Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 64

2D ST. PETERSBURG TIMES WEDNESDAY. SEPTEMBER 30, 1987 Pinellas moves toward grant for a bay area arts coalition By MARY ANN MAROER Tun Cowpondtrt CLEARWATER With the writing of a letter. Pinellas County's participation in a proposed Tampa Bay Arts Coalition moved a giant step ahead Tuesday. At the Pinellas County Arts Council's request, the Pinellas County Commission agreed to draft a letter stating its awareness of an application for a federal grant that would require local governments to match the grant money 2-to-l over a three-year period.

The Hillsborough County Commission has already issued a corresponding letter. The $371,500 that Hillsborough County would pay already has been budgeted, says Art Keeble, director of the Arts Council of Tampa-Hillsborough County, which is funded entirely by Tampa and Hillsborough County. The grant is from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a federal program that provides money for the arts. The Pinellas commission's letter is a watered-down version of the one proposed by the Pinellas County Arts Council, a coordinating group funded to a large extent by the county commission. The new letter makes clear that the commission's awareness of the application does not bind the commission to grant funds.

The letter was agreed upon during a workshop session of the commission. Susan Manning, chair-elect of the arts council, made the presentation on its behalf. While the original letter asked only for support of the concept, commissioners stated concern that the letter implied a moral obligation for the county to provide matching funds if the NEA grant were approved. The arts council has suggested that the money come from the Tourist Development Council, which uses county resort-tax money to promote Pinellas County, The grant and the accompanying county commission letter must be submitted to the NEA by Thursday. The tight time frame is because of the county commission's difficulties in scheduling the arts council's plea.

Local money would have to match the NEA grant on a 2-to-l basis. The Pinellas County Arts Council is requesting the county to pay $250,000 over a three-year period. The Arts Council of Tampa-Hillsborough County has asked Hillsborough County to pay $371,500. The NEA's contribution would be $300,000, for a total of $921,500. Most of the grant money would be used for for arts organizations and individual artists.

During the first year, though, funds would primarily go to joint marketing of the arts. Commissioner Charles Rainey requested that the County Commission write the letter with the understanding that it is not binding, nor is the commission committing Tourist Development Council funds. Earlier in the session, commissioner Bruce Tyndall asked. "If we write the letter, would you expect the match?" Replied Pinellas County Arts Council Director Peggy MacLeod: "I would expect to have to fight for it. I expect it to be an uphill battle." Gato Barbieri: Busch Gardens Oct 10.

TV from 1-D October fills the bill for jazz fans By ERIC SNIDER Tun Conpondnt October is the pay-off for Bay Area jazz fans, who have suffered through an essentially bleak 1987. The key event is the eighth annual Clearwater Jazz Holiday, free to the public at Coachman Park. Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Phil Woods, Nancy Wilson and 14 other acts will perform. On a smaller scale, but extremely significant, is the appearance of piano master Keith Jarrett and his "Standards" trio with Jack Dejohnette and Gary Peacock. Another free concert features Tim Weisberg (whose status as a jazz artist is iffy at best) with Fred Johnson and others at Straub Park in downtown St.

Petersburg. Rounding out the October jazz lineup are: Andy Narell, who plays jazz steel drums, creating a unique sound; Latin-style saxophonist Gato Barbieri and pop-fusion sax man George Howard. All in all, it's a diverse and long overdue menu for jazzophiles. Tampa Stadium is active once again with the sold-out Pink Floyd show. Other notable arena rock shows are Boston, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Cars.

Smaller shows worth considering are blues-man Roy Buchanan and the pop vocal group the Nylons. Oct 1, Boston This is the second of two Sun Dome sell-outs for the pop-rock band that stayed away from the music scene for seven years Last year, the band released its first album of the '80s. Third Stage, and it was a huge seller. The tour is following suit. Show starts at 8 p.m Oct.

