[Music] This week on State of the Arts, connecting through poetry, the memoirs of a silent film star, and art that helps those in need.

These stories from around the country as we explore creativity and community from different angles.

It's all coming up on State of the Arts.

Hello, I'm Mary Paul.

Thank you for tuning in.

This week we start by taking you to a local tavern in downtown Reno, Nevada.

Here the community gathers weekly for Monday night poetry.

For the last several years this open mic poetry event has encouraged participants to express themselves and build connections.

Have a listen.

[Music and crowd sounds] My entire body frigidly cold, it cannot be warmed.

My entire body burning hot, it cannot be cooled.

This is when I know it is poetry.

Monday Night Poetry is basically an open mic centered around poetic expression.

So it's not like your traditional open mics where you have musicians and comedians.

It's centered strictly around poets.

It is in downtown Reno, so it's bustling.

For the most part it's a community where everyone's invested in what we're trying to do, which is celebrate the art form of poetry.

And we've democratized fame in a way in that anybody can come off the street and share five to six minutes.

So a typical night at Monday night poetry starts usually when Jesse shows up.

He sets up everything, puts the list out, and once the list is out people are free to show up and sign up.

We do ten slots and then we have a group photo, brief intermission, and then ten more slots, and then people are done for the night.

Which is why some call me the godfather.

Thanks for that.

The goal is to make the poetry as an art form that we love, both page poetry and performance poetry, to make it accessible to everyone.

It is free to attend Monday night poetry.

The only stipulation is you have to be over 21.

It was a fairly dead night before.

Now Monday night might be the busiest night of the week at Shims.

Even busier than Friday or Saturday, depending on the week.

It's there to catch me.

See y'all, I need to catch my breath.

I need to catch up on my sleep.

I need to learn how to sit still and to be honest, I've just been exhausted.

My name is Ian Michael K. Watson and I'm learning to be better than my yesterdays.

I'm learning to say no more often.

I'm learning to love my imperfections and be kind to myself.

And there is still so much work I have to do.

Thank you.

We started the very first Monday Night Poetry, was held at 6pm January 3rd, 2022.

So each year, the closest Monday to January 3rd, we've celebrated the birthday.

It was just a beautiful, beautiful night for me to be there as a host to see how much the community really celebrates what we're doing and looks forward to it each week.

They have these fears, heavenly twins, they know each other well.

Opposites have a story to tell.

After all, when push comes to shove, you're either in fear or you're in love.

So the chants and the snaps and all the callbacks, that comes from the poetry scene in general.

Just kind of what a spoken word open mic should look like because it's not a typical poetry reading.

You want to bring a lot of energy.

You want the crowd to participate.

You want them to feel like they're part of something.

So the "where they at?"

It's just a way to get the audience charged up for each individual performer.

Is for people to respond audibly are the snaps.

If somebody excels what's worthy of snaps, then you get into the "mmm," almost like you have peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.

It's usually short, kind of pithy aphorisms that are meant to be encouraging, but not so much that they're distracting.

Get like a comedian.

The comedian needs that instant gratification when they tell a joke.

And they need to hear people laugh because if you don't get laughed or you're like, "Okay, I'm tanking."

So poets don't need as much of that.

But when you have a line and you're like, "Okay, I think this is a good line," and you deliver it and you hear the reaction, you're like, "Yes, that was a good line."

All the way to the stage for Pax, please.

I am a poet and I've been coming pretty regularly for over a year.

It happens every Monday night, so I'm here most Monday nights.

And a lot of my good friends come here too.

It's a big community in my life.

This one's called For the Curly People.

The Truckee River was straightened for the sake of efficiency.

The first river in the U.S.

to be unbent.

Armies of engineers writing their equations on curves.

So doing this every week has helped me as a poet exponentially.

I'm always inspired by the other poets here, all the different styles.

And then just having a built-in audience makes you want to write more.

Like if you happen to say there's someone who's going to listen and so you want to say it.

The path the loose leaf chooses with the wind.

Curves of hope shooting through the darkest nights.

Ride those waves.

They will bring you home.

Thank you.

[applause] Monday is my favorite day of the week now.

And I used to dread Sunday night going back to work the next day.

And now on a Sunday night I'm thinking, well yeah, I've got to go to work tomorrow.

