Last weekend, more than 100 area high school students and their families spent the day walking around the campus of Lyon College, and they walked away with an idea of how getting a liberal arts education here would benefit the rest of their lives.

On Saturday, Jan. 27, Lyon College hosted another Preview Day event for high school seniors and juniors and their families on campus. President Dr. Walter Roettger, and Denny Bardos, vice president for enrollment services, welcomed the visitors in Nucor Auditorium.

The schedule of events for the day included presentations by faculty on the academic programs of the College, lunch on campus and campus tours. Other presentations focused on state, federal and institutional financial aid.

Parents and students also had the opportunity to participate in separate student and parent discussion panels, with current Lyon College students answering questions from parents regarding campus life.

Speaking at the discussion, Bardos said Lyon is home to more than 40 clubs and organizations.

He pointed to XAS, or the X-Treme Adventure Squad, as an example. The group is the fastest growing club on campus and sponsors outings for laser tag, paint-balling, kayaking, rock climbing/rappelling and much more.

Bardos also pointed out all the cultural events the College offers, such as performances and readings from comedians, entertainers and writers. The Lyon College Visiting Writers Series, the Visiting Fellowship in Creative Writing, and the Heasley Prize Reading Series all provide outstanding opportunities to anyone interested in reading – or writing – fiction, poetry, drama and creative non-fiction.

He related how, during his search for the right institution at which to build his career, two factors made him decide to choose Lyon: The small size of the College and its sense of community.

Scenes from Preview Day

Photos by Wil Shane

"American Life in Poetry," a free weekly column featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet, has chosen one by Lyon College’s Writer-In-Residence Andrea Hollander Budy.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser hosts the column as a free resource for newspapers and online publications.

"Newspapers are close to my heart and my family," said Kooser, whose wife and son both work in journalism. "As Poet Laureate I want to show the people who read newspapers that poetry can be for them, can give them a chuckle or an insight."

Poetry was once a popular staple in the daily press, according to Kooser.

"Readers enjoyed it," he said. "They would clip verses, stick them in their diaries, enclose them in letters. They even took time to memorize some of the poems they discovered."

Kooser spotlights Budy’s poem, "For Weeks After the Funeral."

"Grief can endure a long, long time," he writes in his introduction. "A deep loss is very reluctant to let us set it aside, to push it into a corner of memory. Here the Arkansas poet, Andrea Hollander Budy, gives us a look at one family’s adjustment to a death."

In recent years, poetry has all but disappeared from newsprint. Yet the attraction to it is still strong, Kooser said.

"Poetry has remained a perennial expression of our emotional, spiritual and intellectual lives, as witnessed by the tens of thousands of poems written about the tragedy of September 11 that circulated on the Internet," he said. "Now I’m hoping to convince editors that there could be a small place in their papers for poetry, that it could add a spot of value in the eyes of readers. Best of all, it won't cost a penny."

To view Budy’s poem, go to: www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/current.html.

Famed sculptor visits Lyon John David Mooney, an internationally recognized artist known for his large-scale, public sculptures presented an artist's talk Jan. 24 at Lyon College. His work has been showcased from Chicago to Australia to the Vatican Observatory, and has included a 133-foot-long rooftop light sculpture in Los Angeles; an aluminum and Waterford crystal work hanging in the atrium of the John Crerar Library at the University of Chicago; and light sculptures in the Chicago Tribune Tower and Adler Planetarium. He is the founder and artistic director of the John David Mooney Foundation in Chicago, an organization that provides a postgraduate study program for international artists and architects. The Foundation is a not-for-profit public educational organization that seeks to transform the public domain through art, architecture, and urban planning in a way that fosters and demonstrates the unique societal responsibility of the artist.                                                                                                                             Photo by Eric Stewart

A touring art exhibition program currently in its 20th year on the road will soon make a stop at Lyon College.

