Compelling personalities from Columbus’ past will be featured when the annual Ghosts & Legends Tour returns Friday and Saturday, Nov. 8-9. Local performers will present dramatic vignettes for passengers taking bus tours that will depart the Tennessee Williams Home and Welcome Center at 300 Main St. at 6:30, 7, 8 and 8:30 p.m. Tour-goers will disembark at several locations to meet interesting citizens from the city’s history. The family-friendly event is presented by Columbus Community Theatre, Columbus Cultural Heritage Foundation and the Columbus Arts Council. Tickets are $12 for arts council members; $15 for non-members.
“This has been a wonderful event for our community,” said Jan Miller, executive director of the Columbus Arts Council. “This also brings in people from out of town who come to see it.”
Columbus Community Theatre (CCT) members are taking the lead in researching and writing vignettes.
“Our Community Theatre loves the history of our community and wants to tell the stories, and we’ve got a great set of them this year,” Miller said.
CCT member Chelsea Petty, with Kyla Norwood, will tell one of them at Friendship Cemetery.
“We’re doing a story that most people don’t know even exists,” said Petty, who teaches drama at Columbus Middle School. The tour will also introduce passengers to a former slave who became a bridge builder in Columbus, offer a glimpse into a popular gathering place of long ago and serve up an encounter with Tennessee Williams, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright born in Columbus in 1911.
Some of the featured figures lived in a much earlier era, but Terry Coffey will pay tribute to a woman who more recently made an impact at Mississippi University for Women, Mary Ellen Weathersby Pope. She passed away in 2007.
“I’ve portrayed people before who were born in the early 1800s,” said Coffey, a Ghosts & Legends participant since 2015. This will be the first time she’s helped share the story of an individual she actually had the honor to meet.
“I used as my main source of information the ‘Golden Days’ (‘Golden Days: Reminiscences of Alumnae, Mississippi State College for Women’) book of interviews of MUW alumnae put together by the Southern Women’s Institute at MUW,” Coffey said. “It was great to read her actual own words in response to the interview questions put forth by Barbara White and Susan Puckett and filmed by Chris Jenkins and transcribed by Brandie Ashe.”
Tour-goers are encouraged to dress for the weather; comfortable walking shoes are recommended.
Tour tickets are $12 for arts council members, $15 for non-members. Get them at columbus-arts.org, at the Rosenzweig Arts Center at 501 Main St., or by calling 662-328-2787. Advance tickets are recommended in order to secure a preferred tour time.
IF YOU GO:
■ WHO: Columbus Community Theatre, Columbus Arts Council, Columbus Cultural Heritage Foundation
■ WHAT: Ghosts & Legends Tour (bus tours and stops)
■ WHEN: Friday and Saturday, Nov. 8-9; 6:30, 7, 8, 8:30 p.m.
■ WHERE: Buses depart Tennessee Williams Home, 300 Main St.
■ TICKETS: $12 arts council members; $15 non-members; advance tickets for preferred tour time recommended, at columbus-arts.org, or 662-328-2787.
Jan Swoope is the Lifestyles Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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