We’ve all been in that situation. You show up for an event, a performance or reception or perhaps a party. You aren’t sure who was invited or who might be attending. You walk through the door and, Terminator-stye, start your scan. You inspect each face, both familiar and foreign, looking for that one person that will make you feel comfortable, at home and, if the planets align, happy to have arrived.
Debi Ballas, who died this week, was one of those people for me.
MORE: Longtime Augusta Players’ Director Has Died
As a journalist, I was taught to keep sources at a distance. Be polite, I was told, but not overly familiar. Debi made that impossible. Her passion and enthusiasm – for the Augusta Players, for her family, for her community, for her friends – didn’t allow for half measures. Either you were in or out. And I was in. That’s not to say there were not disagreements. My desire for art with an edge and her passion for keeping theater alive and well meant several conversations – never impassioned – about whether “Annie” was the right move. In retrospect, and despite my continued misgivings, I believe she may have been correct. What she wanted, I suspect in all aspects of her life, was to see people happy. That didn’t mean the brooding productions and dark dramas I campaigned for. It meant “Annie.”
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In many ways, she was Augusta’s Annie – the eternal optimist. She believed the Augusta Players could – and deserved – to be saved. So, she did it. She believed there was always an Audience for the Great American Musical and so, often with great difficulty, she saw that they were mounted. She believed there was an audience for the arts in Augusta and found, engaged and attracted them. Without Debi Ballas taking an active interest in the cultural well-being of this city, we would be far poorer.
But now she is gone, absent from our lives. There is a hole, unfathomably deep, left in her absence. It is our job, now, to fill that hole. To fill it with our own enthusiasms. With plays, and productions and all manner of song and dance. I feel certain that’s the kind of legacy Debi wanted to leave behind. A legacy of creativity and, more importantly, joy.
Thank you, Debi, for all you have done for this community. We applaud you.
Here are few other things I’ve been thinking about recently.
Rebel Lion – The Vaccine: When asked what my favorite Augusta acts past or present are, Rebel Lion always hovers near the top of my list. A brilliant amalgamation of a variety of hip hop styles and approaches, this Augusta act managed to find a beautiful balance between the righteous and the profane; between well-founded bravado, cultural awareness and the deep grooves that typify Southern hip hop. Until recently, when I referred to Rebel Lion it was in the past tense, an act I felt nostalgic for.
No more.
Recently, the men behind the Lion have begun creating again, and the result is a more mature and thoughtful version of their particular style that illuminates the group’s natural facility as both beat makers and pontificators. In the best hip hop tradition Rebel Lion’s new album, topically entitled The Vaccine, works not only as a collection of individual track but also a collective whole. Plug them in, turn it up and take a long drive. I promise, it is good to hear the Lion roar once again.
The Vaccine is available on all streaming services.
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‘Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park’ by Andrew Mulvihill with Jake Rossen: The stranger-than-fiction story of the semi-legendary New Jersey amusement park has been told a time or two before, but never as effectively as this. Drawn from the memories and personal experiences of Andrew Mulvihill, the son of Action Park’s founder, creator and spiritual guru, ‘Action Park’ is as less a story about how the park, known for its somewhat risky attractions, came to be and more about the ethos of personal freedom that drove one man to create it. Certainly, on paper – or pages as the case may be – Action Park seems to have been a place where responsibility went to die. But beyond the half-cut teenagers, backyard engineering and, yes, inevitable tragedy the park became a physical manifestation of the dreams of one man, a man who believe fun is active, never passive and worth the risk. A great summer read – it is about an amusement park after all – that autumn readers should find equally insightful and entertaining.
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‘Kodachrome’ (2018) – Before he went all Ted Lasso on us, Jason Sudekis appeared in this dramatic comedy about fathers and sons. Sudekis plays a record label rep (when those still existed) convinced to join his estranged dying father, a famous photographer, on a road trip to have four rolls of Kodachrome film developed before the processing technique becomes unavailable. The cast, which includes Ed Harris as the father and Elizabeth Olsen as the nurse hired to take care of Harris, is incredible. Most remarkable is the film’s ability to resist the temptation to become overly sentimental and maudlin, instead taking a far trickier path that allows characters to reveal themselves and grown. It is currently streaming on Netfilx.
Steven Uhles has worked as professional journalist in the Augusta area for 22 years, and his Pop Rocks column ran in The Augusta Chronicle for more than 20. He lives in Evans with his wife, two children and a dog named after Hunter Thompson.
His ‘Brand New Bag’ column will run the second and fourth Friday of each month in The Augusta Press.
