Not 48 hours after the remarkable Rock Street redux of the Beaux Arts Ball, event planner Todd Bagwell told me he would not comment on his event. But wh-wh-why?
He's free of the Arkansas Arts Center, he said. Finit. Technically, his contract ends June 30, but practically, it was over when the ball wrapped.
There's nothing outwardly controversial here. It's the end of a nice three-year run for Bagwell and the center, who are parting amicably, like Mike Huckabee and Arkansas.
Bagwell said he has opportunities today that "demand pursuing at this time." He has outgrown his work at the center, and he has given them an education.
"It's kind of gotten routine now, so we don't really need to pay for his expertise," Chief Financial Officer Laine Harber said. "We have the template."
Meanwhile, Bagwell was paid about $32,000 each of his three years; in an effort to be prudent, his duties will be absorbed by event rental coordinator Jean Heslip and contract caterer Simply the Best.
"Going forward, I would rather support the AAC at arm's length, by purchasing a ticket," Bagwell said.
The biggest complaint about Beaux Arts Ball, Harber said, was "overcrowding." The center expected about 310 and welcomed 400.
If party planning were pirating, that's like complaining the booty is sinking the ship.
SHOW ME THE WAY TO THE NEXT OYSTER BAR
The biggest nonprofit events happen inside the Wally Allen Ballroom of the Statehouse Convention Center -- The Heart Ball, the Hope Ball, the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute Gala for Life, etc. So, then, where do the smallest meetings take place?
The surprising answer -- excepting nonprofit offices or people's homes -- is the Oyster Bar at Stifft Station on Markham Street.
Have you been inside this joint? The ambience is not unlike Sunday brunch inside a saloon. It's no Cache restaurant. It's not even Shorty Small's with its factory-direct distressed wood and kitschy hand tools. The Oyster Bar's wood is actually distressed, its ceilings real stamped tin, its gingham-pattern tablecloths authentically not gingham.
"They've got Christmas lights up all the time. No matter what season we're in, your meeting is well-lit by Christmas lights," said Glen Hooks, Arkansas chapter director of the Sierra Club.
Last week JDRF (nee Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund) read its annual report to board members at the bar. Anyone was welcome, and Megan McClain and Gonca Dequeant took the charity up on a spread that included shrimp, oysters on the half-shell, and chicken salad in bite-size pastry shells. Director Sue Tull was delighted and promptly asked if they like to ride bicycles -- the Arkansas chapter of JDRF has a very active, very determined bicycling team that does "rides" (not races) in places like Death Valley.
"There's a great charm" at the bar, said Karen Halbert, who helps lead the bike trips. "You're more comfortable here. Less formal. You get more chit-chat."
"I usually take a picture or two every month and put it up on our Facebook page," Hooks said. "My colleagues around the country are always kind of jealous of where we're meeting because it looks like a great time all the time. We're having a great time at the Oyster Bar talking about water quality or something."
"You know they don't charge us for the room?" says Liz Caldwell, president of the Arkansas Canoe Club.
OK, that goes a long way to explaining this thing. Providing no one has claimed it, Virginia Boyd over at the bar will open the doors to most anyone, take a buffet order (or a la carte), and dedicate a server for the group. That's quite an accommodation, especially when you consider that some of these groups have a standing monthly meeting going back a decade or more.
"I've been a member [of the canoe club] for 12 years, and it's been that long," Caldwell says. (Caldwell asked Cowper Chadbourn of Conway, who said the club has been meeting there since 1979, at least.) "You're right, it is pretty shabby. I mean, it's not anything at all. It's just a neighborhood hangout kind of thing, and the people who meet there probably originated in that area, and it was like a favorite for them."
Though we speak ill of the digs, that last clause deserves special emphasis -- "it was like a favorite for them."
Everyone I spoke to said the food is delicious, dependably delicious. There's beer and wine. Scharmel Roussel, director of Arkansas Interfaith Power and Light, a faith-based environmental advocacy group, said dinner is served on dishes and drinks in glassware, and what "disposable flatware is [used is] potato-based and biodegradable, and we appreciate the Oyster Bar for that."
The space has a television and the capabilities for a slideshow or audiovisual presentation. And -- and this important -- it's central to downtown (where so many people work), North Little Rock and west Little Rock.
"I'll tell you this," said Hooks, "when I first started here -- this was in 2003 -- the volunteers were having their meetings out at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Reservoir every month, and most of the folks were 60 or older. It was a potluck or a spaghetti supper every time, and the meetings were not well-attended, especially not among the younger demographic. So it took a little bit of doing, but we finally moved it [to the Oyster Bar], so people can come after work, they can have a beer, they can have some dinner, and our meetings have easily doubled in size."
NOAH'S ARC LANDED IN NEW YORK
There's this famous New Yorker cover by cartoonist Saul Steinberg, View of the World From 9th Avenue. In the foreground is a detailed cityscape looking down on Ninth Avenue, Manhattan. As the eye rises to the horizon, there's the Hudson River, Jersey, some mountains, the Pacific Ocean. In the minds of Manhattanites, the map is to scale of national significance.
Susan Altrui was reminded of this last weekend. Here's what she wrote me.
"So, the Clintons were in New York for the Wildlife Conservation Society gala June 13. Chelsea, in her speech, says how she was first inspired to love animals from her visits to the Little Rock Zoo. Cool shout out, right? My phone started blowing up with all my PR friends from the Bronx Zoo and Central Park Zoo telling me about the shout out as it happened. Our director even got an email from another zoo director who was there who also shared the news.
"But, alas, Page Six" -- the gossip section of Rupert Murdoch's tabloid New York Post -- "reported that Chelsea said she grew up going to the Bronx Zoo, not our zoo. Unreal. Everyone in New York seems to have forgotten that the Clintons are even from Arkansas."
Altrui, spokesman for our zoo, wrote the Post's reporter, Mara Siegler, asking for a correction. None's forthcoming.
High Profile on 06/22/2014