But then when I'm done with the day, I get to start my week off on the right note.

And I get to see my friends.

And I get to see my chosen family.

And I get to encourage people.

And I get to see people light up.

Seeing people increase in confidence that were painfully shy to begin with and now they can't wait to share.

That is a magical experience for me as a host.

That's one thing I'm always been proud of is just having a platform where people can connect and feel like they're seen and they're heard.

I just think that's really worth its weight in gold is just having a community and a safe place that people want to be in.

Here's the thing about honesty and love.

Neither is fully possible without the other.

Much like friendship.

Much like family.

Much like belonging.

Much like us.

With the holiday season getting started, there are festive ways to celebrate all over Southern Arizona.

Here's a look at a few things coming up on our arts calendar.

This weekend, artisans of all kinds will descend on Tucson's Reid Park for the annual Holiday Arts and Crafts Fair.

More than 140 artists from Southern Arizona and the greater southwest will be in attendance on Saturday and Sunday.

For many years, folklorist Big Jim Griffith kept the storytelling tradition alive in the borderlands, documenting our unique sense of place here in the Sonoran Desert.

Now let's take a peek into the AZPM vault to learn about El Nacimiento.

I'm standing in La Casa Cordova next to the Museum of Art and I'm standing in front of an absolutely remarkable assemblage of figures.

This is a Nacimiento, a Mexican-style nativity scene that's erected every year by a woman named Maria Luisa Teña who does it in memory of her mother whom she says used to make a really big one in Guadalajara in the old days.

This is a Mexican adaptation of a European custom that probably started in the Middle Ages and in Mexico it took root and flowered in a particularly wonderful way because not only do we have what you'd expect in a nativity scene, you know the manger, the holy family, the shepherds, the wise men, but you have the wise men arriving.

You have the wise men leaving home.

You have a castle with King David to show that Mary and Joseph were the line of David.

You have the enunciation.

You have all these different scenes from the Old and New Testaments.

It is an opportunity to be intensely creative.

So many families have their own specific Nacimiento or nativity scene traditions.

Now I grew up in such a family and my mother, when I was first married and moved away from home she called me up and said, "Well, did you put up the nativity scene?"

"Yes, Mother."

"Did you put rosemary?"

"Rosemary?"

"Well, haven't you noticed?

We always have rosemary in the nativity scene and so we always did, except I never noticed because according to her rosemary grew in the original stable in Bethlehem and you have to have rosemary in the nativity scene.

So individual families have their own traditions and this is a time when of year in the Christian world at least where families can come closer together emulating the holy family and remembering the events of so long ago with this really beautiful custom that Maria Luisa Teña has made public for all of us and which exists all over our community in many different forms, the Nacimiento.

It's during the holiday season that many people turn their minds to giving and helping others.

Second Heart Homes is a non-profit organization that works to provide housing to the homeless in Florida year round.

In support of the mission, a local art gallery partnered up with the organization to host art auctions that raise funds for those in need.

Here's the story.

Art Avenue is an international art gallery on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

I love to do many things besides the traditional art exhibits from the artists when they appear here live but I also love to give back to the community.

However, this is a twist.

I met Megan four years ago and I fell in love with her concept called Second Heart Homes and we teamed up and it's been nothing but a fun ride ever since.

It is such an incredible feeling to have the community really come together for this event that has grown.

The art auction plays an integral role in the whole program that Megan has conceived.

We have every year I invite my top 25 local artists to submit one work, donate it 100% and the gallery gets zero.

100% of the money goes to Second Heart Homes.

I started doing wood sculptures about 20 years ago and it's just sort of evolved into something like this and I call it brain candy.

So this piece is created by 93-year-old Charles Rosenblum who is a local Sarasotaian but he also is quite heavily involved in supporting non-profits, the arts.

Besides all that, as an art gallery owner, I happen to like what he does.

Each piece of wood is hand carved, each piece of wood is hand painted and each piece of wood is hand glued.

The universe helped me get this idea for Second Heart Homes.

I was a waitress and I was going to college getting my master's degree and thought I was going to be a therapist or something like that because I had been homeless when I was four years old.

So I knew I wanted to work with the homeless and there was a homeless man that was literally living on the sidewalk outside of the restaurant and he was making these incredible drawings and it really drew me to him because I wanted to know more about what his inspiration was, what they meant and so I sat down on the sidewalk with him and we became friends for years.

