Tom Key has graced Atlanta audiences with many dramatic productions at Theatrical Outfit and the Alliance Theater, but the curtains rose on his own dramatic Moment 26 years ago when he was offered a chance to lead a theater in New York City.
With echoes of nightly off-Broadway standing ovations for his one-man show still ringing in his head, Tom instead chose to nurture his talents in Atlanta – his “home place in the American South.”
It’s that season of certainty – tax season, representing one element of life we can all truly count on. And those who do the counting for us—accountants—are similarly bound by stereotypes: suits and numbers, professionally bound to never deviate from a norm.
Then there’s Gary Edwards, who naturally draws attention with his South African accent. His charisma builds as he tells stories from his world travels and shares insight about building friendships an increasingly global industry.
But he’s more than a stereotype buster. He’s also had his own assumptions shattered.
Bob Voyles has spent much of his career developing signature buildings that grace Atlanta’s prime intersections and highways, so “it was like a fire bell going off in my head” when his daughter Virginia revealed she wasn’t moving back to her hometown because of Atlanta’s growing congestion.
“This was a huge surprise to me, because I love Atlanta and worked here nearly 40 years and my family is from here and always expected my children to want to embrace the city that I loved,” Bob recalled in our accompanying video.
This is the last week for “Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism” at Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum. Through May 6, “The Sacred Round: Mandalas by the Patients of Carl Jung” is on exhibit at the Oglethorpe University Museum of Art.
These kaleidoscopic circles offer a way to greater mindfulness that is so easy to lose – and thus so much more valuable — in today’s swirl of information, networks and distractions. In the age of technology, a mandala is a simple tool for staying focused.
By Chris Schroder
Joyce Fownes has completely transformed the workspace of many of her firm’s clients, proving again and again that interior design can alter how employees interact with each other.
Ironically, she found herself completely transformed one recent Easter morning when she felt spiritual “lightning” travel through her body. She hasn’t been the same since – at home or at work.
Regardless of religion, we all are equaled through humbling moments.
The Palm Sunday service at the Church of the Common Ground in Woodruff Park repeatedly chipped at the gap between the homeless worshippers and those who were much better .
Staring into a street person’s face to see the face of Christ is a stark discovery of one’s own neediness – for status, approval and fleeting comforts.
By Chris Schroder
Having now published a dozen installments of Moments, it seemed an appropriate time to visit with Joel Babbit, the ever-inventive viceroy of Atlanta’s creative scene.
When Furman Bisher came into my life in 1986, I was fresh out of college, a whippersnapper sportswriter in awe of the legendary Atlanta Journal columnist. Aged 68, he seemed positively ancient.
Over the next quarter century, I studied the way he worked and wrote, and we became friends through our shared interest in golf – a sport that connects people of diverse ages and abilities.
When “the Bish” died a week ago, to me he was a young 93, because he changed my view of what it meant to grow old.
He did this by example — by living and writing the way he played golf.
A garden gate by Andrew T. Crawford is a frame of beauty and a joy of metal.
It’s also a sign of the artist’s mid-career transformation.
Eleven of Andrew T. Crawford’s organically inspired gates frame the daffodils, tulips and hyacinths in the current exhibit, “Atlanta Blooms: 300,000 Watts of Flower Power” at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, through April. “I learned that you can change how you do something without changing what you do,” said the successful blacksmith who switched gears into more sculpture art at age 40. “Because of that freedom, I’ve done more honest work and met with more success.”
As a longtime news anchor on Atlanta’s top-rated television stations, John Pruitt narrated and often embodied the tumultuous events that punctuated our last half-century. On July 4, 1964, John stood next to a colleague at a segregationist rally when four young African-American men wandered in, inciting a melee in the stands. John’s colleague handed him a video camera, quickly showed him how to press the button to record on film and pushed him in the direction of the battle and into his own Moment of journalistic fate.
When Noel Khalil moved to Atlanta in 1983, chasing development deals on the affluent north side of Atlanta seemed as natural to him as it was unusual to the white men who dominated the industry in that part of town.
