It's time again to meet our judges' choices for Arkansas's top 20 high school seniors. The class of 2014, our 20th, is a dizzyingly smart bunch, with rarely a B on their transcripts and near perfect test scores. They fill their lives with far more than studies; when they're not in school, they're shadowing doctors, building robots, growing exotic plants, playing in orchestras and volunteering overseas.

Back in 1995, we created the Academic All-Star Team to honor what we called then "the silent majority — the kids who go to school, do their homework (most of it, anyway), graduate and go on to be contributing members of society." Too often, we argued then, all Arkansans heard about young people was how poorly they were faring. Or, when students did get positive attention, it came for athletic achievement.

As you read profiles of this year's All-Stars, it should be abundantly clear that good things are happening in Arkansas schools and that academic achievers deserve to be celebrated.

To mark this milestone anniversary of Academic All-Stars, we checked in with alumni to see how far the promise of high school excellence has taken them. As you'll see on page 26, today, alumni are doctors of every variety, research scientists, international aid workers, award-winning teachers, critically acclaimed filmmakers — the dozens we managed to contact are spread out around the world doing fascinating, meaningful work.

Who knows where the future will take this year's All-Stars? We can say with some confidence that most of them will attend a ceremony at UALR this week where they'll be honored with plaques and $250 cash awards.

The final deadline for college decisions has not yet arrived. College plans listed here are, therefore, not set in stone.

HYTHAM AL-HINDI Age: 18
Hometown: Jonesboro
High School: Jonesboro High School
Parents: Ahmad and Manal Al-Hindi
College plans: Vanderbilt University

A future without borders

Sitting in a peaceful classroom, it might be hard to believe that there are places in the world where people are dying for a drink of water, or a plate of food, or the right to go to school. One scholar who keeps those truths in mind every moment he's in class, however, is Hytham Al-Hindi. The state student actions coordinator for Amnesty International, Hytham helps plan protests and student actions all over the state. Hytham said that helping people around the world has been a passion of his from a young age. This year, for example, he has been active in discussing and staging events in opposition to U.S. drone strikes in the Middle East, and advocating for the closing of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Hytham said it's amazing that people have the power to change the life of someone on the other side of the world. "Just a couple of people who take the time to write letters and petitions can save the lives of people who are oppressed for their beliefs," he said. "I really think it's humbling and empowering for anybody, even if you're in high school, to do something like that — to help people around the world just by doing activist work." Hytham currently has a 4.33 GPA and runs on Jonesboro High School's track and cross-country teams. He has been accepted into the Ingram Scholarship Program at Vanderbilt, which will allow him to work in the summertime with groups like Doctors Without Borders and the United Nations. He plans to become a doctor, and said his parents have been a huge influence on him. "They always taught me to try your hardest, no matter what situation you're in," he said. "They've taught me to just look to the future and do your best in the present."

MCKENZI BAKER
Age: 18
Hometown: North Little Rock
High School: North Little Rock High School
Parents: Willie and Kathy Baker
College plans: University of Arkansas at Little Rock

The accidental All-Star

North Little Rock High School's McKenzi Baker said she never set out to be the best in her class, she just happened to get there on the way to achieving her dreams. An avid writer from a young age, McKenzi — ranked No. 1 in her class at North Little Rock High with a 4.3 GPA — said that creative writing, and fiction in particular, has always been in her blood. "I love writing. I've always loved writing," she said. "It's a very special passion of mine. It is a way for me to understand things. When I write about them, I can see things from different perspectives. It makes me understand people's perspectives as well." McKenzi will be attending the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where she has been offered a scholarship in the school's Donaghey Scholars Program. After college, McKenzi hopes to turn her love of the written word into a career in the publishing industry, though she hasn't yet decided if she wants to work for a large publishing house or start her own press. Asked why she pushes herself to succeed, she said a lot of the credit for that drive goes to her parents, though she reserves some for herself. "They were responsible for establishing my studying habits when I was little," she said. "But a lot of that would also have to come from having a plan of what I want to do after high school. Once you have a plan of where you're trying to go, then you can figure out what you need to do to get there. ... I just wanted to make sure that I was on the right track to get to my dreams."

