gras” with Roux Du Bayou
March 10th
with Kelle Jolly & The Women in Jazz Jam Festival Band
WHERE
Tennessee Theatre (604 S. Gay St.)
WHEN
Friday, Feb. 10, at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 12, at 2:30 p.m.
HOW MUCH $21-$99
865-525-6101 KNOXART.ORG LIKE US ON c
ALIVE AFTER FIVE KNOXVILLE MUSEUM OF @RT
INFO
knoxvillopera.com
February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 21
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Music
Extended Stay Jennifer Higdon, one of America’s most celebrated composers, returns to East Tennessee for a week-long residency at UT BY ALAN SHERROD
S
ome people chase fame. For others, celebrity seems to chase them—their talents reveal themselves at decisive moments, doors of opportunity swing open unexpectedly, and chance decisions turn into major life successes. Fame has chased—and found—composer Jennifer Higdon, one of the most well-known contemporary American composers. Quite modestly, Higdon describes her music as “melodic, rhythmic, and audience-friendly,” although that description severely understates the attraction of instrumental colors, textures, and evocatively fresh mixtures of percussion against strings and woodwinds throughout her work. This also certainly explains the often hard-to-describe emotional effect that her pieces bring to listeners. Born in Brooklyn, the 54-year-old Grammy and Pulitzer Prize winner spent eight of her formative years in the Maryville area, graduating from Heritage High School in 1981. While there, she gravitated toward music performance, picking up the flute at age 15 and performing in her highschool band. Attending a summer flute camp in Bowling Green, Ohio, before her senior year, Higdon met flutist Judith Bentley, an event that encouraged her to attend Bowling Green State University as an undergraduate and study with her there. Although her late start in music and lack of classical-music training presented obstacles for her as a performer, it was at Bowling Green that Higdon first tried her hand at composing. “Judy Bentley got me started composing by giving me a small assignment to write a two-minute piece for flute and piano,” Higdon
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
says. “I loved it. It’s an amazing thing to put notes on a page and then watch people play those notes.” Higdon later took an artist diploma in music composition from the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, and later earned a Ph.D. in music composition from the University of Pennsylvania. “There were a few times where big things happened that catapulted my career forward,” Higdon says. “The biggest thing was having the Philadelphia Orchestra take a chance on me, an unknown composer, by commissioning me to write a large work (Concerto for Orchestra in 2002) and then they premiered it at the national orchestral convention in front of 3,400 orchestra managers. My entire career could have gone down in flames in one night, but lucky for me, it went well and launched me like a rocket.” Since then, Higdon’s works have been performed several hundred times every season by orchestras around the world. Higdon’s blue cathedral, from 1999, written in memory of her younger brother, Andrew Blue Higdon, ranks among the most performed contemporary orchestral works the U.S. The Knoxville Symphony Orchestra performed it last season under guest conductor Eckart Preu. 2010 was a major year for Higdon: She won the Pulitzer for music for her Violin Concerto, a work commissioned by a group of orchestras and premiered by celebrity violinist Hilary Hahn and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. The same year, Higdon won a Grammy for her Percussion Concerto. That work will be performed by Andy Bliss and the UT Wind Ensemble as part of the Higdon residency concerts.
In 2015, Higdon made her first venture into opera. Her distinctive approach to tonal composition in vocal, choral, and orchestral music yielded Cold Mountain, with a libretto by Gene Scheer and based on Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel of the same name. The work was premiered in sellout performances at Santa Fe Opera. New music and new audiences for classical music are topics of great interest to Higdon. “I think audiences are now much more open to new music than they were 10 or 15 years ago,” she says. “And I think part of this has to do with the fact that there are many more different styles of contemporary music. So if an audience member doesn’t like one kind of music, I guarantee that there will be some other kind of new music that they will like. But it’s fascinating how audiences have come to the point where they ask for new music, because they’re interested in something new.”
Donald Ryder, the director of bands at UT, attended Bowling Green with Higdon and has stayed in touch with her during her meteoric rise. He’s been interested for several years in having her visit Knoxville and interact with the students who perform her music. He’s finally arranged a series of events this month—concerts, lectures, and classes—that will celebrate the composer and her career. Higdon herself will attend. There are three main concerts as part of the week-long event, each featuring a separate area of the music school. On Sunday, Feb. 19, the UT Symphony Orchestra will perform two of Higdon’s works on an hourlong concert: Fanfare Ritmico, from 1999, and The Singing Rooms, from 2007. “I wanted to do Fanfare Ritmico because the music is accessible to good college orchestras, and very accessible to audiences,” says James Fellenbaum, director of the UT Symphony. “Then, upon exploring a number of her pieces, I came across
The Singing Rooms. I just loved it from the very first moment. I’ve always looked at it as a choral/ orchestral piece that has a fabulous solo violin part that helps tell the story. I think she originally conceived it as a violin concerto and then chorus was added into it.” On Tuesday, Feb. 21, Higdon’s chamber music will be the focus of a recital with UT faculty members Wesley Baldwin (cello) and Shelly Binder (flute) and violinist Sean Claire, of KSO, and soprano Melisa Barrick Baldwin. Ryder’s UT Wind Ensemble is the featured group on the Thursday, Feb. 23 concert, which will feature UT faculty percussionist Andy Bliss in Higdon’s Grammy-winning Percussion Concerto. The program also includes Mysterium and Kelly’s Field. Ryder feels that Higdon’s approachability will be an asset for the students, although there is one caveat: Higdon doesn’t like to get involved in technical analysis of her music. “Higdon wants to stay on the emotional and creative side of discussions of her music,” Ryder says. “I’m not sure that all of the students fully understand the magnitude of her level as a composer. But the fact that they are going to get to spend a week with her will end up being a unique experience in their careers.”◆
WHAT
A Celebration of Jennifer Higdon
WHERE
The University of Tennessee
WHEN
Feb. 17-23
HOW MUCH Free
INFO
music.utk.edu/higdon
Ar t
Electronic Interaction The future of electronic art opens up at KMA’s new Virtual Views group exhibit BY DENISE STEWART-SANABRIA
T
here is a presence to electronic and mechanical art that can engage your senses in a deeply personal way. A gallery filled with new media works always has its own sounds and atmosphere. The space is darkened to allow the light to come mainly from the art. The hums and whirs they produce lend the glowing and moving work their own life force. The Knoxville Museum of Art is no stranger to displaying art using electronic new media; the museum’s most recent exhibit, presented in conjunction with the upcoming Big Ears music, art, and film festival, scheduled for March 23-26, focuses on the work of nine new-media artists drawn from the Thoma Foundation: Jim Campbell, Craig Dorety, John Gerrard, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Alan Rath, Daniel Rozin, Björn Schülke, Jennifer Steinkamp, and Leo Villareal. Before you even step foot into the ground-floor gallery where Virtual Views: Digital Art From the Thoma Foundation is located, you encounter Rozin’s “Selfish Gene Mirror.” The large-screen monitor acts as a mirror, processing what and whoever stands
in front of it. The image is processed through a filter that resembles a digital watercolor filter. The slow speed of the interaction allows the viewer to understand how the pixels move and reform. Though Rozin’s piece was created as an open invitation for interaction, it is also an irresistible location for selfies. The largest work on view is Steinkamp’s “Bouquet 1.” The massive computer-generated animation of botanical specimens pulses on the wall and almost convinces you it’s a hologram. There is something almost spidery about the hypnotic movement that lends a feeling of potential threat, but the greens and pinks soften the instinctive reaction. Leo Villareal’s “Big Bang,” a circular arrangement of 1,600 programmed LEDs, is engaged in a continuous reinvention of patterns and colors. The mathematical sequence involved is very deliberate— the micro controller that runs the random sequences in one-second intervals comes up with more patterns than the seconds in the average human lifespan. The theoretical
nature of this is ironic—an average human life will last a lot longer than any computer circuitry. This, of course, is the biggest problem with electronic media. It is not archival—at least not yet. No electronic exhibit is complete without some mention of surveillance and paranoia. Schülke’s “Spider Drone #3” is part drone, part video camera, mounted high on a wall like an alien insect getting ready to strike. Motion sensors rouse it from dormancy, and its little propeller arms and pulley system rotate it about as it tracks the humans in its territory. Installed on a shelf directly to its right is Rath’s “Electric Eyes.” The tubular specimen vial contains two video screens, one for each eye. They blink, stare, and seem to watch you as you move past. The detachment from any other anatomy gives it a creepy android sensibility. After you’ve been tracked and surreptitiously watched, it is only fitting to have your fingerprints recorded. Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive “Pulse Index” requires the viewer to stick her index finger into a digital screening recess mounted next to a large vertical video screen. Your fingerprint is then slowly scanned and uploaded into various-sized tiled and tinted images that recede back into infinity. (It only seemed to scan a partial print, however, so any stored data could not be hacked by evildoers and used for nefarious purposes.) Campbell has upped the technological complexity of his work since his solo exhibit at KMA in 2006. “Home Movies, Pause” is a complex grid of small synchronized LEDs that individually project what fuses as one massive image on the wall. Each individual projector has only a section of the pixels of a deliberately low-resolution image file. The choice of low-resolution imagery is critical to the emotional impact of his work. The image is blurry and vague, like a partially recalled dream or memory. The missing details erode the image like time itself. Dorety’s “Offset Circles-Yellow Flowering Tree Against Blue Sky” layers shaped and painted aluminum
A&E
with LEDs. If glimpsed quickly, it kind of looks like a dissected sound speaker, but it isn’t a woofer you are looking at. It’s really a light box. Unseen strands of LEDs hide behind the aluminum circles. My guess is they are only yellow and blue lights, but as they go through an animation sequence, they mix to also make greens. When the entire sequence is watched, it has the feel of a time-lapse animation showing what the light of the sun and moon does to an object over the course of one day. The last piece, Gerrard’s “Dust Storm (Manter, Kansas),” appears at first to be a more traditional video, but it is actually an animation using 3-D gaming techniques to fuse contemporary and historic photographs. Though its imagery is culled from the past, it could also appear to predict a dystopian future of environmental damage from climate change. The future of electronic media in art seems to be absolutely limitless when you examine this exhibit, not only because a fair variety of approaches is represented, but because you understand that this is just the beginning. The technology will continue to expand, improve, and be readily available to more academic programs, ensuring a steady supply of practitioners. ◆
WHAT
Virtual Views: Digital Art From the Thoma Foundation
WHERE
Knoxville Museum of Art (1050 World’s Fair Park Drive)
WHEN
Through April 16
HOW MUCH Free
INFO
knoxart.org
February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 23
CALENDAR MUSIC
Thursday, Feb. 9 COIN • The Concourse • 8PM • All ages. Visit internationalknox.com. • $12-$15 DAY AND AGE WITH EYELET • Pilot Light • 9PM • 18 and up. • $5 STARS REGARDLESS • Barley’s • 6PM • FREE THE JONNY MONSTER BAND • Barley’s • 10PM STARS REGARDLESS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 6PM • The WDVX 6 O’Clock Swerve is weekly musical trip with talented regional artists featuring live performances and insightful interviews in a living room atmosphere. • FREE FIRESIDE COLLECTIVE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 8PM THE REAL LIFE HEAVIES • Preservation Pub • 10PM Friday, Feb. 10 ALIVE AFTER FIVE: WALLACE COLEMAN • Knoxville Museum of Art • 6PM • A native of Morristown, TN, Wallace Coleman was captivated by blues music as a young boy listening to Nashville’s WLAC on the radio. Coleman left Tennessee in 1956 to find work in Cleveland, Ohio, and, to his delight, an active blues community where Jimmy Reed, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, Elmore James, B.B. King and others that he had heard on the radio came to perform live. A self-taught musician, Coleman was playing harmonica in Guitar Slim’s band when he caught the ear of Robert Lockwood, Jr., stepson of legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. He played in Lockwood’s band for ten years and performed on the Grammy nominated CD “I Gotta Find Me A Woman.” Coleman formed his own band in 1997, and his fifth CD, “Blues in the Wind”, is a tribute to Lockwood. Visit knoxart.org. • $10-$15 BRAVE THE ROYALS WITH LUMINOTH, INDIE LAGONE AND THE BILLY WIDGETS • The Open Chord • 7:30PM • All ages. • $8-$10 FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 8PM • Jason Thompson’s band doesn’t play bebop, the mainstay of the American saxman for more than half a century. He prefers to do something different. Frog and Toad can sound more old-fashioned than bebop, with Dixieland and ragtime tunes. But then, in the same set, they’ll sound more modern than bebop, with funk or fusion, or something original he wrote last week. • FREE BADLANDS • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 9PM PAPADOSIO WITH JAW GEMS • The International • 10PM • 18 and up. Visit internationalknox.com. • $15-$20 THE BROOMESTIX • Barley’s • 10PM KEVIN WHITFIELD • Vienna Coffee House (Maryville) • 6PM • FREE FOLK SOUL REVIVAL • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • FREE PHOEBE HUNT AND THE GATHERERS WITH BEN MANEY AND YASAMEEN • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM CANEY CREEK COMPANY WITH BLOND BONES • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 9PM THE JOHN SUTTON BAND • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM HYPERKRANK WITH GRAVE MENTALITY AND COFFINWOMB • Pilot Light • 10PM • 18 and up. • $5 THE POP ROX • Wild Wing Cafe • 10PM THE GOOD BAD KIDS • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM CHEW WITH ALEUDE • Preservation Pub • 10PM • See preview on page TK. Saturday, Feb. 11 JANGLING SPARROWS • Sugarlands Distilling Co. 24
KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
Thursday, Feb. 9 - Sunday, Feb. 26
(Gatlinburg) • 6PM • FREE COUNTY WIDE • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 9PM ELEPHANTE • The Concourse • 9PM • 18 and up. • $12-$15 COL. BRUCE HAMPTON • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Bruce Hampton is a surrealist American musician. In the late 1960s he was a founding member of Atlanta, Georgia’s avant-garde Hampton Grease Band. Adopting the moniker Colonel Hampton B. Coles, Retired or alternatively Col. Bruce Hampton Ret., and sometimes playing a sort of dwarf guitar called a “chazoid”, he later formed several other bands. Some of those band names include The Late Bronze Age, The Aquarium Rescue Unit, The Fiji Mariners, The Codetalkers, The Quark Alliance, Pharaoh Gummitt, and Madrid Express. • $5 SCOTT MILLER • Laurel Theater • 8PM • Naturalized Knoxvillian Scott Miller’s genuine interest and identity with the lore of the South and the Civil War, along with his intelligent and take-no-prisoners lyrics, set him apart from other roots rock artists and have propelled him to national and international prominence. • $19 CHRIS LONG • Vienna Coffee House (Maryville) • 6PM • FREE MEOB WITH SWEET YEARS AND GAMENIGHT • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM THE GREEN DAY XPERIENCE WITH COVALENCE • The Open Chord • 8PM • A tribute to the pop-punk giants. All ages. • $5-$8 RANDY WOODY AND THE SOUTHBOUND BAND • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 9PM WONKY TONK • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 9PM THE DIRTY DOUGS • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM HARD WIRED • Wild Wing Cafe • 10PM THE CRUMBSNATCHERS • Preservation Pub • 10PM
THE SLOVENE INDEPENDENT BIENNIAL Emporium Center for Arts and Culture (100 S. Gay St.) • Through Feb. 24 • knoxalliance.com
Slovenia is the small western edge of what used to be Yugoslavia. With only slightly more than two million citizens, and open borders, the country has a vibrant community of graphic designers producing contemporary illustration and a small but progressive contemporary art scene. The 50 artists represented in the Slovene Independent Biennial are mostly fairly young— some of them are still enrolled in graduate programs. Some, such as jewelry designer Olga Košica and her graphic designer partner Rok Marinšek, are multipurpose entrepreneurs, who not only are producing products, from jewelry to clothing, but also doing their own skilled graphic design to promote their work. The variety of work represented is informed by sources that range from Slovenia’s traditional folk art to street art. What is really fascinating about this exhibit is that each brief artist bio refers to the use or client for the work shown. (I noticed only one image marked with a copyright in the entire exhibit, which made me curious about any problems with intellectual theft they might have in Slovenia.) Many pieces had the names of the company that commissioned them listed, and just as many appeared to be work from a portfolio, or perhaps graduate thesis work. One piece—a street-art bubble-letter design by Ron Preinfalk, was “made in the city while drinking coffee.” There appear to be as many underemployed graphic designers in Slovenia as there are here.
