OEA Awards Live Music Nominees Announced

Live music nominees for the 2010 Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards will perform at five Benson venues beginning at 8:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 13 for the 2009 Nominee Showcase.

The OEA Awards is an annual contest that celebrates the creativity and performances of local musicians, artists, directors, actors and other metro area performers.

The Waiting Room, The Sydney, PS Collective, Burke’s Pub and the Barley Street Tavern will host performances by OEA Awards live music nominees on the 13th. A $10 wristband will allow access to all five venues that night and can be purchased at the door of each venue.

About 4,000 individual nominations were received earlier this year for the 2010 OEA Awards. The top online vote-getter in each of the 40-plus subcategories received an automatic nomination. The four other nominees were determined by a juried panel in each of the areas. 

At the Nominee Showcase, more than 25 local bands and artists will perform to allow fans to sample as many music nominees as possible. Performers at the Nominee Showcase include Brad Hoshaw and The Seven Deadlies, who lead all live music nominees with five nominations, followed by It’s True with four nominations.

“We received so much positive feedback from the venues, musicians and music fans following the 2009 OEA Awards Summer Showcase, which was a huge success for the Omaha music scene and the OEA Awards,” said MarQ Manner, OEA Awards board member and Nominee Showcase organizer. “I’m excited for the Nominee Showcase, which will once again feature a diverse group of the area’s best musicians. The Nominee Showcase has welcomed some breakout performances in past years. I expect this year to be no different.”

Nominees in the categories of visual arts and performing arts will be announced later this month.

Visit the OEA Awards Web site for the Friday, Nov. 13 Nominee Showcase performance schedule and the complete list of 2010 OEA Awards live music nominees.

All winners will be announced at the 2010 OEA Awards.

Follow the OEA Awards on Twitter: @oeaawards; become a fan on Facebook.

About Omaha Entertainment Awards, Inc.
Omaha Entertainment Awards, Inc., seeks to enhance our community by planning and producing an annual awards event that uniquely recognizes the performing arts, visual arts and live music of the Omaha area. With all-star talent and red-carpet prestige, the Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards is a memorable evening that thanks the artists who keep Omaha culture alive.

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Halloween 2009 Snapshots

Halloween this year seemed to creep up like it always does, leaving in its wake the holiday countdown through November and December. Matt and I celebrated at the Whiskey Tango in downtown Omaha, followed by stops at Downtown Blues and the art studio of Peter Lochren. The Halloween celebration lasted until the wee hours of Sunday morning, but the fun was worth it. And with an extra hour of sleep the next day, who can complain?

Me and Matt

Hunter S. Thompson

Lindi the Lady Jailbird

Facebook

Click through the rest of my Halloween photos at Flickr.

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Costumes of Halloween Past

Me and Jill Grabowski, originally uploaded by wendytownley.

Facebook is a nifty social media interface. With a few keyboard strokes and mouse clicks, nostalgia can take center stage.

The above photo landed in my inbox earlier this year from Jill Grabowski-Kersey. We were best friends through much of our time at Holy Ghost Catholic School, proven by this image taken on Halloween many, many moons ago.

Jill’s recent comment on this photo via Facebook says it all.

I was a baby and you were a majorette? My favorite is the tights. I am having a hard time thinking that you needed control top back then, or even now for that matter.

Happy Halloween!

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Write Now: My Secret Wish

My Secret Wish | By Jeffrey Koterba
{This essay is an excerpt from Inklings, the first book by Jeffrey Koterba.}

That night, my father taps lightly on my bedroom door. “Feeling better?” he asks.

I’m up on one elbow. A dull ache throbs in my jaw, but I want to appear brave.

“Would you like to hear a story?” His voice is low, mesmerizing.

“Okay.”

My father’s bedtime visits are sporadic. Most of the time it’s my mother’s job to tuck me in. She reads me stories from Golden Books; other times she lies next to me, holding my hand until I fall asleep.

“How about ‘Puffy the Cloud’?” my father asks, reclining next to me.

“Puffy,” he always starts out, “is a little cloud in the sky. He floats down, down, down, and comes in through the side door of our house, through the kitchen, through the hallway, to this bedroom.

“Hi, Jeffrey!” My father’s voice now high-pitched, breathy. The voice of Puffy. “Climb aboard!”

Back in his narrator’s voice, my father tells me I climb aboard.

I shift under the covers as though I am climbing aboard. “Puffy’s body is fluffy and soft like a big pillow,” he continues. “Together, Jeffrey and Puffy float out of the bedroom, through the kitchen, through the hallway, out the side door, and into the night sky. They go up and up and up, and the night is clear.”