The "Small Works On Paper" juried exhibition, coordinated by the Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of the Department of Arkansas Heritage, tours statewide from January to November and will make 11 stops.

Slated to appear in Lyon’s Kresge Gallery Feb. 3 – 25, the exhibit will feature 38 works by 29 Arkansas artists. This year’s juror will be David S. Rubin, the Brown Foundation Curator of Contemporary Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art.

"When limited within the confines of small scale works on paper, the artist…can transform visual information into something that breathes its own life," Rubin said. "Whether observed in the physical world around us or culled from the interior realms of imagination, a form or a subject can be energized by expert orchestration of the variables of composition – such as rhythms of line, contrasts in light and dark, or modulations in color and texture."

The artists selected for the exhibition have succeeded at converting something small and intimate in scale into something "grand and powerful" in impact, Rubin added.

"Whether representational or abstract, photographic or drawn by hand, each work in the exhibition is like a pearl that glistens with its own inner light," he said.

In addition to choosing the artists to be represented in the exhibition, Rubin also chose seven Purchase Award winner. These pieces become part of the Small Works on Paper permanent collection.

Small Works on Paper will be for sale at the show unless it is marked "not for sale," is a Purchase Award winner or has already been sold. If a piece of artwork is sold, it will continue to tour with the event until the end of the calendar year, and frames are not included in the purchase price.

Admission to the exhibition is free and open to the public.

For more information on the event, contact Chris Valle, Lyon’s assistant professor of art, at 698-4336.

Lyon College theatre and art major interns on Broadway

By Sarah Fendley
Contributing Writer

Even as a young girl, Emily Fleming knew what she wanted to do. She was watching "Full House" with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen when she said to herself, "I could do that." That same afternoon she asked her mother for a television show for Christmas.

Last summer she moved closer to her dream and acquired some professional experience working in the Upright Citizens Brigade and the Mint theaters in New York City.

Fleming is a junior with a double major in theatre and art. She was recently the lead actress in the Harlequin Theatre Production, "Death and the Maiden," a play by Ariel Dorfman. Fleming is also a member of the Lyon College branch of Alpha Psi Omega, the oldest branch of this National Dramatic Honor Society. She has trained in several types of acting, including improvisation, musical theatre and masque theatre. She is also an accomplished artist. At right, she is shown with her painting, "Squirrel Hunting," which won the Presidential Purchase Award as Best of Show in the recent Juried Student Art Exhibit at Kresge Gallery.

The Upright Citizens Brigade began with four original members, Matt Besser, Amy Poehler (also a co-anchor on the Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live), Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh. According to their Web site, these four actors came to New York from Chicago in 1996. They began a training program in 1997 after they all noticed a lack of the "Chicago-style" long form improvisational theatre, or improv, in the city.

Improv is a type of theatre that involves little or no planning as to what the scene or sketch will include. The actors deliver their lines spontaneously, often in response to suggestions from the audience. Long form is a type of improv in which the performers create progressive and interconnected shows or series of sketches. These can be related by many aspects, including stories, characters or themes. These scenes can be driven by audience suggestions to form a full-length improvisational play, or they might be completely unrelated except for one aspect or point of inspiration.

In 1999, thanks to then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s fight against obscenity, the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre opened in the former location of the New Harmony, a strip club that was reported, according to the UCB Web site, "to be seedier than seedy." According to their Web site, the UCB theatre became so successful that "casting directors, agents, festival producers, and journalists all began to flock to the little 74-seat theater in Chelsea to see the best comic talent in the city."

As the reputation of the theatre grew, the training programs expanded to accommodate the hundreds of students training in improvisational theatre. In 2003, the new Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre opened. This new theatre includes a 150-seat theatre that, "continues to offer the best and most innovative improv and sketch comedy in the city every day of the week," and is also home to the Improv Guerrilla Training Center where students learn both improvisational and written comedy. They also have a theatre in Los Angeles, Calif.