Sunday, Feb. 12 SUNDAY JAZZ BRUNCH • Downtown Grill and Brewery • 11AM • Knoxville’s coolest jazz artists perform every Sunday. • FREE SHIFFLETT’S JAZZ BENEDICT • The Bistro at the Bijou • 12PM • Live jazz. • FREE PALE ROOT • Barley’s • 8PM ROBINELLA • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 7PM SCHWIZZ • Preservation Pub • 10PM
This Biennial was launched eight years ago with a manifesto that demands noncensorship. Since Slovenia scores one point higher on the 2016 World Press Freedom Index than the United States, it must be memories of the past that made them include that.
Monday, Feb. 13 JACK AND THE BEAR • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM MISTER F WITH EARPHORIK • Preservation Pub • 10PM Tuesday, Feb. 14 MATT NELSON, GARRIT TILLMAN, AND JAKE EDWARD SMITH • Pilot Light • 6PM • A free live improv showcase. 18 and up. • FREE TRAPDOOR SOCIAL WITH HOLIDAY, ROBINSON PARK, AND FIELD NOTES • The Open Chord • 7PM • WNFZ’s Valentine’s Day bash. All ages. • $8-$10 SWITCHFOOT WITH RELIENT K • The Mill and Mine • 7:30PM • Where the Light Shines Through, Switchfoot’s 10th studio album, is an old-soul, rock-n-roll record with new eyes. • $33.50-$36 KJO: JAZZ IS FOR LOVERS WITH CARMEN BRADFORD • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • Carmen Bradford returns to Knoxville to celebrate 100 years of Ella Fitzgerald. Visit knoxjazz.org. • $35.50 KUKULY AND THE GYPSY FUEGO • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM PRESERVATION PUB • 10PM Wednesday, Feb. 15
Since we are looking at this exhibit through American eyes, it is a challenge to think which pieces might be considered edgy in Slovenia. Perhaps the close-up of a woman breastfeeding a plastic doll, by Eva Lucija Kozak, might provoke negative commentary? Would Martej Jarc’s fairly comic photos of punching bags with screen-printed images of artists’ faces on them offend, or could the demolished construction setup refer to a possible historical event of political violence? Many of the artists have won national and international awards, and some are no longer living in Slovenia. One is in the graduate art program at Yale University. This project made its way to the Knoxville Art and Culture Alliance by way of the Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in Washington, the Republic of Slovenia Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Slovene Consulate in Tennessee, Kino Šiška, and the Tretaroka Association. On display Feb. 3-24. (Denise Stewart-Sanabria)
31
Spotlight: The Public Cinema: Tower
CALENDAR FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 6:30PM • Jason Thompson’s band doesn’t play bebop, the mainstay of the American saxman for more than half a century. He prefers to do something different. Frog and Toad can sound more old-fashioned than bebop, with Dixieland and ragtime tunes. • FREE ISAIAH RASHAD • The Concourse • 8PM • 18 and up. Visit internationalknox.com. • $15-$65 THE CAM DUFFY BAND • Preservation Pub • 10PM WITHERED WITH IMMORTAL BIRD • Pilot Light • 9:30PM • Withered with Immortal Bird • 374 • Withered is a tortured blackened doom/death metal band from Atlanta, Ga., established in 2003 to focus on masochistic introspection while traversing many sub-genres of extreme metal. 18 and up. • $8 Thursday, Feb. 16 THE KNOX COUNTY JUG STOMPERS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 6PM • The WDVX 6 O’Clock Swerve is weekly musical trip with talented regional artists featuring live performances and insightful interviews in a living room atmosphere. • FREE RUFUS WAINWRIGHT • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • Praised by the New York Times for his “genuine originality,” Rufus Wainwright has established himself as one of the great male vocalists and songwriters of his generation. The New York-born, Montreal-raised singer songwriter has released seven studio albums, three DVDs, and three live albums, including the fantastic Grammy nominated Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall, which captured his celebrated Judy Garland tribute performance. • $42 SPAFFORD • The Concourse • 9PM • 18 and up. • $5 STRAHAN AND THE GOOD NEIGHBORS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM MIKE AND THE MOON PIES • Preservation Pub • 10PM Friday, Feb. 17 BLUE PLATE SPECIAL ROAD SHOW: PISTOL CREEK CATCH OF THE DAY WITH JAY CLARK AND THE TENNESSEE TREE BEAVERS • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 12PM • FREE PAT REEDY AND THE LONG TIME GONERS • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 4PM • Those true, hardcore fans of music always want to keep digging until they find that original nugget of a musical movement or influence, or in the case of Pat Reedy, the revitalization of a style of country and roots that has been forgotten by neglect throughout the generations. • FREE ERIC CALDWELL • Vienna Coffee House (Maryville) • 6PM • FREE ANDY SNEED • Bluetick Brewery (Maryville • 7PM FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 8PM • FREE EMI SUNSHINE • The Open Chord • 8PM • The local country music tween sensation. All ages. • $15-$18 AARON KIRBY AND SOUTHERN REVELATION • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 9PM THE BREAKFAST CLUB • The Concourse • 9PM • Formed in 1993, the group was the first of its kind. The mission was simple: create an entertainment group that embodied the enigmatic, creative, and buoyant spirit of music and live performances of the original MTV generation of the 1980’s. 18 and up. • $8 PMA • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM EXCISION WITH COOKIE MONSTA, BARELY ALIVE, AND DION TIMMER • The International • 10PM • Excision shows are like no other- a virtual apocalypse of twisting and morphing sounds turn massive crowds into a frenzy, as virtual walls of bass are relentlessly impaled time and time again upon their fragile bodies and ears. 18 and up.
THE EVENT SWEEPING THE NATION IS COMING TO KNOXVILLE!
Visit internationalknox.com. • $29.95-$60 PAT REEDY AND THE LONGTIME GONERS • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM BRENDAN JAMES WRIGHT AND THE WRONGS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM KISS ARMY • Wild Wing Cafe • 10PM THE LAWSUITS • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM THE WILD THINGS • Preservation Pub • 10PM MAREN MORRIS • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • In the five songs of her EP, it’s easy to discover all of the diverse and dynamic sides that make up Maren Morris – from the confident, danceable swagger of “80s Mercedes,” to the island jam of “Drunk Girls Don’t Cry,” and the soulful confessions of “Wish I Was.” And, of course, the thrilling pop-country-gospel amalgam of “My Church,” a track that was written while Morris was cruising along in her car listening to the radio and had an epiphany: that here’s something downright spiritual to letting your body and mind be enveloped by the power of music. • $16.50-$20 Saturday, Feb. 18 DANA SIPOS • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 6PM • FREE ROSCOE MORGAN • Vienna Coffee House (Maryville) • 6PM • FREE ST. PAUL AND THE BROKEN BONES • The Mill and Mine • 8PM • Sea of Noise, the second full-length album by St. Paul and the Broken Bones, marks a quantum leap in sound and style for the high-voltage Birmingham, Alabama-based band. Produced by Paul Butler and recorded at Nashville’s Sound Emporium, the group’s sophomore effort features an expanded eight-piece lineup of the widely praised soul-based rock unit. • $25-$28 ERICK BAKER • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • Since releasing his debut EP, It’s Getting Too Late To Say It’s Early, in 2008, Knoxville singer-songwriter Erick Baker has played over 1,000 shows, performed in front of crowds over 10,000 people, shared a tour bus with Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, and heard the sound of a sold-out theater singing one of my songs in unison back to me. Visit knoxbijou.com or erickbaker.com. • $25 DIRTY SOUL REVIVAL • The Shed at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson (Maryville) • 8PM • $5 THE MARSHALL TUCKER BAND • Cotton Eyed Joe • 9PM • In the early fall of 1973 The Marshall Tucker Band was still a young and hungry group out to prove themselves every time they hit the stage. Their debut album had already spawned numerous hits. The band’s recent release of their Live! From Englishtown album is a time capsule from that period. As it turned out, the collective talents of The Marshall Tucker Band took them very far indeed. 18 and up. • $20 SHADY BANKS • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM EXIT 60 • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 9PM ELECTRIC DARLING WITH THE BURNIN’ HERMANS • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM SMOOTH SAILOR • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM LUTHI • Preservation Pub • 10PM • Playing hard on a host of influences, from Curtis Mayfield to LCD Soundsystem, the band weaves its way through layers of sound and space while never compromising danceability, a feel that encompasses the whole of their latest EP, Home Again. 21 and up. SOUTHERN REBELLION • Wild Wing Cafe • 10PM CICADA RHYTHM • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM BOMBADIL WITH THE LONETONES • The Open Chord • 8PM • The restless folk-rock/Americana band the Lonetoneswill release their fifth album, Dumbing It All Down, in February. • $5-$10 • See Program Notes on page 20.
ALL YOU CARE TO TASTE 60 BEERS/40 BOURBONS pLOTS OF BBQ pTASTING THEATER CLASSES pARTISTS & BREWERANIA pTHE SHRINE OF SWINE pLIVE MUSIC & MUCH MORE!
ADMISSION OPTIONS: VIP Tasting Glass: $49 advance
VALID NOON - 6PM, Includes admission into the event, a souvenir
tasting glass, unlimited beer and bourbon sampling, TWO EXTRA hours of tastes, a collectible lanyard and all live entertainment.
Regular Tasting Glass: $35 advance
VALID 2PM - 6PM, Includes admission into the event, a souvenir
tasting glass, unlimited beer & bourbon sampling, all live entertainment.
Designated Driver Ticket: $25
VALID NOON - 6PM, Includes admission into the event only. A portion of the proceeds to benefit:
WWW.BEERANDBOURBON.COM Tickets are non-refundable. Show is rain or shine. Please drink responsibly. Advance ticket sales close 05/17/17. On-site tickets subject to tax.
February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 25
CALENDAR Sunday, Feb. 19 SUNDAY JAZZ BRUNCH • Downtown Grill and Brewery • 11AM • Knoxville’s coolest jazz artists perform every Sunday. • FREE SHIFFLETT’S JAZZ BENEDICT • The Bistro at the Bijou • 12PM • Live jazz. • FREE BAREFOOT SANCTUARY • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM BLACKWATER MOJO • Preservation Pub • 10PM Monday, Feb. 20 NOBUNNY WITH THELMA AND THE SLEAZE AND EX-GOLD • Pilot Light • 9:30PM • The raucous rabbit’s music is a intoxicating concoction of all the rights and wrongs that make up the heart and the soul of real rock n roll. 18 and up. • $10 THE DIRK QUINN BAND • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM THIEVES OF SUNRISE • Preservation Pub • 10PM Tuesday, Feb. 21 DEE DEE BROGAN WITH LUCY WOODWARD • The Open Chord • 8PM • Whether singing on the back porch bar stool, a stage with bright lights, or an intimate dark little joint, Dee Dee Brogan brings a sultry innocence with a mix of powerful pop to her listeners. All ages. • $8-$10 SALLY AND GEORGE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM Wednesday, Feb. 22 FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 6:30PM • FREE JAMESTOWN REVIVAL AND THE RECORD COMPANY • Bijou
Thursday, Feb. 9 - Sunday, Feb. 26
Theatre • 7:30PM • The Record Company write and play raw, sincere rock n’ roll. Influenced by the rough honesty of their heroes--bluesmen like John Lee Hooker, early punk bands like The Stooges, and rock greats like The Rolling Stones--their sound incorporates slide guitar, distorted bass, a garage-sale Ludwig drum kit and the heartland-hued voice of Chris Vos, who grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm. • $20 TINNAROSE WITH MARE VITA • Pilot Light • 9PM • 18 and up. • $5 ELI AUGUST AND THE ABANDONED BUILDINGS • Preservation Pub • 10PM Thursday, Feb. 23 BRANDON FULSON • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 6PM • The WDVX 6 O’Clock Swerve is weekly musical trip with talented regional artists featuring live performances and insightful interviews in a living room atmosphere. • FREE CINDY ALEXANDER • The Open Chord • 8PM • Thanks to internet exposure and a loyal international fan base, this indie artist has been able to travel the world with music as the key to her adventure. Known for songs that people sing along with, lyrics they quote to their friends, and a wicked sense of humor in between poignant songwriting, her live performances have charmed audiences and critics alike. • $8-$10 FIRESIDE COLLECTIVE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM THE ALLEN THOMPSON BAND • Preservation Pub • 10PM MARGO PRICE • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • It only takes Margo Price about twenty-eight seconds to convince you that
THE DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES PRESENTS THE DAVID L. DUNGAN MEMORIAL LECTURE SERIES
Sexual (Im)morality in Early Christianity Thursday, February 16, 2017 at 5:30 PM Alumni Memorial Building, Cox Auditorium
SPEAKER: DALE B. MARTIN Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies, Yale University Free and open to the public.
