“We played in the Western section,” remembers Larry Keel. “We had cowboy boots and hats. “We played ‘Red River Valley’ and ‘Wildwood Flower’ — songs they thought people would recognize,” reveals the Larry Keel Experience’s flat-picking front man of his first job as a professional musician — a seven-month contract at Tokyo Disneyland. “My brother […]

“One of my favorite dancers was my grandfather, and I only ever saw him dance once,” Giles Collard recalls. “He was waiting for his wife to cook his breakfast,” continues Collard, a dancer, choreographer and instructor at Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre and the New Studio of Dance. “This wonderful, old-timey music was playing, and he […]

Cynthia West’s play Jar the Floor has been likened to an African-American take on TV’s The Golden Girls — a misconception local actor Janet Oliver is quick to correct. “People don’t know how to characterize a play that’s all women,” she observes. “You’d be closer to compare it to [the stage version of] Steel Magnolias,” […]

You probably know the story by heart: There’s a Christmas party, a mysterious uncle appears with a bag of gifts, and Clara gets a toy Nutcracker that her bratty brother promptly breaks. Then, in a through-the-looking-glass twist, the Christmas tree grows — as do the resident rodents — and the Nutcracker doll comes to life […]

Autumn brings with it brightly colored leaves, a chill in the air, and longer evenings offering plenty of time to curl up with a good book. But before falling back on an all-too-familiar name or taking potluck with some total unknown, why not check out instead one of the many local and regional authors whose […]

Charles F. Price writes excellent imagery — gruesome enough, in the local author’s latest novel, to rival his characters’ own increasingly cruel lives. Blatant racism, mistreatment of animals, harsh living conditions — each section of Where the Water-Dogs Laughed: The Story of the Great Bear (High Country Publishers, 2003) festers with the ugliness of disharmony. […]

Joann Kelley didn’t give birth to a baby. Instead, her partner conceived a child through alternative fertilization — but that doesn’t make Kelley a mother, either. “What makes me a mother,” Kelley says in Gigi Kaeser and Peggy Gillespie’s book Love Makes a Family (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), “is baking muffins at 11 p.m. […]

“It’s not a street festival with art, but an art festival that happens beyond the streets,” muses Dana Davis, director of operations for the Asheville Area Arts Council. She’s trying to explain the raison d’etre of the Urban Trail Arts Festival, a newly expanded event that aims to honor both Asheville’s history and its love […]

If you believe their bios, singer/songwriters Evan Dando and Vic Chesnutt were born in different years to different mothers on opposite ends of the East Coast. One tasted stardom in his 20s, in the 1990s, fronting a successful post-punk alt-pop group, only to crash and burn — or burn out — by the end of […]

There are nearly as many listings for Martinez in the Asheville phonebook as there are for my own gringo surname, Marshall. Western North Carolina has experienced a nearly 400-percent increase in its Latino population since the 2000 census, confirms YMI Cultural Center Executive Director Rita Martin. And yet our local Fiesta Latina reports only marginal […]

A dozen years ago, I was hanging out in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park at a Ben and Jerry’s Fest — one of those hippie wet dreams with free ice cream and a day’s worth of live music. At one point, the smoke cleared enough to reveal a rowdy group of New Orleans horn players […]

Playwright, actor and Eastern North Carolina native Andy Corren opens his latest work — a patchwork of short stories and character sketches — with an a-cappella version of the traditional tune “Dixie” merged with Loverboy’s manic ’80s hit “Turn Me Loose.” Sounds disconcerting — but the bizarre medley accurately forecasts the mood of Corren’s semi-autobiographical […]

Some trends take awhile to catch on. “Goombay is spreading now, because diversity is cool and people are into culture,” comments YMI Cultural Center Executive Director Rita Martin. Citing fledgling versions of Asheville’s annual African/Caribbean-flavored festival in other areas — “There are smaller Goombays in Tennessee, festivals that are maybe just a block, like when […]

“Two geniuses walk into a bar,” quips director Andrew Gall. It sounds like a joke, but it happens to be the premise of Picasso at the Lapin Agile, the play Gall is currently directing for Highland Repertory Theatre. “We wanted to do something funny, yet something in our niche,” Gall explains. “Something contemporary, a little […]

“We’re not stuffy classical,” insists flutist Kate Steinbeck. And her point is well taken: Classical music, for all its sexy prodigies like Lara St. John, still invokes images of grimacing, black-clad men and women prodding somber tones from such inexplicable instruments as the oboe or bassoon. Steinbeck and her group, the Keowee Chamber Music Festival, […]