JOSEPH "JAY" BOUSHELLE
Age: 18
Hometown: Fayetteville
High School: Fayetteville High School
Parents: Chris and Mary Boushelle
College plans: University of Tulsa

A home run

Given how challenging it is — both in terms of time and energy — to be either a star high school athlete or a standout in the classroom, it's not surprising that we can count on one hand the number of Arkansas Times Academic All Stars over the years who have also been members of high ranking athletic teams. At some point, most students just have to choose: Do I want to devote the time to my studies or to the field? One of the rare students who has done both is Fayetteville's Jay Boushelle, who normally plays right field on his school's varsity baseball team, crowned state champions last year. With a pop-fly of a GPA — 4.34, for those into a player's stats — he said he's a "math and science person" whose particular love is calculus. "It's been a life journey for me," he said. "The process of improving, the process of making my way up in high school teams and competitive teams. Being able to improve myself is very fulfilling." Boushelle said that splitting his time between academics and sports can be challenging, especially during baseball season, but he's been able to make it work. "It really gets very challenging, especially when the spring semester comes around," he said. "I'm at school until 6 p.m. almost every day, if not later. That gives me very little time to fit in my homework. I'm in five AP classes this year, five last year, so it's been a challenge, but I've been able to work my way through it, and I've come out on top." On the field and off, he said, he has always been working for a brighter tomorrow for himself. "I know that might be the stereotypical answer," he said, "but that's absolutely true for me. ... I'm always just working toward a better future."

MADELEINE CORBELL
Age: 18
Hometown: Fayetteville
High School: Fayetteville High School
Parents: Mark and Leslie Corbell
College plans: University of Arkansas

Sketching her dreams

Though science has pretty much debunked the idea that there's a "right brain" and a "left brain," with one dedicated to creative pursuits and the other tied to math and science, you might not be able to convince Fayetteville High School's Madeleine Corbell of that. A math and science whiz with a grade point average of 4.14 at last count, Madeleine has come to see her artistic pursuits as a welcome respite from her more numbers-heavy passions for math and science. She's loved sketching and drawing her whole life, she said, but never pursued it until recently. Her art has since become a sort of mental cushion when the rigors of her challenging academic schedule become too much. "I have really come to love it really as a sort of escape from the strain of everyday life," she said. "It's a great way to direct my energy elsewhere so that my brain can rest. I love being creative and doing things hands-on. It's a really relaxing and enriching experience for me." These days, Madeleine — recently selected as a National Merit Scholar and awarded the Governor's Distinguished Scholarship — paints in both oils and water, sculpts, and draws in pen and ink. She'll put her pens to good use in coming years at the University of Arkansas, where she plans to study to be an architect. "I feel like I have quite a bit of inner motivation and self-discipline, the desire to perform to the best of my abilities, and not take an easier route. I know I can do better and I want to do the best that I can. I'm sure that stems from my family's background. My parents have always stressed the pursuit of knowledge, and that inspired a love of learning."

SETH DANIELL
Age: 17
Hometown: Arkadelphia
High School: Arkadelphia High School
Parents: Toby and Dorothy Daniell
College plans: Considering Belmont University and Ouachita Baptist University

Pressed for success

The best class Seth Daniell ever took was a philosophy class, part of the Arkansas Governor's School summer program at Hendrix College. "We talked about what is reality and what is truth," Seth said. "We spent a whole 90 minutes discussing whether a tree was more real than the color red or the other way around." When he isn't considering the nature of reality, Seth is usually playing music. He plays trumpet in jazz band, sings in the choir and plays French horn in his school's marching and symphonic bands. His parents are music lovers, he said, and he's always had a gift for it. As you might expect, he is particular about his listening habits. "I'm not a huge fan of rap or hip-hop or that kind of thing. Though some pop music, I think, is good," he says. He cites the contemporary Christian singer Michael W. Smith as an artist he especially looks up to. Aside from music, he also participates in Quiz Bowl, which he calls an "outlet for useless knowledge," of which he has a lot. He remembers one recent victory — what word could mean both a support element on the wing of a plane and a way of walking? (Strut.) His classmates, for reasons he prefers not speculate about, voted him "Most Likely to Succeed.""I kind of have mixed feelings about that," he said, "because now I kind of have to succeed or else I'll look like even more of a failure." He plans to study music composition in college, and hopes to eventually write film scores. He cites John Williams, Hans Zimmer and Daft Punk as influences.