2, Dead Milkmen Those who care about hardcore punk probably already know about this show. For those not yet informed, it free at Crescent Hill on the USF campus, 4 p.m. Oct 3, Keith JarrettJack DeJohnetteGary Peacock The Ruth Eckerd Hall show is billed Standards." and features renowned pianist Jarrett. nonpareil drummer DeJohnette and bassist Peacock in a traditional jazz trio format Jarrett's penetrating improvisations are otherworldly; the interplay between the musicians is subtle and sophisticated. Show starts at 8 p.m.

Oct 3, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam New York City street music mixes with an catchy pop sensibility in this group's dance-oriented sound. The ail-girl Miami group Expose opens up at the Sun Dome. 8 p.m. Oct 3, Tim Weisberg This free concert at Straub Park in downtown St. Petersburg sponsored by Michelob and radio station WHVE-102' kicks off a fund-raising drive for the St.

Petersburg Centennial Celebration. Flutist Weisberg is the headliner. Area acts Belinda Wom-ack Kool Reflections and the Fred Johnson Group will open. The music is scheduled to start at 6 p.m. Oct.

8, Molly Hatchet The veteran group keeps hanging on with it hard-edged brand of guitar-heavy southern rock. London Victory Club. (Time not announced). Oct. 9, "Bowzer't Original Doo-Wopp Party" featuring the Drifters, Charles Thomas, The Marvelettes and the Dell-Vikings Sha Na Na jokester Bowzer Baumann hosts this '50s-style oldies show.

The Drifters, in a maximum exposure effort, also are scheduled to play Etchings (St. Petersburg Beach) on the 7th and Penrod's Palace (Clearwater) on the 8th. Oct. 10, Badfinger Smooth, melodic pop-rock from the 70s. London Victory Club.

(Time not announced.) Oct. 10, Gato Barbieri The South American tenor saxophonist keeps his hat pulled down low and blows raspy solos over a Latin-style beat. Do not expect much audience repartee from this moody musician. Busch Gardens, 7:30 p.m. Oct.

10, Nazareth The veteran hard-rock band has never made it to the top of the heap, but all the years on the road have infused the group's stage act with energy and tightness. Jannus Landing, 8 p.m. Oct. 11, Andy Narell To the best of my knowledge. Narell is the world's only jazz steel drum player.

His sound is breezy and melodic with more energy than most of the other musicians on his record label, Windham Hill. The steel drums works very nicely in an improvisational context. Jannus Landing, 7 p.m. Oct. 13, Smothers Brothers Tom and Dick will hold court in usual fashion; singing a little and joking a lot.

Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, 8 p.m. Oct 15-16, Peter, Paul and Mary The legend no one has gone before. As for Friday the 13th, there is a standard announcer's line that goes, "The real terror is about to begin." It seems the real terror is going to be watching this terrible series. The six Friday the 13th movies were bloody teen thrillers, or schlock-gore, as they have been labeled in film history. The TV series forgoes the gore, thus the schlock, and also the Jason character.

This tube version is from Frank Mancuso who had producer stints on five Friday the 13th movies but not the original, which critics concur is the best. The story goes: When Uncle Lewis dies, he leaves his business, Vendredi Antiques, to two relatives. Micki Foster (played by one-name-only actress, model and singer Robey) and Ryan Dallion (John I). Le.May). Joining the two on scary escapades is Jack Mar-shak (portrayed by Christopher Wiggins), an antiques expert.

Here's the evil twist. Uncle Lewis made a pact with the devil that results in his antiques being cursed. They turn on poor Micki and Ryan. So what the viewer sees is a cupid zinging a deadly arrow, a poison pen and a possessed doll. Week after week, the characters will "race against time and fate to retrieve each evil antique before it unleashes its deadly force." Whether this will make viewers afraid of their china cabinets remains to be seen.

The new starship commander is Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, played by British actor Patrick Stewart. He is not the new Capt. Kirk, although he borrows an order from the old Capt. Kirk: "Get off my bridge." But he's neither impulsive nor a philanderer.

