Saturday, March 12, 2011

Tennessee Williams’s 100th Birthday, Marked in Columbus, Miss.


From Mississippi-

“DO you know what Spring Pilgrimage is?” asked Brenda Caradine, the chairwoman of the Tennessee Williams Birthday Celebration in Columbus, Miss. “It’s when you Yankees come down South to see our antebellum homes and we take back your money.”

By turns coquettish and tender, Ms. Caradine, who also runs the Amzi Love Home, a restored 1848 home that now functions as a B&B, is just one of many personalities in the playwright’s hometown who might as well have been created by Williams himself.

Williams would have turned 100 this month, and towns and cities around the country are hosting fetes in his honor, but none more fittingly than Columbus, the playwright’s birthplace and his home until age 7. This year, the birthday celebration (March 24 to 27) coincides in part with the town’s Spring Pilgrimage (March 28 to April 9), the event that Ms. Caradine referred to, which is traditionally held during the azalea bloom.

Williams-themed festivities will include an exhibition of playbill and movie paraphernalia related to his stage and screen work at the Columbus-Lowndes Library (317 Seventh Street North); tours of St. Paul’s Episcopal (318 College Street), where his grandfather preached (don’t miss the stained-glass windows mentioned in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”); and performances of one of his more obscure plays, “Strangest Kind of Romance,” at the Rosensweig Arts Center (501 Main Street).

More here-

http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/travel/13headsup-williams.html

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