After closing a few deals in the northern suburban counties of Atlanta, Noel was surprised when the secretary of Atlanta’s most prominent African-American developer called to say her boss, Herman Russell, wanted Noel come to his office for a meeting.
For those who link the ki-yotes’ plaintive howl to the romance of an old Western — the distant soundtrack as the cowpokes tell stories around the campfire – forget all that.
Coyotes’ story in urban Atlanta is about pests, pets and prevention.
Last week, Dr. Chris Mowry, a biologist from north Georgia who has studied coyotes, described their gritty survival skills to a crowd gathered at Fernbank Science Center for a forum titled, “How can humans and coyotes co-exist?”
After 17 years in pro baseball, the Carlyles are used to rapid shifts in the foundation of their family’s life.
That’s why their family supporters are so precious to them, and that’s why when the earthquake shook Japan on March 11, 2011, the Carlyles pitched in to care for Akane Nakagawa, the single mom who had cared for them, and for her community that suddenly, desperately needed help.
By Chris Schroder
Chuck Leavell leads a musical life that most guys would trade everything to have – playing keyboards for the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton the Allman Brothers and later next month with John Mayer – but his Moment was one all the ladies will love.
Now at age 59, looking back on all that rock ‘n’ roll, Chuck really wants to talk about his true loves: his wife, family and his deep abiding care for the environment, support for which he is spending an increasing amount of his time and treasure.
On Saturday at 7 pm at St. Pius X Catholic High School gymnasium, you can see a team of local lawyers show up on a different court against a squad of Atlanta doctors with a prescription for winning.
The game, billed as “Jawbones vs. Sawbones,” will be played the weekend before the ACC college basketball tournament in Philips Arena. March Madness kicks off with a bit of March Malpractice.
“I hope their cardiologist brings his paddles,” one lawyer joked in an email.
The game benefits Side by Side Clubhouse, a day program for people who have experienced traumatic brain injury – a population that has swelled with returning troops. Brain injuries have also become more publicized through athletic concussions.
By Chris Schroder
For more than 20 years, Bill Nigut was a mainstay of Atlanta’s WSB-TV’s political coverage and it looked like he would end his career there – until the day in 2002 when his Leadership Atlanta class walked into a non-profit taking care of international refugees in Clarkston. That was the Moment that changed his life.
“Compared to what those people are doing in Clarkston, all I do is blab on television every day,” he thought. “I really need to make a change. I need to get across the wall that separates reporters who are observers from the leaders who are making a real difference in our community.” Today he’s Southeast director of the Anti-Defamation League.
As I watch Dr. Evelyn Wynn-Dixon glide into her stride, telling her life story, I try to brush away a nagging premonition that we might soon see her firing up a Monday night crowd at a national political convention – but then again, other people’s premonitions is how she ended up in the mayor’s chair of Riverdale, Georgia.
Evelyn was driven to find a way out of her situation for both her and her children and serves now as an inspiration to her seven grandchildren and others who meet her.
The two men, connected by a last name and DNA, separated by two generations and different dreams, together reflected on the forces that have driven their family.
Driven Jimmy Carter past national vilification for his presidential failures, driven him into the humanitarian work that has changed the world, and driven his grandson to appreciate the example set by the older generations – especially the women behind the men.
Steve Nygren’s decades-long work amidst the rolling farms and forests of Chattahoochee Hill Country in south Fulton County is akin to a sculptor carefully studying each sliver of stone before slicing it from an eventual masterpiece.
Steve’s Moment occurred in 2000 when he and his daughter were jogging along the property line and their bucolic run was disturbed when they came upon bulldozers tearing down trees in the forest next door. Many in his situation would have shrugged their shoulders and planted a long row of leyland cypress. Others might have bought a different farm, further from Atlanta. Steve decided to stay and fight. His life changed, again, that instant.
Now is the bosom of advertising season, after the new Super Bowl commercials reveal what we “need” to feel really good about ourselves, and right before the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue arrives.
We women – and the men who love us — should attend to a basic way to uplift our bodies and spirits: A properly fitted bra.