Stewart plays a sterner, more calculating commander. His crew brings a swirl of backgrounds. Jonathan Frakes is Cmdr. William Riker, the executive officer and second-in-command. LeV-ar Burton is Lt.

Geordi La Forge, who is blind and wears space-age sunglasses that enable him to "see." Denise Crosby is security chief Lt. Tasha Yar. Gates McFad-den is chief medical officer Dr. Beverly Crusher. Marina Sirtis is the half humanhalf alien Betazoid Starfleet counselor Deanna Troi, who has psychic powers.

Brent Spiner is Lt. Cmdr. Data, an android with super strength and memory. Wil Wheaton is Wes Crusher, Dr. Crusher's 15-year-old son.

And Michael Dorn is the Klingon Lt. Worf, who recites the memorable line, "Shields and deflectors up, sir." The storyline of tonight's two-hour pilot sounds like typical Star Trek. It's titled "Encounter at Far-point" and is about the crew's having "24 hours to uncover secrets of a strange world." Alien life looks Shakespearean in this case. The pilot was written by Rodden-berry and D. C.

Fontana. Special effects are especially ary folk trio will play the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, starting at 8 p.m. each night. Oct 15-18, Clearwater Jazz Holiday Almost 30 hours of free jazz Coachman Park in Clearwater. The eighth annual festival features such prodigious talent as Phil Woods, Tito Puente.

Rare Silk, Nancy Wilson and Joanne Brackeen. Several area bands will perform, including Citiheat, the Fred Johnson Group and Common Ground. My most anticipated act is the raucous New Orleans "marching ensemble." The Dirty Dozen Brass Band. The Thursday and Friday portions start at 5:30 and 515 p.m. respectively; Saturday and Sunday begin at 2 p.m.

Oct 16, Gordon Llghrfoot Acoustic guitar and a deep, dramatic voice anchor Lightfoot storytelling music. Bayfront Center, 8 p.m. Oct. 16-18, Brandon Balloon Fest Music is just part of the festival's events. Appearing will be Gregg Allman, Tanya Tucker.

Steppenwolf. Foghat and others at the Florida State Fairgrounds. Oct 17, Lynyrd Skynyrd Tampa Bay fans have never forgotten Skynyrd. a much-beloved Jacksonville-based southern rock band. The current tribute tour takes place 10 years after a plane crash killed lead singer Ronnie Van Zant and two other members of the band.

Many of the original band members will be on hand. Tickets have sold briskly for this 8 p.m. show; only seats behind the stage remain. Oct. 17, The Nylons The Canadian vocal quartet sings pop music backed by percussion only.

Their recent cover version of the Turtles' Happy Together was a modest hit. The Nylons' harmonies are rich and seamless: their stage show is effervescent. Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, 8 p.m. Oct 21, Front 242 Industrial dance music from Belgium. Jannus Landing.

8 p.m. Oct 21, Judy Collins and John Sebastian Both of these former folkies have tasted pop success. Sebastian was the leader of the Lovin' Spoonful in the '60s and had a few subsequent hits. Collins' soaring, crystalline voice is familiar from such songs Send in the Clowns and Both Sides Now. Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, 8 p.m.

Oct 21, George Howard Instrumental funk from a soprano saxophonist influence by Grover Washington, Jr. Ruth Eckerd Hall, 8 p.m. Oct 23, Air Supply This Australian band is one of the truly banal acts in popular music. Their following has diminished over the years, but Air Supply keeps hanging on. Perhaps the intimate Ruth Eckerd Hall will help.

Show starts at 8 p.m. Oct. 23, The Cars Out of the late '70s new wave movement, the Cars have emerged as a durable, if self-derivative, electro-pop group. Sun Dome, 8 p.m. Oct.

27, Roy Buchanan Once a much-revered blues-rocker, guitarist Buchanan has turned toward a purer blues form in recent years. He'll play at Skipper's Smokehouse in Tampa a rare opportunity to see a blues master in a nightclub. Oct. 30, Pink Floyd The progressive rock band sold out Tampa Stadium in a matter of hours. According to reports, this tour is predictably a lavish affair.

