Old School Variety Show - The January Show

The Old School Variety Show offers a fall, holiday, winter and spring show to gather friends and newcomers to experience entertainment done old school. This means live acts highlighting music, theatre and storytelling. The spontaneity and freewheeling style of the variety show provides an ever-changing, organic entertainment experience. There are no rehearsals. Each show develops a rhythm of its own. Sometimes the performers come in with similar ideas about tone or content.  They plan love songs for the February show or scary stories for the October show. The January show can be a toss-up. The show this month had a somber feel with 40 mph hour arctic wind gusts whistling by the windows. The Pearl sign outside the window creaked back and forth.  There were songs of regret, there were wistful stories, there were challenging stories. And then there were some laughs.  There was variety.

Front entrance to the Grand Hotel on Pearl Street.

Tara Jacquette opened the show on piano.

Ryan Hartkopf singing originals followed by a Dylan song...one of my husband's favorites.

Halie Becker performing Neil Labute's Medea Redux.

Eddie Allen, singer-songwriter, muse of the Driftless Area.

TerryVisger, founding member of La Crosse Storytelling Festival and an Old School regular.

Mike doing "The News from La Crosse Wisconsin"....local news done Garrison Keillor-style.

A warm and cozy bar,  a place to connect with old friends and meet new ones and a parade of artistic talent on the stage in front of you. For more information about the show go to http://oldschoolvarietyshow.com/ or Like them on Facebook.

Sold out!!

9/11 and Story

As the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 has approached, I've been surprised by the number of stories and pictures that I'm seeing for the first time.  I wonder "am I seeing them for the first time or just noticing them for the first time?"  One of the first 9/11 articles I read heading in to this anniversary was in Esquire http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/the-falling-man-10-years-later-6406030.  The article started with a picture that I vaguely remember seeing years ago.  The picture is called Falling Man.  I couldn't take my eyes off of the image.  I'm sure I wasn't the only one who googled Falling Man to find out more about the identity of this individual.  The picture disappeared largely from view after it was first published in The New York Times.   In my research, I realized there is a documentary called 9/11 The Falling Man http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXnA9FjvLSU.  This film is very intense, not sensationalistic, and very heartbreaking.  It is also riveting.

Also mentioned in the Esquire article is a documentary called 9/11 made by a couple of brothers http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1uktl_9-11-by-the-naudet-brothers-1-of-6_news.  They had set out to do a film about the New York Fire Department.  One of the brothers was standing a block from the World Trade Center filming a couple of firefighters.  He begins panning the area, the towers the sky and then you hear this loud plane noise and see the firefighters all look up.  The camera slowly pans to the left as the first plane hits.  They continued filming in the towers as the event was happening.  Absolutely amazing footage.  While they don't show anything graphic, the footage is a lot to take in all at once.

There are so many written pieces out there, it can be difficult to sift through the masses.  There was a recent article about the babies (now adolescents) of 9/11 victims.  Each of the kids had lost a daddy to 9/11.  They had no memory of him, only stories.

As we gain more distance from 9/11, each of us will choose the degree to which we want to remember or engage.  Putting politics and media noise aside, there are many beautiful, heartbreaking and incredible stories being told and waiting to be told.  And I hope we will continue to listen.