26
KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
religiousstudies.utk.edu
you’re hearing the arrival of a singular new talent. “Hands of Time,” the opener on Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, is an invitation, a mission statement and a starkly poetic summary of the 32-year old singer’s life, all in one knockout, self-penned punch.Visit margoprice.net or ticketmaster.com. • $18 Friday, Feb. 24 ALIVE AFTER FIVE: ROUX DU BAYOU • Knoxville Museum of Art • 6PM • Led by Paul Gregoire from Dulac, Louisiana, Roux du Bayou plays authentic cajun, zydeco, swamp pop, mardi gras music, and more. Visit knoxart.org. • $5-$10 WOMEN’S EQUITY FOUNDATION LEADING LADIES • Vienna Coffee House (Maryville) • 6PM • FREE HAZEL WITH RAVINER, THE MONDAY MOVEMENT, DANGER SCENE, AND KERCHIEF • The Open Chord • 7PM • Indie synth pop from Knoxville and Nashville. • $8-$10 FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 8PM • FREE DAN + SHAY • Tennessee Theatre • 8PM • The duo – Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney – have literally been obsessing over the song selection for their aptly titled sophomore album Obsessed. Visit tennesseetheatre.com.” • $25-$49 CARY MORIN • Preservation Pub • 8PM PORCH 40 • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM DIRTY POOL • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 9PM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT WITH FIRESIDE COLLECTIVE • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM AFTAH PARTY • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM RAMAJAY INTERCOASTAL • Wild Wing Cafe • 10PM
THE BEARDED • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM ANNABELLE’S CURSE WITH TIME SAWYER • Preservation Pub • 10PM MOON TAXI • The Mill and Mine • 9PM • The members of Moon Taxi are no strangers to the stage. Hailing from Nashville, the five-piece formed in 2006 and set out to conquer the Southeast with their unforgettable live set. Nine years later, they’ve amassed over one thousand shows and released two albums, Cabaret (2012) and Mountains Beaches Cities (2013). • $25-$45 Saturday, Feb. 25 THIS SIDE OF 49 • Vienna Coffee House (Maryville) • 6PM • FREE DIERKS BENTLEY WITH COLE SWINDELL AND JON PARDI • Thompson-Boling Arena • 7:30PM • Seven albums into one of country music’s most respected and most unpredictable careers, award-winning singer/songwriter Dierks Bentley continues to grow. His latest evolution comes in the form of Riser, his 2014 album. • $34.75$54.75 FATHER MISTY AND THE BIG ROCK • Preservation Pub • 8PM DEMON WAFFLE WITH SENRYU, MOJO:FLOW, AND KRISTEN FORD • The Open Chord • 8PM • Ska-pop from Atlanta. All ages. • $8-$10 THE MATTHEW HICKEY BAND • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 9PM FISH STICKS • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM SWEET YEARS • Pilot Light • 10PM • Sweet Years’ second EP, Tough Season, offers a great overview of a sound that falls somewhere between early Merge Records alt-punk
CALENDAR and earnest Polyvinyl-style arpeggiation. (Certain rough edges also directly recall Knoxville’s own Royal Bangs, with whom guitarist Dakota Smith joined up late last year.) Recording and releasing the five-song burst themselves in little over a month, the band was intent on having the music ready for Knoxville’s windows-down, fist-pumping warm weather needs. They’re celebrating the release of their debut album and a new video. 18 and up. • $5 THE GO ROUNDS WITH HOLY GHOST TENT REVIVAL • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM THE BLAIR EXPERIENCE • Wild Wing Cafe • 10PM THE WAY DOWN WANDERERS • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM THE COVER LETTER • Preservation Pub • 10PM ABBEY ROAD LIVE • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM • A tribute to the Beatles. MOON TAXI • The Mill and Mine • 9PM • The members of Moon Taxi are no strangers to the stage. Hailing from Nashville, the five-piece formed in 2006 and set out to conquer the Southeast with their unforgettable live set. Nine years later, they’ve amassed over one thousand shows and released two albums, Cabaret (2012) and Mountains Beaches Cities (2013). • $25-$45 Sunday, Feb. 26 SUNDAY JAZZ BRUNCH • Downtown Grill and Brewery • 11AM • Knoxville’s coolest jazz artists perform every Sunday. • FREE SHIFFLETT’S JAZZ BENEDICT • The Bistro at the Bijou • 12PM • Live jazz. • FREE WINTER JAM 2016 • Thompson-Boling Arena • 6PM • Since its formation by NewSong in 1995, The Winter Jam Tour Spectacular has featured many of the top names in Christian music, including TobyMac, Third Day, Newsboys, Steven Curtis Chapman, Lecrae, Skillet, and more! The tour has outpaced any other tour’s attendance for the past four years. Winter Jam is an incredible evening of live concerts by the top artists in Christian music, plus worship and ministry, • $10 FLAW WITH RIGHTEOUS VENDETTA, SOURCE, AUTUMN REFLECTION, AND FALLINGAWAKE • The Open Chord • 7PM • Flaw’s story began with the independent release of home-grown albums American Arrogance (1996), Flaw (1998) and Drama (2000). It was the songs on these recordings that garnered the attention of Universal Republic Records, who signed the band and released the break-through Through The Eyes in 2001. All ages. • $12-$15 BEN FOLDS • Bijou Theatre • 7:30PM • Throughout his career, Folds has created an enormous body of genre-bending musical art that includes pop albums as the front man for Ben Folds Five, multiple solo rock albums, as well as unique collaborative records with artists from Sara Bareilles and Regina Spektor, to Weird Al and William Shatner. Visit knoxbijou.com or benfolds. com. • $40 THE BROCKEFELLERS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM LOUIE LOUIE • Pilot Light • 9PM • 18 and up. • $5
OPEN MIC AND SONGWRITER NIGHTS
Thursday, Feb. 9 SCOTTISH MUSIC SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • A proud tradition, Scots love nothing more than music and drink. The drink is strong and the music is steeped in the history of the green highlands and rocky cliffs.
Whether lyrics or no lyrics, every song tells a story. The hills of East Tennessee are a home away from home for this style. Pull up a chair to listen or play along. Held on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month. Visit jigandreel.com. • FREE Sunday, Feb. 12 EPWORTH MONTHLY OLD HARP SHAPE NOTE SINGING • Laurel Theater • 6:30PM • Visit jubileearts.org. • FREE Monday, Feb. 13 MONDAY BLUES • Bar Marley • 8PM • Live every Monday, blues, jazz, funk, reggae and jam musicians from all over Tennessee meet at a backwater crossroad to sit in and show what the blues are made of. • FREE Tuesday, Feb. 14 PRESERVATION PUB SINGER-SONGWRITER NIGHT • Preservation Pub • 7PM • 21 and up. Visit scruffycity.com. OLD-TIME JAM SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • The musicians sit together and pick and strum familiar tunes on fiddles, guitars, and bass. Open to all lovers and players of music. No need to build up the courage to join in. Just grab an instrument off the wall and take a seat. Hosted by Sarah Pirkle. Visit jigandreel.com. • FREE Wednesday, Feb. 15 TIME WARP TEA ROOM OLD-TIME JAM • Time Warp Tea Room • 7PM • Regular speed old-time/fiddle jam every Wednesday. All instruments and skill levels welcome. BRACKINS BLUES JAM • Brackins Blues Club • 9PM • A weekly open session hosted by Tommie John. Visit Facebook.com/BrackinsBlues. • FREE Thursday, Feb. 16 IRISH MUSIC SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Held on the first and third Thursdays of each month. Visit jigandreel.com. • FREE Sunday, Feb. 19 OLD-TIME SLOW JAM • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 4PM • A monthly old-time music session, held on the third Sunday of each month. Visit jigandreel.com. • FREE Monday, Feb. 20 MONDAY BLUES • Bar Marley • 8PM • Live every Monday, blues, jazz, funk, reggae and jam musicians from all over Tennessee meet at a backwater crossroad to sit in and show what the blues are made of. • FREE Tuesday, Feb. 21 PRESERVATION PUB SINGER-SONGWRITER NIGHT • Preservation Pub • 7PM • 21 and up. Visit scruffycity.com. OLD-TIME JAM SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • The musicians sit together and pick and strum familiar tunes on fiddles, guitars, and bass. Open to all lovers and players of music. No need to build up the courage to join in. Just grab an instrument off the wall and take a seat. Hosted by Sarah Pirkle. Visit jigandreel.com. • FREE Wednesday, Feb. 22 TIME WARP TEA ROOM OLD-TIME JAM • Time Warp Tea Room • 7PM • Regular speed old-time/fiddle jam every Wednesday. All instruments and skill levels welcome. BRACKINS BLUES JAM • Brackins Blues Club • 9PM • A weekly open session hosted by Tommie John. Visit Facebook.com/BrackinsBlues. • FREE Thursday, Feb. 23 SCOTTISH MUSIC SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • A proud tradition, Scots love nothing more than music and drink. The drink is strong and the music is steeped in
www.TennesseeTheatre.com
February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 27
CALENDAR the history of the green highlands and rocky cliffs. Whether lyrics or no lyrics, every song tells a story. The hills of East Tennessee are a home away from home for this style. Pull up a chair to listen or play along. Held on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month. Visit jigandreel.com. • FREE
DJ AND DANCE NIGHTS
Friday, Feb. 10 TEKNOX • The Birdhouse • 10PM • With Ryan Scannura and Occidental from Denver and Nikki Nair. 21 and up. • FREE SOUTHBOUND FRIDAYS • Southbound Bar and Grill • 9PM • With DJ Eric B. RETRO WEEKEND DANCE PARTY • Hanna’s Old City • 9PM • Hanna’s Retro Weekend dance party with DJ Ray Funk is where you will hear all of your favorite 80’s and 90’s dance hits. So get down to Hanna’s in the Old City this weekend to party like it is 1999. Saturday, Feb. 11 SOUTHBOUND SATURDAYS • Southbound Bar and Grill • 9PM • With DJ Eric B. Friday, Feb. 17 SOUTHBOUND FRIDAYS • Southbound Bar and Grill • 9PM • With DJ Eric B. RETRO WEEKEND DANCE PARTY • Hanna’s Old City • 9PM •
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
Thursday, Feb. 9 - Sunday, Feb. 26
Hanna’s Retro Weekend dance party with DJ Ray Funk is where you will hear all of your favorite 80’s and 90’s dance hits. So get down to Hanna’s in the Old City this weekend to party like it is 1999. Saturday, Feb. 18 SOUTHBOUND SATURDAYS • Southbound Bar and Grill • 9PM • With DJ Eric B. TEMPLE DANCE NIGHT • The Concourse • 9PM • Knoxville’s long-running alternative once night. 18 and up. Visit facebook.com/templeknoxville. • $5
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Friday, Feb. 10 KNOXVILLE OPERA: ‘LA BOHÈME’ • Tennessee Theatre • 7:30PM • In the glittering Latin Quarter on Christmas Eve, Mimì and Rodolfo fall in love, but her failing health and his abject poverty threaten their happiness. Puccini’s ravishing music brilliantly depicts the joie de vivre and heartbreaks of the struggling Bohemian artists. Visit knoxvilleopera.com. • $21-$99 • See preview on page TK. Saturday, Feb. 11 HARP ENSEMBLE CONCERT • Blount County Public Library • 2PM • Lasting approximately one hour, the program will include solo and ensemble selections from standard repertoire for harps including works by Hasselmans, Renie, and Grandjany. • FREE OAK RIDGE SYMPHONY ORCHESRA AND CHORUS: CHAMBER ORCHESTRA DELIGHTS • First United Methodist Church of
Oak Ridge • 7:30PM • The concert will feature solo performances by Oak Ridge Symphony Orchestra principal cellist, Ihsan Kartal and principial oboist, Deniz Ayca Yayman. Music director Dan Allcott will lead the orchestra in works by Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Vivaldi, and Janacek. The concert will also feature the debut of Jaclyn Johnson as the newly appointed director of the Oak Ridge Chorus; she will lead the Oak Ridge Symphony and Chorus in Faure’s Pavane for Orchestra and Chorus. • $25 Sunday, Feb. 12 READY FOR THE WORLD MUSIC SERIES: BRAZIL • University of Tennessee Natalie L. Haslam Music Center • 2PM • The University of Tennessee’s Ready for the World Music Series brings renowned artists to perform and talk about musical styles and literature from diverse regions around the world. Three countries will be featured in the 2016-2017 academic year are Poland (Sunday, Sept. 25); Brazil (Sunday, Feb. 12); and China (Sunday, April 2). Visit music.utk.edu/rftw. • FREE KNOXVILLE OPERA: ‘LA BOHÈME’ • Tennessee Theatre • 2:30PM • In the glittering Latin Quarter on Christmas Eve, Mimì and Rodolfo fall in love, but her failing health and his abject poverty threaten their happiness. Puccini’s ravishing music brilliantly depicts the joie de vivre and heartbreaks of the struggling Bohemian artists. Visit knoxvilleopera.com. • $21-$99 • See preview on page TK. OAK RIDGE COMMUNITY BAND: MUSIC OF THE BRITISH ISLES • Oak Ridge High School • 3:30PM • This program will feature music of Scotland, Ireland, and England performed by the band and also two soloists - Dianne
Farris on saxophone and vocalist Deidre Ford. For more information visit www.orcb.org or call 865-482-3568. • $5 CARING FOR ALL CREATION: A CHORAL CELEBRATION • Messiah Lutheran Church • 4PM • The Caring for All Creation choral celebration is being offered to the community by faith group partners of Tennessee Interfaith Power and Light, an interfaith response to the challenges of climate change. Choirs from four Knoxville churches will perform songs that celebrate the majesty of God’s creation – the earth and all living beings. The four choirs are from Messiah Lutheran Church, Church of the Savior, Clinton Chapel AME Zion Church, and St. Mark Church. The concert is open to the public without charge. • FREE Thursday, Feb. 16 KSO MASTERWORKS: BEETHOVEN PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 • Tennessee Theatre • 7:30PM • The KSO Masterworks series welcomes pianist Lise de la Salle for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Since 2001, Lise de la Salle has been following an impressive international career performing in the major concert halls of Europe, the United States and Asia. • $13-$83 MARBLE CITY OPERA: CHOCOLATE AND WINE • Modern Studio • 7:30PM • Five featured soloists will perform love songs spanning various genres, from opera to musical theater and jazz standards, cabaret-style, accompanied by a selection of chocolates and wines handpicked and supplied by Holly Hambright of Holly’s Corner/Holly’s Eventful Dining. 21 and up. • $50 Friday, Feb. 17
CALENDAR
Sunday, Feb. 19 EVELYN MILLER YOUNG PIANIST SERIES • University of Tennessee Natalie L. Haslam Music Center • 2:30PM • Jie Yuan is a recipient of the prestigious Artist Diploma from The Juilliard School and has been appointed as the National Arts Youth Ambassador of China by the China State Council. His YPS concert will feature compositions from Chopin, Haydn and Stravinsky.For more information, visit youngpianistseries.com or call (865) 408-8083 • $25-$65
THEATER AND DANCE
Thursday, Feb. 9 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘OUTSIDE MULLINGAR’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • From the Tony and Academy Award winning playwright of “Doubt” and Moonstruck.” Filled with beautiful language and set in the rural hills of Ireland, this romantic comedy reminds us that – early or late – love always arrives on time. Farmers Anthony and Rosemary are clueless when it comes to love. To find it, they will have to overcome a land feud, family rivalries, and their own fears about romance. Feb. 1-19. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • $22-$42 TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY: ‘FOUND OBJECTS’ • Historic Southern Railway Station • 8PM • Does the truth always set us free? When a mother and daughter attempt to deal with the accidental death of their son/brother, the truth may indeed stand in the way of their healing. The world-premiere production of Marilynn Barner Anselmi’s drama kicks off the Tennessee Stage Company’s New Play Festival. Feb. 2-12. Visit tennesseestage.com. • $15
Saturday, Feb. 11 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘OUTSIDE MULLINGAR’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • Feb. 1-19. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • $22-$42 GO! CONTEMPORARY DANCE WORKS: ‘BARBAROSA: THE TALE OF PIRATE ANNE BONNY’ • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • Through a dynamic merging of ballet, modern dance, aerial work, fencing, and world cultural dance, GO! Contemporary Dance will introduce the audience to Anne Bonny, a 16th-century privileged and fiery teenager who turned to the seas for the rebellious life of a pirate. • $17-$50 TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY: ‘FOUND OBJECTS’ • Historic Southern Railway Station • 8PM • Feb. 2-12. Visit tennesseestage.com. • $15 LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE • Pellissippi State Community College • 7:30PM • $12 Sunday, Feb. 12 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘OUTSIDE MULLINGAR’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • Feb. 1-19. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • $22-$42 GO! CONTEMPORARY DANCE WORKS: ‘BARBAROSA: THE TALE OF PIRATE ANNE BONNY’ • Bijou Theatre • 3PM • Through a dynamic merging of ballet, modern dance, aerial work, fencing, and world cultural dance, GO! Contemporary Dance will introduce the audience to Anne Bonny, a 16th-century privileged and fiery teenager who turned to the seas for the rebellious life of a pirate. $17-$50 TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY: ‘FOUND OBJECTS’ • Historic Southern Railway Station • 3PM • Feb. 2-12. Visit tennesseestage.com. • $15 LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE • Pellissippi State Community College • 2PM • $12 Wednesday, Feb. 15 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘OUTSIDE MULLINGAR’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • Feb. 1-19. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • $22-$42
A LESSON YET TO BE LEARNED
PAUL RUSESABAGINA AN EVENING WITH
FEBRUARY 15 COX AUDITORIUM 7:30PM
Thursday, Feb. 16 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘OUTSIDE MULLINGAR’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • Feb. 1-19. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • $22-$42 Friday, Feb. 17 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘OUTSIDE MULLINGAR’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • Feb. 1-19. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • $22-$42 LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE • Pellissippi State Community College • 7:30PM • $12 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: ‘CLYBOURNE PARK’ • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Clybourne Park is a razor-sharp satire about the politics of race. In response to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, playwright
ARD ENTS BO
US EV
CAMP
His story was turned into an award-winning movie in 2004, Hotel Rwanda, starring Don Cheadle as Rusesabagina.