Then one day he went missing and I knew his real name so I found him at Sarasota Memorial Hospital and I asked what his discharge plans were.

He told me he was ready to get off the streets so there it was.

That's how it was birthed.

He was homeless for 25 years.

I set up his place, started coordinating his outpatient medical care and any kind of appointments he needed and it was really his concierge support and that's how the model was birthed.

I knew once I had him off the streets, if that wasn't impossible, there's more.

Now we're a 501c3 not for profit organization called Second Heart Homes.

Our mission is to revive the dignity of homeless adults with mental illnesses through housing, support and love.

Today we have 12 homes, we have 68 formerly homeless men and women off the streets who are vulnerable, who need love and support and accountability and a place to call home, not just a house but a home.

I was adopted at the age of 6.

I went through 19 foster care houses.

Life after adoption wasn't easy.

It wasn't good at all.

Abuse was not uncommon.

That led into incarcerations and I went homeless with my brother John and we were homeless together for 10 years.

My 45th arrest, I was sitting in my jail cell and I just got tired of seeing brick walls, I got tired of hearing doors slam.

That's when I met Megan and I can still remember getting in the car.

We drove to the house on Central.

I was like, "Can I live here forever?"

She kind of looks back at me like, "Yeah, yeah you can."

It is incredibly important to have artwork in the homes.

We're really thinking about the impact on mental health and how you interact with the environment.

When you've been homeless sleeping on the sidewalk and now you have a nice piece of art to wake up to, there's nothing like that.

It's not even comparable.

I was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I would try to draw out everything that goes on inside my brain.

It helps with my mental health to draw and get appreciation for the work that I do.

It inspires me to keep going.

The fact that anybody would even spend a little bit of time looking at my art and the fact that it's in an art auction, it blows my mind.

This is not just a mission of helping the homeless.

This is a mission about the arts collaborating to help the homeless.

It all started with art, the gentleman on the sidewalk, so everything has come full circle.

When Paul asked me to be the future artist, I just really immediately said, "Yes, I will do it."

The reason is in Chinese, which means when you have life in this body, you're committed to helping people.

This picture can bring money.

All people look at the picture and then they see a great example in our society and how things get done and how the young just take the lead and start this organization.

It's so admirable and so inspirational as well.

I want to present that her truly to the society, to see her.

I just get so much joy that knowing that these art pieces are going to be appreciated by a group of people that have come together however way they came together, they are just so profoundly affected by the beauty of their walls.

It makes me so happy.

[music] Starring in films like Cleopatra, A Fool There Was, and Salome, Theda Bara was one of the most famous silent film actresses of her time and her impressive life and career are chronicled in her unpublished memoirs.

We take you for a visit to the University of Cincinnati's Archives and Rare Books Library in Ohio where the memoirs are housed.

Theda Bara was a silent film star of the early years of the 20th century.

She is someone that a lot of people don't know about nowadays.

However at the time, roughly from 1914 to 1920 or so, she was pretty much one of the top stars in film of the times.

She was considered the original, as they called it, vamp, which doesn't mean quite the same thing that it does now, but meant that you were a seductive woman who was dangerous to men even though the studio, Fox Studios, made a biography for her that made her sound very exotic and told everyone that she was born literally in the shadows of the Sphinx in Egypt.

She was actually just a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati, as she sometimes said.

She grew up as a middle class Jewish girl in the Avondale section of Cincinnati, which was at the time a predominantly middle class Jewish area, and she went to Walnut Hills High School.

That's the Theodosia Goodman who became Theda Bara later on.

She attended the synagogue, the Plum Street Temple Synagogue.

Theodosia did attend UC after she graduated from Walnut Hills High School.

She attended for two years.

We do see Theodosia Goodman in 1904 and the 1905 yearbook.

She does not seem to have graduated.

She left for New York in the midst of her studies.

She had this very condensed career from roughly 1914 to 1919 or 1920.

During that time she made over 40 films, which is hard for us to think of given how films work today.

But some of her most significant films were A Fool There Was, which was an early film that really created that vamp image for her.

It's where she broke out as a star and in that film she played the seductress who was bringing a man who had a wife to his room.

