May, the month of botanical bounty! Here, from my peregrine perch downtown, I spy a span of social events as diverse and unexpected as a tour of P. Allen Smith's Moss Mountain Farms on a homemade hallucinogen.
Why, just this week, for example ...
WEDNESDAY
For 12 years the Thea Foundation, the arts education nonprofit founded by Paul Leopoulos, has had this Washington Dinner With President Bill Clinton fundraiser in the nation's capital. Last year it raised about $176,000.
This year, for the first time, they're bringing it to Little Rock. To the presidential center, and its namesake will be there.
The goal for Into the Blue: An Evening With President Bill Clinton is $250,000, which, with tickets starting at $1,000, almost seems modest.
"I think we're the biggest economic development engine in the state," Leopoulos told me last month. He means Thea, and specifically, its arts curriculum, which has been adopted in some form or fashion in schools in 62 Arkansas counties -- "tens of thousands of students," he says.
Teaching visual and performing arts increases aptitude and effort across all curriculum, and not in some Baby Mozart way. It elevates engagement and confidence, as it did with his late daughter, Thea, who was a C-student before a semester of visual arts curriculum. Suddenly, she was on a different bus, getting an A in trigonometry and signing up for calculus and physics her senior year at North Little Rock High School.
"Arts education is education," he says. "We're not sitting around trying to create a bunch of artists. We're about giving kids confidence the way Thea gained confidence."
But, after 14 years and about $2 million in student scholarships (in areas such as fashion design, acting and drawing) and curriculum expenditures, "we need a big fundraiser here."
The night is presented by Chip and Cindy Murphy and co-chaired by Dennis and Gayla Jungmeyer.
We're told there's a media blackout on the event -- "wha-a-a, you don't like my camera?" -- so don't look for any follow-up in these pages.
THURSDAY
The next day, at lunch, the hall inside the Clinton center rolls out the fine print for the area's Risk Management Association chapter. Shall I take some predictable, opportunistic jab at how much fun a room full of risk managers will be? Nyet! Instead I'll say, one of the panelists -- yes, there will be a panel, a panel entertaining issues around risk; specifically, risk management -- is George Makris, the head of Simmons First National Bank, which recently reported glorious 1Q earnings, up 44 percent from a year earlier.
The news of it immediately sent the stock plunging, down $1.19 for the day. Thus, the "risk" of high performance is a market tsk-tsk.
Anyway, I know George, and I'd listen to anything he might have to say, even, nay, especially, on the subject of risk management.
Tickets were $40 but are sold out, but anyone interested in the group may email [email protected].
That night, across town at the Metroplex, Central Arkansas Rescue Effort (CARE) dogs walk some celebrities down the catwalk for the eighth Paws on the Runway. This is the first year at the Metroplex. It had been at the Governor's Mansion, but this thing has gotten big enough that CARE had to turn some folks away. Fundraisers, as a rule, don't turn donors away. This is not Contestants' Row on The Price Is Right. They will build out.
The celebrity lineup includes several television broadcasters, such as Tom Brannon (KTHV-11) and Deedra "Dee Dee" Wilson (Fox 16); Little Rock Zoo spokesman and High Profile high priestess Susan Altrui; her friend and our attorney general, the Hon. Leslie Rutledge; radio rowdies Heather Brown (Alice 107.7) and Roger Scott (103.7, The Buzz); and a slew of OneBanc veeps, including our favorite, LaTina Curry -- hi, LaTina!
The fundraising goal is $60,000, money that "immediately translates into a saved dog or cat," CARE director Jon Garrison says.
One of the dogs who'll amble around angling for attention is "Faith," a Great Dane who was picked up just before Christmas on the side of a road nosing through human rubbish. She weighed a little more than 100 pounds. After a trip to the vet she was deposited at the home of a CARE loyalist in the Heights, so that "she started her day rooting through garbage on the side of the highway; she ended her day at a mansion in the Heights trying to find a place to lay down between the Christmas tree and a grand piano," Garrison says.
Check out careforanimals.org.
FRIDAY
All weekend, Little Rock will be abuzz with happenings surrounding the Little Rock Film Festival. It's a fine time, then, to bring in the area's most famous Tinsel Town thespian, Mary "Steel Drivin'" Steenburgen. She and Ted Danson are not quite silent partners in chef Matt and Amy Bell's South on Main restaurant, which is the official restaurant of Oxford American magazine, and for the second spring, she's hosting a "Mary & Friends" fundraiser for the publication.
I've been told Steenburgen will be arriving by tour bus from Nashville, Tenn., with a coterie of young singer-songwriters. I've also been told she's got a list of celebrities she's invited that's impossibly hopeful. Last time around, fellow North Little Rock famouswoman Joey Lauren Adams was there, and this time there's a whiff of a surprise celeb or two.
"This is only the second year for the event, and we like the wild card nature of the party," says Greg Spradlin at the magazine.
Folks, Adams is delightful, and in this space, she and Mary and Ted -- and Alice? -- are super accessible. I can't say enough about how extraordinary this event is, amid the mix of mainstay fundraisers.
Tickets are $200, Oxfordamerican.org/fundraiser.
SATURDAY
There's Swiss Family Robinson and there's Tiffany and Daniel Robinson. One is a fictional family that makes an island home halfway between the poles; the other is a caring couple making a fictional island home halfway between Hillcrest and the Heights.
All right, that was a stretch.
But at the real Robinsons', the 10th Caribbean Cabaret goes off at 6. Tickets are $75. Our Robinsons are really enthusiastic supporters of the Women & Children First shelter for domestic violence survivors.
According to the website, WCFArkansas.ejoinme.org/cabaret, guests will enjoy music and island libations and "poolside festivities." To my knowledge there is absolutely no prohibition on jumping into the pool. So, please, meme this up, people! Post your cannonball videos on your favorite social media website, #caribbeancabaret!
All the cool kids write to me at
High Profile on 05/10/2015