Author: nancysharoncollinsstationer

New Years Eve: Dad, Mid-20th Century Foreign Intrigue & the Almighty American Dollar
Premiering New Year’s at 6:00 pm CDT. Our final production for 2021, Doing Business in New Orleans.  A prelude to the upcoming, 2022 regular programming event about New Orleans’ beloved international businessman Clay Shaw, international trade, CIA, and the JFK assassination conspiracy.

A link to the New Year’s podcast will be posted HERE. You can listen to previous Letters Read recordings and podcasts HERE.

The December 31st podcast is one of our incubator, experimental-style readings. It weaves comparisons between Shaw and another, international-export-fella, Nate Feldman. Who spoke about his trade during a 2007 entrepreneurship panel discussion at Loyola University New Orleans. The other panel members speaking were environmental justice activist Michel Varisco—a Letters Read Executive Advisor—and this project’s Director well before Letters Read began in 2017. A link to that discussion is HERE.

The audio producer for this event is Steve Chyzyk, Sonic Canvas Studio in New Orleans.

The 2021 Season:

Thanksgiving: Premiering HERE November 25 at 6pm and remaining on air thereafter, letters and ephemera created in 1962 by a local professional association for graphic designers, ADDA.

If you liked the TV show, Mad Men, you’ll love the real thing, New Orleans-style. Art Directors and Designers Association of New Orleans (ADDA) was chartered in 1961. Illustrators, lettering artists, art directors, photographers, commercial artists, and graphic designers banded together and promoted themselves to advertising executives throughout the Gulf South.

Central to this was a promotional slideshow presentation. Digitized in 2008. You can view an animation of it HERE.

If you are curious about the then new-fangled entertainment gizmo, slideshows, watch the Mad Men scene about their origin, HERE.

Join our reader Colin B. Miller, himself a practicing graphic designer, as he continues the programming theme 2021, Doing Business in New Orleans.

Intro and outro-music in the podcast, and the promotional slideshow presentation, are from the original reel-to-reel audio tape recording of the jingle composed and performed in 1961 for the slideshow by Paul Guma. Guma’s music plays an interesting part in the 16th podcast in this series. Airing New Years Eve!

This, Thanksgiving Eve event at 6:00 pm CDT, is the 15th full-length podcast. Don’t fret if you cannot listen at that hour, it remains available thereafter.

 

 

July 15, 2021: This podcast comprises readings from the 1905 scrapbook produced contemporaneously with the last documented yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans and the United States. 
LISTEN HERE!

Featuring readers William Bowling and Grace Kennedy with audio production by Steve Chyzyk and Sonic Canvas Studio.

In photographs and text, this interesting relic presents the idea that bananas imported by the largest importer of them in the world at that time were safe and did not promote the spread of yellow fever.

What was the purpose for this curious piece of ephemera compiled and produced in New Orleans? Documentation of United Fruit’s best practices in sanitation and mosquito abatement? Merely propaganda? For over four years prior, effective protocols for mosquito eradication had already been in place for most American cities. Characteristically, New Orleans lagged behind.

As explained previously in the December 2020 Letters Read Incubator: In 1901, Major Walter Reed, M.D., U.S. Army, and his colleagues confirmed the theory that yellow fever was transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and not by human contact. Further:

Despite the conclusions of the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Board … many people in New Orleans still did not take the threat of mosquitoes seriously. Residents got their water from wooden cisterns, a breeding ground for the insects.—American Experience, NPR.

In a stubborn manner usual to New Orleanians, preemptive measures had not yet been adopted by all citizens. As a result, in the city that had been ravaged multiple times by catastrophe and disease, in 1905 cases of the saffron scourge did show up presaging another, and final, yellow fever epidemic.

What part did the United Fruit Company play? Listen to the podcast at 6:00 pm CST and anytime thereafter at this LINK as it airs Thursday, July 15. Listen now to other Letters Read podcasts there, too.

You can follow along and browse through the entire photo album HERE.

March 25, 2021: A podcast of personal letters from Edgar Degas surrounding his 4-month stay in Reconstruction-era New Orleans.
LISTEN HERE.

Christopher Kamenstein reads as Degas. Audio production is by Steve Chyzyk and Sonic Canvas studio. The event is emceed by stationer and project director Nancy Sharon Collins.

This podcast is hosted by Pitot House and co-promoted by Alliance Française de La Nouvelle-Orléans. Letters Read fiscal sponsor is Antenna.

Join us for an intimate listen to thoughts and emotions experienced by Edgar Degas as he visits his mother’s family in the Crescent City as it strives to heal post-antebellum wounds after the American Civil War. Business, money, family, property ownership, class, race, and privilege, all play important roles in this compelling story.