ANDREW FLEMING
Age: 18
Hometown: Pine Bluff
High School: Watson Chapel High School
Parents: David Fleming and Karla Hefty
College plans: Hendrix College

Still cool

"I always felt it was cool to know things," says Andrew Fleming. "Even if they have no real meaning." It's a sentiment that Fleming, ranked No. 1 in his class at Watson Chapel High School in Pine Bluff, embodies daily as a star participant in Quiz Bowl, which at Watson Chapel is taken fairly seriously. The team practices every day at lunch and three days a week after school, competing in tournaments almost every weekend. He describes earning a reputation as a smart kid early in life and enjoying it. "People would always ask me things," he said. "That was a time when it was really cool to be smart, and I guess I never really lost that — I held onto that." He said his best area is history, though he's also good at "trash questions: popular culture, sports, pop music." Fleming also takes part in Modern Arab League, most recently representing Jordan. "We always hear about these other places, and sometimes I wonder if half the people in the U.S. know what the news is talking about," he said. "Sometimes I don't even know." He also sings in the choir and has been All-State for the past two years. When his school band director needed a tuba player, he asked Fleming, who had no prior experience with the instrument. "Now I'm the only tuba in the band," he said. "Just because he asked me to." Fleming has been selected as a Governor's Distinguished Scholar.

ALEXANDRA GLENN
Age: 18
Hometown: Little Rock
High School: Mount St. Mary Academy
Parents: John and Elisabeth Glenn
College plans: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Determined to carve her own path

When Alex Glenn told her parents that she planned to join Arkansas's first all-girls ROTC program, they were more than a little concerned. "Are you sure you want to do this?" she remembers them saying. "You don't want to join the military, right?" She laughs thinking about it now, offering that they were probably worried she would "sign up and, like, go to war." Her friends at Little Rock's Mount St. Mary Academy were equally surprised. "When I started showing up to school in a full-on military uniform," she said, "they were a little taken aback at first." But as Alex explained, "I was determined." This has been a pattern in Alex's life. She tells a story about a taekwondo tournament she attended in the sixth grade, in which she found herself the only girl participating in a group that included nine boys in her age bracket. She came in first. "They were a little mad," she says. She eventually earned a black belt, and is now working toward her second degree. Is she planning to join the military? She acknowledges she's thought about it. "I really want to go into a medical career," she says. "So I've thought about becoming a military doctor." She describes a visit to a veteran's hospital as "eye-opening," and said it left her convinced that she would go into a career working with veterans, "maybe physical therapy or psychiatry," she said. Either way, she's certainly capable. As her school guidance counselor explains, "There are strong academic students, and then there is Alex Glenn."

ARMAN HEMMATI
Age: 18
Hometown: Fort Smith
High School: Southside High School
Parents: Jill and Ignacio Guerra
College plans: Washington University in St. Louis

Classic rocker/scholar

Arman Hemmati's calculus teacher calls him "intellectually brilliant," while his English teacher settles for "gifted," noting also that working with Arman on ACT prep questions "helped to improve my grammar skills." In a letter of recommendation written to the Arkansas Times on Hemmati's behalf, his guidance counselor Amy Slater notes simply, "He is brilliant." Arman is a National Merit finalist, one of six students in the state to earn a perfect score on his ACT, and also the captain of his high school soccer team. "It's gotten more serious lately," he said of his soccer obligations. "There are actually things at stake." In addition to his various academic and athletic responsibilities, Arman is also a more than competent pianist and plays keyboard and rhythm guitar in a classic rock cover band called Just The Chips ("Like 'no salsa, just the chips,'" he explains). Denizens of the greater Fort Smith area music scene will no doubt will be familiar with the band's rendition of Boston's prog-rock anthem "Foreplay/Long Time," which opens with a virtuosic keyboard intro from Arman. He cites the song as his favorite to play, along with Journey's "Separate Ways." They've played "some festivals and churches" and local spots like Neumeier's Rib Room and La Heurta Mexican Restaurant. Arman plans to keep his piano lessons up in college but won't make it his focus. Instead, he's leaning toward "chemistry or physics, or just theoretical math, because that stuff is cool."

