Faithfully Yours in Fantasy

Faith can mean so many things.

I used to consider it a supreme act of faith that my 90 plus year old neighbor planted bulbs every Fall, fully expecting that she'd see them bloom come Spring.

Once you've had your heart broken, certainly falling in love again is an act of faith and people do that all the time.

It's that range of definitions of faith that make up the fifteen productions in this year's Acts of Faith Festival, which previewed tonight at the Empire Theater, right here in lovely downtown J-Ward.

Some choices are obvious, like "God of Carnage" or "Jewtopia" while some require a closer look to figure out the faith connection.

"Always...Patsy Cline"? Er...? "Ain't Misbehaving"? Um...? Okay, "The Tragedy of Macbeth," sorta, kinda.

Tonight's preview offered brief snippets of all the plays, hopefully whetting the audience's appetite for seeing the full productions.

The brief scene from Henley Street's "Lord of the Flies" reminded me how unsettling that book had been back when I read it in school.

"Shakespeare and Galileo," which I actually saw when it was first produced at the Carpenter Science Theater, imagines that Shakespeare went to Italy and met the great scientist.

This one was obvious. Galileo's description of the moon was the perfect melding of art and science, aka a higher power.

There were plenty of humorous moments, too.

We were told by the director of the Seminary Shoestring Players from Baptist Theological Seminary that he'd started the group because, "I thought it was a good thing for students going into the ministry to learn how to act."

Major laughter greeted that remark.

Likewise there was tittering for Cadence Theater Company's scene from "August: Osage County" where the woman says, "Men always say crap like that, as if the past and future don't exist."

You guys know better, right?

Despite most people probably not even noticing, one moment that brought a smile to my face was during the Patsy Cline song, "Walking After Midnight."

Instead of a band, she had a pianist accompanying her tonight and for sheet music, he was using an iPad.

That's right, touching the screen periodically to go to the next page of music to play a song from the fifties.

He must have had faith that technology wouldn't fail him in the midst of the performance.

And while I'm a card-carrying heathen, one thing I appreciate about the Acts of Faith Festival is that they have talkbacks for every play, inviting audience members to share their take on the issues presented in the plays.

So it's safe to say that once the festival begins, I'll catch a few of the plays and maybe even share my opinion with a roomful of strangers.

I moved from faith to fantasy by going to Eric Schindler Gallery for the opening of Lily Lamberta's new show "Pageant Style Puppetry and Folk Art."

Lily is the brains and talent behind All the Saints Theater Company and the fantastical puppets and masks used in the Annual Halloween and May Day Parades, two events I love participating in.

Her fanciful mounted heads look down from walls oozing personality like no actual stuffed animal ever could.

"Grandma Forest" had lace eyebrows."Watchman of the Woods" had a burgundy velvet head wrap with tassel.

"Winter White Caribou," the piece I coveted, was extravagantly feminine, pink, lacy and with delicate twig antlers.

From the front brightly lit gallery room to the second room represented a colossal shift in mood.

In that space, Lily had crafted a luminous shrine to her parade works. This, I knew, was Lily's world.

Enormous puppets, heads, hands and skulls hung from the walls with fairy lights strewn around them.

Familiar faces from past parades looked down, including George Washington, whom I remembered from the Founding Fathers-themed parade.

It was here I found the artist herself, dressed in a short black taffeta prom dress and cowboy boots, looking like she was having the time of her life among the capacity crowd.

But she didn't seem in the least surprised about all the people raving about her work, snapping photos of it or that she'd already sold three pieces.

And why should she? As far as I can tell, being an artist is a full-time act of faith.