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in the news/segment 2
Volume 15/Issue 12

Sea What's Cooking at WYES-TV/Channel 12

W YES-TV/ Channel 12 is cooking up some great things this summer and here's how you can be a part of it! Mark your calendars for Saturday, July 12 beginning at 9:00 am for our viewer recipe cooking marathon, SEAFOOD CELEBRATION.

Much like the SOUPER BOWL CELEBRATION that aired in January, viewers are invited to send in their favorite crab, shrimp, fish, crawfish or other seafood recipes to be included as part of the SEAFOOD CELEBRATION. All recipes will be reviewed by cooking experts from the New Orleans School of Cooking and some of the most creative, delicious recipes will be prepared during our on-air celebration. All recipes will appear in a WYES cookbook, which will then be used as a fund-raiser for WYES.

If you've ever aspired to be a TV chef, this could be your chance! So, it's time to dig up your family's favorite recipes for bisque, gumbo, seafood boils, dips, breads, sauces and more! Send your recipes to: SEAFOOD CELEBRATION, P.O. BOX 24026, New Orleans, LA, 70184. The deadline to submit recipes is Friday, June 13.

SEAFOOD CELEBRATION premieres on Saturday, July 12 at 9:00 am and will encore Sunday, July 13 at 1:00 pm. Returning to host this bounty of seafood delights is Jata Brown. So, don't forget to submit your recipe.


Big Chief Tootie's
Mardi Gras Indian Art
Featured at NOMA

R ecognizing the unique achievements made by Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, the New Orleans Museum of Art is presenting a special exhibition "He's the Prettiest." A Tribute to Big Chief Allison "Tootie" Montana's Fifty Years of Mardi Gras Indian Suiting from July 12 through August 31, 1997. Chief Montana is the Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe, one of the oldest "gangs" to participate in this solitary tradition, and he is widely recognized as the dean of the more than twenty-five Big Chiefs who head various tribes in the city.

On display will be approximately six of his most recent extraordinary creations made for the Mardi Gras Indian celebrations. These hand-made costumes, or "suits," are designed and fabricated each year by the Chief to be worn on Mardi Gras day and on Super Sunday, the Sabbath following St. Joseph's Day. Beginning immediately after each Mardi Gras, the Chief conceives of and sews the suit using a variety of commercially dyed feathers, sequins and beads. Front and back aprons, boots, gloves and an elaborate crown constitute the multitude of components in these intricate costumes, which have a highly sculptural quality. Montana's last suit before retiring, worn this past Mardi Gras and Super Sunday, is included in the exhibition. This spectacular costume is white with gold accents and is the finest costume in his long career for which he is known to have "the prettiest" creation.

Accompanying the exhibition will be color photographic blowups showing the Chief as he walked through the streets of New Orleans, a 15-minute video produced for the exhibition and running continuously in the gallery illustrating the Chief sewing, his last "practice" at local bar and his gang on the streets parading. A catalogue with color plates by photographers Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun and two essays by New Orleans writer and poet Kalamu Ya Salaam and Mardi Gras Indian historian Dr. Maurice Martinez will accompany the exhibition. The essays will discuss the origins of this century-old New Orleans tradition and provide an insight into the Chief, his thoughts and reflections on his participation in this unique event.

In 1987, Chief Montana was awarded a fellowship as Master Traditional Artist by the Folk Art Program of the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington D.C. The full color catalogue and special programming for the "Tootie" Montana exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from Southeast Medical Alliance of Metairie, Louisiana. The video is supported by a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding is provided by Liberty Bank and Trust Company, New Orleans. The installation of the exhibition is assisted by Lakeside Shopping Center of Metairie, Louisiana.


NOMA Exhibition Focuses On
The Times-Picayune Archives

V isitors will get a rare glimpse at yesterday's news in a unique new exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art. See All About It!, opening June 20, celebrates 100 years of photographs in The Times-Picayune, New Orleans' only daily newspaper, with an extensive look at newspaper photography. The exhibition will remain open through September 14.

"For a hundred years New Orleans newspapers have published the photographs that illustrated our city and our world," said Steven Maklansky, NOMA's Curator of Photographs. "Each day brought new reports and new images by local, national and international photojournalists." And each day these wonderful photographs were dutifully placed into storage, creating an incomparably rich and diverse archive of approximately 1.5 million photographs, now owned by The Times-Picayune. Most of these images have been seen only once, on the day that they were originally published.

Included in the exhibition are photographs that offer a second look at events and personalities from the often colorful history of New Orleans and Louisiana, as well as national and global events: a parade in New Orleans celebrating the end of Prohibition, Mrs. Al Capone, Huey Long, his assassin, Dr. Carl Weiss, armed guards during a streetcar strike and more. In all, approximately 100 images are included in the exhibition, almost all of which were taken by Times-Picayune staff photographers.

Many of the photographs have the presence of artifacts and, indeed, have outlived their makers and their subjects, Maklansky noted. Their uniqueness is often demonstrated in the retouching or crop marks applied by newspaper layout artists and by editors.

"The qualities that make a photograph appropriate for a museum are not necessarily the same that caused it to be selected for the morning edition," said Maklansky, who considered aesthetics as well as history in selecting the photographs. "Consequently, the photographs in See All About It not only depict some of the people, places and events that make history, but also present an assortment of less notable characters and occurrences which have been caught on film with the economic elegance that characterizes the photojournalists craft," he said.

