Kith & Kin

Weston Wills and Lorena Oretha (aka “Buddy”) Skaggs , my paternal grandparents, lived in Edmond, an unincorporated community southeast of Charleston, West Virginia. Grandpa was a godly man, not without a sense of humor, and he was born on August 29, 1901. In another blog post I referred to my Grandpa Skaggs’s “tough, rangy body battered by years of hard labor in the West Virginia coal mines.” That’s actually a pretty good description. He was tall and thin and bony. He had had a hard life, as many men did in those days, working in the coal mines at a job that risked his life every day. Somewhere along the way he lost his entire pinky finger and part of his index finger on his right hand. He ended up with black lung and cancer (which resulted in the removal of one of his eyes), so the mines really did eventually kill him. Grandpa worked for seven different coal companies between 1928 and 1960. Imagine working a job where you breathe in black carbon powder every day all day long, down...

Tony Mowatt (guest artist) as Lumiere; yours truly as Maurice in Beauty and the Beast . I haven’t written for a while because I’ve been busy with rehearsals for our university production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast musical. I’m playing Maurice, Belle’s father, aka “crazy old Maurice” and a “harmless crackpot.” It’s a fun role to play—I feel pretty comfortable in Maurice’s skin. He’s an oddball, a genius, and a loving father. A good guy. The trick to getting into any character is to understand how that person thinks . Most bad guys don’t think they’re bad guys—they think they’re right and everyone else is wrong. I tried to remember that when I played Mr. Gilmer in To Kill a Mockingbird , the racist lawyer who prosecutes Tom Robinson; and Arthur Compeyson, the escaped convict who is bent on revenge on his fellow former convict, Magwitch, in Great Expectations . I got to be in two fight scenes as Compeyson, and, in preparing for those, I understood for the first time why they cal...