Last summer Fleming had the opportunity to intern at the New York branch of the Upright Citizens Brigade and another theatre in New York City called the Mint Theater. For her Mint Theater internship, Fleming said she went online and searched for internships in Broadway theatres in New York City, and just started calling them to see if she could intern there. Fleming said that the Mint Theater was the third theatre that she called, and at that time they were not even offering internships but, according to Fleming, "theatres always need free help."

After arranging her internship with the Mint Theater, Fleming’s boyfriend e-mailed her about the UCB Theatre. They both love the Upright Citizens Brigade and watch it all the time. When she called the UCB Theatre, they told her to send in her résumé. About a week later she got a call from UCB saying that she had gotten the internship.

Part of the reason that she interned last summer was that Dr. Michael Counts, theatre professor at Lyon College, strongly suggests that all theatre majors complete two internships before they graduate; she just took care of both of hers at once.

While in New York, Fleming stayed with a friend from Nashville, Tenn., and his roommates. She had a room to herself for about a month while one of the roommates was studying abroad, but after he returned she had to sleep on a couch in the apartment.

While working at the two theatres, she was able to have some very unique experiences, especially for a junior in college. She was on the all-female stage crew at the Mint Theater for the show called "Susan and God." Fleming was impressed both by the actors in the show and with the fact that crew was comprised of only women.

Fleming ran the curtain, which opened and closed on every scene. She had a headset through which she did scene changes and gave cues to the actors. She also worked with the lead actress on costume changes. According to their Web site, "the Mint Theater Company is dedicated to searching out worthy but neglected voices from the past, with a sharp appetite for timeless but timely plays that speak to issues, struggles and questions that are as current as today’s headlines."

Fleming worked as a receptionist at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Though this was not on-stage practice for her, through her internship, she was able to get into all of the Upright Citizens Brigade shows for free. She even had the opportunity to appear on stage with two of the original cast members, Roberts and Walsh, during one of the sketches.

Though she did not get paid, Fleming said that she would not trade her experience for anything. She was working constantly, and when she would get off work from one theatre, she would head to the other, either to work or to watch a show that was going on. She did not waste any time while she was there.

"The plan right now is to continue interning at UCB during the summer because if anyone is looking for comedians for a television show, they go to UCB," Fleming said.

She wants to work in the theatre in Los Angeles next summer. Fleming thinks that if you can do comedy you can do anything else in acting. She quoted Dr. Counts in support of this. "Dr. Counts said if you have good comedic timing, then you can have good timing with everything else," Fleming said.

Fleming plans to pursue a career in acting. She said that she is working hard to develop strong technique in whatever role she might be playing. She said that she knows looks fade, but she thinks "it is never going to change that people want to laugh."
 

A woman with long family ties to Lyon College has just published a book on what it was like to be born and raised in the wilds of Africa’s Belgian Congo.

Sarah’s father had been a top student at Lyon (Arkansas) College, and her grandfather, Theodore Maxfield, became a trustee of the College in 1875. He later served as the College’s vice president as well.

According to the book "Lyon College: 1872-2002," authored by Lyon’s assistant professor of history, Dr. Brooks Blevins, Maxfield played a prominent role during the early years of the College.

The opening line of "Long Journeys: An Arkansas Family in Africa" pays homage to the first sentence of "Out of Africa," the famed book by Isak Dinesen, the pseudonym of Danish Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke. Dinesen’s "I had a farm in Africa" is replaced with Burnside’s "I had a childhood in Africa."

Intimate letters and photographs from those years round out the narrative, giving the reader a unique insight to life in the far reaches of the Dark Continent.

The book’s title evolved from a story told in the Congo of a student who loved his missionary teacher and decided to give her a special Christmas gift. He knew of a lake a great distance away, a place where a certain type of shell could be found. When he gave the shell to the teacher, she protested on the grounds that the trip had been too far to take on her account.

"Long journey part of gift," the student said.

