Copious Notes

Dave Shuffett, host of "Kentucky Life" and a KET producer, teamed with author Neil Chethik to produce a KET special "FatherLoss," based on Chethik's best-selling book of the same name. Photo by Rich Copley | staff.

Dave Shuffett thought he was prepared for the death of his father.

Bill Shuffett had lived a full life before dying two years ago at age 84. By his son’s account, he was a hero dad, a guy who passed up the chance to play baseball with the St. Louis Cardinals to serve in World War II, where he earned several honors, including a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

Later, after a divorce, he became a single father of three until he remarried.

Young Dave Shuffett with his father, Bill. Photo courtesy of KET.

“He was this baseball star, war-hero dad who came home and devoted his life to his kids,” Shuffett, host of Kentucky Life on Kentucky Educational Television, says of his dad, who lived in Greensburg. “He was, for me, larger than life.”

He lived a complete, long life. And Dave figured he would be ready to carry on after the inevitable.

But his life fell apart.

“When we lost him, my whole world turned upside down,” says Shuffett.

He was on a lonely journey, thinking he was a unique case until he found a book while doing an Internet search: FatherLoss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms With the Deaths of Their Dads.

It was the only book he could find on the subject, and he was surprised to find that the author, Neil Chethik, lives in Lexington.

Shuffett reached out to Chethik, and initially thought about doing a segment on the book on Kentucky Life.

But KET programming director Craig Cornwell saw more.

“Dave was really hurting after his father died, and I didn’t think five minutes was enough time to express it,” Cornwell said. “It had the makings of a good story.”

Shuffett’s journey weaves through the half-hour FatherLoss: A Kentucky Life Special, which premieres at 8 p.m. Saturday, the day before Father’s Day.

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Lynn Nottage’s Ruined has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, besting the Broadway hit In the Heights, by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes; and Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw, which had its world premier at the 2008 Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Lynn Nottage.

Lexington has actually seen quite a bit of Nottage’s work and even the playwright herself. Early in the Fall of 2002, Nottage seemed to be all the rage in the Horse Capitol. KET filmed her short play Poof!, about a woman whose abusive husband spontaneously combusts, with Rosie Perez and Viola Davis, at the same time Actors Guild of Lexington was preparing a production of her play, Crumbs from the Table of Joy.  The film brought Nottage to town, and she paid the Actors Guild cast a visit, talking to them about Crumbs’ clash of blues and be-bop culture. During Deb Shoss’ tenure as AGL artistic director, the theater also produced Nottage’s Mud, River, Stone and in 2006, the University of Kentucky presented her Intimate Apparel.

Nottage can add the Pulitzer to a list of a highly prestigious grants she’s received, including a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2007 MacArthur Genius Grant. Ruined, currently playing at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club, is about women during a brutal civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Michael Johnathon is pretty hard on his hero in the opening act of Walden: The Ballad of Thoreau.

We find Henry David Thoreau, as played by Adam Luckey, in his cabin at Walden Pond sounding like the years alone have really, really gotten to him. For a man with nothing on his calendar, he’s almost breathless trying to figure out what to do with himself. When he thinks, “music and art are born at sunrise,” he is torn between whether he needs to write that down or play his flute, thereby creating some musical art. He putters, chatting with his wood pile and snap beans until a blessed moment of self awareness: “Dear God, you’re having conversations with peas and finding it intellectual.”

Johnathan doesn’t shy away from the fact that even today, as Thoreau is now considered a literary giant and the forefather of the environmental movement, his personality and journey can seem a little bit odd and sad. But that acknowledgment and a steady refinement of Thoreau’s ideas through Ralph Waldo Emerson and two other visitors to Thoreau’s cabin raise this script well above two acts of hero worship.

Yes, the play can be a little preachy and preoccupied with Thoreau’s need for a woman. But it and the documentary segments that bookend the new video production are informative about Thoreau and particularly the ways in which he foresaw the impact of modern technological progress on the environment. The video was made last fall, with segments filmed at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., some Lexington woods, and at performances of the Walden play at the Lexington Opera House last fall.

With supporting performances by Eric Johnson, Anthony Haigh and Jessie Rose Pennington, and solid stage direction from Beth Kirchner and video direction by Doug Smart, the film fulfills a popular environmentally-based slogan: Kentucky Proud. The production will be broadcast on KET and WEKU-FM 88.9 locally and be seen around the country this Earth Day week. The script is available for free download at the Walden play site to anyone who wants to perform it, so long as they register their performance. According to Johnathon, more that 7,000 people or groups have already done that. The program is also available on DVD.

Stephen Powell (far left) and members of his crew work on one of his pieces at Centre College. Photos by Steve Shaffer | KET.

“Watching him work, it’s like an extravaganza of the five senses,” Centre College professor Mark Lucas says at the opening of a documentary on Centre College art professor and glassmaker Stephen Powell.

While Lucas’ words do set a stage, Tom Thurman’s film about Powell proves that, yes, Powell’s does need to be seen at work to be fully appreciated. And since most of us won’t get to go down to Centre to see him create one of his masterpieces — and you get the impression that if too many of us showed up at once, we’d be in the way — this film gives us an invaluable look at a unique artist in our midst.

PBS used to have an advertising slogan, “If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?” You could substitute KET for PBS and have just as pointed a question. In television, KET is unmatched in chronicling the diverse and unique culture of the Bluegrass State, and Thursday night’s episode of Kentucky Muse illustrates why.

Steve Armstrong in his studio.

This episode, Fire and Motion, is made of two films, Thurman’s Stephen Powell: Master of Color and Light and Frank Simkonis’ The Automata Art of Steve Armstrong.

There is a sense of contrasts here. Powell’s craft is very physical work, so much so that in most of his interview footage, he is stretching to get ready to make a new creation. It’s group oriented, with a basketball team-sized crew needed to bring a new piece to fruition. And like basketball, which Powell originally came to Centre to play in the early 1970s, the last few minutes of the process are critical in determining whether the piece will be a winner or not so much.

Armstrong, on the other hand, often works in the solitude of his basement late at night, creating mechanical sculptures that fascinate gallery viewers as if they were kids walking into FAO Schwarz. Intimate relations including Armstrong’s wife and brother talk about how teachers would just tell Armstrong to go create, and they’d give him an A.

And that’s where these stories come together.

The unifying theme of Fire and Motion is artists who found their own paths to following their passions, and here in Kentucky, they create work that dazzles people around the world.

These are great Kentucky stories, and it is great to have KET to tell them.