Hey, everybody, and welcome to the season 29 premiere of Kentucky Life.

I'm your host, Chip Polston.

We've been working literally since we wrapped up season 28 on some amazing adventures to share with you.

We are so excited to bring you stories about this amazing place we call home, and all of us on the Kentucky Life crew are so proud to launch this show into its 29th season.

From right here in Paducah, to Pikeville, to all points in between, we have so many great stories to share and can't wait to tell you all about them, right here on Kentucky Life.

[theme song playing] Today, the Kentucky Life crew is here at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah.

The National Quilt Museum has been operating since 1991, and was originally the vision of Bill and Meredith Schroeder, influential Paducah publishers and founders of the American Quilter's Society.

Now, later on, we'll learn more about this incredible museum, but before that, if you've ever wanted to take a trip down under without leaving the Commonwealth, well, you are in luck.

Our first story this season takes us to the Hart County town of Horse Cave where you can embark upon an Australian escape and poke around underground as well.

Let's take a trip down under Kentucky Down Under.

[birds chirping] [music playing] Brian, how did all this come about?

What's the origin story of Kentucky Down Under?

A young gentleman from Horse Cave was a scientist.

He went to Antarctica on expedition, had a layover in New Zealand, met a young physical therapist from Australia and they fell in love, moved back to the States.

This property was his grandfather's and there was a cave here, Mammoth Onyx Cave, they did tours.

His wife said, you know, there's so many caves in this area, what makes ours different?

So, why don't we do something like Branson?

I'm from Australia.

I had pet kangaroos growing up.

So, let's start a down under.

Down under for Australia, down under for the cave, a double entendre.

[dramatic music playing] Chip: We'll double back to the Mammoth Onyx Cave in just a bit, but first, a walkabout for a closer look at those kangaroos.

So, how has that worked out for you in terms of people's interest in coming here and getting to interact with the kangaroos?

-How's that done?

-People, at first, are fearsome but then they find out how lovable and docile our kangaroos are, and they've had so much interaction with guests here and they're super friendly and people just can't get over it.

They fall in love with it, they want to take selfies with them.

They actually want to take them home because, you know, kangaroos are better pets -than cats or dogs.

-How's that?

They're always "hoppy" to see you.

The shtick is thick around here.

I like that.

That's good.

They're "hoppy" to be living here at the park, too.

Brian: We take extra care of our animals.

Our zookeepers, they have a regimented diet that they subscribe to.

Kangaroos and most of our other animals live longer in captivity than in the wild.

Our kangaroos live about twice as long.

Some of them still with 7 or 8 years of life span live 15-16 years.

We're also monitored by the US Department of Agriculture, Kentucky Fish & Wildlife, so we make sure our animals have it, you know, well taken care of.

Chip: When I think of Down Under, the arid, dry landscape of that part of the world, as opposed to the lush green Rolling Hills here in Kentucky, do the animals adapt pretty well to the change in atmosphere like that?

Yeah, kangaroos love to get out and play in the snow and a lot of people don't realize kangaroos are nocturnal, so they're active at night and early morning.

So, if you come to visit, best to see them early in the morning when they're the most active.

Around noon, they start taking their naps.

Chip: Nap time was a great time to check out some other park residents, like these colorful lorikeets who, trust me, have zero sense of personal space, whatsoever.

[birds chirping] I think I have a new co-host.

He's kind of a camera hog though.

Josh Warf works closely with the animals here at the park.

He introduced us to a few local favorites.

Tell us who we have here.

-This is Luna.

-Okay.

She's our umbrella cockatoo.

She's just over two years old right now, so she's pretty much still a baby.

So, we're doing a lot of training with her right now.

A lot of introductions to new tricks that we're trying to teach her, and she does have completely unclipped wings.

-Chip: Oh, wow.

-So, in the future when she's past five years old, whenever she's considered an adult, we hope to be able to do free flight training with her, that way I can say her name or do a click or recall and she'll fly to me wherever I am.

And we plan on keeping her wings completely unclipped, that way she has a good sense of flying and she can do that.

Right now, though, she's pretty much a free will bird, she does whatever she wants to do.

She talks when she wants to.

I can't make her talk on command, but she already knows about 30 different words, which is very advanced for a two-year-old cockatoo.

They can get a vocabulary of over 500 words after they turn into an adult, five.

Next up, this is Bongo.

Bongo?

Hi, Bongo.

He's one of our African serval kittens.

-Can I pet Bongo?

-Yeah, you can hold Bongo -if you want to.

-Oh, okay.

He is extremely, extremely docile.

Bongo is about 10 weeks old, so he's been off of milk for about 3-4 weeks now.