Saturday, Feb. 18 KIRK HANSER • Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan • 7PM • Since the mid 80’s, Kirk Hanser has performed throughout the U.S., Europe and Japan as a soloist and ensemble member. In concert and on recordings these days, he is mainly heard with John McClellan as the internationally acclaimed Hanser-McClellan Guitar Duo. Their most recent recording, ”La Vida Breve”, was called “…passionate, beautiful…guitar playing at its highest order” by Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine (U.S.), while Classical Guitar Magazine in the U.K. delighted in the duo’s “…sheer swagger & verve.” Visit knoxvilleguitar.org. • $20 MARBLE CITY OPERA: CHOCOLATE AND WINE • Modern Studio • 7:30PM • Five featured soloists will perform love songs spanning various genres, from opera to musical theater and jazz standards, cabaret-style, accompanied by a selection of chocolates and wines handpicked and supplied by Holly Hambright of Holly’s Corner/Holly’s Eventful Dining. 21 and up. • $50
Friday, Feb. 10 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘OUTSIDE MULLINGAR’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • Feb. 1-19. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • $22-$42 TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY: ‘FOUND OBJECTS’ • Historic Southern Railway Station • 8PM • Feb. 2-12. Visit tennesseestage.com. • $15 LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE • Pellissippi State Community College • 7:30PM • This play is a series of monologues and ensemble pieces that explore the mysterious interplay between women, memory, and clothing. This compelling dramady discusses everything important: mothers, prom dresses, buying bras, and why women wear so much black. • $12
Paul Rusesabagina, who sheltered more than 1,000 people in his hotel during the Rwandan genocide, says the brutal violence in Syria, the Central African Republic and the Congo shows history repeats itself while people fail to learn from it.
KSO MASTERWORKS: BEETHOVEN PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 • Tennessee Theatre • 7:30PM • The KSO Masterworks series welcomes pianist Lise de la Salle for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Since 2001, Lise de la Salle has been following an impressive international career performing in the major concert halls of Europe, the United States and Asia. • $13-$83 MARBLE CITY OPERA: CHOCOLATE AND WINE • Modern Studio • 7:30PM • Five featured soloists will perform love songs spanning various genres, from opera to musical theater and jazz standards, cabaret-style, accompanied by a selection of chocolates and wines handpicked and supplied by Holly Hambright of Holly’s Corner/Holly’s Eventful Dining. 21 and up. • $50
HOTEL RWANDA
TICKETS FREE (OPTED-IN STUDENTS) $5 (GENERAL ADMISSION) TICKETS AVAILABLE ON KNOXVILLETICKETS.COM, THE BOX OFFICE IN THOMPSON BOLING ARENA & AT THE DOOR DAY OF SHOW
GO.UTK.EDU For more info (865) 974-5455 February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 29
CALENDAR Bruce Norris set up Clybourne Parkas a pair of scenes that bookend Hansberry’s piece. These two scenes, fifty years apart, are both set in the same modest bungalow on Chicago’s northwest side that features at the center of A Raisin in the Sun. The first scene takes place before and the second scene takes place after the events of A Raisin in the Sun. Feb. 17-March 5. Visit theatreknoxville. com. • $15 Saturday, Feb. 18 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘OUTSIDE MULLINGAR’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • Feb. 1-19. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • $22-$42 LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE • Pellissippi State Community College • 7:30PM • $12 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: ‘CLYBOURNE PARK’ • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Feb. 17-March 5. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 BROADWAY AT THE TENNESSEE: ‘CHICAGO’ • Tennessee Theatre • 8PM • Set amidst the razzle-dazzle decadence of the 1920s, Chicago is the story of Roxie Hart, a housewife and nightclub dancer who maliciously murders her on-the-side lover after he threatens to walk out on her. Desperate to avoid conviction, she dupes the public, the media and her rival cellmate, Velma Kelly, by hiring Chicago’s slickest criminal lawyer to transform her malicious crime into a barrage of sensational headlines, the likes of which might just as easily be ripped from today’s tabloids. • $37-$77 Sunday, Feb. 19 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘OUTSIDE MULLINGAR’ •
Thursday, Feb. 9 - Sunday, Feb. 26
Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • Feb. 1-19. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • $22-$42 LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE • Pellissippi State Community College • 2PM • $12 BROADWAY AT THE TENNESSEE: ‘CHICAGO’ • Tennessee Theatre • 1:30PM and 7PM • Set amidst the razzle-dazzle decadence of the 1920s, Chicago is the story of Roxie Hart, a housewife and nightclub dancer who maliciously murders her on-the-side lover after he threatens to walk out on her. Desperate to avoid conviction, she dupes the public, the media and her rival cellmate, Velma Kelly, by hiring Chicago’s slickest criminal lawyer to transform her malicious crime into a barrage of sensational headlines, the likes of which might just as easily be ripped from today’s tabloids. • $37-$77 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: ‘CLYBOURNE PARK’ • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 3PM • Feb. 17-March 5. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 Wednesday, Feb. 22 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE BUSY BODY’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • A young woman, her handsome lover, and their friends plot to escape a controlling guardian in this hilarious Restoration comedy. Will a nosey nobleman ruin the plan or save the day? Feb. 22-March 12. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. Thursday, Feb. 23 CARPETBAG THEATRE: ‘BETWEEN A BALLAD AND A BLUES’ • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7:30PM • Between a Ballad and a Blues, a play with music from award-winning playwright Linda Parris-Bailey, tells the
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Stay tuned to WUTK
for chances to qualify for a pair of weekend passes on air, and via WUTK social media.
Register at Stefano’s Pizza 1937 Cumberland Ave. until February 16!
GRAnd PRize dRAWinG TAKeS PlACe FRidAy, FebRUARy 17 live on AiR!
Streaming 24.7.365 at WUTKRADIO.COM 30
KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
story of African-American-Appalachian renaissance man Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, one of the most celebrated string-band musicians in the history of American music. Feb. 23-26. Visit carpetbagtheatre.org. • $20 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE BUSY BODY’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • Feb. 22-March 12. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: ‘CLYBOURNE PARK’ • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Feb. 17-March 5. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 Friday, Feb. 24 TENNESSEE CHILDREN’S DANCE ENSEMBLE: ‘SOARING’ • Knoxville Civic Auditorium • 8PM • Looking for something to enliven your spirit, delight and inspire you? Something the whole family will enjoy? Then be there when the Tennessee Children’s Dance Ensemble opens its 2017 touring season with an eclectic array of dances showcasing the varied work of ten different choreographers. TCDE encourages you to soar along with them in a mood that ranges from light and joyful, to dramatic and intense. Feb. 24-25. • $26 CARPETBAG THEATRE: ‘BETWEEN A BALLAD AND A BLUES’ • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7:30PM • Feb. 23-26. Visit carpetbagtheatre.org. • $20 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE BUSY BODY’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • Feb. 22-March 12. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: ‘CLYBOURNE PARK’ • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Feb. 17-March 5.
Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 Saturday, Feb. 25 TENNESSEE CHILDREN’S DANCE ENSEMBLE: ‘SOARING’ • Knoxville Civic Auditorium • 2:30PM and 8PM • Feb. 24-25. • $26 CARPETBAG THEATRE: ‘BETWEEN A BALLAD AND A BLUES’ • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7:30PM • Feb. 23-26. Visit carpetbagtheatre.org. • $20 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE BUSY BODY’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • Feb. 22-March 12. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: ‘CLYBOURNE PARK’ • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Feb. 17-March 5. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 Sunday, Feb. 26 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: ‘CLYBOURNE PARK’ • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 3PM • Feb. 17-March 5. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE BUSY BODY’ • Carousel Theatre • 2PM • Feb. 22-March 12. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. CARPETBAG THEATRE: ‘BETWEEN A BALLAD AND A BLUES’ • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 4PM • Feb. 23-26. Visit carpetbagtheatre.org. • $20
COMEDY AND SPOKEN WORD
UT PARALEGAL STUDIES CERTIFICATE PROGRAM The UT Paralegal Studies Certificate Program curriculum has been updated to better train you in the aspects of paralegalism most in demand.
LEARN MORE You’re invited to attend a free information session at the UT Conference Center in downtown Knoxville. Please call 865-974-0150, e-mail utnoncredit@utk.edu, or go online to make your reservation.
