Features

Have you ever thought about your drawings coming to life?

You are the animator, storyteller and director when The Edge of Imagination Station visits the Wimberley Village Library on August 1, 2015.    

With custom workspaces and software, The Edge of Imagination Station has been designed to streamline the video production process and bring the studio to you.  

For more than six years The Edge of Imagination Station has been engaging users with stop motion animation workshops in schools, museums, public spaces and other crafted learning environments. The compact workspace allows a table top to become an animation studio and the user-friendly interface enables students of various ages and abilities to tell their stories.  Now the question is, “What’s your story?”

The Price Center in San Marcosis  plaingy host to a short run of the musical-comedy 42nd Street, presented by Lee Colee’s Summer Music Theatre Bootcamp Productions. Produced, directed and choreographed by Colee, this presentation of a Broadway classic is unique because of the mostly children’s cast, with a special guest adult actor, Bob Elliot, as Julian Marsh. 

The long children’s chorus line literally and figuratively clicks in an impressive display of tap-dancing routines throughout the show. The young and even younger actors-singers-dancers exude the enthusiastic energy of not only their youth, but also from the sheer enjoyment of participation. 

This article was originally published by AmaTerra Environmental, Inc. on www.amaterra.com. It is republished here with permission.

Following the catastrophic Memorial Day flooding on the Blanco River in Blanco, Comal and Hays Counties, the USGS flew the length of the river taking hundreds of handheld geo-located oblique photographs along the way.  

These photographs, available at the Hazards Data Distribution System (HDDS) Explorer website, graphically tell the tale of historic destruction caused by the 500+ year flood event a few weeks ago. They also revealed tracks left around 110 million years ago. 

The flood also affected the area’s animals, but lost or abandoned dogs were minimal and not what was expected.  Still WAG was involved in caring for flood victims’ pets. They were posted outside the Bridges Gym, people donated 10 kennels, Texas A&M Emergency Vets were also there, ready to help. WAG knew that animals probably return back to their homes after 48 hours or so.

By midweek, they were not finding any dogs or cats (WAG is really dogs only). They reached out to San Marcos, Buda, Kyle to see if any displaced dogs.  

•WAG took in eight dogs whose owners weren’t found. The dogs “looked pretty lost and tossed.”  The dogs were listed on the WAG’s Facebook page and for all the lost dogs, the time period for owners to reclaim them was extended from 7-10 days to 30 days.

Given recent tragic events in Wimberley, the themes of thoughtfulness, heart, and courage highlighted in The Wizard of Oz certainly hit home. The large, hard-working cast and crew transform the main outdoor stage at the EmilyAnn Theatre & Gardens into a Kansas farm, Munchkin land, and the Emerald City. During the production’s planning stages, the theatre’s artistic director, Bridget Farias Gates, chose to present this musical in the fashion of a subgenre of the literary arts called “steampunk.” Set designer, Reed Neal, explained, “Steampunk is not just a style or a color template but an alternate world’s way of life.” Neal’s artistic vision created a wondrous world of make-believe, incorporating some cleverly used technical innovations, as in the case of the yellow brick road.

The Zavala family is one of many in Wimberley to lose everything. Their house on the lower side of Cedar Oak Mesa was wiped away completely. Now, they are looking for a semblance of their lives before the flood. 

Mike Zavala, son of locals Art and Melinda, came from California to help. He stands in the Wimberley Library surrounded by photos of people he doesn’t know.

For flood victims, this is now a sanctuary, as the Wimberley Village Library  has cleared a room to store photos found in the flood.

Around him are hundreds of photos. An autograph picture of George Strait certainly used to be proudly displayed on somebody’s wall. Photos of a happy couple, in what looks like a lovely wedding. There are children pictured with such a bright smile it’s as if their innocence doesn’t even understand what a flood could do. 

With summer just around the corner and swimming becoming an everyday occurance, one thing is sure to happen. Brand new, expensive smart phones will end up in the river. 

For those heart-wrenching moments, as you watch your iPhone float aimlessly to the bottom of Blue Hole, there maybe some help.

H-E-B, albeit the one in San Marcos, has recently installed a machine that can save wet electronic devices. 

The machine is called DryBox and is located at the “big” H-E-B at 641 East Hopkins Street right in front of the checkout area. For $20 and 30 minutes, the machine has a 75 percent success rate of saving an electronic device if it’s brought to the box within 24 to 36 hours, said David Naumann, managing partner for Dry Ventures, Inc. 

The charm of Wimberley was thrust onto the national stage when USA Today nominated Wimberley for their Best Southern Small Town contest.

“Visiting these 20 nominees for Best Southern Small Town – each with a population of fewer than 20,000 people – is like stepping back in time, where the famed Southern hospitality remains a tradition and where life moves along at a more leisurely pace,” USA Today’s 10best.com says.

Only 20 towns in the southern United States were nominated and voting for the best last through May 25. 

The Wimberley Way is a way to help others in the community by volunteering, or really lending a helping hand. This has has been a good part of Wimberley’s foundation. Circle of Friends is one new organization that follows those ways.

Alzheimer’s disease and dementia are diseases that reek havoc on an individual’s mind and on caregivers, family, friends and neighbors. The mind of those afflicted slowly loses their memory with no hope of a reversal. Being a caregiver is a 24/7 job, with little time to catch your breath and refresh yourself.

Only officially started in January, the Circle offers to caregivers a respite, if only for only a few hours every Thursday. The founder of the group, Carol Scheel, saw there was a huge need, so along with Jan Fitzhugh and Sharon Kennedy, they decided to fill this great need. 

If you’ve lived in small-town Texas for any stretch of time, you’ll get “Greater Tuna.” The show itself is like a big inside joke, silly to some, too real for the rest of us.

The Wimberley Players opened the show last weekend, directed by Aaron Johnson. While the show itself is not a mind-blowing display of literary prowess, it’s an ode to those country folk in the heart of America, and everyone else who thinks they’re as dumb as rocks. The two-person cast reflects this in an unexpected way: The variety of characters isn’t really that many at all. They all resemble each other in one way or another, and probably because half of them are related. 

Will Mercer and R. Michael Clinkscales (both featured most recently in the “Young Frankenstein Musical”) play the whole cast of characters.