YEONGWOO HWANG
Age: 17
Hometown: Jonesboro
High School: Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts Parents: Dr. Yeonsang Hwang and Kyoungsuk Ahn
College plans: Carnegie Mellon University

Code creator

Like many science-minded Arkansas students, Yeongwoo Hwang chose to leave home (in his case, Jonesboro) to attend the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts in Hot Springs so he could advance beyond the calculus class offered by his high school. "It's really amazing," he said of the school: ASMSA has 10 computer science classes (there were zero at his home high school) and has made it possible for him, for example, to do research into ad hoc networks for mobile devices. He's given back to ASMSA too, writing the code for the school's class registration website and creating an app that allows users to upload 3-D printer diagrams from the school's server. We may all take comfort in the fact that Yeongwoo wants to work for the government as a network security analyst; sounds like he can do the job. Yeongwoo is a multidimensional sort of guy; he enjoys hiking in the national park with his friends and he plays clarinet in the Arkansas Youth Symphony. Music, he says, is "really cool. ... Every time you play music, it's different from what you played before ... there are so many emotions and feelings" that go into it. Which is also why he likes computer science: "Every time you write a program, you're always creating something new." He'll continue to pursue computer science and engineering studies at college.

MADISON KATE "KATIE" MCGRAW
Age: 18
Hometown: Beebe
High School: Beebe High School
Parents: Lance and Penny McGraw
College plans: Lyon College

Planner

Katie McGraw's high school counselor, Carla Choate, said Katie "doesn't wait to be told what to do or to be shown how to do something. She is already way ahead in her thinking and usually has a plan already well in place." So if you ask Katie what her college and career plans are, you get the idea that what she thinks now is what she'll think in four years, and that is to enter medical school and specialize in anesthesiology. She knows this because she job-shadowed at White County Hospital and, while she'd hoped to shadow a cardiologist, was assigned to an anesthesiologist instead. She met him at 7 a.m., followed as he did seven surgeries, "and he told me all about the different things he was doing. ... You wouldn't expect surgery to be so calm," she observed. Katie plans to do a dual major at Lyon, where she is attending on the full-ride Brown Scholarship, adding Spanish into the pre-med mix, with a minor in creative writing. (Why Spanish? "I've always wanted to go to Spain," she said, again planning ahead.) Katie's writing — on the need for primary care physicians — won her a first prize from the Clinton Foundation when she was just a junior. She got to meet President Clinton. "He talked to [all the contestants] for a long time about our essay ideas. ... I was kind of surprised because he actually read all of our essays." Katie has a deep faith in God, and despite all her wide-ranging talents and honors — first in her class, National Merit scholar, winner in Stamp Out Smoking essay and poetry contests — she said her most significant achievement is "making it through school without sacrificing my Christian testimony." She gave her career on the basketball team as an example: "There's pressure to be ruthless on the floor and ruthless with your teammates. ... One of the things I believe is you have to love everyone just like Jesus did. Sometimes in athletics there's a lot of jealousy that goes on and it's really hard to keep a good, positive outlook. That's something I'm kind of proud of myself because I haven't really succumbed to that."