I allow my head to sink into the pillow, closing my eyes to the dim, cobwebbed ceiling.

“Look, Jeffrey,” says Puffy. “See down there? That’s your school.”

Although it’s a December night, I imagine the story takes place on a warm spring afternoon. Children skip and dance on the playground.

“They keep floating,” my father tells me, through the night sky. “Puffy is cozy.”

I’m struggling against sleep.

“And see that tiny house down there?” says Puffy. “That’s where your father grew up. And that big brown circle? That’s the baseball field at Brown Park.”

Puffy takes me on a flight high above the business district of South Omaha, above Seig Drugs, Hinky Dinky, and the Salvation Army, where we buy clothes. In my mind, I see squares and rectangles, building after building.

“Well,” says Puffy, “it’s time I got you home and into bed.”

Together, I am told, we return to our neighborhood, past the ravine, over our backyard and house, floating “down, down, down, through the side door, through the kitchen, through the hallway, into this bedroom,” where I “crawl back into bed.”

As my father stands, he asks if I’d like a “parachute.” Before I can answer, he grabs one end of my bed sheet, softly snapping it in the air, allowing it to unfurl into a rectangle. Slowly, he allows the sheet to float to the bed, to my body, covering me, my face.

About Jeffrey Koterba
Jeffrey Koterba is an acclaimed syndicated political cartoonist. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and during the summer of 1978 was struck by lightning and lived to tell about it. But even before that, he drew cartoons, creating his own newspaper at the age of seven. In 2010, Koterba will create a cartoon that will fly aboard one of NASA’s last planned space shuttle flights. He is also lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the Prairie Cats, a swing and jump-blues band he formed in 1998. His memoir, Inklings, is a story of Tourette’s Syndrome, a complicated father, bad weather, jazz music, and cartooning. Inklings will be published November 3 with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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Learn more about the Write Now project and how you can submit works for publication.

Making Room for More Chapters

I love to read, but I always thought that the dream [to write a book] was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god. It wasn’t a person.
– Rita Dove, poet

In this past week alone two of my friends have landed new jobs, and a third announced she’s preparing for pending motherhood. Given the exciting news that’s happening all around me, I decided the time was right to share a bit of good news of my own.

Hi Wendy,

We’ve received your manuscript. It is headed to the editor. It will probably be a few weeks before you hear anything.

Hooray for you!

– Cindy

The rumblings you may have heard are true: I’m writing a book! My collection of nonfiction essays is slated to be published this spring. The history of my first book is much too lengthy to recount today, but the stories behind my stories will come soon.

Writing a book has been a distant goal of mine for several years. When trying my hand at writing fiction — and loathing the difficult style while doing it — I quickly assumed all was lost.

Not so, however. A few months ago I found myself smack dab at the intersection of preparation and opportunity.

Which brings me to today, and to this good news! I’m so excited I can hardly stand it.

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Write Now: Never Forget You’re Irish

Never Forget You’re Irish | By Chantel Crockett
{This essay was written for the What is home? call for submissions.}

After his first arrest, when he established himself as a hellraiser, someone christened him Red Dog. This had as much to do with his wiry auburn hair as it did with his legendary temper.

He’s always had large hands – from birth, I imagine – a trait he was passed from his father. Calloused and scarred, they are now used to tinker in his garage instead of for the bar fights he pursued for reasons he couldn’t even define.

Now a bit softer and worn down, his build was once as tight and strong as a piece of leather. He was always defensive – perhaps in part to growing up with red hair and glasses, as a result of blindness in his left eye, or the later taunts of “Sally” because of his shoulder-length hair.

His mother often told him, “Never forget you’re Irish, Jimmy,” and he remembered this, first in Italian neighborhoods in St. Louis, and later on in Detroit. His four older brothers would stage neighborhood boxing matches, pitting little Jimmy against Ricky Magretta or Tommy Caniglia, fights he continued for years.

After Red Dog graduated from high school and many of his friends were stolen off to Vietnam, he was deemed 4-F – unfit to serve — by the U.S. government. He didn’t last long at the pipefitting plant his father managed, so he turned his hands to carpentry.

The friends who remained were drifters, and those who returned from Vietnam came back angry and damaged, acting out in the only way poor boys from Detroit knew how. Most of them wore their hair long, as Red Dog did, and split their time between neighborhood bars. When they got kicked out of one for fighting, they went down the street to the next.

After several arrests for fighting or reckless driving in his new black-topped GTO, local police began paying attention to Red Dog. He and his buddies needled one officer in particular – a guy who was also defensive, with something to prove. Red Dog and his closest friend, Webster, baited him whenever they crossed paths.

