This year, the Spy is expanding its commitment to the Chesapeake Film Festival by co-producing a monthly podcast with CFF Executive Director Cid Walker Collins and her dedicated team of volunteers. The series will feature in-depth conversations about the films being presented throughout the year, offering listeners a behind-the-scenes look at the creative forces behind them.

In this episode, Irene Magafan, the CFF’s new board president, talks with filmmaker, storyteller, and CFF Vice President, Monda Raquel Webb. Monda has built her career around uncovering the “little known stories” that rarely make it to the big screen—voices from our mothers, grandmothers, and community elders whose lives shape history but often remain untold.

This podcast is approximately 22 minutes in length.  For more information and to purchase tickets for the Chesapeake Film Festival, please visit this link.

Almost since the Spy started in 2009, we have reached out to some of the Mid-Shore’s most respected leaders as they transition off or retire from critically important positions in our region. From college presidents to successful nonprofit directors, the Spy Exit interviews has captured a moment of time in our collective history that time and again offers real lessons in leadership and imagination.

We continue this series with outgoing Academy Art Museum board chair Donna Alpi during a particularly important time in its history. Credited with guiding the AAM through the challenges of staff leadership changes, its innovative partnership with the Air Bridges project, and the extraordinary perseverance of the board and curatorial staff to bring the Bugatti: Reaching for Perfection exhibition, the largest and most resource-intensive undertaken in AAM history, Donna shares her experiences and lessons learned as she prepares to handle over board leadership to Talbot County’s Christine Martin this month.

This video is approximately six minutes in length. For more information about the Academy Art Museum please go here.

 

On Saturday, September 27 the Mainstay in Rock Hall welcomes the progressive bluegrass sounds of Big Howdy featuring Dede Wyland on vocals and guitar.

Big Howdy is an award-winning progressive bluegrass band with a repertoire that mixes bluegrass classics with compelling original songs, intriguingly novel instrumentals, and well-chosen contemporary material, Big Howdy presents bluegrass with modern polish while honoring the tradition and drive that lies at the heart of the music.” Big Howdy’s members are Randy Barrett on vocals, banjo, and guitar, Ira Gitlin on vocals and bass, Tom McLaughlin on mandolin, and Dede Wyland on vocals and guitar.

Dede Wyland’s pure and compelling voice has enchanted bluegrass audiences around the world (and is often cited as bringing to mind Emmylou Harris’s voice). She’s been in bluegrass, first in regional bands around her native Milwaukee, and then in New York where she became a charter member of the internationally acclaimed bluegrass group Tony Trischka and Skyline.

Dede has graced the stage of some of America’s most prestigious bluegrass and acoustic music venues and festivals and has performed in over a dozen countries throughout Europe and Asia. Bluegrass fans have heard and seen Dede on the nationally broadcast shows A Prairie Home Companion and Mountain Stage, and on The Nashville Network’s Fire on the Mountain.

In the 1990s, Dede moved to the greater Washington D.C. area. Her recordings and concert performances with the cream of Washington’s bluegrass players made her an eleven-time winner of the greater Washington, DC, area “Wammie” award for Bluegrass Singer of the Year.

Showtime for the Mainstay concert event is 8 pm. Tickets are $20 in advance of the show and can be purchased online at mainstayrockhall.org. Phone reservations are accepted by calling (410) 639-9133 (tickets reserved by phone are $25 when paid at the door). The Mainstay is located at 5753 N Main Street in Rock Hall.

This show is scheduled for the Mainstay’s outdoor stage to the rear of the building, weather permitting.

As remarkable and important as the Water’s Edge Museum collection of Ruth Starr Rose paintings and prints may be, its provenance is even more so. Dating back to a time when women had just recently won their right to vote and when Jim Crow laws sought to deny all human rights to African-Americans, Rose – a white woman – created, as she put it, “a record of the life of Negroes of the Eastern Shore. It had never been done,” she wrote, “and is still unique in the annals of art.”

While art depicting people of color is no longer “unique” to this collection at the museum located on the Tred Avon’s edge in Oxford, it most likely was the case in 1933 when she wrote about her work. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine that anyone else could have achieved such a legacy. In the early decades of the 20th Century it was rare for black artists or women artists of any color to gain much notice. And her access to an isolated community with every reason to mistrust white strangers is itself remarkable. There were black artists whose success at the time was hard-earned – from Jacob Lawrence in fine art to Paul Robeson in performing arts – they won their notoriety in metropolitan capitals of the United States, principally New York City.

By comparison, Rose, the daughter of staunch Wisconsin abolitionists, won the trust of all-black communities of Talbot County at a time when the Eastern Shore – before any Bay Bridge was even dreamed of – was a geographic backwater. Yet she made friends with residents of The Hill in Easton, the historic neighborhood of free African-Americans dating back before the Civil War, as well as Unionville and Copperville settled by veterans of the war that won their emancipation.