A 50-foot round video screen is mounted right above the band and projects various images (not just stage action). Lights, lasers and smoke round out the visual effects. The show starts at 8 p.m. Oct. 30-31, Gladys Knight the Pips One of the great soul acts, the group is driven by the smokey voice of Knight and the rich background vocals and flashy dance steps of the all-male Pips.

Ruth Eckerd Hall. 8 p.m. on the 30th; 6 and 9:30 p.m. on the 31st. LeVAR BURTON impressive.

They're done by George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, which did the whizbang stuff for all four Star Trek movies as well as for Star Wars. As for the new Enterprise. Roddenberry offers this description (predictably detailed): "The Starfleet designation of our new Enterprise is NCC-1701-D. Now twice the length of the original 23rd century Enterprise, which adds up to eight times the original's size, our new Star-ship has much the same symmetry of the original, but it is now a vessel of less battleship sterility. It serves as more of a community and home to a considerably larger and more diverse crew." Ship's mission? Well, that's remained the same.

In unison, let's say the words: To explore strange worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations and to boldly go where Fiddling from 1-D carries in his battered pickup truck. "I call stakes and I prefer to call worm fiddling 'snoring' or he said. "But it don't matter what you call it. We say fiddling in Caryville 'cause it makes it easier for the people to make sense of it. It kind of reminds people of somebody playing a fiddle." He fingered the stake.

"This here stob is white pine, and I'd rather have cedar, 'cause you get a better vibration, but white pine will have to do." He snuffed out his Pall Mall, fell to his knees and stared at the hard ground. "I knew it," he said, touching a tiny mound of dirt. "We got worm sign here." On a stifling hot day in a field near his home, the maestro was about to compose another movement in his earthworm symphony. He drove the stake into the ground and picked up the ax. Then, like an artist playing Beethoven's Violin Concerto, he rubbed the ax head against the stake, and the quiet country afternoon was shattered by a cacophony of squeaks, grunts and rumbles that literally shook the ground for 15 feet around.

Head bowed, eyes half shut in concentration, Palmer played his instrument, constantly changing the angle to get different tones, sometimes stopping to pour sand on the top of the stake to create a grittier pitch. Suddenly, on the ground surrounding Jack Palmer, it happened: Earthworms squirmed into the sunlight. If worms had hands and ears, those hands would have been covering ears. Doing everything but begging for mercy, the worms writhed in what can only be described as agony. "Them worms don't want to go back in the ground," Jack Palmer said.

"They sure enough don't. Worm fiddling, it just drives 'em crazy." Palmer knows not. Worm fiddling, like grits, is a southern mystery. "I can't even tell you who discovered it would work on worms," Palmer said. "I've always heard that one day somebody happened to notice that vibrations from an idling Model or a tractor bothered worms enough to make 'em come out of the ground." This much is known: The best time for fiddling is early morning or late afternoon when the ground is cooler and worms are shallow.

After a rain is good, as long as it wasn't a downpour, and the slightly damp earth of a shady swamp is worm paradise. Jack Palmer regards winter worm fiddling a waste of time because worms are hibernating. Besides, he would rather hunt deer than bass fish once the air turns crisp. "There are probably worms in this here field," Palmer said, getting out the ax and stake he always 'Bette and Boo' from 1-D didn't they think before they got married? Why does no one ever think? Why did God make people stupid?" A question for the ages. Bette and Boo get married because it's expected of them, Hatch says.

They are expected to have a large family, and that is Bette's downfall. "She was raised to think she's got to have this picture-book marriage and a large family," Hatch says. "At age 22, she can't have children, but she keeps trying over and over, and they all die. But she won't stop trying." On one level, Bette and Boo is a mean-spirited satire of marriage, religion and human frailty; the subtext, however, is somber stuff. Durang can be scathing, even tasteless.