Tuesday, March 7 6-7:30 p.m. Course # 17WIP300R-1
www.utnoncredit.com
Thursday, Feb. 9 - Sunday, Feb. 26
Thursday, Feb. 9 PIZZA HAS • Pizza Hoss • 8PM • On the second Thursday of the month, Pizza Hoss in Powell hosts a showcase featuring sets from some of the best comedians in East Tennessee along with selected up-and-coming talent. Each month one of the hosts of Rain/Shine Event productions (Shane Rhyne, Tyler Sonnichsen, and Sean Simoneau) serves as your guide to introduce you the best of our region’s comedy scene. • FREE Monday, Feb. 13 FRIENDLYTOWN • Pilot Light • 7:30PM • A weekly comedy night named after the former red-light district near the Old City. Visit facebook.com/friendlytownknoxville. 18 and up. • FREE Tuesday, Feb. 14 OPEN MIC STAND-UP COMEDY • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM • Come laugh until you cry at the Longbranch every Tuesday night. Doors open at 8:30, first comic at 9. No cover charge, all are welcome. Aspiring or experienced comics interested in joining in the fun can email us at longbranch.info@gmail.com to learn more, or simply come to the show a few minutes early. • FREE EINSTEIN SIMPLIFIED • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM • Einstein Simplified Comedy performs live comedy improv at Scruffy City Hall. It’s just like Whose Line Is It Anyway, but you get to make the suggestions. Show starts at 8:15, get there early for the best seats. No cover. Visit einsteinsimplified.com. • FREE
CALENDAR
tional troupe, bringing together community members for laughs and overall general merriment. • FREE
FESTIVALS
Friday, Feb. 24 48TH ANNUAL JUBILEE FESTIVAL • Laurel Theater • 7PM • Jubilee Community Arts showcases some of the finest practitioners of mountain music across the generations, home grown in our own back yard. Friday and Saturday night we will have old time string bands and song and plenty of jamming in the basement. The festival concludes with Old Harp Singing on Sunday. This year’s performers include the John Alvis, David Lovett, the Tennessee Stifflegs, Leah Gardner and Peggy Hambright, the Knox County Jug Stompers, Y’uns, Pickett State Ramblers, Kelle Jolly, Roy Harper, Bill and The Belles, Mike and Marcia Bryant and the Mumbillies. • FREE-$13 Saturday, Feb. 25 OLD CITY WHISKEY FESTIVAL • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 12PM • We will take over all 3 rooms in the pub to give you a unique and intimate Scotch whisky experience. On arrival
you will be greeted with a delicious whisky cocktail and have a chance to mingle with other whisky lovers. Visit jigandreel.com. • $100 48TH ANNUAL JUBILEE FESTIVAL • Laurel Theater • 7PM • FREE-$13 Sunday, Feb. 26 48TH ANNUAL JUBILEE FESTIVAL • Laurel Theater • 2PM • FREE-$13
FILM SCREENINGS
Monday, Feb. 13 THE BIRDHOUSE WALK-IN THEATER • The Birdhouse • 8PM • A weekly free movie screening. Visit birdhouseknoxville. com. • FREE Wednesday, Feb. 15 THE BAD KIDS’ • Knox County Public Defender’s Community Law Office • 6PM •Located in an impoverished Mojave Desert community, Black Rock Continuation High School is an alternative for at-risk students with little hope of graduating from a traditional high school. It’s their last chance. This coming of age story shows
Wednesday, Feb. 15 KNOXVILLE POETRY SLAM • The Open Chord • 8PM • All ages. • $5 Thursday, Feb. 16 THIRD THURSDAY COMEDY OPEN MIC • Big Fatty’s Catering Kitchen • 7:30PM • We will showcase local and touring talent in a curated open mic of 6 to 8 comics. The event starts at 7:30, and there is no charge for admission. The kitchen will be open as well as their full bar. • FREE COMEDY AND SPOKEN WORD • February 20 • Friendlytown • Pilot Light • 7:30PM • • 19:30:00 • 2/20/2017 19:30:00 • Friendlytown • 374 • A weekly comedy night named after the former red-light district near the Old City. Visit facebook.com/friendlytownknoxville. 18 and up. • FREE Monday, Feb. 20 FRIENDLYTOWN • Pilot Light • 7:30PM • A weekly comedy night named after the former red-light district near the Old City. Visit facebook.com/friendlytownknoxville. 18 and up. • FREE Tuesday, Feb. 21 OPEN MIC STAND-UP COMEDY • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM • Come laugh until you cry at the Longbranch every Tuesday night. Doors open at 8:30, first comic at 9. No cover charge, all are welcome. Aspiring or experienced comics interested in joining in the fun can email us at longbranch.info@gmail.com to learn more, or simply come to the show a few minutes early. • FREE EINSTEIN SIMPLIFIED • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM • Einstein Simplified Comedy performs live comedy improv at Scruffy City Hall. It’s just like Whose Line Is It Anyway, but you get to make the suggestions. Show starts at 8:15, get there early for the best seats. No cover. Visit einsteinsimplified.com. • FREE Wednesday, Feb. 22 FULL DISCLOSURE COMEDY • The Open Chord • 8PM • Full Disclosure Comedy is Knoxville’s long-form improvisa-
THE PUBLIC CINEMA: TOWER Scruffy City Hall (32 Market Square) • Thursday, Feb. 16 • 8 p.m. • Free • publiccinema.org and scruffycityhall.com
The line between fiction and documentary has always been a complicated one. The best documentaries, from Nanook of the North to Erroll Morris’ films, are as much about the nature of reality, and film’s relationship to it, as they are about their nominal subject matter. After all, “what is fiction?” might be a harder question to answer than “what is truth?” Emmy-winner Keith Maitland ignores the old rules of documentary filmmaking to powerful effect in Tower, combining archival footage, interviews, recreations, and breathtaking rotoscopic animation to examine the 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas campus in Austin. “Maitland uses familiar and even overfamiliar devices … to compensate for a dearth of archival images,” writes Richard Brody in The New Yorker. “But he does so in boldly imaginative ways that prove to have a long philosophical tail, one that ultimately circles around to address the very subject of the nonexistent images that the animations replace, and to spotlight the role of the movie itself in revealing that historical lack of imagery and making up for it.” Besides its innovative technique, Tower’s subject—homegrown terrorism in an era of political uncertainty, military intervention, and civil unrest—seems particularly timely. Count on Maitland’s novel approach to shed as much light on current events as it does historical ones. (Matthew Everett)
February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 31
CALENDAR extraordinary educators and talented students combat the crippling effects of poverty. Followed by a town-hall style discussion. Presented by Independent Lens and East Tennessee PBS in partnership with the the Knox County Public Defender’s Community Law Office and Stop School Pushout. • FREE Thursday, Feb. 16 THE PUBLIC CINEMA: ‘TOWER’ • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM • Visit publiccinema.org. • FREE • See Spotlight on page TK. Monday, Feb. 20 THE BIRDHOUSE WALK-IN THEATER • The Birdhouse • 8PM • A weekly free movie screening. Visit birdhouseknoxville. com. • FREE Wednesday, Feb. 22 AFRICA’S GREAT CIVILIZATIONS’ • Beck Cultural Exchange Center • 5:30PM • Join East Tennessee PBS and the Beck Cultural Exchange Center for an advanced screening of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Africa’s Great Civilizations. Event is free and open to the public. Doors open at 5:30pm. Food will be provided. • FREE Sunday, Feb. 26 THE PUBLIC CINEMA: ‘FIRE AT SEA’ • Knoxville Museum of Art • 2PM • The first documentary to ever win the top award at the Berlin International Film Festival, Fire at Sea takes place in Lampedusa, a once peaceful Mediterranean island that has become a major entry point for African refugees into Europe. Visit publiccinema.org. • FREE
Thursday, Feb. 9 - Sunday, Feb. 26
SLOW FOOD TENNESSEE VALLEY MOVIE AND POTLUCK NIGHT • Ijams Nature Center • 5PM • Do you eat leftovers? Do you buy bananas with brown spots? Do you compost? Do you throw food out if it’s past its expiration date? Do you leave food on your plate at a restaurant? Find out what your answers to these questions should be by joining us for a community pot luck dinner and a screening of the movie Just Eat It, a film documentary about food waste and food rescue. • $5
SPORTS AND RECREATION
Thursday, Feb. 9 CYCOLOGY BICYCLES THURSDAY MORNING RIDE • Cycology Bicycles • 10AM • Visit cycologybicycles.com. • FREE NORTH KNOXVILLE BEER RUNNERS • Central Flats and Taps • 6PM • Meet us at Central Flats and Taps every Thursday night for a fun and easy run leading us right through Saw Works for a midway beer. • FREE FLEET FEET GROUP RUN/WALK • Fleet Feet Sports Knoxville • 6PM • Visit fleetfeetknoxville.com. • FREE BEARDEN BEER MARKET FUN RUN • Bearden Beer Market • 6:30PM • Visit beardenbeermarket.com. • FREE Saturday, Feb. 11 BIKE ZOO SATURDAY ROAD RIDE • The Bike Zoo • 9AM • Visit bikezoo.com. • FREE WEST BICYCLES SATURDAY ROAD RIDE • West Bicycles •
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That short walk from home to the bus stop can slash your risk of cardiovascular disease by up to 50%. In 2017, ride the bus more.
32
9AM • Visit westbikes.com. • FREE Smoky Mountains Hiking Club: Old Sugarlands/Twin Creeks/Gatlinburg Trail Loop • 8:30AM • Leaders: Rebekah Young, rebekahy27@ aol.com and Brad Reese, bradktn@gmail.com. • FREE SMOKY MOUNTAINS HIKING CLUB: OLD SUGARLANDS/TWIN CREEKS/GATLINBURG TRAIL LOOP • 8:30AM • Let’s show some love for Gatlinburg on almost-Valentine’s Day weekend! We will begin our hike just across the road from the Sugarlands Visitors Center on the Old Sugarlands Trail. Leaders: Rebekah Young, rebekahy27@ aol.com and Brad Reese, bradktn@gmail.com.” • FREE Sunday, Feb. 12 KTC DIRTY SOUTH TRAIL HALF AND DIRTY DOUBLE TRAIL MARATHON • Ijams Nature Center • 9AM • This is a fantastic opportunity to tour Knoxville’s Urban Wilderness on a loop course that takes in most of the various parks and recreation areas that comprise the UW. We’ll start and finish at Ijams Nature Center, allowing us a comfortable staging area protected from the elements, as well as bathroom facilities, and most importantly, the opportunity to juggle the course AGAIN, offering yet a new route to tour the fabulous Urban Wilderness that will include a section on the fabulous new Baker Creek trails. Visit ktc.org. • $20-$50 Monday, Feb. 13 KTC GROUP RUN • Mellow Mushroom • 6PM • Visit ktc.org. • FREE TVB MONDAY NIGHT ROAD RIDE • Tennessee Valley Bikes • 6PM • Visit tnvalleybikes.com. • FREE
Tuesday, Feb. 14 CYCOLOGY BICYCLES TUESDAY MORNING RIDE • Cycology Bicycles • 10:30AM • Visit cycologybicycles.com. • FREE HARD KNOX TUESDAY FUN RUN • Hard Knox Pizzeria • 6:30PM • Join Hard Knox Pizzeria every Tuesday evening (rain or shine) for a 2-3 mile fun run. Burn calories. Devour pizza. Quench thirst. • FREE Wednesday, Feb. 15 FLEET FEET WEDNESDAY LUNCH BREAK RUN • Fleet Feet Sports Knoxville • 12PM • Visit fleetfeetknoxville.com. • FREE KTC GROUP RUN • Runner’s Market • 5:30PM • Visit ktc. org.; • FREE TVB EASY RIDER MOUNTAIN BIKE RIDE • Ijams Nature Center • 6PM • Call 865-540-9979 or visit tnvalleybikes. com. • FREE SMOKY MOUNTAINS HIKING CLUB: BALD RIVER FALLS TRAIL • 8AM • FREE Thursday, Feb. 16 CYCOLOGY BICYCLES THURSDAY MORNING RIDE • Cycology Bicycles • 10AM • Visit cycologybicycles.com. • FREE NORTH KNOXVILLE BEER RUNNERS • Central Flats and Taps • 6PM • Meet us at Central Flats and Taps every Thursday night for a fun and easy run leading us right through Saw Works for a midway beer. • FREE FLEET FEET GROUP RUN/WALK • Fleet Feet Sports Knoxville • 6PM • Visit fleetfeetknoxville.com. • FREE BEARDEN BEER MARKET FUN RUN • Bearden Beer Market • 6:30PM • Visit beardenbeermarket.com. • FREE
#KATReSolution
Cars can be expensive. Americans who ride public transit save about $9,634 annually. Ride the bus more and feed your piggy bank. 301 Church Ave., Knoxville, TN 37915 • T 865.637.3000 • katbus.com
KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
Thursday, Feb. 9 - Sunday, Feb. 26
Saturday, Feb. 18 BIKE ZOO SATURDAY ROAD RIDE • The Bike Zoo • 9AM • Join us every Saturday for a group three-hour road ride of 50+ miles at a fast pace of 18/20 mph. Weather permitting. Visit bikezoo.com. • FREE WEST BICYCLES SATURDAY ROAD RIDE • West Bicycles • 9AM • Visit westbikes.com. • FREE LITTLE RIVER TRADING CO. GUIDED HIKE: POGUE CREEK CANYON STATE NATURAL AREA • 10:30AM • Easy/moderate, approximately 8-10 miles. FREE SMOKY MOUNTAINS HIKING CLUB: BAKER CREEK PRESERVE • 12PM • This trail system is located in the South Knoxville Urban Wilderness area. Leader: Chris Hamilton, hikeintenn@gmail.com. • FREE Sunday, Feb. 19 SMOKY MOUNTAINS HIKING CLUB: CONCORD PARK • 12PM • We will make this an English-style Sunday afternoon hike with an option to stop by the local pub when complete. Concord Park in west Knox County has an extensive bike trail grid. Leader: Tim Bigelow, bigelowt2@ mindspring.com. • FREE Monday, Feb. 20 KTC GROUP RUN • Mellow Mushroom • 6PM • Visit ktc.org. • FREE TVB MONDAY NIGHT ROAD RIDE • Tennessee Valley Bikes • 6PM • Visit tnvalleybikes.com. • FREE KTC GROUP RUN • Mellow Mushroom • 6PM • Join Knoxville Track Club every Monday evening for a group run starting at the Mellow Mushroom on the Cumberland
CALENDAR
Avenue strip on the University of Tennessee campus. Visit ktc.org. • FREE
University’s Glick Center for Glass. Visit downtown.utk. edu.
Tuesday, Feb. 21 CYCOLOGY BICYCLES TUESDAY MORNING RIDE • Cycology Bicycles • 10:30AM • Visit cycologybicycles.com. • FREE HARD KNOX TUESDAY FUN RUN • Hard Knox Pizzeria • 6:30PM • Join Hard Knox Pizzeria every Tuesday evening (rain or shine) for a 2-3 mile fun run. Burn calories. Devour pizza. Quench thirst. • FREE
East Tennessee History Center 601 S. Gay St. NOV. 19-APRIL 30: Rock of Ages: East Tennessee’s Marble Industry. Visit easttnhistory.org.
Wednesday, Feb. 22 FLEET FEET WEDNESDAY LUNCH BREAK RUN • Fleet Feet Sports Knoxville • 12PM • Visit fleetfeetknoxville.com. • FREE KTC GROUP RUN • Runner’s Market • 5:30PM • Visit ktc. org.; • FREE TVB EASY RIDER MOUNTAIN BIKE RIDE • Ijams Nature Center • 6PM • Call 865-540-9979 or visit tnvalleybikes. com. • FREE
ART
Art Market Gallery 422 S. Gay St. JAN. 31-FEB. 26: Artwork by Ron Smith and Carl Gombert. Visit artmarketgallery.net. Downtown Gallery 106 S. Gay St. FEB. 3-28: Intersections, glass art from Ball State
Emporium Center for Arts and Culture 100 S. Gay St. FEB. 3-24: Slovene Independent Biennial; Arts and Culture Alliance National Juried Exhibition; and Through My Eyes, by autistic artist Derrick Freeman. See Spotlight on page TK. Ewing Gallery 1715 Volunteer Boulevard JAN. 11-FEB. 11: A Common Lineage, sculpture by Lee Benson and his family. Visit ewing-gallery.utk.edu. Knoxville Museum of Art 1050 World’s Fair Park Drive JAN. 27-APRIL 16: Outside In, new paintings by Jered Sprecher. FEB. 3-APRIL 16: Virtual Views: Digital Art From the Thoma Foundation. ONGOING: Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in Tennessee; Currents: Recent Art From East Tennessee and Beyond; and Facets of Modern and Contemporary Glass. Visit knoxart.org. See review onpage 23. McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture 2016 - 2017
S E A S O N
PERFORMANCES
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APRIL / 6 / 2017 7:30PM
THE FLYING KARAMAZOV BROTHERS
1327 Circle Park Drive FEB. 3-MAY 7: Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt. ONGOING: The Flora and Fauna of Catesby, Mason, and Audubon and Life on the Roman Frontier.
