Author: Bianca Phillips

The Boeing 727 cockpit that’s lain dormant on the front lawn of the Children’s Museum of Memphis since 1992 is finally going places. Literally. On Saturday, August 3rd, the museum will unveil the now-enclosed cockpit in the “Going Places” exhibit along with three other exhibits that have been under construction since last March.

“Going Places,” aimed at teaching children about the forces of flight, will finally utilize the cockpit after its 10-year slumber. It’s now suspended in a glass atrium and will be the focal point of the exhibit. Children will be allowed to climb inside and get an idea what a real airplane cockpit looks like. Each button controls a recording describing its function, and the back section of the cockpit contains various computer simulations and games.

“The existing cockpit is the centerpiece of the new museum. That airplane suspended from the ceiling is really going to grab children’s attention,” says Randy McKeel, public-relations manager for the museum.

The staff of the Children’s Museum has had this exhibit in mind since the plane was donated by FedEx and the Memphis Group, a distributor of new and overhauled aircraft equipment, but it’s taken a while for the idea to come to fruition.

“FedEx and the Memphis Group knew a long time ago that we wanted to do an exhibit that had to do with flight,” says Judy Caldwell, executive director of the museum. “The timing was such that, when we got the plane, we couldn’t include it as an exhibit. So all of these years, we’ve had this plan under our hats.”

Up until construction of the 16,000-square-foot addition to the museum, the cockpit sat outside the museum on a concrete pedestal surrounded by a fence, where it became home to a family of birds.

“They had to refurbish the whole inside,” says McKeel. “They had to repaint the whole thing. It was white, orange, and blue, and now it’s all-white like a FedEx cockpit.”

The cockpit is 18 feet tall and 31 feet long and weighs over 20,000 pounds. It was separated from the rest of the plane in Greenwood, Mississippi, and transported to the museum by truck. The leftover fuselage and wings were sold as scrap.

In the new exhibit, stairs lead up to the captain’s chair of the cockpit. (An elevator provides access for the handicapped.) Directly across from the plane is an air-traffic tower where children can “control” airplanes by instructing them to decrease or increase altitude or speed based on the planes’ positions on a radar screen. Below the cockpit, a flight simulator allows children to experience the motion of an actual flight, such as roll, pitch, and yaw.

The exhibit also features a wind tunnel to demonstrate velocity as well as the effects of wing shape on flight. A distribution station teaches children about the various modes of shipping goods to and from Memphis using a touchscreen and based on weight, size, spoilage potential, and urgency of delivery.

“Going Places” will also feature a dress-up area where children can try on the clothing of pilots and flight attendants, a hot-air balloon demonstration that teaches the dynamics of air temperature, and a station for building model airplanes.

Since our mission is to reach children ages 1 to 12, we really needed something more science-based for the older children. Since flight is science, that facilitated making the whole exhibit,” says McKeel.

Besides “Going Places,” the museum will also unveil three other exhibits this Saturday. “Art Smart,” “Growing Healthy,” and “WaterWORKS!” are aimed at attracting older children without being too advanced to hold the attention of younger minds.

“WaterWORKS!” features a 25-foot model of the Mississippi River with miniature boats and barges and a tiny replica of Mud Island. Children will be able to create bridges and levees as well as manipulate the direction and velocity of the water. The exhibit also features a glassed-in Rain Room where kids can cause warm air from the floor to rise and meet cool air at the ceiling, forming an actual cloud. They can then push another button, which produces a shower of water from the cloud, simulating rain.

The “Art Smart” exhibit, framed by giant pencils and paintbrushes, features a stage, where children can dress up and put on their own productions, as well as an art room, where they can draw, paint, and sculpt. A giant loom allows kids to weave patterns out of cloth strips of varying colors, and a Twister game teaches kids about primary and secondary colors.

“Growing Healthy” features three huge arteries that children can climb through. The first will be completely clear and easy to maneuver through, but the second will be partly clogged and much harder to get out of. The third is so clogged, kids will have to exit through a bypass. The exhibit also contains a lung station where kids can don lab coats and view X-rays of healthy and tobacco-damaged lungs on a light box or view slides of lung tissue through a microscope. They’ll also get to try on fat costumes and attempt to play basketball.

“The Children’s Museum of Memphis is a hands-on interactive discovery museum, and we’re an informal learning facility. We want kids to take real-life experiences from our museum and apply them to the real world,” says McKeel.

Grand opening of new exhibits, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, August 3rd.

Movies based on novels always seem to lack something. Perhaps it’s the rhythm of the written work’s “he said, she said” or the detailed descriptions of the otherwise trivial. University of Memphis drama professor Gloria Baxter and the ensemble theater company Voices of the South have found a way to stage a novel without leaving out all the little things. It’s called narrative theater.