He's eating solid food great.

We have Bongo and Kiara, our male and our female African serval kittens, but they do come from different litters, that way in the future, hopefully, we'll be able to breed them and have more litters of little serval kittens to play with.

They're the smallest in the big cat family only reaching 35-40 pounds, and so because of that, they are a little bit more vulnerable to over-hunting over other larger predators in their ecosystem.

Chip: We finished our day at Kentucky Down Under by going down under into the dark, cold depths of the Mammoth Onyx Cave.

So, when folks go down in the cave, what do they see?

What do they experience?

Chris: We actually have what we call a very active cave here.

It means we're still in the process of growing and forming.

When you walk throughout this cave, we have multiple different varieties of dripstone formations from stalactites and stalagmites to cave coral and brimstone dams.

And it's really very unique because a lot of the caves in the area, it's spread out, but when you're walking through this one, everything is just all together and you get to see everything all in one spot.

Chip: Back above ground, a peacock fanned its color as we wrapped up our visit to the park.

What's it like to work in a place like this?

I can't imagine being able to get out every day, if you wanted to, and just go hang out with a kangaroo for a little while.

Oh, if you love animals, this is the place.

Every animal we have has its own unique personality.

You get to know them by names and everything and you just fall in love with them.

It's fantastic.

It makes it so much easier to work - with this type of environment.

-Chip: Sure.

What are the stories that visitors tell you about their experience here with getting to interact with the kangaroos and the like?

Brian: Oh, we have so many that came here on field trips years ago and they still remember that experience.

They want to bring their kids to enjoy that same experience.

[music playing] A member of Kentucky's Fab Five and a Merry Prankster, Ed McClanahan, was a prolific writer and creator until his death in 2021.

Now, while he's most known for his coming-of-age novel, The Natural Man, Ed leaves behind new works and a manuscript that his peers hope might one day be published.

[music playing] Ed: "My name is Ed McClanahan," I prompted, searching his face for some reaction.

For the first few seconds, nothing.

Then, spurred by sudden inspiration, I took off my glasses, and as I lowered them, Rickie-O straightened slowly, raised his eyes to the cobweb-festooned ceiling, and dramatically clapped a palm to his forehead.

"Eddie McClanahan!"

he cried.

Thomas: Ed was not just a great writer but a great character and a great chronicler of an important period of history, and a raconteur of the highest order, and somebody who just made you feel better and somehow more enlightened just being in his presence.

JT: He grew up basically in Bracken County.

He ended up in California with a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford.

And at Stanford, as a writer, he encountered Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Ken Kesey and his group of friends known as the Merry Pranksters, which Ed became one of those friends, were creating what would be the psychedelic revolution and the hippie culture and style.

Ed took some Bluegrass style to the Merry Pranksters in California, but then he brought Merry Pranksters' style back to Kentucky.

Guy: He wrote "New Journalism," it was called back then, because up until Tom Wolfe and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and people like Ed, journalism was about, who, what, why, when, where, and how, and they made it much more personal and cosmic and fun and more about wordplay and, you know, literature.

Ed was in the white hot center when he was 25.

It was in the big fold out in Esquire, and it predicted that he was gonna rule the world.

And 30 years passed, I guess, nearly before he finished his first novel that he'd been working on.

I think the New York Times said it deserves a place on that small shelf between Huck Finn and Catcher in the Rye, which is high praise indeed.

His book, The Natural Man, is one of the funniest books I've ever read and it's about a bunch of, you know, teenage boys in '40s, in Needmore, Kentucky, and Burdock County, mythical places of course.

Ed: A smallish banty rooster of a fellow, slim-hipped and natty in his tailored uniform, his cap cocked low and rakish on his brow, his nifty little Mandrake the Magician mustache already twitching in pleasurable anticipation, the thick log of newspapers balanced one-handed on his epauletted shoulder.

Then, flinging open Marvin Conklin's screen door, he'd cry, in perfect rubbernecker tour guide lookit-the-funny-natives-folks singsong, complete with an Ohio accent, "State of Kentucky, County of Burdock, City of Needmore, population 6 7/8 when they're all at home!

Where prosperity is a-always just around the corner!

Heads up, hayseeds!"

Thomas: All of his fiction is about Kentucky and all of it is about small-town losers and petty criminals, and it never lost its edge, but he found redemption and forgiveness and humanity in everybody.

And for a writer who is primarily a sort of comic, satirical, language-based writer, that kind of spiritual generosity is really rare.

There was a perception that Kentucky was backwards and illiterate, and here we produced these fabulous writers.