ESTHER PARK
Age: 18
Hometown: Little Rock
High School: Little Rock Central High
Parents: Inyong Park and Miyoung Lee
College plans: Brown University or University of Pennsylvania

Multi-talented

Esther Park's essay she submitted to be considered as an Arkansas Times Academic All-Star shows a real talent for writing, which she might put to good use as a lawyer, one of the careers she's considering: "I had my palm read once. The lady gazed at my right hand, and then my left, and commented on the peculiar palm lines I had. 'Straight across the hand,' she mused. She proceeded to tell me that I was clear-sighted and wise. I'm not sure how much of her personality reading was on divination, but after that event I began to think about my traits." One of them: "I am essentially unable to procrastinate because it makes me feel terrible; any laziness I indulge in is usually preplanned." You don't become third in the senior class at Central by being lazy, that's for sure. Besides earning a 4.46 grade point average and having 16 AP classes under her belt, Park also plays violin at Central and in the Arkansas Symphony Youth Orchestra, earning first runner-up at a National High School Honors Performance series at Carnegie Hall (and we all know how you get to Carnegie Hall). She said, by the way, that she hates K-pop music despite her Korean ancestry. Park also volunteers at Presbyterian Village, where she reads to residents and enjoys hearing the "interesting stories" they tell about their lives. Though Park is also considering pre-med in school, she said, "I've been thinking about law for a while. ... Maybe as a judge, but not a lifetime lawyer. I think that would not mess up my character, but it might tamper with it." She could put her experience on Central's Ethics Bowl to good use at the bar. She didn't say so, but geology might be a good career choice: She loves rocks and fossils, picks them up whenever she travels to add to her collection of around 200. Writer, musician, volunteer, acing classes in microeconomics and calculus and Chinese and world history: Park can do it all. Can't wait to catch up with her in 20 years, as we do with other All-Stars in this issue.

KALEIGH RAMEY
Age: 17
Hometown: Searcy
High School: Searcy High School
Parents: Kevin and Kelly Ramey
College plans: Harding University

Competitor

Kaleigh Ramey is a serious competitor. "I like to beat people," she said. "It's one of the reasons I do so well. I like to be the best at everything I do." That takes hard work, and she's proud of the fact that she has worked her way to second in her class of 258 students and has earned a National Merit finalist award. She didn't always work hard — because schoolwork came so easily. But you're not going to ace the eight AP classes you've taken without work. (She said she taught herself how to study in her junior year.) When she's not hitting the books you might find Kaleigh playing golf, well enough to be on the school golf team and be named All-Conference. Kaleigh was born in Lubbock, Texas, but her family moved to Searcy so her father could take a job at Harding in the physical therapy program. She's going to Harding too, and while she would have been able to attend at a much-reduced rate simply for being the daughter of a faculty member, she got a full ride for her National Merit standing. Her college plan is to pursue a double major in biology and criminal justice, and then head to graduate school to get a degree in forensic science. She wasn't inspired by the spooky books of forensic pathologist and writer Patricia Cornwell, which is just as well since they can be fairly gruesome, but by the crime shows that she and mother enjoy watching on television. Asked how her friends would describe her, Kaleigh said "sarcastic ... but we all kind of are." She'll probably drop the sarcasm this summer when she goes on a mission trip to Houston to work with inner-city kinds. Then she'll hit the links before diving in to academics again.

TIFFANY TANG
Age: 17
Hometown: Rogers
High School: Rogers High School
Parents: Meng and Nga Tang
College plans: Rice University

Team player/p>

Team player seems a slightly unusual phrase to apply to someone so gifted in an individual sport, but Tiffany Tang uses the phrase and so does her coach about her role on the Rogers High tennis team. She's only the third player on record to win four state championships in high school tennis — two in singles and two in doubles (with her sister Katherine). She was undefeated in 101 matches. Though singular in achievements, her influence was greater, her coach wrote. "She has a unique ability to lead the team through her gentle kindness and humble nature. Tiffany is a team-first person. She is most proud of her two team championships ... a one-in-a-million kid." Tiffany ranks second in a class of 491 students at Rogers with a 4.38 GPA. Her ACT score of 35 is just one short of the best you can do. Her courses run the spectrum of AP work, from science to math, literature and government. "She is positive, genuine and always has a smile on her face," said counselor Janna Gartman. Her high school life isn't all about tennis. She's also been a team leader (there's that word again) in the Link Crew, which provides mentoring to freshmen students. She spent the year helping young students make the transition to their first year in high school. She'll be off to Rice University in the fall to study mathematics. She doesn't have clear career goals yet. "I just really like math." Problem-solving is "fun," she said. And she'll be focused on it. College will end her team tennis career, though she expects she won't stop playing a sport to which she devotes a couple of hours a day. Something has to give, though, as when she put aside competitive piano, a pastime she'd worked at since age 5. She still plays her favorite classical music, but competition? "I'm just too busy." But, said counselor Gartman, she is never too busy not to help others. Gartman recalls a summer camp at which Tiffany quietly helped a physically challenged student participate in all the activities. "She's always thinking of others," she said. That's teamwork.

