Spooky Action Ranch Report: Week Three 2015

Winter Greens! The beds of lettuce and spinach have finally filled in well enough to warrant regular harvests.  We are now enjoying daily salads on the ranch.  As a native northerner, it has taken me a bit of transition to think about salads in the winter.  For me, January used to be a time for hibernation and comfort foods.  The fabulous winter weather here in Central Texas, however, brings days filled with sunlight and plenty of time enjoyed outside.  And salads.  Lots of salads. Our spinach is Bloomsdale Spinach, an organic heirloom variety we purchased from Botanical Interests.  It grows well in the colder season, but is also really slow to bolt, which means we can harvest spinach further into the spring.  It has a fantastic flavor too, very nutty.  We compliment it with a very simple dressing we make out of peanut oil and raspberry balsamic vinegar. Our lettuce, also supplied by Botanical Interests, is a variety known as Black Seeded Simpson.  Like the spinach, it handles freezing weather and frosts while being slow to bolt once the weather turns warmer.  Additionally, it is a type of lettuce which is known as ‘cut and come again.’  This means we can harvest leaves from the plants, which will simply grow new leaves for later harvest, rather than harvesting the entire plant. Wimberley Art Fest This week was the deadline for application to the Wimberley Valley Art League’s Wimberley Arts Fest.  The festival, now in its seventh year, will be held at Wimberley’s Blue Hole, April 18th and 19th.  It is the same weekend as the EmilyAnn Theater’s Butterfly Festival, and several thousand people are expected to attend.  There will be live music and food, and it a wonderful time to come out and check out this lovely hill country town.  I am excited to be involved in my first art show, so I hope you will come and check it out. I will be selling 4″ x 4″ oil paintings framed or mounted on magnets from my first solo show Gross | Life in Pieces,  as well as a number of larger originals and framed prints.  I also hope to put together sets of greeting cards, bookmarks, and other useful items and will be offering custom services.  You can see more of my work on my personal website www.dawnyoungs.com.   Finishing the Paths The work on the front gardens has continued with an upgrade to the paths.  We originally laid in a layer of pebbles on the earth paths, but have found that the smooth stones moved easily, washing away in the rains, and made for a less than stable walking surface.  We also did not lay the original...

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Nurturing New Ideas | A Conversation with the Artistic Director

What makes a community? How can we turn back the clock to unlock the future? What scares you? Dawn Youngs takes a moment away from casting; venue and travel arrangements; and publicity to answer a few questions about bringing Last Chance: tales from a broken heartland to Austin, Texas as part of Spooky Action Ranch’s Nurturing New Ideas Series. 1) Why bring plays about the Ozark Mountains to Austin? Well, first off, I am not sure that I would describe these plays as plays about the Ozarks. They take place in a fictional town in the Ozark region, and there is no doubt that there are themes running through the plays that get at the root of that rural American life, but I also think these are universal themes that run through the lives of people around the country. Most of all, I think these are plays about community and interconnection, and the struggle to find a place for self or to define self. Austin is a booming town, but part of what that means is that the unique community and small town feel of the place has been rapidly consumed by the rabid growth. Individual neighborhoods, and I think the city as a whole, are grappling with issues of identity. Struggling with how to maintain the older connected ways of life while money and technology flood in. There is a clash between the folks working to keep Austin weird, the trailer parks and honky-tonks, and chicken coops and urban farms of Austin are clashing with the condos and developers. And on a broader sweep, this is happening all over. My generation, raised in the 70s and 80s were raised as little consumers: pushed to believe that constant growth and consumption was not only necessary for the success of our nation, but also really good for us. I see people questioning this idea all around me. I think they are waking up to the lies and wondering, what are all of these material goods really worth? What do we lose when we become one huge homogenized consumer culture? These plays tap into that awareness and I think that Austinites are ripe for exploring these ideas. In fact, I think they are poised to be the leaders in a new movement and shift in American values. Austin is not only ready to hear the questions raised by this work, but ready to grapple and search for real answers too. 2) What form do you imagine this series of plays or this project taking? Many of the plays have extremely different tones and settings, how do you navigate that? There are a lot of ideas floating around in my head on this...

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