When Webster was killed, run off the road in his little red MG by the officer’s patrol car, Red Dog and his pregnant 16-year-old girlfriend decided two things. They would marry before the baby arrived and they would name the child — the only boy out of four children – after his dead friend.

Just six years older than his wife, Red Dog only slowed down after his second child was born. Everyone said something changed when he had a daughter.

I grew up hearing his stories, sometimes as warnings and other times to boast. When I became a teenager, those stories served as a threat to boys who had nerve enough to approach Red Dog’s daughter.

I remember reading “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” when I was in junior high and having his image float into my head whenever I read a scene with McMurphy. I imagined that was how Red Dog was when he was younger – wild and aggressive, but oddly balanced with a sense of fairness.

When I was a teenager, I was constantly impatient with him. Car trips took much longer than expected, as he had to stop for anyone with car troubles on the side of the road. He gave away his winter hats and gloves to drifters who hung around his job site. The men he gave jobs to – sometimes from work-release programs or Labor Ready – made me nervous and repulsed, and I didn’t understand why he bothered with them.

My mother, his 16-year-old girlfriend who became his wife of many years, loved to crow, “You’re so much like your father,” a statement that sometimes made me uncomfortable with all it implied.

His fighting rarely appeared in later years, only when needed to protect his family. When an incoherent man grabbed me on the street one night while walking with my father and brother, he was thrown to the ground before I even registered what happened.

The name Red Dog isn’t used much anymore, as many of his buddies are dead and he has long earned other titles. He worries about his grandson, a strawberry blond with glasses and a mouth bigger than his build, so he teaches him how to protect himself. He holds up his hands, which show more about his life than anything else, and says, “Give ‘em a punch! I may be old, but you can’t hurt steel.”

About Chantel Crockett
After trying out the East Coast for a few years, Chantel Crockett, a born Midwesterner, found her way back to Nebraska. She now lends her background in writing and communication to instructing and advising students in the College of Communication, Fine Arts and Media at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. When she’s not skateboarding, bike riding or breakdancing with her 10-year-old son, she spends her time working on her thesis and filling her house with books and thrift-store curiosities. Say hello at chantel.crockett@gmail.com.

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Learn more about the Write Now project and how you can submit works for publication.

A Little of This, A Little of That

I spend an inordinate amount of time surfing and skipping about the World Wide Web. Quite often — almost to the point of compulsion, to be honest — I post cool links and unique stories to my Facebook and Twitter pages. I consider these slick interfaces public bulletin boards for all the world to harvest and enjoy.

But why should my fellow social media whores have all the fun?

Here are links to amusing content I’ve recently collected.

Have fun!

Bad Banana on Twitter
PC World ranked this Lincoln, Nebraska-based copywriter the second-funniest person on Twitter today. Take that, Colbert.
http://twitter.com/badbanana

flowers2mail
There’s no question that real flowers are a delight to send and even more enjoyable to receive. But they’re expensive. And they eventually die. Why not send flowers that last forever?
www.flowers2mail.com

The Ministry of Type
It’s a blog designed to feed the cocaine-like addiction we have to typography. Plus, it’s based in the UK so you know it just has to be cool.
http://ministryoftype.co.uk/

Twitter Patterns
There’s absolutely no reason for your Twitter background to exclusively use the default designs. Fancy it up and enjoy.
http://twitterpatterns.com

Design*Sponge
I know, I know. Design*Sponge is nothing new. Yet the calming and colorful photographs and ideas offer me just the right amount of delusion to think I could actually be crafty someday. Here’s hoping.
www.designspongeonline.com

Bored to Death
I love HBO. I love writing. I love reading. I love Zach Galifianakis. I love Jason Schwartzman, and his mole. And because of this, I’m (starting) to love Sunday nights.
www.hbo.com/boredtodeath

Food Network Humor on Twitter
Become a fan if only for this recent tweet: “Gourmet [magazine] is closed yet Sandra Lee is in a kitchen somewhere putting Cool Whip on a pot roast. What the hell is going on?”
http://twitter.com/FNHumor

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
The cover art alone was enough for me to purchase her new memoir. Her hilarious approach to tragedy, along with her stories about being married to Paul Simon, kept me turning the pages. I also learned that, according to George Lucas, underwear does not exist in space. Who knew?
http://carriefisher.com/?p=14

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Creativity and Heartbeats

Way back in 2003 I was a relentless freelance writer, penning lengthy feature profiles I couldn’t be prouder of for the now-defunct Medium Magazine. My paths crossed with a number of local creative individuals, one of the most memorable being Omaha artist Rodger Gerberding.

