SHER: Art Through the Eyes of Those Who Love It

Marty Burgess gears up for Sunday's Cape Charles Quick Draw. (Photos by Sher Horosko)

Marty Burgess gears up for Sunday’s Cape Charles Quick Draw. (Photos by Sher Horosko)

By SHER HOROSKO
Cape Charles Wave

August 7, 2013

I came up in a world where everyone wanted to be like everyone else, which is to say, just the same.

It was a universe of perfect patterns: Carnation Instant Breakfast (always chocolate) for breakfast, Raymond and Glen throwing apples at me on my way home from school, a potato, some meat, and a vegetable at 5 p.m., a father who ate too fast and a mother who told him so every night without exception, religious school on Saturdays, church on Sundays, and best of all, hot rye bread from the Jewish bakery I devoured in the back seat of our white Galaxy.

It was an excruciatingly bland world for a little firecracker girl. I suffered it daily, and vowed to never acquiesce. For those who may be interested as to whether I succeeded at whistling my own sweet song: I did. And yes, I paid for it.

When I was growing up, art was something you hung from a six-penny nail tapped into a long tan wall. Art was a wall covering, really, that acted pretty much the same as a windbreaker on a Kansas prairie. It broke the wind and it broke the tan. It filled an empty space on a tan runway that stretched farther than my little eyes could see. That was art.

Last Saturday night I went to the IVir Danza performance at the Palace Theatre. There may have been 40 or 50 of us in that impossibly intimate jewel on Mason Avenue. Four men and four women from Italy danced on a stage in your yard. They moved like cougars and gazelles; their muscles pulsated with the blood thirst of the Kalahari. They went quiet, and turned into each other, like coils of smoke or butterflies finding each other through scent alone.

It is not often I wish I were young enough to start on a new course. I felt that on Saturday. And you will feel it too if you catch their last dance on August 16 at the Palace. [Read more…]

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