Rose attended their AME churches regularly and developed her appreciation of spirituals performed by people she regarded as friends and neighbors. Among the oil portraits she painted were those of Isaac Copper, namesake of the founding family of the village bearing his surname, and Bernard Moaney, whose descendant, George Moaney, narrates the five-minute video “The Afterglow of Ruth Starr Rose” by Talbot Spy that can be seen on the Water’s Edge website, You Tube or talbotspy.org. He’s also a founding member and genealogical adviser to the museum.

Even in major museums of the world, George Moaney notes, “You don’t see a black person in their paintings except in the background as servants” or, more recently, in portraits of celebrities and political figures, notably Muhammad Ali and President Barack Obama. Before 2015, when the Rose collection surfaced, “Our family didn’t even know these images existed.” The unveiling of the works by Rose (1887-1965) marked, he said, “the first time I had seen on the Eastern Shore black and white people coming together for a cultural event.”

Of her 1933 color serigraph “Jonah and the whale,” featured four years later at the Paris International Exposition, Rose wrote: “Long ago the slaves sang, ‘If the Lord delivered Jonah from the belly of the whale, He will deliver me.’ And these words came too: The Negro race has been delivered from dangers and torments worse than Jonah knew. They have been given a vision of the freedom that can finally be complete.”

But there is much more to see and experience at the Water’s Edge Museum. In its special exhibits gallery, “Black Watermen in the Chesapeake” opens later this month. In the hallway just outside, pause to view “Victoria Park as a Civil Right.” In 1848, about a decade into her 63 years and seven months reign – surpassed only by the 70-year monarchy of Elizabeth II – Queen Victoria granted an “urban botanical garden” for the people of Antigua and Barbuda, part of the British Empire until 1981. The garden, she wrote, serves as open space “for the healthful enjoyment of air and space” for the people of the Caribbean island colony – now a nation.

Be sure, then, to step outside to the Water’s Edge botanical garden. Replete with flowers, plus basil, bell pepper, cucumber and tomato plants, the fruits of which are composted. Besides the staff, the garden is tended, in part, by visiting elementary to middle school children who “learn about environmental justice that is denied to those who live in food desert neighborhoods,” said Sara Park, co-director of Water’s Edge along with Ja’lyn Hicks.

Water’s Edge was awarded a certificate of recognition from the Talbot County Council for the “pictorial history and artifacts on display [portraying] a resilient people who lived their lives, and loved and fought for their country and continued to forge ahead, despite the obstacles and hardships faced.” Council member Keasha Haythe, who had attended the museum’s anniversary celebration earlier in February, commented on the recognition: “Thank you for telling these stories. Having a grandfather who was a waterman, it’s important to tell stories of the heritage, history, and diversity that we have in Talbot County.”

Coincidentally or not, this occurred at the same council session in which a motion to rescind the county’s declaration supporting the goals of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) was defeated. However, following Trump administration threats to deny federal funding for expansion of the Easton Airport, the council voted in June to delete all mention of DEI goals in its official statements.

Nevertheless, Kay Brown, the museum’s assistant director, continues her work as manager of the Middle Passage Port Marker Project. Oxford is the only UNESCO-documented Middle Passage port on the Eastern Shore with no sign declaring that this is where slave ships docked to deliver its human-bondage cargo for sale. It’s a distinction shared in part just across the Tred Avon River where the Bellevue Passage Museum is planning and raising funds to build a space to tell the story of one of the country’s oldest African-American waterfront communities, which became self-sufficient following the Civil War abolition of slavery. The goal is to add on to one of the few remaining historic buildings available, located next to the Oxford-Bellevue Ferry dock. For now, the museum is a virtual one where you can view photos, artifacts and documentation of Bellevue’s own water’s edge past. In partnership with the museum in Oxford, the two would comprise a ferry-linked match in presenting an immersive educational and heritage tourism experience.

***
For more on slavery to self-sufficiency and the Eastern Shore’s witness to both, the Harriet Tubman Freedom Center in Cambridge is exhibiting “Harriet: A Taste of Freedom” through Sept. 30. Curated by Larry Poncho Brown, a Baltimore-based artist, through interpretive works by 40 artists whose visions know no bounds as they are both local and international. The art ranges from portraiture to abstract imagery. In that sense, it’s almost as varied as Tubman’s remarkable life’s work – starting as a runaway slave herself who returned time and again to free family and other fellow slaves in Dorchester County to freedom at least as far north as Philadelphia. And she literally fought for freedom in the Civil War, having recently been promoted posthumously to the rank of general.