It made a lot of us feel the power and that you didn't have to be in New York or California, you could be in Lexington, Kentucky, and have a literary life, have an artistic life.

His humor was always woven into a really elaborate writing style, that he admired Dickens and Trollope and read them constantly.

Thomas: I think Ed had a fascinating career, but it's incredible to me how much writing he did the last bit of his life.

And almost anybody could have been forgiven at that point for calling it a day, you know, I got my novel out, I got my memoir out, I got my short stories, and I've got my other things packaged together, and then he sort of really launched a whole new career, which I think climaxed in his 80s.

You know, people say there are no third acts in American lives, he had a great third act.

JT: Ed (mine's) actual collaboration was to turn Juanita and the Frog Prince into the comic book form.

It starts off with this motif that the county courthouse has four different clocks, neither of them have the same time.

Things are not always what they seem and something that might be happening in one timeline might or might not be real in another.

Ed: Atop the courthouse that imposing eyesore, is situated yet another imposing eyesore.

A bulbous beehive shaped cupola with four clock faces the size of mill wheels, each asserting with all the authority of its hugeness, four entirely different times of day.

Guy: I got to see Juanita and the Frog Prince in progress, and it was, I guess, Ed's last book, his second to last one then would have been Not Even Immortality Lasts Forever.

He wrote a sequel to Natural Man.

I think it's an airtight manuscript for 88 pages and I think that anybody that wants to know what happened to Harry and Monk and some of those characters from Natural Man would be well suited to read this book if we can get it back, yeah.

He worked on The Return of the Son of Needmore for a long time.

So it's an unfinished work.

Guy: Ed McClanahan was a treasure.

He was proud to be a Kentuckian and he was, I think, glad to show people that there was a life of the mind and a love of the printed word and the spoken word that comes from old traditions of storytelling.

[music playing] Well, we've had a remarkable afternoon here at the National Quilt Museum and joining us now is the curator of this facility.

This is Rachael Barr.

Rachael, thanks so much for being with us here today.

Oh, it's my pleasure.

Thank you.

So, how did this land in Paducah?

What's the back story here?

The back story is our founders, Bill and Meredith Schroeder, are Paducians, and so we live in Paducah.

They started also the American Quilter's Society and they were collectors of quilts.

And they were amazed at the artistry, the creativity of these quilts , and they thought everyone needs to be able to see these quilts.

And so they created a museum for today's quilters and this is a museum then that honors what every quilter today may be working on, no matter what it might be.

And it really is amazing art... -It is.

-..that you've got here, and so many art museums now, Rachael, are really trying to curate female-driven art, and that's 95% of your collection here now.

-Is that right?

-Absolutely.

Quilting has always been traditionally a female art form, but it's also even more than that.

For the artist, it's their creativity, it's their way to express themselves.

And so you may think of quilt as something that you can wrap up in, but these are not your grandmother's quilts.

-Chip: Right.

-And these are works of art.

Rachel: These artists, quilt artists, are using thread and fabric as their canvas and paint.

Now, to your point, these aren't clearly your grandmother's quilts, but when somebody comes here, what are the types of quilts and the art really that they're going to experience -when they come visit here?

-Absolutely.

Today's quilters can be working in several different styles of quilting.

A traditional quilt, which has that maybe a center motif and looks something that people are kind of familiar with.

Then we also have studio quilts and studio quilt artists, they maybe have another medium in that, maybe their background was photography or sculpture, and now they're going into quilting.

We also have contemporary quilt artists and they may use a little bit of everything with their quilts, and then modern quilt artists.

Modern quilters have a lot of negative space that they're working with.

Very bold, bright colors, graphic designs.

So whatever is in that genre of today's quilters, this is what we do here.

And what do people tell you when they've come through the facility?

Oh, my goodness.

Most of them will just walk in and go, wow!

-Right.

-Their jaws will drop.

It's funny because we'll have a lot of husbands who will think, "Oh, I'll wait in the lobby."

And if we can get them inside, then we have a hard time then -getting them back out.

-That's great.

Because, as we said, that these are works of art and people are inspired.

They are in awe of just the creativity, the mindset, the patience.

That's another big thing that people will say, "How long did it take someone to do this?"

So it's always fun to kind of blow people's minds.

I can imagine.

A final question.

You all have been so remarkably successful here, 30 years, you've seen more than a million visitors in here.

What do you want the legacy looking forward of this place to be?

Want that to continue.

To continue with the art form with today's quilters.

Making sure that we are here for them, for whatever they may be doing, and also then inspiring new quilters.

We have a fabulous education program with junior quilters with quilt camp.

So we are inspiring young people then to be quilters for tomorrow.

Well, it's been a remarkable adventure.