FAMILY AND KIDS’ EVENTS
Friday, Feb. 10 S.T.E.A.M. KIDS • Blount County Public Library • 4PM • For grades K-5. Every week will be a different adventure, from science experiments to art projects and everything in between. • FREE Saturday, Feb. 11 WDVX KIDSTUFF LIVE • WDVX • 10AM • Sean McCollough’s weekly kids’ music show hosts a live studio audience on the second Saturday of each month. Visit wdvx.com. • FREE LEARN TO CODE!: INTRO TO PYTHON WITH MINECRAFT • Knoxville Entrepreneur Center • 12PM • Kids age 11-17 can learn how to write computer programs in Python while “modding” their Minecraft world. No previous programming experience required. • $25 3-D PAPERCRAFT: MINECRAFT AND POKEMON • Knoxville Entrepreneur Center • 3PM • With just paper, scissors, and glue, you can make models of almost anything you can think of from the Minecraft world, and hundreds of Pokemon. We will display our large collection of
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY 33
CALENDAR Pokemon models, Minecraft models, and teach people how to make their own. • FREE BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY GAMING SESSIONS • Blount County Public Library • 2PM • Games of all kinds—board games, MarioKart, Super Smash Bros., Yu-Gi-Oh!, or bring your own game to share. • FREE BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY NERD GROUP • Blount County Public Library • 3PM • Students can learn the basic principles of computer programming, also known as coding. FREE BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY CHESS GROUP • Blount County Public Library • 10AM • For middle- and high-school students. • FREE Sunday, Feb. 12 KMA ART ACTIVITY DAY • Knoxville Museum of Art • 1PM • Every second Sunday of each month, the KMA will host free drop-in art activities for families. A local artist will be on-site to lead hands-on art activities. • FREE KNOXVILLE JEWISH ALLIANCE MITZVAH DAY • Arnstein Jewish Community Center • 9:30AM • In the Jewish tradition, a mitzvah is literally a “commandment” to perform good deeds and not just talk about being good. “ While mitzvahs are encouraged daily, the KJA organizes an annual day of volunteering for all ages – from school-aged children to adults. For information, please contact the KJA at 690-6343 or office@jewishknoxville. org. Website: www.jewishknoxville.org. • FREE Tuesday, Feb. 14 BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY LITTLE LEARNERS GROUP • Blount County Public Library • 10AM • FREE
Thursday, Feb. 9 - Sunday, Feb. 26
CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY KID TO KID: FUN WITH A PURPOSE • Cancer Support Community • 3:30PM • Your children will gain coping skills and have opportunities to talk about a loved one’s cancer diagnosis while also having fun. BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY LEGO CLUB • Blount County Public Library • 4PM • For grades K-5. • FREE BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS GROUP • Blount County Public Library • 5:30PM • FREE Wednesday, Feb. 15 BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY BABY AND ME GROUP • Blount County Public Library • 10AM • Recommended for ages 2 and under. FREE Friday, Feb. 17 S.T.E.A.M. KIDS • Blount County Public Library • 4PM • For grades K-5. FREE Saturday, Feb. 18 PYTHON SKILL BUILDER CLASS • Knoxville Entrepreneur Center • 12PM • For teens who have done some Python programming before. In this three-hour programming class we will use lists and classes to make a slither. io-type game or a shooting game. • $25 BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY NERD GROUP • Blount County Public Library • 3PM • Students can learn the basic principles of computer programming, also known as coding. • FREE “OUR STORIES, OUR POWER” • Blount County Public Library • 2PM • Teenagers who have experienced racism from
various perspectives will share their stories at a discussion session for other teens and tweens, entitled “Our Stories, Our Power.” Teens, tweens age 12 and up and the adults who care for and work with them are especially invited to this free session. To find out more about “Our Stories, Our Power” or any other information about the initiative, please email office@fuuf.org or call 865-282-3883.” • FREE KNOX LIT EXCHANGE • Central Collective • 11:30AM • The Knoxville Literary Exchange is a free, monthly poetry and prose writing workshop open to high school age students. The workshop will focus on giving students the opportunity to engage in writing, share their writing, and receive encouraging feedback--all in a supportive, safe space. For further information, please contact organizer Liam Hysjulien at KnoxLitExchange@gmail.com. • FREE BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY CHESS GROUP • Blount County Public Library • 10AM • For middle- and high-school students. • FREE UT ARBORETUM FATHER AND DAUGHTER HIKE • University of Tennessee Arboretum • 9AM • Dads and daughters: why not plan some quality time together this winter and do it outdoors? Come out to the University of Tennessee Arboretum for a fun, short trail hike (1 to 1.5 hours), a great winter occasion to spend some quality time outdoors with your daughter or dad. To learn more about this hike or the UT Arboretum Society, go to www. utarboretumsociety.org. For more information on the program, call 483-3571. • FREE Monday, Feb. 20
CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY TEEN NIGHT • Cancer Support Community • 6PM • A monthly networking group for teens ages 13-18 who have a family member with cancer. • FREE Tuesday, Feb. 21 BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY LITTLE LEARNERS GROUP • Blount County Public Library • 10AM • Recommended for ages 3-5. FREE BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY LEGO CLUB • Blount County Public Library • 4PM • For grades K-5. FREE WILD KRATTS LIVE! • Tennessee Theatre • 6:30PM • Wild Kratts joins the adventures of Chris and Martin Kratt as they encounter incredible wild animals, combining science education with fun and adventure as the duo travels to animal habitats around the globe. Each adventure explores an age-appropriate science concept central to an animal’s life and showcases a rarely seen wildlife moment, all wrapped up in engaging stories of adventure, mystery, rescue, and the Kratt brothers’ brand of laugh-out-loud-comedy that kids love. • $25-$100 BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS GROUP • Blount County Public Library • 5:30PM • FREE Wednesday, Feb. 22 BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY BABY AND ME GROUP • Blount County Public Library • 10AM • Recommended for ages 2 and under. These lapsit sessions for baby and caregiver feature short stories, action rhymes, music and pre-literacy tips and tricks for caregivers. It is also a great time for caregivers and babies to socialize. • FREE
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
Thursday, Feb. 9 - Sunday, Feb. 26
LECTURES, READINGS, AND BOOK SIGNINGS
Thursday, Feb. 9 LAUREN MITCHELL AND MARY MAHONEY: ‘THE DOULAS: RADICAL CARE FOR PREGNANT PEOPLE’ • The Birdhouse • 5:30PM • Join authors Lauren Mitchell and Mary Mahoney for a reading from their book The Doulas: Radical Care for Pregnant People, followed by Q&A and a happy hour. • FREE Friday, Feb. 10 LYDIA PEELLE: THE MIDNIGHT COOL REVUE • Union Ave Books • 5PM • Nashville based author Lydia Peelle will be celebrating the publication of her first novel The Midnight Cool with an appearance featuring music, mixed media and a reading. The Midnight Cool, set in Tennessee in 1916, features a haunting, richly told story of two flawed but endearing grifters who pursue women, wealth and mules. • FREE Saturday, Feb. 11 SATURDAY MORNING PHYSICS • University of Tennessee • 10AM • Saturday Morning Physics will feature physics faculty talking about their areas of expertise and how they pertain to the world around us. • FREE TEDXUTK • Clarence Brown Lab Theatre • 9AM • The program will feature a combination of live speakers and screenings of official TED talks, with the purpose of promoting ideas worth spreading in the University of Tennessee and Knoxville communities. Tickets are $10 per session, and are available at www.tedxutk.com. Monday, Feb. 13 STACEY D. SMITH: “BORROW AND STEAL: THE NEFARIOUS HISTORY OF FLOWER POWER” • University of Tennessee Alumni Memorial Building • 7PM • Dr. Stacey D. Smith will give the keynote lecture for Darwin Day Tennessee’s 20th Anniversary. • FREE BOB PROFFITT: “A FAMILY PHYSICIAN’S JOURNEY” • Blount County Public Library • 7PM • As a family medicine physician in Maryville, longtime county commissioner and current Maryville City Schools board member, Dr. Proffitt has experienced a surprisingly diverse and widespread range of experiences – in a variety of places and cultures all over the globe. • FREE JOHN MCNERNY: ‘WEALTH OF PERSONS: ECONOMICS WITH A HUMAN FACE’ • Maryville College • 7PM • Crises in economics and in the economy will be topics of discussion when Father John McNerney, head chaplain at the University College Dublin, discusses his book Wealth of Persons: Economics with a Human Face. Tuesday, Feb. 14 KNOXVILLE CIVIL WAR ROUNDTABLE • Bearden Banquet Hall • 7PM • Featuring notable historians and other Civil War experts. Call (865) 671-9001 for reservations. • $3-$17 Wednesday, Feb. 15 PAUL RUSESABAGINA: “HOTEL RWANDA: A LESSON YET TO BE LEARNED” • University of Tennessee Alumni Memorial Building • 7:30PM • For two months of his life, Paul Rusesabagina held insanity at bay as he watched his country fall into the grips of genocide in 1994. A Hutu manager of a luxury hotel in Rwanda, he sheltered over 1,200 people, including his own Tutsi wife and children, saving their lives at a time when extremists massacred more than 800,000 members of the Tutsi and moderate Hutu tribes in just 100 days. Considered the “”Rwandan
CALENDAR
Schindler,”” his wrenching story and that of the genocide is chronicled in the critically acclaimed film, Hotel Rwanda. • $5 Thursday, Feb. 16 PECHA KUCHA KNOXVILLE • The Mill and Mine • 6PM • PechaKucha 20x20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. • $5 Friday, Feb. 17 KNOX HERITAGE LOST AND FOUND LUNCH • Knox Heritage • 11:30AM • Knox Heritage continues its series of educational lunches. A free lunch buffet will be served beginning at 11:30 a.m. and the program will begin at 12:00 p.m. Reservations for lunch are required. Call Hollie Cook at 865-523-8008 or email her at hcook@ knoxheritage.org to make a reservation. • FREE TRACEE DE HAHN: ‘SWISS VENDETTA’ • Union Ave Books • 6PM • Book signing with Tracee de Hahn reading from her new mystery, Swiss Vendetta: A Mystery. • FREE Saturday, Feb. 18 SATURDAY MORNING PHYSICS • University of Tennessee • 10AM • Saturday Morning Physics will feature physics faculty talking about their areas of expertise and how they pertain to the world around us. • FREE Monday, Feb. 20 UT WRITERS IN THE LIBRARY SERIES • University of Tennessee • 7PM • The University of Tennessee’s annual Writers in the Library series features novelists, poets, and nonfiction writers from around the region and visiting writers at UT, reading from and discussing their work in the auditorium of the John C. Hodges Library. Visit lib.utk. edu/writers/. • FREE Tuesday, Feb. 21 UT HUMANITIES CENTER CONVERSATIONS AND COCKTAILS SERIES • Holly’s Gourmets Market and Cafe • 6PM • The Humanities Center at the University of Tennessee kicks off its annual Conversations and Cocktails series. The programs provide the community an opportunity to interact with guest scholars as they discuss history,. EVA SCHLOSS: A STORY OF TRIUMPH • Knoxville Civic Auditorium • 7PM • Like her stepsister, Eva went into hiding in Holland until she, along with her family, was betrayed, captured, and sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Since 1985, Eva Schloss has devoted herself to holocaust education and global peace. • $35-$125 BOB BRIER: “MUMMIFICATION IN ANCIENT EGYPT” • McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture • 7:30PM • The East Tennessee Society of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and the McClung Museum present Dr. Bob Brier, one of the world’s foremost Egyptologists and mummy experts, lecturing on mummification in ancient Egypt. The lecture reveals why the ancient Egyptian mummified and then goes on to describe a modern mummification. • FREE
CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS
Thursday, Feb. 9 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Balanced You Studios • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail. com. Donations accepted. KNOXVILLE CAPOEIRA CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 6PM • This class is an hour of student-led training and review of Capoeira skills and exercises.
Come prepared to sweat. • $10 GROOVEMENT DROP-IN DANCE CLASS FOR ALL BODIES • Broadway Academy of Performing Arts • 6PM • We start with a mild-movement warm up that also focuses on getting you destressed, focused, and mindful on the moment at hand. We then get in the groove—every night we learn something new and you never know what style we’ll take on, from lyrical to jazz to cabaret to hip hop to funk or whatever fusion we come up with. • $10 KNOXVILLE PERSONAL TRAINING PILATES • Beaver Creek Cumberland Presbyterian Church • 6:30PM • Every Tuesday and Thursday. First class is free. Call (865) 622-3103 or visit knoxvillepersonaltraining.com. • $4 BEGINNER ACROYOGA CLASS • Breezeway Yoga Studio • 7:30PM • $15 BELLY DANCE LEVELS 1 AND 2 • Knox Dance Worx • 8PM • Call (865) 898-2126 or email alexia@alexia-dance.com. • $12 Saturday, Feb. 11 KNOX HERITAGE PRESERVATION NETWORK • Knox Heritage • 10AM • Preservation Network is a series of free workshops held once every month on the second Saturday. The monthly workshops feature guest speakers who are specialists in windows, flooring, roofing, stained glass, tile, plumbing, electrical, and more. For more information visit knoxheritage.org. • FREE KNOX COUNTY MASTER GARDENERS: SPRING LAWN REPAIR • Cedar Bluff Branch Library • 10:30AM • Last fall was so dry that most homeowners could not repair the lawn damage that resulted from the blazingly hot summer. Spring is the second best time to do lawn repair. Master Gardener Ron Pearman will provide some guidance on how to fix that lawn mess. Call 865-470-7033. • FREE Sunday, Feb. 12 CIRCLE MODERN DANCE BALLET BARRE CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 1PM • Visit circlemoderndance.com. • $10 CIRCLE MODERN DANCE: MODERN DANCE FOUNDATIONS CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 2PM • Visit circlemoderndance.com. • $10 CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY MINDFULNESS-BASED STREET REDUCTION EIGHT-WEEK SERIES • Cancer Support Community • 4:30PM • This series is a systematic practice that involves focusing attention in the present moment in order to relax the body and calm the mind. FREE Monday, Feb. 13 HEART OF YOGA SERIES • Central Collective • 5:30PM • February is National Heart Health Month and what better way to celebrate it then with yoga? Practicing yoga can help keep your heart healthy with its cardiovascular benefits. The Heart of Yoga will focus on all aspects of heart health. We will get our heart rate up with a moderately-paced vinyasa flow, reduce stress with breathing exercises, and cultivate love with a Pink Light meditation. You can purchase the series (4 classes) or drop in on individual sessions. • $15-$50 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Balanced You Studios • 6PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail. com. Donations accepted. KNOXVILLE PERSONAL TRAINING BOOT CAMP • Beaver Creek Cumberland Presbyterian Church • 6:30PM • First class is free. Call (865) 622-3103 or visit knoxvillepersonaltraining.com. • $15 MONDAY NIGHT YOGA • Church Street United Methodist Church • 7PM • Cost is $5, with first class free. Bring a mat and strap. In the class we stretch, bend and relax with low light and music. It is suitable for beginners and February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 35
CALENDAR all levels. No advance registration required. Contact Micarooni@aol.com with questions. • $5 Tuesday, Feb. 14 CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY NUTRITION AMMUNITION • Cancer Support Community • 12PM • Call (865) 546-4611. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer. • GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Balanced You Studios • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail. com. Donations accepted. KNOXVILLE CAPOEIRA CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 6PM • Visit capoeiraknoxville.org. • $10 KNOXVILLE PERSONAL TRAINING PILATES • Beaver Creek Cumberland Presbyterian Church • 6:30PM • Every Tuesday and Thursday. First class is free. Call (865) 622-3103 or visit knoxvillepersonaltraining.com. • $4 Wednesday, Feb. 15 CIRCLE MODERN DANCE OPEN LEVEL BALLET CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 6:30PM • Visit circlemoderndance.com. • $10 Thursday, Feb. 16 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Balanced You Studios • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail. com. Donations accepted. CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY: KNIT YOUR WAY TO WELLNESS • Cancer Support Community • 1PM • Whether you are a novice knitter or an old pro, you are invited to bring your own project or join others in learning a new one.
