Engaging Cape Girardeau's right brain

Feb. 7, 2002

Dear Leslie,

A new snow has fallen, a lighter one than a few weeks ago, when kids were tobogganing down the steep courthouse terrace that flows toward the Mississippi River. As a kid I often rode my sled down those hills with my brother and cousins on snow days. The trick was to overturn your sled before reaching the bottom and screaming out onto Spanish Street.

Not everyone knew that trick. Every 10-year-old does know the most dangerous places to ride sleds.

From this distance of 40 years, that Cape Girardeau seems idyllic. The two shopping centers now west of downtown were still pastures. The life of the town was concentrated within just a few square miles, and yet each neighborhood and elementary school district seemed a land unto itself. They were parental boundaries drawn for our own good.

Three movie theaters lined Broadway. They were not quite like Cinema Paradiso in the movie, where the town gathered each night to dream the same dreams together. We could dream together elsewhere as well, at Skateland and on Little League baseball diamonds and at community picnics in big, green parks.

For a kid the theaters were mystery palaces with otherworldly carpet, popcorn smells and chocolate covered raisins secured in cellophane-wrapped boxes. What could be better than emerging loaded down from the lobby into utter darkness to watch a movie about swamp creatures?

Kids like any place where you have to be led to your seat by flashlight.

These recollections have little to do with the arts, a subject that occupies me much more today. Cape Girardeau had a community concert series, art exhibits sponsored by the newspaper, a community chorus called the Choraliers and an annual variety show, the Jaycees Follies, but exposing children to the arts was not a community goal. Our parents and grandparents had to work too hard to make a living to spend much time on aesthetics.

But they did survive and flourish.

The Cape Girardeau of 2002 is a kind of paradox where the left and right brains are in a struggle. Artistically, we have so much more and so much less. We have a symphony orchestra and chorus, a busy arts council, university theater and dance productions, a community theater, poetry readings, rock and folk concerts and the occasional Broadway touring company.

But we have no consensus about the value of the arts to the community.

Our downtown, if restored, would evoke riverboats and jazz musicians bound for St. Louis and New Orleans and traveling salesmen peddling potions. These people came selling goods and services, but they also brought different ideas and news from elsewhere. They passed along the culture. That's what the arts do.

The downtown movie theaters are still here, though little used or not at all for many years. The Marquette Hotel, the grande dame of the city's architectural beauties, sits empty and in danger of being rocked by a wrecking ball.

We await word from the Missouri Supreme Court about whether the university can start turning an historic Catholic Seminary into the River Campus, a School for the Visual and Performing Arts.

All these assets await a decision by the community about the importance of the arts and culture and historic preservation to our children.

Will today's 10-year-olds remember Cape Girardeau with affection when they are middle-aged? So much depends on their parents and grandparents.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.