GRACE THOMASSON
Age: 18
Hometown: Maumelle
High School: eStem Public Charter School
Parents: Bruce and Carol Thomasson
College plans: Considering Lyon and Hendrix colleges

Personal bests

Grace Thomasson credits her parents with her ideas about competition. Don't compare your grades or swimming times with others, they said. Compare them with your own past efforts. "I strive for my personal best at everything I do, disregarding any other validation," she wrote. She admits in an interview, almost sheepishly, that the results have never translated into Cs, though she insists she'd be fine with that if it was the best she could do. Not to worry. Grace ranks first in her class of 111 with a 4.32 GPA. She's a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist. Her straight-A record covers such tough courses as AP statistics, Spanish 4, calculus, chemistry, history, English and environmental science. Grace isn't just a grind, piling up course credits. Louisa Rook, her counselor, said: "She's not only first in her class, but a true intellectual." Others are equally admiring. She won an award for her off-campus internship, essentially a part-time job at the Department of Human Services compiling data for a program that moves people from nursing homes to community care. She works a couple of hours at it every day. She moved from data input to personal surveys of 370 people on how the program works. Grace thrives on such personal interaction. The personal touch explains her desire to get into biomedical engineering. She thought of learning to make "hospital gadget kinds of things," but said, "I wanted to do something social with people." That led her to prosthetics. She wants to learn to invent and fit prosthetic devices and talk to people about improving their lives. "That would be fun," she says. She credits a project at UAMS, the Perry Initiative, for inspiring her. She was among a select group of girls who donned scrubs, heard talks, built things, worked on a cadaver and otherwise were shown a pathway to science careers. One lecturer, "a sweet woman who was a mom and a doctor," persuaded her that you could be a successful doctor and have a family life, too. "If she could move into the medical world, I could, too. And I thought, well, that's awesome." Sort of like Grace.

CHRISTINE TOWNSLEY
Age: 17
Hometown: Rogers
High School: Heritage High School
Parents: Lindel and Soonmee Townsley
College plans: Duke University

The comfort of books

It's a long way from China, where Christine Townsley spent her earliest years, to Rogers, Ark., where she's managed to assimilate well enough to become a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, top debater and a mentor to at-risk students at Heritage, where she ranks 12th in a class of 479. But she appreciates a retreat now and then and does it by working in a nonprofit bookstore that benefits the library. Her weeks "are loud," she says. So weekends spent shelving books (in the sci-fi/fantasy/horror section) are welcome. Pushing a book cart, she finds "there is something calming in the smell of an old book, a comforting connection to the past." Christine's own past is full of movement, from China to Kansas, back to China and then to Rogers. Her parents met at the University of Arkansas. Her mother was a native of Malaysia, with Chinese roots. Christine was born when her father worked in China and her years there equipped her with the ability to speak Chinese. She's founded a Chinese Club at Rogers. Her counselor, Ericha Edgar, said the experience has forced Christine to redefine her cultural identity and also to stretch herself in less familiar subjects. There's no doubt she's got a gift for science and math. She finds applied engineering appealing, which explains a past summer program at UA and a plan to major in biomedical engineering at Duke. "It's a way I could help," she says, and a hands-on discipline to "really see the effects of what you are researching." If it doesn't work out, she says matter of factly, there's always med school. She dropped debate after a successful season last year. Too many demands from a rigorous AP courseload and leadership of Chinese, math and engineering clubs.