The exhibition, which will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, will be in NOMA's Photography Gallery on the Museum's second floor. A companion exhibition will be featured on NOMA's website at www.noma.org.


Elise Mayer Besthoff
Chinese Export Collection
Shown at NOMA

T he extensive collection of delicate Chinese Export porcelain formed by native New Orleanian Elise Mayer Besthoff is the focus of a new exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art. China for the West: The Elise Mayer Besthoff Collection debuted in the Lupin Foundation Center for the Decorative Arts which remains open through August 17.

Miss Besthoff, who in 1929 was born into a family of avid art patrons, had two passions as a collector-the Chinese Export porcelain that is the subject of the exhibition, and jewelry. Educated at the University of Alabama and New York's Tobe-Corburn School of Fashion Design, Elise Besthoff had a developed sense of design in addition to the collector's "eye." She worked in the fashion arena for years in her adopted city of New York. Her other great interest was travel, and she kept apartments in Rome, London and Palm Beach. Miss Besthoff died in 1996, retaining her strong sense of style and leaving her beloved Chinese Export to NOMA as well as establishing a purchase endowment for such porcelains.

Chinese Export porcelain was bom of the European desire for "things Chinese" in the 17th and 18th centuries. More durable than tea, spices or silks, these porcelains are a lasting reminder of the robust trade between East and West during this period.

When the first Chinese porcelains reached European shores in the late 15th century, they were rare and highly prized, often kept in a private room and displayed with gold and silver mounts. The porcelain retained its popularity over the years as it became more readily available and could be displayed in groupings as part of a room decoration. The thin, vitreous body of the porcelain, with its remarkable painted decoration, was unlike anything produced in European porcelain manufactories, which were not founded until 1710. Feeding the popularity were the habits and tastes of Europeans-the regular serving of tea and coffee and the fashion of obtaining large porcelain dinner services. The porcelain could be made to order, and reflected European demands in form and decoration, often florals or coats of arms.

"The Besthoff Collection, with European-shaped objects decorated in the Chinese manner and, conversely, traditional Chinese shapes decorated with European designs, offers a fascinating look at a period when the cultures of the East and West met in the medium of porcelain," said Lisa Rotondo-McCord, NOMA's Curator of Asian Art.

"The generous bequest from Elise Besthoff enriches our existing collection of Export porcelains from the Kuntz and Boles collections and the long-term loans of Lillian Pulitzer Smith," said John W. Keefe, Curator of Decorative Arts at NOMA. "The new endowment created by Miss Besthoff's bequest provides the Museum with means to make future purchases of fine Chinese porcelains to further enrich our permanent collection."

A color catalogue will accompany the exhibition.


Anti-Gay Dr. Laura Goes On Homophobic Warpath

In a May 25 column appearing in newspapers all over the country, Dr. Laura Schlessinger calls gay men and lesbians "afflicted," calls being gay a "biological faux pas," and denounces lesbian and gay parented families as inferior to cogendered, heterosexual parented ones.

"With respect to gender identity," she writes, "heterosexuality is the functional norm," while she sees homosexuality as "as error in proper brain development. Acceptance of [homosexuality] as a state of being comparable to heterosexuality is not appropriate."

She then tries to paint herself as tolerant: "A significant bulk of the critical letters I get at my radio program have to do with my apparent tolerance' of homosexuals-that I talk to gays and lesbians about the same moral, ethical and life issues as I do with heterosexuals when I should be condemning them. Even for me, it is too great, bizarre and regrettable a leap to go from compassion and tolerance for an individual who is afflicted with homosexuality' to declaring that nuclear, heterosexual families have no importance or advantage over any other form of family. To even suggest that this state of being is equivalent morally or practically to heterosexuality is taking an advocacy to the degree of being destructive to children's development-as well as to the very existence and continuity of a coherent society."

Either Schlessinger is ignorant to the increasingly large volume of psychological and sociological studies that have proven that children with same-sex parents are as well-adjusted and healthy as those of cogendered parents, or she chooses to stick her head in the sand to protect her own prejudices and bigotry. Her assertion that being gay is an "error in brain development" as opposed to just a difference, like skin color or personality is completely groundless in scientific fact. Finally, how same-sex parenting could possibly be seen as "destructive" to the existence and continuity of society is just plain irrational. Her bigotry is a slap in the face to serious psychological professionals, same-sex parents, their children and all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people.

Write to Dr. Laura and expose her prejudice for what it is-irrational and ill-informed-and provide her with a "bulk of critical letters" explaining that her thinking isn't tolerance-it's bigotry. Dr. Laura Schlessinger, New York Times Syndication Sales Corp., 122 E. 42nd St., New York, NY 10168, phone: 1.800.375.2872, e-mail:
wisdom@cprinc.com, http://www.drluara.com/forum.
[from GLAAD]


GQ & Rupaul See Double

The June issue of GQ (Gentlemen's Quarterly) features a fun and gender bending photo spread and interview, entitled "Dude Looks Like A Lady," with the supermodel drag performer RuPaul.

With the help of computer technology, RuPaul is featured frolicking around Manhattan with none other than himself, out of drag and in a men's suit.

The accompanying interview by Sallie Motsch finds RuPaul discussing his life as a drag performer, answering such questions as where he hides his "candy."

RuPaul tells GQ that he is "the queen you can take home to meet Mom and Dad."
[from GLAAD]

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