LETTERS FROM HOME: 'TRIBUTE TO THE EGG' ARRIVES AT CROSSROADS ON THE MISSISSIPPI

Aug. 6, 1998

Dear Julie,

Consider "Tribute to the Egg."

"Tribute to the Egg" is a fanciful teapot that emanated from a two-week pottery class DC just took from the local arts council. To me it symbolizes something more.

For two weeks I only knew of "Tribute to the Egg" from DC's description. She compared it to a Catholic shrine, the way the image of an egg was inset into the face of the teapot. Later on, DC said a myth appeared on the teapot: the chaste, virginal huntress Diana turning Actaeon into a stag because he has seen her bathing. Actaeon then is killed by his own hounds. Calling Dr. Jung.

This was DC's first attempt to throw pots, and she was a bit intimidated by all the artistry around her. The chairwoman of the university art department and another art professor were in the class. "Tribute to the Egg" belonged to the chairwoman, whose "serious" art tends to the unconventional anyway.

DC feared for her own lack of creativity in this company. "I never could have thought of `Tribute to the Egg'," she complained one night, coming to bed exhausted after three hours of shaping clay.

But as the class progressed, she returned with excited recountings of her conversations with the other artists, and she and they stayed later and later. Clay, others have said, gets under more than your fingernails.

At lunch a few days later, I watched DC absently shaping her mashed potatoes.

This class occurred as the university was about to ask the city to help pay for a new campus for the visual and performing arts. The campus is to be on the grounds of a seminary built before the Civil War. The university wants the city to extend its motel tax and increase its restaurant tax to help pay for the renovations and construction.

The seminary had sat empty for many years while various groups tried heroically to save it. Then a magnanimous man bought it for the university. Now a long-sought purpose has been found for the promontory overlooking the Mississippi.

The city has been good to education, to business, to athletics but it has not yet created an environment that sustains the arts in the same way. Business and political leaders are just beginning to acknowledge that the city's cultural heritage is its great potential resource.

The city council is expected to decide at its next meeting whether to put the tax increase on the November ballot. The implications are potent for the future Cape Girardeau is creating for itself. It is a crossroads opportunity to decide what we shall become.

On pottery graduation night, I went to peruse the creations. There were the instructor's pots, works of smooth perfection. And there were the professor's, a contrast for all the texture she worked into them. DC called one of hers "The Porcupine."

And "Tribute to the Egg" was splendid, a teapot to be reckoned with. A teapot that expressed itself. A teapot that aspired to something more.

DC's own pots were the carefully crafted work of someone trying not to make many mistakes in her first attempts at the potter's wheel. I enjoyed them, especially the coffee mug with the oversized handle.

When I told Sarah, the department chair, what worried DC about "Tribute to the Egg," she said, "I didn't think of it. It just came as I was working with the clay."

Creativity is what you allow to well up from your soul when the restrictions of technique have been surpassed and the limits placed on a teapot disappear with the doubts about your own creativity. Everyone is a creative being. Creativity is continually surprising yourself with what you can do and what you can become.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.