Thursday, Feb. 9 - Sunday, Feb. 26
KNOXVILLE CAPOEIRA CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 6PM • This class is an hour of student-led training and review of Capoeira skills and exercises. Come prepared to sweat. • $10 GROOVEMENT DROP-IN DANCE CLASS FOR ALL BODIES • Broadway Academy of Performing Arts • 6PM • $10 KNOXVILLE PERSONAL TRAINING PILATES • Beaver Creek Cumberland Presbyterian Church • 6:30PM • Every Tuesday and Thursday. First class is free. Call (865) 622-3103 or visit knoxvillepersonaltraining.com. • $4 ADULT COLORING SESSIONS • Blount County Public Library • 7PM • Held on the third Thursday of every month. • FREE BEGINNER ACROYOGA CLASS • Breezeway Yoga Studio • 7:30PM • Each class explores the foundations of the AcroYoga practice. We work closely with spotters, providing a safe and supported environment for newcomers to immerse themselves in the practice. Come and learn what it means to trust, to let go, to fly, and to play. No partner needed. • $15 BELLY DANCE LEVELS 1 AND 2 • Knox Dance Worx • 8PM • Call (865) 898-2126 or email alexia@alexia-dance.com. • $12 Friday, Feb. 17 LET’S TALK QUAL • The Public House • 4PM • Ever wanted to chat more about qualitative research outside of the classroom? Here’s your chance. Let’s get out of our silos and talk about thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and practices of qualitative work. This event is for anyone interested in QUAL and hosted by Lauren Moret, assistant professor in the Educational Psychology and Counseling Department. •
FREE LOVE POTIONS COCKTAIL/MOCKTAIL CLASS • Central Collective • 6PM • Learn how to create three love-inspired cocktails from Dale Mackey, co-founder of The Central Collective. • $25 Saturday, Feb. 18 GROW YOUR GARDEN: SPRING FRUITS AND VEGGIES • Knoxville Botanical Garden • 9AM • Participants will learn about growing a fruits and vegetables this spring and discuss what to plant, when to plant it, and how to grow a spring edible garden. • $20 CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY: MINDFULNESS IN EVERYDAY LIFE • Cancer Support Community • 10AM • Life is full of challenges. What can we do when our lives feel out of control? A practice of mindfulness can help. RSVP. Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer. Sunday, Feb. 19 CIRCLE MODERN DANCE BALLET BARRE CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 1PM • Visit circlemoderndance.com. • $10 CIRCLE MODERN DANCE: MODERN DANCE FOUNDATIONS CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 2PM • Visit circlemoderndance.com. • $10 CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY MINDFULNESS-BASED STREET REDUCTION EIGHT-WEEK SERIES • Cancer Support Community • 4:30PM • This series is a systematic practice that involves focusing attention in the present moment in order to relax the body and calm the mind. • FREE
Monday, Feb. 20 HEART OF YOGA SERIES • Central Collective • 5:30PM • $15-$50 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Balanced You Studios • 6PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail. com. Donations accepted. KNOXVILLE PERSONAL TRAINING BOOT CAMP • Beaver Creek Cumberland Presbyterian Church • 6:30PM • First class is free. Call (865) 622-3103 or visit knoxvillepersonaltraining.com. • $15 MONDAY NIGHT YOGA • Church Street United Methodist Church • 7PM • Contact Micarooni@aol.com with questions. • $5 COLD WEATHER BACKPACKING WORKSHOP • Little River Trading Co. • 6:30PM • Staffers Michael Fleming, Chris Higgins, and Scotty McClure will lead a workshop on cold weather backpacking, with a checklist for gear/supplies as well as tip and tricks on how to stay warm. • FREE Tuesday, Feb. 21 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Balanced You Studios • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail. com. Donations accepted. GROW YOUR GARDEN: SPRING FRUITS AND VEGGIES • Phylis Wheatley YWCA • 12PM • Participants will learn about growing a fruits and vegetables this spring and discuss what to plant, when to plant it, and how to grow a spring edible garden. • $20 KNOXVILLE CAPOEIRA CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 6PM • Visit capoeiraknoxville.org. • $10 KNOXVILLE PERSONAL TRAINING PILATES • Beaver Creek
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36
KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
MELINDA GRIMAC AFFILIATE BROKER
CALENDAR Cumberland Presbyterian Church • 6:30PM • Every Tuesday and Thursday. First class is free. Call (865) 622-3103 or visit knoxvillepersonaltraining.com. • $4 LADY PARTS: KNOXVILLE’S FEMALE BICYCLE MAINTENANCE CLASS • DreamBikes • 7PM • Lady Parts is an all female and femme bicycle maintenance class. It is a safe and inclusive space for women to learn about how to fix their bikes. In our second season of courses we are collaborating with DreamBikes Knoxville to teach our classes at their non-profit bike shop. • FREE Wednesday, Feb. 22 A SAFE PLACE CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE AWARENESS AND PREVENTION WORKSHOP • 9AM • Register at speakingout-csa.com or call 865-230-6059. At Asbury Place Clubhouse (2648 Sevierville Road, Maryville). • $30 GROW YOUR GARDEN: SPRING FRUITS AND VEGGIES • SEEED Knox • 5:30PM • Participants will learn about growing a fruits and vegetables this spring and discuss what to plant, when to plant it, and how to grow a spring edible garden. • $20 CIRCLE MODERN DANCE OPEN LEVEL BALLET CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 6:30PM • Visit circlemoderndance.com. • $10 CLIMBING FUNDAMENTALS • River Sports Outfitters • 6PM • Come learn the basics of climbing every second and fourth Wednesday of the month. Space is limited so call 865-673-4687 to reserve your spot now. Class fee $20. Visit riversportsoutfitters.com. • $20
MEETINGS
Thursday, Feb. 9 AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 6PM • Visit farragutalanon.org or email FindHope@Farragutalanon. org. • FREE ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS/DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES • The Birdhouse • 6PM • A 12-step meeting for adults who grew up in alcoholic or dysfunctional homes. The group offers a safe space for emotional healing. Contact Laura at 706-621-2238 or lamohendricksll@ gmail.com for more information or visit the international ACA website at adultchildren.org. • FREE BLACK LIVES MATTER • The Birdhouse • 7:30PM • #BlackLivesMatter is working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. Visit blacklivesmatterknoxville.org. • FREE Friday, Feb. 10 UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE SCIENCE FORUM • Thompson-Boling Arena • 12PM • The University of Tennessee’s Science Forum hosts weekly presentations about cutting-edge research on a variety of topics, ranging from the truth about GMOs to the recent Gatlinburg fires. Science Forum talks are held from noon to 1 p.m. most Fridays in Thompson-Boling Arena Cafe private Rooms C-D. They are free and open to the public. Visit scienceforum.utk.edu.; • FREE Saturday, Feb. 11 CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY PROSTATE CANCER NETWORKER • Cancer Support Community • 10AM • This drop-in group is an opportunity for men to network with other men about their experiences with prostate cancer. Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer. AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 11AM • Visit farragutalanon.org or email FindHope@Farragutalanon.org. • FREE
JOIN TENNESSEE SMOKERS CALLING IT QUITS IN 2017!
Sunday, Feb. 12 SKEPTIC BOOK CLUB • Books-A-Million • 2PM • The book club of the Rationalists of East Tennessee meets on the second Sunday of every month. Visit rationalists.org. • FREE AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 5PM • Visit farragutalanon.org or email FindHope@Farragutalanon. org. • FREE
IT’S
Monday, Feb. 13 TECHNICAL SOCIETY OF KNOXVILLE • Crowne Plaza Knoxville • 11:30AM • Fangxing Li of the University of Tennessee will discuss demand response for modernized grid control. Our electrical power distribution system is so important that everyone needs to understand as much as they can about it. Visit technicalsociety.net. • FREE COMMUNITY DEFENSE WEEKLY MEETING • Tabernacle Baptist Church • 6PM • Are you facing criminal charges? Do you know someone who could use support with a criminal case? Community Defense of East Tennessee is a grassroots organization of community members who provide support for families and individuals facing charges in the criminal justice system. Contact us at communitydefenseET@gmail.com or (865) 214-6546. • FREE GAY MEN’S DISCUSSION GROUP • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7:30PM • We hold facilitated discussions on topics and issues relevant to local gay men in a safe and open environment. Visit gaygroupknoxville.org. Tuesday, Feb. 14 STFK SCIENCE CAFE • Zoo Knoxville • 2PM • A free monthly discussion of science-related topics, hosted by the Spirit and Truth Fellowship of Knoxville. Email rsvp@ knoxsciencecafe.org. • FREE ATHEISTS SOCIETY OF KNOXVILLE • Don Gallo • 5:30PM • Weekly atheists meetup and happy hour. Come join us for food, drink and great conversation. Everyone welcome. Visit meetup.com/KnoxvilleAtheists. • FREE HARVEY BROOME GROUP OF THE SIERRA CLUB • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7PM • FREE AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 7PM • Visit farragutalanon.org or email FindHope@Farragutalanon. org. • FREE THREE RIVERS! EARTH FIRST! • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM • Call (865) 257-4029 for more information. • FREE
TENNESSEE QUIT WEEK February 13-17, 2017 #QuittinTimeTN Talk to your doctor or healthcare provider today about smoking cessation treatment options that may be right for you.
#
Use #QuittinTimeTN to share your quit story on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and find more information about Quit Week events. Get more information about Tennessee Quit Week at tn.gov/health/topic/FHW-tobacco. Find helpful tools online at Quitter’sCircle.com. Call the Tennessee Tobacco Quitline at 1-800-QUIT-NOW (784-8669) for access to FREE resources.
Healthcare providers can use the online portal to refer and get patient status updates at iqhquitline.com/referrals
Wednesday, Feb. 15 AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 11AM • Visit farragutalanon.org or email FindHope@Farragutalanon. org. • FREE CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY WOMEN WITH ADVANCED CANCER NETWORKER • Cancer Support Community • 1:30PM • Call 865-546- 4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer. CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY HEAD AND NECK CANCER EDUCATION AND SUPPORT MEETING • Cancer Support Community • 4PM • This new program will provide an opportunity to meet others living with head and neck cancer with emphasis on education and shared experience. Call 865-546-4661. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer. • FREE THE SOUTHERN LITERATURE BOOK CLUB • Union Ave Books • 6PM • Union Ave Books’ monthly discussion group about Southern books and writers. Visit unionavebooks. com. • FREE February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 37
Thursday, Feb. 16 AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 6PM • Visit farragutalanon.org or email FindHope@Farragutalanon. org. • FREE CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY FAMILY BEREAVEMENT GROUP • Cancer Support Community • 6PM • Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer. CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY LEUKEMIA, LYMPHOMA, AND MYELOMA NETWORKER • Cancer Support Community • 6PM • ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS/DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES • The Birdhouse • 6PM • A 12-step meeting for adults who grew up in alcoholic or dysfunctional homes. The group offers a safe space for emotional healing. Contact Laura at 706-621-2238 or lamohendricksll@ gmail.com for more information or visit the international ACA website at adultchildren.org. • FREE Friday, Feb. 17 UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE SCIENCE FORUM • Thompson-Boling Arena • 12PM • Visit scienceforum.utk.edu. • FREE Saturday, Feb. 18 AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 11AM • Visit farragutalanon.org or email FindHope@Farragutalanon. org. • FREE Sunday, Feb. 19 RATIONALISTS OF EAST TENNESSEE • Pellissippi State Community College • 10:30AM • Visit rationalists.org. • FREE AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 5PM • Visit farragutalanon.org or email FindHope@Farragutalanon. org. • FREE Monday, Feb. 20 COMMUNITY DEFENSE WEEKLY MEETING • Tabernacle Baptist Church • 6PM • Contact us at communitydefenseET@gmail.com or (865) 214-6546. • FREE GAY MEN’S DISCUSSION GROUP • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7:30PM • Visit gaygroupknoxville.org. Tuesday, Feb. 21 ATHEISTS SOCIETY OF KNOXVILLE • Don Gallo • 5:30PM • Weekly atheists meetup and happy hour. Come join us for food, drink and great conversation. Everyone welcome. Visit meetup.com/KnoxvilleAtheists. • FREE AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 7PM • Visit farragutalanon.org or email FindHope@Farragutalanon. org. • FREE THREE RIVERS! EARTH FIRST! • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM • Call (865) 257-4029 for more information. • FREE Wednesday, Feb. 22 AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 11AM • Visit farragutalanon.org or email FindHope@Farragutalanon. org. • FREE KNOXVILLE WRITERS’ GROUP • Naples Italian Restaurant • 11AM • Guest speakers read from and discuss their work. All-inclusive lunch is $12.00. RSVP to 865-983-3740. THE BOOKAHOLICS BOOK GROUP • Union Ave Books • 12PM • Union Ave Books’ monthly book discussion group. Visit unionavebooks.com. • FREE KNOX HERITAGE PRESERVATION AND LIBATIONS • The 38
KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
Crown and Goose • 5:30PM • Join friends of historic preservation for a drink and good conversation. No need to RSVP, just stop by. Free and open to the public. Visit knoxheritage.org. • FREE AGAPE CAFE • St. Paul United Methodist Church • 6:30PM • St. Paul United Methodist Church seeks to combine TED Talks and the Chautauqua tents of the early 20th century into one package called the Agape Cafe, celebrating life through music, art, talks and performances. • FREE LESBIAN SOCIAL GROUP OF KNOXVILLE • Kristtopher’s • 6:30PM • Just a casual gathering of women to socialize and plan activities. Meetings are the second and fourth Wednesday of the month. • FREE
ETC.