“Narrative theater is the staging of material not originally written for the stage, usually prose fiction or creative nonfiction,” explains Baxter. “When we stage material, we don’t change the text into all-dialogue. When other people say adaptation, they rewrite the novel into dialect, but we use the author’s actual language.”

Baxter and the nine-member company are currently working on Places of Enchantment, based on Wapiti Wilderness by Olaus and wife Margaret “Mardy” Murie, published in 1965. The Muries founded a nature center in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, dedicated to defending the wilderness and stressing its importance to the human spirit. Their book is the field journals of each spouse, kept while following an elk herd. Olaus’ journal focused on his scientific studies, while Mardy’s deals with what it was like to raise children while leading such a nomadic lifestyle.

Voices of the South will hold only one local performance of Places of Enchantment on July 10th. They’ll then travel to Jackson Hole to perform at the Murie Center in honor of the widowed Mardy’s 100th birthday. The production will return to Memphis next spring for a full run.

Baxter has been involved in narrative theater for more than 30 years. She got her start in graduate school at Northwestern University, a breeding ground of the form. Her professor, Robert Green, was experimenting with the concept of staging novels in the 1960s. He believed “chamber theater,” as he called it, could only be performed in stripped-down minimalist stage productions. Unlike Green, Baxter and company have since put on large multimedia productions based on the works of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Terri Tempest Williams, to name a few.

“Narrative theater opens up the range of stories I would like to tell. Sometimes, I feel limited by the classic repertoire of literature,” she says. “The novel spends so much time with interior life. I love the challenge of trying to figure out how to stage the interior life of a character, how to stage their dreams and memories.”

Baxter goes through a step-by-step process when adapting novels to the stage. The first step, of course, is choosing the book. “Generally, to spend this much time with a piece, it has to be material that I have a deep, emotional connection with and a real need to express something about,” she says. “Wapiti Wilderness is a book I discovered in 1975, and it’s been a guidebook for me during many, many summers in Wyoming. So it’s been in my heart for almost 30 years.”

Her next step is what she calls “seedwork,” or familiarizing the company with the material. To prepare for Places of Enchantment, she joined cast members from Voices of the South at the Murie Center for two weeks. She introduced them to Mardy Murie and took them on walks through the environment to allow them to “internalize the rhythms and imagery” of the wilderness.

Next, she and the company hold workshops where the book is dissected and chapters are explored for theatrical potential. She creates a tentative script, and rehearsals begin. At first, the company creates imagery to go with the text. These early rehearsals show Baxter exactly what works and what doesn’t. The script is then altered to include only the richest imagery.

“My job is kind of watching, editing, shaping, and altering the text to support the imagery because the relationship of language and image is like a tapestry,” says Baxter. “If the company has given me an image of rippling pages, I’ve got to decide what phrase or what sentence goes with that action.”

When the script is finalized, traditional rehearsal begins. Movement is extremely important in narrative theater, and actors are responsible for capturing the imagery they’ve created through emotion and stage action.

The actors must have total awareness of where the other actors are onstage. To convey an image, they must move in a way that suggests that image while other actors play off that movement. For example, if an actor is portraying a heavy wind, she might sway violently while others move as though being blown about.

Since these narrative plays are not solely made up of dialogue, they contain information that isn’t usually read aloud during a stage adaptation, including descriptive paragraphs, the “he said, she said,” and the internal thoughts of characters. As a result, members of the audience have to work their brains. “People love it when their imagination has to be powerfully engaged. The audience is creating what they’re actually seeing,” says Baxter.

And, says Baxter, when everything adds up — powerful vocabulary, emotional imagery, rhythm, and tempo — the performance almost attains the state of music.

“By the end of the play, I’m no longer an architect but a conductor,” she says.

Places of Enchantment

8 p.m. Wednesday, July 10th

Buckman Performing

and Fine Arts Center, 323-0128

Need a place to practice your chink-chink, casper flip, or roast beef without being harassed by the po-po? The Memphis area is now home to three skate parks where skateboarders, in-line skaters, and BMX bikers can feel free to do it all without being hassled by the cops or angry property owners. The newly opened Skate Park of Memphis (SPM) in Cordova, the indoor Kullison Ramp Park in Midtown, and the outdoor Houston Skate Park in Germantown offer a variety of ramps, bowls, ledges, and rails.

“People say Memphis is behind a couple of years from everywhere else,” says Clay Clements, manager of CBS Skateboards in Cordova.