In late 1872, Degas accompanied his brother René to New Orleans where he observed his paternal family’s business managing the post-Civil War cotton trade. The painting used to illustrate this online event is the oft cited depiction of his time here. It captures a moment during the decline of his uncle Michel Musson’s business, the Cotton Office. Which went bankrupt shortly thereafter.

Upon his return to France early in 1873, Edgar learned that René had also bankrupted their own father’s banking business.

It was about this time and occasioned by the family’s multiple financial misfortunes that Degas turned his trade as a serious painter into a successful livelihood.

The 2020 Season:

December 31, New Years Eve
Listen to the podcast HERE

In an unprecedented shift from an intended, March production, we offer a remote interview with two professional actors, George Saucier and Colin Miller in Lafayette, Louisiana. Formatted within ten questions, this last 2020 offering threads excerpts from a two-hour conversation between George and Colin about being an actor, theatre as an art form, ruminations about Tennessee Williams, the Southern Gothic genre, and the arc of one’s career.

The audio production is by Steve Steve Chyzyk, and Steve Himelfarb, Sonic Canvas Studio in New Orleans. This project was made possible with the help of Acting Up (In Acadiana) and Amy Waguespack, Artistic Director, and founder of Acting Up.

The conversation took place in George’s Lafayette studio. Nancy Sharon Collins recorded in Sonic Canvas Studio. Sonic Canvas’s sound quality differs from that captured in George’s studio, and, you will hear the difference. While discussing early influences, both actors refer to the Children’s Community School. George later refers to this as CCS. “The script” is mentioned several times. This is the 2018 Letters Read script that was to be restaged with Acting Up in March, 2020, before the pandemic changed everything.

November 30
Hosted by: Bastion | Community of Resilience
Gentilly, New Orleans.
William Bowling, Reader.
Steve Chyzyk, Audio Producer.
LISTEN HERE

Robert, “Bob” Stuart was born in 1923, just three years after women in this country were allowed to vote. Originally from Shreveport, Louisiana. He served in the Navy during WWII, was honorably discharged in May, 1946, and lived a long and productive life as a civil servant in New Orleans. This during a time in the middle of the 20th century when identifying, or being identified as gay—or queer—could  cause a dishonorable discharge from the military, strip you of civilian jobs, deny you housing, and ruin your reputation forever.

This event reflects upon the arc of Stuart’s life, the times through which he lived, and offers a tiny glimpse into correspondence from men who were his close and intimate friends, and one woman.

Letters and documents for this recording are from the Robert W. Stuart Papers, The Historic New Orleans Collection. Gift of Frank Perez, Acc. No. 2018.0225.

August 20
The Letters of Skip Ward
A podcast hosted by:
Alexandria Museum of Art
Alexandria, Louisiana.
LISTEN HERE

Ward’s letters provide a rare glimpse into rural gay life and the political struggles of the 1980s and 1990s. —excerpted from the caption to “Letter to A Friend Just Coming Up Front”, in the online exhibit, Women and Gender.

April 26
The Letters of Stewart Butler
LISTEN HERE

The 14th Letters Read and first produced remotely and podcast.

Originally scheduled for March 26 at Frenchman Art & Books in New Orleans, this event was preempted by the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak. Instead, listen to Dylan Hunter reading as the voice of our subject. Rebecca Hollingsworth is Anne. Both self-recorded in the safety of their own home. Our emcee is Frank Perez, President of LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana. Frank was recorded through a telephone conversation with Dylan. Dylan is also our audio engineer for this event. Music is written and performed by Rob Hudak.

This event provides a rare glimpse into the personal life of an important Louisiana political activist. It begins with the 1967 correspondence from Anne, an intimate friend. The reading weaves in annual Valentine’s letters beginning in 1999 that, as recently as this year, were still mailed to 200 of his dearest friends.

Since the 1970s, Butler has been a significant force in the Louisiana civil rights movement. In 1984, 1986, and 1991 he strategically advocated for changing gay-rights ordinances. Butler was a co-founder of LGPAC (the Louisiana chapter of Lesbian and Gay Political Action Caucus) and has served on boards including the Lesbian and Gay Community Center, PFLAG, and LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana.

Thanks go Antenna, our fiscal agent. To David Zalkind, owner, Frenchman Art & Book, and to Dancing Grounds from whom we were borrowing chairs. The live audio engineer was to be Steve Chyzyk, Sonic Canvas Studio. Thanks also go to Bill Hagler, John Magill, Robert Feiseler, and Courtney Sharp for providing background and context. Thank you Letters Read narrative and storytelling advisors Ted Cotton and Cassie Pruyn.

We are delighted to announce that Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities has awarded LETTERS READ a Rebirth Grant for the 2020 programming season. *

Additionally, LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, Corners Foundation, and The Reba Judith Sandler Foundation have each awarded grants for next year.