#h#Portraits for Posterity#/h#
Photographer Sherry Rubel first began the Living Legacy Project in 1998, creating portraits and oral histories of 25 residents of the Actors’ Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey, featuring many of this nation’s earliest actors, singers, dancers, musicians, and producers.
In an extension of the project, Rubel has been collaborating with student volunteers from South Brunswick High School to develop oral histories and portraits of residents at Buckingham Place, an assisted living and adult day care facility in South Brunswick.
The portraits are on view to the public in an exhibit opening with a reception Saturday, December 2. The portraits include Gertie Frost, 83, above left, who grew up in the south as a widow raising four children, all of whom have become professionals in their field; W. Priestley Conyers, 85, above center, former dean of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia; and Milton Stern, 83, above right, a former Nazi prisoner of war.
Living Legacies, Saturday, December 2, 1 to 4 p.m., Buckingham Place, 155 Raymond Road, off Route 1 south, South Brunswick. Meet photographer Sherry Rubel. Holiday gift and craft bazaar. 732-221-6678.
#h#Call Me Urbane#/h#
When Woody Guthrie was inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, his daughter Nora Guthrie asked Ellis Paul to sing at the celebration. Paul brings his urbane, literate and thoroughly modern folk-pop sound to Concerts at the Crossing, Sunday, December 3, at the Unitarian Church at Washington Crossing in Titusville.
Among the first to single him out from the vast pack clamoring to rise from Boston’s open mics in the early ’90s was Bill Morrissey, even then considered the definitive New England ballad writer. He was so impressed, he produced Paul’s first record, “Say Something,” in 1993.
“So many of the songwriters then were trying to imitate whoever they thought was successful,” Morrisey says. “Ellis was always himself; he didn’t try to separate himself from his audiences.”
Paul grew up in northern Maine, in a potato farming community so remote that his exposure to music came almost entirely from the one top-40 station he could get on his radio, and his school band, where he played trumpet well enough to earn a summer scholarship to the Berklee College of Music.
Though he remains among the most pop-friendly of today’s singer-songwriters — his songs regularly appear in hit movie and TV soundtracks — he has bridged the gulf between the modern folk sound and the populist traditions of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger more successfully than perhaps any of his songwriting peers.
Ellis Paul, Sunday, December 3, Concerts at the Crossing, Unitarian Churchat Washington Crossing , Titusville. $20. ALso appearing is Antge Duvekot. 609-406-1424.