A couple? Try about 23, at least when it comes to skate parks.

The parks have been around for nearly 30 years in the United States, and there are currently about 800 in the country. Curved plywood ramps were first used for skating in Melbourne Beach, Florida, in 1975, and in 1976, Port Orange, Florida, became home to the first skate park, Skateboard City. Memphis didn’t join in until 1999, with the construction of Houston and Kullison. And on June 9th, SPM, the city’s largest, opened its doors.

SPM is the Mid-South’s first professional skate park and boasts 14,000 square feet, 10 quarter pipes, 10 ledges, eight bank ramps, a six-foot bowl, and a 1,400-square-foot pyramid with ledges, stairs, and rails. At the grand opening, ages ranged from 7 to 35. Skaters zoomed from ramp to ramp, somehow managing to avoid collision. There were, however, quite a few “slams” — that’s skater-talk for falling off your board.

Josh Lowry, co-owner of CBS Skateboards, saw SPM to fruition with the help of his parents Janis and Jeff. The facility was designed and built by experienced skaters from the Memphis area. “We want to be a stopping-off point for the major teams that come through,” says Janis Lowry. “We want to do demos, contests, that kind of thing.” On June 30th, the park will host Mike Vallely, a pro skater with his own line of boards and interactive DVD-ROM skater trading cards. Vallely also sings in a band called Mike V and the Rats and recently released the skateboarding video Drive.

Skaters can join SPM for a $50 annual membership fee and receive a discount on skate sessions. BMX bikers get to use the facilities on Thursday nights.

Kullison (pronounced “collision”) is smaller than SPM but has a loyal following. It has 8,000 square feet with 13 ramps, including a half-pipe, a pyramid, two jump boxes, and a box rail. The park is open to skateboarders, in-line skaters, and BMX bikers, or, as owner Derrick T. Jones says, “We ride and jam on bikes, skateboards, and blades.” And since Kullison is the only park that allows BMX bikers to practice alongside skaters, there are quite a few regular bikers.

Kullison is located inside an old warehouse that was once used for designing BMX bikes. Several bike sponsors suggested to the warehouse’s previous owner, Clyde Warner, that he build a few ramps for bikers to practice on. The ramps were constructed, and the park was opened as Darkside Ramp Park, catering to both bikers and skaters.

The park’s signature is a ramp built for the MTV Sports and Music Festival, which was held at Tom Lee Park in October 1998. “We found out where a bunch of MTV ramps were. This guy wanted to sell them, so Clyde Warner bought a ramp. We put it back together, and it’s still rockin’,” says Jones.

The park charges an annual membership fee of $20, although nonmembers can skate or bike for a few extra bucks. The park even has a lounge so tired skaters can take a breather and watch some TV.

There’s also the option of skating for free at Houston, located within the Houston Levee Park in Germantown. Composed of various slopes, embankments, walls, rails, curbs, and a fun box, it’s open only to skateboarders and in-line skaters — no bikes allowed.

Houston was built in 1999 by the Germantown Parks and Recreation Department. The area has safety rules posted, but since it’s located in an open area in a public park, there is no one to supervise and ensure those rules are followed. And while the park attracts skaters due to its outdoor location, it also lacks the large obstacles found in the other parks.

“I usually skate at Houston, but I’ll be going to Skate Park of Memphis in the future because it’s one of the best parks in the South,” says Joseph Williams, who, at 20, has skated half his life.

Just having the ability to choose is a good thing. Says Williams, “There’s a pretty decent skate culture [in Memphis]. It’s not as big as in other parts of the country, but it’s definitely growing.”

Skate Park of Memphis: 7740B Trinity Road in Cordova. Kullison Ramp Park: 116 Cumberland, just off Broad Avenue in Memphis. Houston Skate Park: behind Houston High School in Germantown.

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Putting on the dog

Skateboarding is as popular today as Monopoly, french fries, and vacations to Walt Disney World. Tony Hawk is a household name, and the X Games cater to the loyal fans of this “extreme” sport. Numerous video games allow the less active a shot at perfecting their virtual frontside air. But none of this would’ve been possible without the Z-Boys, the fathers of modern skateboarding. Dogtown and Z-Boys, a documentary about the group’s activities in the 1970s, chronicles skateboarding’s history back to the days before its commercialization.

Ex-Z-Boy and filmmaker Stacy Peralta tracked down 11 of the original 12 members (one could not be found) to come together and bear witness. Peralta tells the story of growing up in Dogtown, a rundown area of Santa Monica that served as a mecca for surfers, street gangs, and graffiti artists, through a montage of interviews with grown-up Z-Boys, 1970s video clips of the skaters, and stills of the boys frozen in action.

