Mark Howell's - "Soundings"
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Soundings

The folks at The Studios of Key West have described her as a "phenomenal performer with quite a following."

But no-one warned us that Cheryl Wheeler -- who sings her songs at the Old Town New Folk series in the former Armory building, 600 White St., at 8 p.m. on Thursday, March 11 -- is a professional comedienne. Her tossed-away lines in our phone talk last week had us deeply laughing.

Her fame came first from the songs she wrote for others, such as Peter, Paul and Mary, Bette Midler and Garth Brooks. Today, at a young 58, she's riding high on performing her own work in clubs, small theaters and concert halls. Her latest CD, "Pointing at the Sun," is on her own label and includes the long-awaited "Cat Trilogy."

The day she called from her home in Massachusetts, Cheryl still had the cold that forced her to cancel two recent bookings in Wisconsin. But she'd not lost her sense of humor.

"I was last in Key West to get certified in scuba diving," she said, "back in the 1870s. I still carry the card for the comic effect. There's nothing I love more than diving but I haven't done it for years. It's the closest I've ever been to another planet."

We dared ask what her secret was as a performer, her inner direction that so appealed to so many. "I don't have an answer to that question and I don't want one," she said. Any element in her work "charming enough to appeal, I wouldn't want to destroy it." Her "whole way," she said, "is that I'm not different from the audience, I'm not separate from them. It's as if I'm talking to people in my own house."

Born in Timonium, Md. -- "you don't want to go anywhere with that" -- Cheryl owned her first 45-rpm record at the age of 6 (Buddy Knox singing 'Lovey Dovey") and got her first ukulele at 10, out of a trash pile. Her father gave her a new ukulele the next year and a guitar the year after that.

Her mom was a nurse and her dad a high school principal who became superintendent of schools. "The family sang four-point harmony all the time," she said. "We never thought it was odd, everybody in the family was musical. But I was the only one to carry it as far as not getting a job."

How could it not have happened? Her heart found folk and then she heard Joan Baez. She's just seen, she told us, a new PBS TV show on Baez and, for the first time, "I could see where my finger-picking came from -- I was very influenced by her." She was "gone on the Beatles," too, and "Oh my God, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon!" It's music that "keeps getting better all the time," she said, beatifically.

First set in her concert at The Studios on Thursday is by Kenny White. "We go back a thousand years," said Cheryl. "He's one of my best friends." White is fresh back from Wales on a tour with Judy Collins.

Tickets are $25, available through keystix.com.

• • • • •

Unusual winter climate records continue to be set.

Seattle had its warmest January on record. Record high temperatures were also set in Boston, Mass., and Nome, Alaska.

Two cities selected by USA Today to demonstrate cold temperatures were Tallahassee, with a record number of subfreezing days (13), and Key West, which tied with itself for its coldest week, Jan. 7-13 (matching a record cold week here in 1856).

• • • • •

An article by local birthday girl Carol Tedesco on the Santa Margarita shipwreck has been translated into Russian and featured in this month in Russia's top dive magazine, Invertum. (An English language version is in this month's X-Ray International Dive magazine.)

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"At Last Light" is the People's Theater of Key West's first full-length production, directed by Chris Tittel.

Playwright Kathy Cafferty developed her script through the emerging company's weekly workshops last year. Audiences attending subsequent readings and showcases then voted hers the one of all the plays developed locally by the company to go to full production.

"At Last Light" runs Friday and Saturday, March 12-13, at 8 p.m. on the cabaret stage at the Tennessee Williams Theater. Tickets at keystix.com.

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The Key West Orchid Society show, "Orchids ... Gems of the Tropics," continues through today, March 7, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the West Martello Gardens at Higgs Beach.

Orchid supplies, plant sales, raffles, food and more are available. Plentiful free parking.

• • • • •

Bizarre news from Michael Welber of thecrab byhermit.blogspot.com:

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal today owns the fourth largest stake in News Corp, parent company of Fox News, making him the largest shareholder outside the family of News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch.

According to the Financial Times, News Corp announced that it is purchasing a $70 million dollar stake in the Saudi prince's Rotana Media, a Middle Eastern music and news conglomerate. Said the prince, "This is a qualitative leap not just for Rotana but for the whole Arab world."

Because Prince Alwaleed has publicly acknowledged that he has forced Fox News to edit its coverage he disliked, conservative activists are attacking the business partnership as "really dangerous for America."

• • • • •

Last Wednesday was the 160th anniversary of Florida's statehood.

• • • • •

March 25 is the day when Matthew C. Perry sailed the schooner Shark to Key West and planted the U.S. flag here, claiming the Keys as United States property in 1822.

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Miami Beach's Fontaine-bleau resort, once ranked among the world's finest hotels, was developed by hotelier Ben Novack Sr. He died in 1985, leaving most of what was left of his fortune to his ex-wife Bernice and his son Ben Novack Jr.

In April last year, Bernice, a former model, died at the age of 87 from what the medical examiner called a "series of falls" at her Fort Lauderdale home.

On July 12 last year, Ben Jr. was found beaten to death in a hotel outside of New York, where he was attending a convention.

In August last year, while her husband Ben's body was still in a drawer in a New York morgue awaiting interment in the family mausoleum, Ben's widow Nancy Novack entered a Bank of America branch in Fort Lauderdale with a key to her late husband's and mother-in-law's safe deposit box, held for them by the bank since the 1970s. She walked out of the vault, reports Julie Brown of the Miami Herald, with a "bulging backpack and a large shopping bag." The bank admitted they erred in permitting her access to the deposit box.

Nancy is sole heir to the combined estates of her late husband and late mother-in-law, estimated to be worth at least $10 million. She is currently a "person of interest" to the FBI. The homicide case remains unsolved, while Bernice's family say they suspect foul play in her death.

Meanwhile Nancy Novack's daughter, May Abad, 33, has sued her mother under Florida's "slayer" statute, which would prohibit her from inheriting Ben Jr.'s estate if she is found to have killed him.

But like her mother, Abad is also a "person of interest" in the murder.

If Nancy were to be convicted of the crime, her two teenage sons would inherit the estate.

• • • • •

"Good morning, Capt. Morgan. What can I do for you today?"

"Same thing as yesterday."

"You and your client wish to make a temporary exit from the port?

"That is right."

"Name?"

"Harry Morgan."

"Nationality?"

"Eskimo."

"What?"

"American."

"Name of ship?"

"Queen Conch, Key West, Florida."

"Five francs, please."

-- opening lines of the script of "To Have and Have Not," written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner from the Ernest Hemingway novel, filmed by Howard Hawks starring Humphrey Bogart and released in 1944.

It was Faulkner who created the character called "Slim" in the script, portrayed in the Hawks' movie by 19-year-old Lauren Bacall. He named her after Hawks' wife, Nancy "Slim" Keith.

(Hawk's and Keith's daughter was Kitty Hawks, who became a famous fashion designer.)

• • • • •

The acronymic name of the rogue computer, HAL, that goes rogue in outer space in Stanley Kubrick's "2001," is made up of the three letters of the alphabet that come before IBM.

• • • • •

The word "swan" has come to mean primarily the long-necked aquatic bird, slightly heavier than the goose and noted for its grace upon the waters.

The word once meant a poet or singer as well. And up until quite recent times it meant to swear or to exclaim in amazement, from "I's wan," a contraction of "I shall warrant."

Lordy, lordy, we swan.

• • • • •

Quote for the Week:

"The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not so sure it is right."

-- Judge Learned Hand

in 1944