We've really enjoyed looking around.

Rachael Barr, curator of the National Quilt Museum.

Thanks for letting us be here today.

Oh, absolutely.

Thank you.

[music playing] For our last story, we'll journey to Richmond to visit the home of the Appalachian Shakespeare Center at EKU.

Now, the Appalachian Shakespeare Center or App Shakes is a relatively young theater company right here in Kentucky that strives to promote citizenship and agency through the works of William Shakespeare.

Let's check them out.

Caesar: There is no fellow in the firmament.

The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks; They are all fire, and everyone doth shine; But there's but one in all doth hold his place.

So in the world: 'tis furnished well with men, And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive; Yet in the number I do know but one That, unassailable, holds on his rank, Unshaked of motion; and that I am he.

Let me a little show it, That I was constant Cimber should be banished, And constant do remain to keep him so.

[coming forward] O Caesar!

Hence!

Wilt thou lift up Olympus?

Great Caesar!

Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?

Speak, hands for me!

[Caesar groaning] Caesar.

Et tu, Brute?

Then fall, Caesar!

[Caesar groaning] I have much mistook your passion; Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?

The mission of the Appalachian Shakespeare Center is to promote agency and citizenship in learners and audience members with the works of William Shakespeare.

So, we kind of take this body of work that is hundreds of years old and open it up for our constituents, which is the citizens of Kentucky, especially those in our service region of Eastern Kentucky, and make the point that without them, Shakespeare doesn't really exist.

It's a medium that needs an audience, but it also needs artists and people to interact with it to help bring it to life so that it continues to have meaning.

Paige: It's funny to think about Shakespeare being relevant in Appalachia, but I think it really is.

Shakespeare is an old text, people have been looking at it for years and years all across the world.

And people are still doing those shows and plays for a reason, that content, the relationships, and just some of the things that people experienced within those shows are things that people are very much living still today.

Matthew: The show that we're working on right now, Julius Caesar, is about an insurrection that happened 1,000 years before Shakespeare was writing.

And he was actually writing about Elizabethan England at the time using history, and so we kind of use his plays in the same way.

We look at what those plays are about, what they're saying for the Elizabethan time, but also what are they saying for us now and cracking that open to make it accessible.

When we're constructing a Shakespeare performance, we tend to keep it more simple than we would a musical or a straight show that's set in the modern era.

There tend to be less flashy gimmicks and what we call spectacle in the theater.

Some of the challenges though are to make things or to make it look like it would have happened in a Shakespeare time.

We don't know exactly what his shows looked like.

So a lot of that is guesswork, a lot of that is looking at period-style drawings and stuff like that, as close as we can get.

You can do whatever you want with Shakespeare because he's dead and he won't complain.

And if he does, just run.

So I'll ask Matt what time period he wants the play to be set in, and sometimes he wants it to be set in no particular period, and I have to make a period up and draw inspiration from various different periods to create a whole brand new one that sort of feels timeless.

Matthew: In Eastern Kentucky, a place that is economically often depressed can see itself as not culturally relevant.

We want to connect with the rich culture that does exist there and plug that into the that sense of self and that sense of connection to Western culture and empower our audience and our artists to remake that for themselves in their own image.

Jonathan: I think we want to mainly show people that Shakespeare isn't for the elite, only the elite.

Most of the people that saw Shakespeare shows were known as the Groundlings.

They were the people that didn't buy the seats, they were the people that stood in front of the stage.

Everybody went to see Shakespeare's plays because that was entertainment at the time.

I think it is important that people in Kentucky see that any kind of culture, not just low culture, high culture is reachable for them, and that includes putting on production, not only, you know, Shakespeare production but original works, original actors, you know, here.

There's a lot of value in Kentucky and I think anything we can do to promote that cultural value of Kentucky is wonderful and I'm glad to be a part of it.

What do I hope an audience takes away from Shakespeare?

I hope that they are engaged.

Entertainment is important, but what we're making is art.

We're not trying to sell anybody anything.

We are trying to make them think about what's happening on stage and how it relates to their life and how they can do something with that.

If that's gonna change them, I want them to change.

I want them to come out the other side somewhat changed.

I'm not sure that we are always successful with that, but if they ask the question, what does that mean?

That's the good starting place.

Marullus: That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood?

That wraps it up for the season 29 premiere of Kentucky Life.

And hey, we are just kicking things off.

We've got even more amazing stories and fantastic adventures from all across our beautiful Bluegrass State that we cannot wait to share with you.

But for now, I'll leave you with this moment.

I'm Chip Polston, cherishing this Kentucky Life.

[music playing] [birds chirping]