The film is beautifully edited, and the chaos created by the mix of media, pumped up by the soundtrack of ’70s rock-and-roll, paints a picture of the anarchy ingrained in the Z-Boys. Dogtown brings long-forgotten moments back to life with an amazing energy that makes you wish you’d been invited to the party.

Narrated by Sean Penn, a former skater himself, and with guest appearances by Henry Rollins and Tony Hawk, the film not only tells it like it was but also shows how much influence the Z-Boys had on aspiring skateboarders back in the day.

Dogtown and Z-Boys takes the story of a group of beach-bum teens with bad grades and a hatred for authority and makes them modern-day heroes. This is not just a film for skateboard enthusiasts but for anyone with a streak of rebellion in their heart and a touch of rock-and-roll in their soul. — BP

An artist who happens to be a Christian, not a Christian who happens to be an artist. That’s the best way to describe pop-rock singer-songwriter Beki Hemingway, who will perform on June 22nd at Hope Presbyterian Church as part of the Hope Summer Concert Series. “Sometimes, we’ll play in a bar and people will come up afterwards and say, ‘Are you religious? You’re spiritual,’ says Hemingway. “But at the same time, people will come up to us in a church and say, ‘What did you mean by that?'”

Hemingway, whose great-grandfather was a cousin of the famous Ernest, doesn’t fill her lyrics with direct references to God or the church. She describes her music as “faith songs from a Christian perspective.” The Chicago artist’s playful pop songs are filled with ideas of eternal hope and everlasting love without sounding like something out of a church hymnal. In fact, several Christian labels have passed on her for not being “overt enough.” Hemingway’s sophomore album Words For Loss of Words hit stores June 2nd. Many of the songs were written shortly after the death of her father, so the lyrics tend to be a little on the dark side. But all have an uplifting message reminding the audience that the bad times won’t last forever.

Hemingway says she generally writes about her own experiences, and most of the songs on WFLOW reflect situations she’s been through and the emotions that went along with them. Of expressing grief and struggle through song, Hemingway says, “These are the things we really don’t have words for. I think it’s funny to say that because we try to put lyrics to these things. It’s really hard to get to the bottom of it with words. ‘Hope Is All I Have’ probably sums up the album best. I went through the hardest times of my life making this CD with the recording situations and schedules. It just came through that hope is eternal, and there’s nothing we can do about it. So as much as I was trying to capture down feelings, I wound up writing a song about how there’s always hope.”

Not all of the tracks mirror her life. The second song, “Only Thing Worse,” is a completely fictitious break-up song. Hemingway and her guitarist/husband Randy Kerkman have been married for years, but they wanted to produce a song that was a challenge to write. “There’s one song, ‘Floating Away,’ about people who are suffering from long illnesses and trying to die well. Someone came up to me at a church service and said, ‘You know, I’m gonna find out tomorrow, but I’m pretty sure I’m dying of cancer. I just wanted to thank you for that song.’ That’s obviously rewarding,” she says.

Hemingway’s been in the Christian-music industry for over 10 years. At 16, she got a job at the Christian Artist Music Seminar driving artists to sound checks. The job gave her some insight into how the music business worked behind the scenes. She sang in various small bands for several years before joining the power-punk/rockabilly band This Train as a vocalist. She was with the band for four years before going solo in 1997. It wasn’t her choice, though; the band went on tour without her. Rather than give up, she began writing songs and recruited her husband to play guitar. She released a six-song EP, rinse. repeat., in 1997 and her first full-length album, Too Much Plenty, in 2000.

Hemingway’s uplifting lyrics and easygoing attitude have made her a name in the Christian-rock scene. She’s down-to-earth and loves for people in her audience to come hang out with her after a show. “If I have one big problem onstage, it’s that, some of the time, I think I’m doing more people-watching,” she says. “I’m wondering about that person’s day or thinking, Hey, I’d like to go talk to that person. I want to jump in the crowd sometimes and just go hang out with people.”

She and Kerkman are currently in the middle of a “stripped-down acoustic” tour which began May 3rd and will run through the fall. The couple purchased a camper van on eBay and set out on the road.

After the tour, Hemingway plans to spend some time working on side projects. She recently recorded a song for a Styx tribute album. She considers it out-of-character but a good way to flex her abilities before starting a new album.

As for the Memphis stop, Hemingway says, “We did Graceland once, and that was awesome. I thought I was going to be the one who was all excited, but Randy spent the most money in the gift shop. He was like ‘Ooh, can I get this?’ We need to sell a lot of CDs this time so we can afford to go back to Graceland. That’s what needs to happen.”