While you’re at it, and especially if you haven’t already visited, drive a few miles out of town to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park. The visitors center there serves both as a stand-alone attraction with exhibits and films changing from time to time with the goal of orientation as a gateway to the multi-state Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Scenic Byway. Tubman is quoted as saying, “I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

FROM RUTH STARR ROSE TO HARRIET TUBMAN

Water’s Edge Museum, 101 Mill St., Oxford. watersedgemuseum.org; Bellevue Passage Museum, online only bellevuepassage.org
Also, “Harriet: A Taste of Freedom,” Harriet Tubman Freedom Center, 3030 Center Dr., Cambridge, through Sept. 30 (possibly extended through December); harriettubmanfreedomcenter.com; Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitors Center, 4068 Golden Hill Rd., Church Creek, nps.gov/htu

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic and editor now living in Easton.

 

 

Sumner Hall Book Club and the Kent County Public Library are thrilled to announce that Carole Boston Weatherford, award-winning author of Kin: Rooted in Hope, will visit Chestertown on Thursday, September 11, at 3:00 p.m. at Sumner Hall, 206 S. Queen Street, Chestertown.

Weatherford will share insights into her research and writing process for Kin, a work that excavates buried histories and breathes life into untold stories. Light refreshments will be served, and all are welcome. Space is limited, so advance registration is recommended.

In Kin: Rooted in Hope, Weatherford draws upon archival records, family research, and lyrical verse to reconstruct the hidden histories of enslaved people connected to Maryland’s Lloyd family. The book begins with an invocation of the names of the enslaved, an act of remembrance and restoration:

“I call their names: Abram Alice Amey Arianna Antiqua
I call their names: Isaac Jake James Jenny Jim
Every last one, property of the Lloyds,
the state’s preeminent enslavers.
Every last one, with a mind of their own
and a story that ain’t yet been told.
Till now.”

Through such passages, Weatherford reclaims the humanity of those too often reduced to ledger entries, reminding readers that these were people with lives, minds, and legacies.

Her book also presses on timeless questions of endurance:

“Seeking answers to key questions: ‘At what age is hope born, when does resistance first rise up, and when do dreams wither’.”

These words underscore the core of the project: the exploration of how hope survives, how resistance emerges, and how memory safeguards dignity across generations.

Sumner Hall is also home to an active community book club, which brings together readers to engage with works that highlight African American history, culture, and contemporary issues. Partnering with Kent County Public Library for this statewide program reflects the book club’s ongoing mission: to honor the past, confront hard truths, and foster meaningful dialogue through literature.

Free copies of Kin: Rooted in Hope will be available at all Kent County Public Library locations on a first-come, first-served basis. Library card holders may also request to borrow copies delivered to the branch of their choice.

Now in its seventeenth year, One Maryland One Book (OMOB) is Maryland’s first statewide community reading initiative, organized by the Maryland Center for the Book at Maryland Humanities. Each year, one title is selected to spark dialogue in communities across the state, with public programs hosted at libraries, schools, museums, and cultural centers.

This year’s program is made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Maryland State Library.

Hosting the event is Sumner Hall, one of only two surviving African American Grand Army of the Republic posts in the United States. Built in 1908, it stands today as a museum, cultural center, and community gathering place dedicated to preserving and celebrating African American history and heritage in Kent County and beyond.

Previously, The Spy interviewed Carol Weatherford and her son, Jeffery. You can watch here.

 

Premiering at the Hampstead Theatre in London on November 7th, 1977, Bernard Pomerance’s “The Elephant Man” saw immediate success in London. The story of Joseph Merrick, a man in Victorian London who is known for the extreme deformity of his body, it opened off-Broadway in New York in January, 1979, before opening at the Booth Theatre on Broadway. The original Broadway run saw 916 regular performances, and the play had revivals in 2002 and 2014. The role of Merrick has been performed by noted actors that include David Bowie, Mark Hamill, Bruce Davison, Billy Crudup, and Bradley Cooper.

In real life, Merrick’s condition began to appear at age 5, beginning with rough, gray, elephantlike skin. His condition progressed significantly, and injuries caused further deformation and permanent disability.

Merrick’s mother died when he was 11, and he left school at 13 to get a job, but his increasing debilitation affected his ability to work. In 1884, at age 22, Merrick decided that his appearance might be his ticket out of the workhouse. He worked with entertainment businessman Sam Torr to create the Elephant Man Exhibit, advertised as half-man, half-elephant, across from the London Hospital. He generated much interest from the medical and scientific community, including Dr. Frederick Treves. Eventually landing in London and under Treves’ care, Merrick’s life began to involve endless exhibition within high society circles. After his death, plaster casts of his body and skeleton were displayed at the hospital.

The play focuses on Merrick’s humanity and quest to define himself as a man of society after spending his life as an outcast. Joseph, called “John” in the play, desires to be seen and accepted, but to transcend his life as a grotesque side show act. The lead role of Merrick usually requires an actor to sustain a contorted body posture and skewed facial alignment for the entire performance without the use of prosthetics.

