After Austin High alums sent in tales, we seek more memories statesman.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from statesman.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Austin 360
Muffled medical masking might seem antithetical to the performance of a play by William Shakespeare, who created whole worlds with spoken words. Yet a staging of the playwright s Twelfth Night outdoors on the St. Edward s University campus proved that this romantic comedy loses none of its charm, clarity or cleverness, even masked.
After all, ancient Greek actors wore full facial masks, some outfitted with little megaphones. Two thousand years later, Italian commedia players donned half masks that emphasized of the durability of the form s stock characters. And many other performance traditions around the world depend on the cloaked practice of masking.
Watch Ballet Austin film Preludes/Beginnings online austin360.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from austin360.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Mexico’s wavering policies on slavery encouraged both slave owners and the enslaved.
The admission of Texas to the union as a slave state ultimately tipped the balance in favor of the free states.
A few years ago, I visited the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center on the high banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati. Not only is this large, modern and well-curated museum a highly recommended tourist stop, but it also symbolically faces the other side of the river and the former slave state of Kentucky a physical fact impossible to forget as one imagines the horrors and hopes experienced by those who fled from bondage in the South.
One day in 1932, Alfred Dotson Sr., and his twin brother, Wilfred, became instant musical celebrities at Kealing Junior High School. The two native Austinites sang “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine” so charmingly that teachers sent the 13-year-old duo around the building on Pennsylvania Avenue in East Austin to perform for all of the classes.
“I sang it at my 75th wedding anniversary, too, with the men’s chorus at Ebenezer Baptist Church,” Dotson says in a smooth tenor voice. “I was with my wife, Ruth, for 79 years. She was my girl.”
If you request that song today, Dotson, who turns 102 on April 15, will likely oblige.