"If a lay person picked up the script and read it, they'd say, 'Oh my God, this is Hatch says. "And they'd laugh, I think I love sick humor. There's a tendency, when you're brought up and forced to follow rules (to) break away and revel in things that are outrageous. "I'm sure some people are bound to be offended. Some were offended when we did Sister Mary Ignatius, and we were worried about that.

I think we're past that point, because if we can do a Sister Mary and not have it picketed and not have droves of people walk out on it, I think our audience will enjoy it." Beyond Therapy and Sister Mary Ignatius were critical as well as commercial successes for the Play- makers, according to Hatch. That is significant because there are relatively few playwrights producing what Hatch refers to as "comedies with substance." Hatch says that Durang, like John Guare (House of Blue Leaves), "gives you something to take home and think about." Bette and Boo is like that. "It's about trying to find order beneath the surface, beneath life's chaos," Hatch says. "That's the underriding theme in all Durang's work. The people in his plays are always in some kind of isolation, looking for answers, something to grasp that will anchor them and they never find it.

I like that about him, that he doesn't draw everything to a pat conclusion." Durang wrote a one-act, 45-minute version of Bette and Boo while he was a student at the Yale School of Drama. That first draft was produced at Yale in 1974, Durang's senior year. The expanded version of the play was presented in 1985 at the Public Theatre by Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival. That production, directed by Jerry Zaks, featured Durang as Matt, the play's "author surrogate" or narrator. "I feel particularly close to The Marriage of Bette and Boo" Durang writes in the "Author's Notes" to the text.

The play 'feels' autobiographical, I rather assume; and it would be disingenuous to pretend that the characters of Bette and Boo do not in many significant ways reflect my parents' lives. Many of the surrounding characters are indeed fictionalized, but there is a core to the play that is pretty much rooted in my past." Until recently, the underlying tragedy of Bette and Boo affected rehearsals, Hatch says. Last week, the cast made a breakthrough when they began to feel the humor of the piece. "The humor itself you don't have to fight for. It's in the dialogue," Hatch says.

"It's up to me and the actors to find the reality of it. In our very first read-through, the cast was kind of howling and groaning at the same time, and that's sheer response to the text. I think the actors were relating too much to the sadness of it, thinking of it totally as a personal tragedy. When the (characters) become real to you, their tragedies become real to the actors. I think that's part of the rehearsal process, part of the exploration." Durang's characters may seem insane if you look at them in superficial terms, according to Match, but a closer look reveals why they act as they do.

"The actors are having a blast with it," Hatch says. "Most of the characters are rather broadly drawn, so it's difficult finding their realities. After we blocked the play, we sat down and discussed these characters and their relationships to each other. We drew out biographies for them so, hopefully, they don't appear as one-dimensional cartoon figures. It would be very easy for that to happen." nan and Aaron Wofford as Boo Hudlocke, whose wedding opens the play.

Neil DeGroot plays their only child, Matt, who becomes the audience's guide through several decades of matrimonial chaos. The cast also features Kathi Grau, Diana Forgione, Bruce Blaine, Gerald Bangs, Patricia French, Jean Mills and Bob Smithwick. Casting was a chore, Hatch says. "The play is really Bette's play, and she's got to be beautiful, likable and have a great sense of humor," Hatch says. "Above everything else, she must be optimistic and hopeful.

That's what keeps her going." As the alcoholic husband, Boo could easily become villainous, which Hatch says "he absolutely cannot be. Inside, he's a very sweet man. He's very passive, he doesn't act on things. We needed an actor who could be 'forcefully The title characters are the focal point of Bette and Boo, but it's an ensemble piece. The humor is black very black.

Bette, the good Catholic wife, wants to have a truckload of children, but she has a series of stillbirths. Boo descends into alcoholic despair. Boo's father, Karl, hurls vile insults at his wife (called who laughs and replies, "Oh, Karl There's also a priest, Father Donnally, who imitates a piece of bacon frying, and who asks, "Why.