The Garfield Center would like to thank Peoples Bank, the production sponsor for “The Elephant Man”, for their community support.

Playing the title role of Merrick in the Garfield Center production is Ben VanNest. Ben has been involved in Eastern Shore theatre since appearing in TAP’s production of “Night of the Iguana” in 2007. Other roles include Bobby in “Company”, and Jasper in “The Aliens”, among others. He has also been a scenic designer for The Underground Actors and Groove Theatre. A music graduate of Saint Mary’s College of Maryland, he currently works as an Architectural Designer for Rauch Inc.

In the role of Frederick Treves is Brad Chaires. Brad has been seen singing and acting in multiple productions on different stages on the Eastern Shore. He appeared in GCA productions of Annie, Greater Tuna, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, among others. He also appeared in CHT’s A Funny Thing Happened…Forum, and their annual Gala. Brad directed Clue for the GCA in 2021.

Performing as Carr-Gomm, Superintendent of the London Hospital, is Matt Folker. Matt recently appeared at the GCA as Lloyd in Noises Off. He has amassed a large number of productions at various Eastern Shore theatres over the years, including The Rocky Horror Show, and Triumph of Love, among others.

As Ross, freak show operator and emcee, is Patrick Pearce. Patrick also plays the roles of the Nurse, Sandwich, and the Duchess. Patrick recently appeared as Freddie in Noises Off, as well as Harold in Happy Birthday Wanda June, Chris Bean in The Play That Goes Wrong, and Dr. Roy Flemming in Prescription: Murder, among others. Patrick has also directed plays for Short Attention Span Theatre and was co-director for Playmakers in 2022.

Brianna Johnson plays several roles, including the First Pinhead, the orderly Snork and financier Lord John. Also a recent performer in Noises Off, in the role of Poppy, she has also appeared at the GCA in Prescription: Murder, A Rock Sails By, and in CHT’s August: Osage County and Charley’s Aunt. She has also directed several plays for SAST.

 Sheila Austrian will also play several roles, including Pinhead Manager, the Conductor, Bishop Walsham How, and the Countess. She returns to the GCA, where she last appeared in Inherit the Wind. At CHT, she has performed in I Hate Hamlet, Our Town, Equus, Witness for the Prosecution, and Watch on the Rhine, among others.

Debra McGuire will play several characters, including the Policeman, the actress Mrs. Kendal, and a Nurse. She returns to the GCA after last appearing in The Laramie Project. She recently appeared in CHT’s August: Osage County. Debra has appeared on stages in Cecil and Harford Counties, as well as Delaware’s New Castle County, in such roles as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Ouiser in Steel Magnolias, and Gertrude and The Ghost in Hamlet, among others.

Cecile Davis will perform in the roles of the Second Pinhead, the Porter, and Princess Alexandria. After starting in dance, and securing a BA in contemporary theatre and film from East 15 Acting School in England, she returned to the Eastern Shore and has performed in various productions in the area. Credits include productions with Shore Shakespeare and TAP, and directing at Saints Peter and Paul and for her nonprofit, The Factory.

Director for The Elephant Man, and the production’s Lighting Designer is E.T. (Talley) Wilford. Talley currently serves as the Artistic Director of Groove Theatre through the Factory Arts Project. For the Groove, he directed many productions including The Jungle Book, The Yellow Boat, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Torch Song. He also directed productions of Peter and the Starcatcher, The Rocky Horror Show and many of the Stephen Sondheim titles for various other theatres. This is his first production for the Garfield Center.

Other production staff credits include Costume Designer Cecile Davis, Stage Manager Natilee Keating, and Assistant Director and Assistant Stage Manager Galen Marquess. Producers are Steven Arnold, Nic Carter and the Garfield Center for the Arts, and media graphics and playbills are by Francoise Sullivan.

The Garfield Center’s production of The Elephant Man opens October 3rd and runs weekends through October 21st. Tickets may be purchased anytime online at www.garfieldcenter.org, or through the Box Office at 410-810-2060. The Box Office is open on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 10 AM to 3 PM.

 

 

 

 

 

This year, the Spy is expanding its commitment to the Chesapeake Film Festival by co-producing a monthly podcast with CFF Executive Director Cid Walker Collins and her dedicated team of volunteers. The series will feature in-depth conversations about the films being presented throughout the year, offering listeners a behind-the-scenes look at the creative forces behind them.

In our third episode, Irene Magafan, the CFF’s new board president, sits down with casting director Kimberly Skyrme. With notable successes such as House of Cards and True Lies, Kimberley talks describes her accidental start in casting, passion for storytelling, championing diverse talent, mentoring newcomers, and empowering women and locals in film.

This podcast is approximately 30 minutes in length.  For more information and to purchase tickets for the Chesapeake Film Festival, please visit this link.