Born in 1930 at Bibanga, a mission station in what was then the Belgian Congo, Sarah was the youngest of four siblings. Her father, George T. McKee, and her mother, Elsie Maxfield McKee, had gone to the mission fields of Congo in 1911, where they stayed until 1941.

That year, at the age of 11, Sarah and her family moved to Arkansas. She eventually graduated from Agnes Scott College in Georgia with degrees in English and French. When her three children – one daughter and two sons – were grown, she went back to college and earned a master’s degree in drama from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where she still resides.

John Coghlan, CEO of Phoenix International Inc., the publisher of the book, said its text often casts a favorable light on Lyon College.

"The book is a slice of life that says a great deal about the role Lyon College has in the lives of students, and the impact they are having on the state, nation and the world."

Coghlan said extra copies of  "Long Journeys: An Arkansas Family in Africa" have been sent to the campus bookstore and are available there now.

Sports

The Lyon College Scots are set to throw the first pitch of their 2007 baseball season on Saturday, Feb. 3, on the road against the College of the Ozarks.

Lyon’s season-opening doubleheader begins at noon in Point Lookout, Mo., and replaces a pair of canceled doubleheaders, originally scheduled for Feb. 2 and 3, against Hillsdale Baptist of Oklahoma City, Okla. The games against Hillsdale Baptist will not be rescheduled.

The Scots are set to debut at home on Tuesday, Feb. 6, in a single game versus the University of the Ozarks. Game time is scheduled for 1 p.m.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- The Lyon College Pipers led the No. 9 team in the country, the Trevecca Nazarene Lady Trojans, at the half but home-court advantage took over in the second and the Pipers fell 66-54 Saturday in a TranSouth Conference game.

Lyon held Trevecca without a bucket from the field for the first five and a half minutes and carried a 32-31 advantage into the break.

After halftime, Trevecca rocketed to a 38-32 advantage behind a 7-0 run. The Pipers sliced into the Trojan lead near the end of the game, but Trevecca forced the edge back to eight down the stretch and ended with a 12-point margin of victory.

Senior guard Nikki Baker led the Pipers with 13 points and hit 5 of 7 shots from the field -- 3 of 5 from 3-point range. Lyon teammates Maribeth Waters and Ashley Waller added eight apiece.

Trevecca was led by Jennifer Bognar, who had a game-high 20 points and 14 rebounds. Mariska Reed added 13 points and nine rebounds.

The Lady Trojans soar to 16-3 overall and 7-2 in TranSouth play. Lyon drops to 9-11 and 3-6.

The Pipers host Blue Mountain College at 6 p.m. Thursday in Becknell Gymnasium.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Another close game dropped on the wrong side of the ledger for the Lyon College Scots.

Lyon College guards Jonathan Donaldson and Trey Salley combined for 41 points, but couldn't shake the Scots out of a season-long TranSouth Conference slump in a 71-66 loss to the Trevecca Nazarene Trojans Saturday.

The conference loss was the Scots' ninth straight, dropping the team to 9-12 overall and 0-9 in the TranSouth. Trevecca improves to 14-7 and 7-2 in league play.

Donaldson scored a game-high 24 points on 9 of 17 shooting from the field -- including a 4 of 7 clip from 3-point range -- and 2 of 2 from the free throw line. Donaldson also had a team-high eight rebounds. Salley kicked in 17 points on 6 of 12 shooting from the field and was 5 of 10 from the arc.

Despite the stellar performances from its guard combo, Lyon couldn't find another scorer to help end the conference slide. Only one other Scot, Alex Kelly, accounted for more than four points in the contest, with five.

Trevecca had four players scoring in double figures led by Rick James with 18 points. Josh Helton added 16 points, Collins Onyando had 13 points and nine boards and Brian Oduor accounted for 13 points.

The Scots will play Crichton at 8 p.m. Thursday in Becknell in another conference matchup.