A quote from my delightful two-hour interview, which found its way into my article, has stuck with me for the past six years. Here Rodger discusses his reaction when encountering work by other artists. I anticipate Rodger’s insight will stay with me for quite some time, and I hope it does the same for you.

The artist and person Gerberding is today also doesn’t allow unwarranted criticism to continually surface. He says he understands and sometimes connects with the person behind the work, regardless of his opinion: “It’s very difficult for me to criticize, in a very outright way, anybody’s work. I tend to look for what beauty is in it, what it says about the person who did it. That’s something I’ve come to fairly recently. You have to consider the hand and heart that’s behind it.”

Upcoming Project Interfaith Events

I recently joined the Communications Committee for Omaha’s Project Interfaith. Founded by Beth Katz, the organization strives to unite people and groups of different faiths, beliefs and backgrounds through collaborative communication. I hope you’ll consider attending these events.

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“Beyond Fundamentalisms: Theirs and Ours” A Community Conversation with Dr. Martin Marty, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago
Sunday, October 4, 2009, 7:00 pm
Countryside Community Church (8787 Pacific Street)
Pre-registration strongly suggested.
Register online at http://martinmartyomaha.eventbrite.com/
Held in partnership with Countryside Community Church and the Omaha Presbyterian Seminary Foundation

Religious Diversity and Public Service: A Training and Professional Development for National Service Members and Non-Profit Leaders
Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 7:30 am- 3:00 pm
OPS Teacher Administrative Center Building (3215 Cuming Street)
Pre-registration is required.
Register online at http://www.regonline.com/Checkin.asp?EventId=766843
Held in partnership with ServeNebraska, the Nebraska Volunteer Service Commission

Religious Diversity Issues in Health Care Community Roundtable
Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 3:30- 4:30 pm
Conference Room at the Center for Health Policy and Ethics (2616 Burt Street)
Directions and details at http://chpe.creighton.edu/events/roundtables/2009-2010/katz.htm
Roundtable hosted and moderated by the Center for Health Policy and Ethics at Creighton University

Religious Diversity Issues in Professional Care Giving: A Training for Professional Care Givers, Medical Personnel and Social Service Providers in Facilities and In-Home Care
Tuesday, November 17, 2009, 7:45 am- 4:00 pm
5 CEUs available
Location TBA
Pre-registration is required. To register email info@projectinterfaithusa.org or call (402) 933-4647.
Held in partnership with the Respite Resource Center of Nebraska and the Creighton Health Sciences Library

Interfaith Youth Service Project
January 2010- February 2010
Service Sites: Together, Inc. and Neighbors United

“Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in the 21st Century”
A Community Conversation with Dr. John Esposito, Founding Director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University
Thursday, February 23, 2010, 7:00 pm
Location: TBA
Held in partnership with the Islamic Center of Omaha

Christian-Hindu Study Circle
March 2010
Hindu Temple (13010 Arbor Street)
Held in partnership with the Hindu Temple

Interfaith Architecture Tour
March 2010
Sites to be announced
Held in partnership with the American Institute of Architects (AIA)- Omaha Chapter

Community Conversations with Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School
“Jesus, the Jewish Story Teller” A Community Conversation
Thursday, April 22, 2010, 7:00 pm
First-Plymouth Congregational Church (2000 “D” Street, Lincoln, NE)
Held in partnership with First-Plymouth Congregational Church

“I’m not Anti-Jewish…Am I? Avoiding Anti-Jewish Preaching and Teaching” A Luncheon Workshop for Christian Educators and Clergy
Friday, April 23, 2010, 11:30 am
First-Plymouth Congregational Church (2000 “D” Street, Lincoln, NE)
Held in partnership with First-Plymouth Congregational Church

ProjectInterfaith grows understanding, respect and relationships among people of all faiths and beliefs. For more information on our programs and resources, visit our blog at www.projectinterfaith.blogspot.com.

Call for Submissions: What is home?

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.
– John Howard Payne, actor

A few weeks ago while zipping northbound on 72nd Street here in Omaha, my ears perked up as I heard “Studio 360” host Kurt Andersen preview a series of stories about The Wizard of Oz. The pieces focused on a variety of angles surrounding the 1939 film, but what caught my attention was brief and rather moving commentary about the concept of home. What is home? Where does it reside? Does the idea of home change as we age?

For the next installment of Write Now essays, I invite you to submit works that answer the question: What is home? Please send your submissions via email to wendy@wendytownley.com.

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