So she was an early vamp and one of our early sex symbols in film.

And so she's had a huge effect, I think, on future starlets and representations of women in film, and yet we know so little about her because her films didn't survive into the contemporary period.

One of the painful things that she went through was the loss of her legacy.

So in 1937, which was during her lifetime, there was a fire in the vaults of Fox Studios.

And so something like 90% of Theda Bara's output was destroyed at that time.

And she was alive and she was very aware of this happening.

The Archives and Rare Books Library is one of 13 library units at the University of Cincinnati.

So we have a collection here that the official name is the T. Everett Harré Manuscript on Theda Bara.

The University of Cincinnati Libraries and the Archives and Rare Books Library acquired this manuscript in 2008 and was through the efforts of a man named Kevin Grace, who was then the head of the Archives and Rare Books Library, who spotted this manuscript listed in a Book and Manuscript Dealers catalog.

It is about 450 typewritten pages of a manuscript on the life of film actress Theda Bara.

It was a completed but never published memoir that was supposed to be published under Theda Bara's name.

And so it was ghost written in collaboration with Theda Bara by T. Everett Harré, who was a newspaperman and author and editor from Philadelphia.

Apart from the manuscript, there's also about 60 letters between Theda Bara and Harré talking about that collaboration.

The importance of this manuscript is it really gets to kind of the heart of Theda Bara's life.

This transformation from Theodosia Goodman, who described herself as a good Jewish girl from Cincinnati, into this femme fatale figure.

We've been very fortunate to work with our preservation lab colleagues who were able to stabilize the document.

The lab is responsible for the preservation of the treasures of the library.

We are a book and paper lab, so we primarily work with bound objects and paper.

The manuscript is an unbound manuscript.

It's a typed manuscript.

It was in good condition.

There wasn't a lot of tearing, but with paper that is that thin, it becomes delicate.

And because it was typewriter ribbon, it is stable, but you could still rub some things off.

There are marginalia where they've written in on pencil, so that could also be rubbed off.

The question was how to make sure it stays in that condition, both by handling, by researchers, and in the future if it would be digitized.

And that's why we made the decision to sleeve it instead of encapsulating it, so it could be removed from the sleeves if it was digitized in the future.

It includes a cover page with the title Woman or Vampire.

It includes chapter titles such as I procured poison caramels with full intent to use them, or saved from an early marriage by a Ouija board, or Devil's Handmaiden Am I. So if you look at the table of contents, it seems like this almost, it's intended to be somewhat this scandalous, spectacular memoir.

When you look at the actual content of it, it's more of a day-to-day life of Theda Bara, everything from her early childhood and education in Cincinnati, the move to New York, entering Broadway and film productions, all the way up to about 1917, 1918, when she was the lead in the film Cleopatra.

Theda Bara's career kind of goes into a decline.

She has I think one stage production which is not received well by critics, and then there's a few years before she has I think there were two remaining films in her career.

So unfortunately this is being written kind of I think as she's sliding out of the public eye and certainly Hollywood producers' eyes, which may have led to why this was ultimately not successfully published.

But it is a fascinating document and testament to the fact that we can continue to find artifacts from silent film stars like Theda Bara.

The outlook is very good for it.

Nothing lasts forever, but it'll be around before probably I pass or anyone I know passes.

We perceive her as having completely lost her legacy when the films burned in the Fox Fire.

But as time has gone on, what we found is that a lot of silent films were shown all over the world because they were silent.

They were very easily translatable to other audiences have survived in different forms.

There have been clips of Theda Bara films that have been found in various other countries.

So it's absolutely the case that we can continue to find more of her films over time as we go into the vaults of various old cinemas.

There really is a sense of kind of a treasure hunt to find material like Theda Bara's films.

She wasn't just a studio creation.

She was also her own creation.

She is very much a woman of her age.

She grew up middle class.

She grew up in Avondale.

She grew up as part of the Reform Jewish movement.

All of these are very central parts of that time period in Cincinnati history.

And she's emblematic of what it was like to be a smart young woman who wanted to make it from the Midwest on the big screen.

And I think that story is one that can absolutely still capture people's imagination if they're told it.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of State of the Arts.

From our family here at AZPM, we'd like to wish you a very happy Thanksgiving.

Until next week, I'm Mary Paul.