Thursday, Feb. 9 KNOXVILLE SQUARE DANCE • Laurel Theater • 8PM • Jubilee Community Arts presents Knoxville Square Dance with live old-time music by the Helgramites and calling by Stan Sharp, Ruth Simmons and Leo Collins. No experience or partner is necessary and the atmosphere is casual. (No taps, please.) Visit jubileearts.org. • $7 Saturday, Feb. 11 NOURISH KNOXVILLE WINTER FARMERS’ MARKET • Central United Methodist Church • 10AM • The Winter Farmers’ Market, held in the Historic 4th and Gill neighborhood, will host farm & food vendors selling pasture-raised meats, eggs, winter produce, honey, baked goods, artisan foods, and more. Outside, food trucks will be serving up lunch from locally sourced ingredients. Visit nourishknoxville.org. • FREE TVUUC ALLIANCE ANNUAL BOOK SALE • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 8AM • This is a great opportunity for lovers of books to take home a load of inspiring new volumes for bargain basement prices, all while supporting Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church as we work to transform the world through love and justice. Live Renaissance music will be provided by the Greater Knoxville Recorder Society from 11 a.m.-1 p.m. • FREE Thursday, Feb. 16 THE SPINS • The Open Chord • 8PM • Vinyl Me, Please presents a monthly record night with giveaways, a preview of a newly released record, and live music performances. Visit openshordmusic.com. • FREE
Send your events to calendar@knoxmercury.com
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY 39
OUTDOORS
Voice in the Wilder ness
Trail Blazer In Ben Montgomery’s Grandma Gatewood, the full story of an Appalachian Trail pioneer is finally revealed BY KIM TREVATHAN
T
hink about that time you were hiking up a steep trail and felt like you were making decent progress, putting one foot in front of the other, sweat dropping off your nose, and then somebody who looked 20 or 30 years older than you brushed past you in a blur, not even breathing hard— and then vanished, like a ghost, around the bend up ahead. After the shock of such encounters, I am usually inspired by the spirit and resiliency of older hikers. The subject of Ben Montgomery’s book, Grandma Gatewood: the Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail, is the prototype of these ridge runners, a 5-foot-2 inch Ohioan who thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail at the age of 67 in 1955, the first woman to do it. And then she became the first person to hike it a second time (1957), as well as the first to complete it three times (1964). Montgomery, a staff writer for the Tampa Bay Times, will give a talk and slide show on his book at the Sevier-
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY February 9, 2017
ville Convention Center on Saturday, Feb. 25, 12:30-1:45 p.m., as part of the Rose Glen Literary Festival. “She broke down the idea that the AT was only for young, physically fit men,” Montgomery says in a phone interview. She showed that anyone, regardless of age or gender, could accomplish something like this with willpower and “gumption.” Emma Gatewood started her hike in May 1955, on Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia, and completed the 2,050mile walk in Maine at Baxter Peak in 146 days. The year before, she had started in Maine, but had to quit, partly because she broke her glasses. High-tech gear aficionados take note: Gatewood carried a shower curtain and warm coat for shelter and she wore a pair of flimsy canvas sneakers: Keds! (She went through seven pairs of them.) She fueled her hike with Vienna Sausages—that and what she foraged, like berries and sassafras leaves and meals from friendly locals. She carried her “gear”
in a homemade drawstring sack. In a way, Gatewood’s story came to Montgomery like a wandering hiker. He had written prize-winning articles for the Tampa Bay Times and attracted the interest of a literary agent, who asked him to come up with a book idea. He remembered his mother’s stories about this eccentric great aunt, a mother of 11 who was born on a farm in Ohio and became fascinated by the trail in the early 1950s when she read about it in National Geographic. The article seemed to promote the hike as an easy lark, “soul-cheering and foot-tempting,” with food and shelter easy to come by. Gatewood would discover first-hand the shortcomings and inaccuracies of the article that helped inspire her hike. Montgomery thinks part of what enabled Gatewood to complete the hike was her toughness. “She had lived a hard life, as many people did at that time,” he says. “She survived the Great Depression, raised 11 kids, and worked alongside men on the farm. She was no stranger to hard work.” Montgomery’s research included interviews with Gatewood’s children, and he was fortunate that Lucy, the youngest, had her mom’s correspondence, her trail journal, and a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. Gatewood had even corrected errors in the newspaper articles about her. In the process of researching, Montgomery found out things that peeled back layers of what had been
reported on at the time, secrets that may have explained part of Gatewood’s motivation and drive. What emerged from her family during Montgomery’s research was a secret story of physical abuse by her husband, P.C. That abuse lasted three decades, including the final fight that nearly killed her, including a cracked rib and broken teeth. At the time of Gatewood’s hike, when reporters asked her why she was submitting herself to such hardship, Montgomery writes, “She’d tell them she found solace in nature, away from the grit and the ash of civilization,” never alluding to her specific reasons for needing solace. None of her grown children knew that she was on the trail that first time. She had no cell phone, of course, and she advanced through a remote habitat populated by poisonous snakes, bears, wild boars, wolves, rabid skunks, deer ticks, black flies and poison ivy. No one had reported on the fact that she walked through two hurricanes—Connie and Diane—on that first hike, nor the fact that the rains from those storms swelled the creeks that she had to cross. Another small complication: She could not swim. “We’ve lionized men for a long time,” Montgomery says. “I like to highlight stories about badass women who did awesome things.” Montgomery’s second book, The Leper Spy: the Story of an Unlikely Hero of World War II, tells the story of
“We’ve lionized men for a long time. I like to highlight stories about badass women who did awesome things.” —BEN MONTGOMERY
Filipina Josefina Guerrero, who won the Medal of Freedom for her valor. Gatewood’s trek, covered by publications such as Sports Illustrated, brought attention to the sorry state of the trail and resulted in much-needed improvements. She got lost often on the hike because the trail was so poorly marked, and one section in the Smokies had been plowed up as part of someone’s garden. Aside from hiking the AT three times, Gatewood, at 71, hiked the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail, from Independence, Mo. to Portland, Ore. Montgomery notes that many hikers, of all ages, credit Grandma Gatewood as inspiring their long thru-hikes on trails like the AT. “A surprising number of people emailed to say ‘I haven’t so much as walked around the block and this has motivated me to become active,’” he says. Montgomery himself underwent a lifestyle change as a result of researching the book. He gave up the automobile as his primary mode of transportation and began walking more in a city, Tampa, that he says is the second-most dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists. “It was life-changing,” he says. “It gave me a connection to place that I didn’t have before…helping me to see the city in a more intimate way.” Published by what Montgomery called “a small but great press” (Chicago Review Press) in 2014, the book became a New York Times bestseller through what Montgomery thinks was mainly word of mouth. Montgomery’s presentation at the Rose Glen Literary Festival will include the only video that exists of Emma Gatewood, an appearance on the television show You Bet your Life with Groucho Marx. Included in his slide show will be photos not in the book. Montgomery’s book on Grandma Gatewood won the 2014 National Outdoor Book Award for history/ biography. ◆ A writing instructor at Maryville College, Kim Trevathan is the author of Paddling the Tennessee River: A Voyage on East Water and Coldhearted River: A Canoe Odyssey Down the Cumberland.
Fundraising Lunch
Knoxville Mercury, Yassin’s Falafel House, and the Central Collective are teaming up to fund a vision for a be er Knoxville. Join us for lunch provided by Yassin’s Falafel House and enjoy a special screening of the recent short film produced by Square, “Yassin Falafel.” We’ll also be introducing you to our new initiative Press Forward which you can see in action on page 13.
Half the proceeds from this lunch event will go toward funding the reporting of these stories. With your help, we can make sure Knoxville continues to become a place where good ideas thrive. WHEN February 12th 12:00pm — 2:00pm WHERE Central Collective 923 N Central St. COST $25 per ticket RSVP Buy tickets in advance at thecentralcollective.com
THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS
9715 Kingston Pike - 865-357-8566 Coming soon to Sevier Ave. in South Knoxville unclelems.com
February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 41
FOOD
Home Palate
Sweet Retreat
the early 1940s. It’s the same model that was in the galley on the USS Missouri.” Furthermore, the Phoenix features true soda jerks wearing white shirts and aprons. “The soda part is carbonated water, seltzer water, from hand pulls, and so the staff that works behind the bar are called ‘jerks,’” Sherrill explains. “They jerk on the pulls to make an endless number of concoctions by hand.” Retro design is nothing new, of course, and we’ve all been fooled by skin-deep accuracy that doesn’t sink into the experience itself. But, blissfully, that is not the case at the Phoenix. “We try to do everything the old-fashioned way. We make absolutely everything, including our ice cream,
Phoenix Soda Fountain’s craft ice-cream creations bring back an old-fashioned buzz BY DENNIS PERKINS
I
Nolan Sherrill is the mind and, sometimes, the man behind the soda fountain. He claims “a real, deep passion about food,” and that ardor is evident in every sundae, shake, and seasonal special that comes across the marble-topped bar. That marble (which also tops the tables) is a part of an overall design aesthetic that recreates the feel of the late 1930s and early 40s, with many pieces of decor dating from that time. And, Sherrill is proud to point out, that includes the soda fountain itself. “We have a Bastian-Blessing—it’s one of the largest made,” he says. “We were really fortunate to find one from
THE PHOENIX PHARMACY AND SODA FOUNTAIN 418 S. Gay St., Suite 104, 865-692-1603 Hours: Wed.–Fri.: 12 a.m.–10 p.m., Sat.: 11 a.m.–10 p.m., Sun.: 12 p.m.–8 p.m.
Photos by Dennis Perkins
might be high. But I’m pretty sure that the Phoenix Soda Fountain is one of the best things going on in downtown Knoxville just now. As current slang would have it, this place is lit. I have experience with sugar highs and plenty of exposure to the euphoria that comes from eating well, but I don’t know that I have had those two elations mingle with such intensity and longevity as they did following my visit to the Phoenix. The buzz lasted for hours. It’s possible that it’s all sugar, but I doubt it; there’s a healthy dose of nostalgia that comes from just walking into the place: an attractive menu of sundaes and other soda fountain treats created with a chefly consideration; rich, satisfying and homemade ice cream; a staff of folks who really like being at work; and a happy, feel-good vibe. That’s a lot of dopamine for a place the whole family can enjoy.
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in-house,” Sherrill promises. “The things we don’t make are our cherries and our nuts, but we make all of our sauces and all of our toppings.” In fact, he was insistent on showing me the walk-in cooler, which, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen plenty. But the Phoenix’s walk-in is full of hand-labeled and dated containers of everything that goes into making already great ice cream into an extra-special treat. The only outside packaged goods I saw in there were the cherries, along with milk and cream. Speaking of those treats… I don’t know what ice cream tasted like in the 1940s, but I can’t imagine it being better than what this soda fountain serves. It’s dense without being stodgy and rich without weighing you down. It’s great as a
Home Palate
scoop, but when it gets full soda-fountain treatment, it’s remarkable. The banana split is a work of art—attractive, tasty, and huge. It’s not a reworking of the classic; but with its topping of homemade pineapple compote, caramel, and hot fudge, it’s almost a brand-new taste sensation. It remains amazing to me how easy it is to get used to, and even come to like, processed and preservative-thick imitations of real food. Even the cherries are tasty— they’re from Washington State’s Tillen Farms and, unlike the average shockingly red Maraschino, these long-stemmed beauties are made without using artificial colors, artificial flavors, sulfites, and preservatives. “You can taste the difference, and hopefully that’s what people see when they walk in here,” Sherrill says. “There’s a way that we do things from a customer standpoint. We really want people to feel welcome in the store and to understand what we’re all about: providing the best quality product that we can.” One of Sherrill’s original creations is the K-PB&J sundae, a tribute to the Kern’s Bakery. It starts with vanilla cake and strawberry syrup, two scoops of vanilla-bean ice cream, and gets topped with a fine homemade peanut butter sauce. And then it’s garnished with a waffled Kern’s Bread curl, which is awfully cute on its own but you’ll like it better if you spread it with a little bit of everything else—including some of the mountain of whipped cream that tops the whole thing. It’s fun and delicious. But for my buck, almost nothing
FOOD
in the whole dessert pantheon matches the mind-blowing experience of the Great Smoky Mountain Sundae. Exaggeration, you think? Nope—this is a tower built on both warm chocolate brownie and vanilla cake, drenched with hot fudge, then dressed with vanilla ice cream, warm caramel, and, of course, whipped cream. But what transports this sundae to Olympian heights is the generous sprinkle of Olive and Sinclair’s Smoked Nib Brittle. Nibs are unsweetened bits of cacao beans; Olive and Sinclair smokes them in the very reputable smokehouse that belongs to Alan Benton. The smoky flavor and crunch elevate the treat into a complex, very haute cuisine-like treat. If you’re an aficionado of fine spirits, take a moment to ponder the flavor combination. You may very well want to invite your whiskey-loving friends along for this non-alcoholic but intensely flavorful moment. On the other hand, the simple goodness of an ice cream float brings sheer pleasure, too. I tried the Strawberries and Cream, which is nothing more than a scoop of strawberry ice cream and a fountain glass full of Sprecher’s Cream Soda. But the scoop is as big as a cat’s head and the combo almost made me giggle, but don’t quote me on that. I wish I could I treat every reader to a sample of what Sherrill and company shared with me, but I’m convinced you’ll want more, so you’re better off getting your own—besides, being abstemious in most things mood-altering, this a treat I’m inclined to bogart. ◆
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February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 43
’BYE
At This Point
The Next Right Thing Consulting the calendar BY STEPHANIE PIPER
F
ive weeks into the new year, I’m glad I resisted the temptation to make any resolutions. I would certainly have broken them all by now. Cut back on chocolate? Not a chance. Step up the exercise? Didn’t happen. Be unfailingly kind and non-judgmental? Take a wild guess. I could blame my unimproved self on too many bleak headlines and too much cable news, but that would be an easy out. In fact, I have been giving the media a wide berth since November. When a click of the remote sends my blood pressure skyrocketing, it’s time to quit. And where does that leave me? Floating along in a bubble of cares real and imagined, debating with myself about the duties of an informed citizen versus the need to practice some degree of mental hygiene. Many years ago, I had a friend whose calm demeanor I envied. I used to study his quiet ways, trying to understand the source of his still center. He moved away before I could figure it out, but he left me with a
parting gift. It’s a perpetual calendar clock, he said, placing a box in my hands. I opened it to find a brightly painted piece of wood. On one side was carved the word “today.” The other side said “now.” It has moved with me from house to house and office to office and still sits on my desk, a reminder that peace of mind is in direct proportion to simplicity. There are long stretches when the block of wood is just part of the scenery, no more evocative than the stapler or the pen holder. Lately, though, I find myself picking it up and turning it over, studying the words, wondering about today and now. Because, like it or not, that’s the date and time. It’s what I’ve got. I’ve been over this ground before, treating myself to preachy little exhortations about remaining present and doing the next right thing. There are days when I’ve actually sustained this way of life for an entire hour. It’s uphill work. But I’m feeling a certain urgency about it now, a longing for the simple
There is something to be said for action, for lighting even the smallest candle instead of cursing the darkness.
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truth of the moment in a troubled and troubling world. Yesterday is done, no longer subject to revision. Tomorrow is unpredictable at best, downright scary if I relapse and click on cable news. My wooden clock is ticking. Act now. So I breathe deeply and begin again. I wonder about the next right thing, how I will know it when I see it. It could be the winter dawn, faintly pink and azure blue, inviting a mindful witness. Maybe it will be the next person I encounter, someone who needs me to see them whole, acknowledge their presence, even if it’s just a nod in the hallway. Maybe it will be the next item on my daily list, completed without procrastination or complaint. It could be the recognition that I am a fallible human being who could gain wisdom from listening to someone else’s opinion. It might even
BY IAN BLACKBURN AND JACK NEELY
be spaghetti carbonara, a favorite person’s favorite dish, prepared from scratch on a ho-hum Tuesday night for no special reason. It seems unlikely that these puny efforts will have much impact on the complex web of world events. Still, there is something to be said for action, for lighting even the smallest candle instead of cursing the darkness. Or floating indefinitely in the bubble. It’s not a resolution, exactly— more a slow but steady course correction, a set of small goals to order my time. With patience and practice, I might actually learn to live by my calendar. Now. Today. Stephanie Piper’s At This Point examines the mystery, absurdity, and persistent beauty of daily life. She has been a newspaper reporter, editor, and award-winning columnist for more than 30 years.
February 9, 2017
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 45
’BYE
Spir it of the Staircase
BY MATTHEW FOLTZ-GRAY
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www.thespiritofthestaircase.com
LOOK FOR OUR NEXT ISSUE ON FEBRUARY 23! Remember, we’re publishing every other week this winter to give us time to work on new content, design updates, and sales initiatives. In the meantime, check out one of our new endavors, Press Forward, on page 13.
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IN THE ARENA. 8 years ago a man with a pocketful of hopes and a wood fired oven, entered the arena. With only a vision to guide him, he emerged from his corner. The challenger? Uninspired pizza. Using old world methods and a collection of personal recipes. He began his journey. Soon word spread of his unique approach to pizza. And he joined the revolution in Knoxville food and drink, that is going strong today. Today, a new and improved Hard Knox Pizzeria is now open, with expanded seating, table service and 14 craft beers on tap. The vision remains, the food is still inspired and the revolution continues.
For more of the story go to hardknoxpizza.com.