april moore skelton

Sometimes she’s getting in touch with the self-consciousness and turmoil of her inner 13-year-old. Others, she unleashes her cougar side, a sophisticated, sexual woman on the prowl for younger men. In case that change-up isn’t enough to cause whiplash, she throws in some flying trapeze for good measure.

Exhausting? Confusing? For actress and author Carolyn Hennesy, her many pursuits just keep life exciting.

It takes a special kind of person to operate six businesses from one office. Make that two special kinds of persons.

When Ryan and Jill Kelly launched Mule Train Records in May 2008, they added a full-service music company offering recording, publicity, booking and merchandising to their already busy schedule.

Don’t go looking for TV dinners in Jillian Guarco’s freezer. In fact, don’t expect anything edible. It’s filled with bugs. Sound monstrous? Precisely.

A girl never forgets her first distortion pedal.

Calley Payne, executive director of Girls Rock Camp Athens, relates how one of the campers to Athens’ first such camp reacted to playing her guitar with the effect applied.

“Her eyes just lit up,” Payne says. “It’s amazing when you give girls the tools. The girls have really latched on to what’s going on around them. They just want to take everything in, and they want to learn so much.”

“It’s one of the bravest things a child can do, to tell someone what happened to them,” says Courtney McVey, executive director of the Tree House Inc., a nonprofit organization in Winder that serves to reduce the impact and occurrence of child abuse. Through its efforts, the staff tries to “plant that seed of beginning that healing process.”

Last year the agency served 794 people from Barrow, Banks and Jackson counties. That includes kids who are victims of abuse, their siblings and nonoffending family members.

On Aug. 16, 1977, things changed for Joni Mabe. She’d never been much of an Elvis fan, but that day, during a 24-hour radio tribute to the just-passed King, Elvis spoke to her.

“I became a fan the day he died,” says Mabe, better known to many as “Joni Mabe the Elvis Babe.” “Something about his voice - I became obsessed.”

Obsessed definitely is the correct word. Mabe later did her University of Georgia thesis work in drawing and painting and printmaking on Elvis, and things only got more intense from there.

It’s one week before the opening of “Dear Edwina,” Oconee Youth Playhouse’s latest production, and dozens of elementary and middle school-aged kids are packed into a rehearsal room to run the show.

OYP co-director Terra Hannon is calling everyone to order. “We’re running straight through, no stopping, so just do your best!”

The accompanist starts to play, and kids begin moving across the stage in the musical’s opening number, which introduces the resident youth of Paw Paw, Mich. Twenty seconds later, Hannon interrupts the action: “Stop! Thomas, what are you doing?”

Thomas had driven a comically small girls bicycle in from the wrong side of the stage. Oops. Hannon corrects him and decides to take it again from the top. “OK, let’s start over, everybody!”

Well, so much for running straight through.

This is a story about the difference good teachers can make.

Or maybe it’s about enduring friendship.

Then again, it’s mostly about the power of music, and how several dozen people, many of whom hadn’t seen each other since junior high or high school 40-odd years ago, came from all over the country earlier this month to hang out and sing the music they learned together many years before.

In itself, that isn’t so remarkable. What is, though, is the genuine excitement and love and fellowship among the attendees to the reunion. If this story wasn’t true, hearing it described as “a heart-warmer” (as one of the event’s organizers did) would be, at best, mildly interesting. But it is true. And it is heartwarming. And maybe a little surprising in its earnestness. Cynics, prepare to be confounded.

If you see sending the kids to camp as a way to get them away from computers and video games, you might reconsider that position.