OLIVIA TZENG
Age: 18
Hometown: Conway
High School: Conway High School
Parents: Jason Tzeng and Cathy Yang
College plans: Chicago, Vanderbilt, Duke or UA, among others

Busy, busy, busy

Desperately seeking Olivia Tzeng:

AT: We'd like to talk to you today or tomorrow.

OT: I won't be getting home until 10:30 tomorrow night because I have a soccer game to travel to right after school. Is that too late to call or is there a better time for you? I am free Saturday afternoon.

AT: How about Monday?

OT: I will be in Fayetteville all Monday morning and early afternoon for their Fellowship Weekend. I should be free between 5 and 6:30 on Monday, though. Would that work for you?

AT: How about Tuesday?

OT: I have a soccer game at 5:45 but my coach will want the team there at 4 to watch our JV team play. My game should be over by 7 p.m. Sorry for all the inconvenience! Sunday morning could work for me? Or Wednesday afternoon. What time should I expect a call? Or should I call.

AT: How about 3 p.m.?

OT: I will be in a Youth Leadership Session until 3:30. Would you be available at 4?

Finally, we did talk with Olivia. We had been warned. Her counselor, Jeannie Moore, had told us Olivia's high school record was a "feat," between band, soccer and rigorous academics. And that's not all. She has a healthy round of other activities, school and community, including a key role since her middle school years in Quiz Bowl. Olivia, whose brother Jevin, was also a Times All-Star, is ranked third in a class of 609 at Conway High, always stocked with top students. She views her busy schedule as more of a "juggling act" than a feat. But, she wrote, the activities are not merely balls, but "individual spheres of influence that represent aspects of more core self." Some core. She's active in the Faulkner county Youth Leadership Program, Key Club, Beta Club, Model United Nations and a raft of volunteer programs. Her 4.327 GPA came from a schedule packed with AP courses.

ELI WESTERMAN
Age: 18
Hometown: Hot Springs
High School: Fountain Lake High School
Parents: Bruce and Sharon Westerman
College plans: Yale University

Future leader, engineer

Eli Westerman is a natural born leader. A four-year letterman in track and football, he served as team captain in both as a senior. He made All-Conference in football and was named Arkansas Scholar Athlete of the Year. But Eli said that more than awards, sports helped him develop his leadership skills —"to speak up and lead people, and to lead by example." It's no surprise, then, that Westerman became Student Council president. He was inspired to run after Fountain Lake extended school times "in a way that I felt was not really democratic." He ran on a platform opposing the change and pushing for more transparency in government. "I worked my tail off to try and get it revoked," Eli said, and though he wasn't able to get the hours changed, he said, "I think the fact that I've taken that stand, that's what's important in the end." Sound like anyone? Eli's dad, Rep. Bruce Westerman, was the Majority Leader in the Arkansas House of Representatives and is now running for Congress in the Fourth District. Eli said he wouldn't completely rule out running for office himself someday, but "right now that's not what I'm looking for." Instead, he's following in the footsteps of his father, an engineer; Eli plans to study biomedical engineering at Yale next year. "I realize that my favorite thing to do is solve problems, whether that's student government or athletics or in the classroom, I just love solving problems. That's basically what engineers do. Maybe that's what God has given me as a task to do on this side of the dirt." In addition to founding his school chapters of the National Honor Society and the Science Club, Eli successfully sought a grant to found a Robotics team at his former middle school. He wanted to foster enthusiasm for learning among younger students and give them an outlet beyond just making A's. Eli served as a coach and mentor to the kids, who created robots that completed various challenges, and also developed a program to educate the community about preparedness for natural disasters. In addition to all of his activities and athletics, Eli — a National Merit finalist — took a whopping 11 AP courses and finished first in his class with a 4.23 GPA.

ANDREW WILLOUGHBY
Age: 17
Hometown: Little Rock
High School: eStem Public Charter School
Parents: Dorothy and Bill Willoughby
College plans: University of Oklahoma

Green thumb

When Andrew Willoughby was 6 years old, the family's cat clawed a hole in one of the leaves on a rubber fig plant his parents had. Andrew, naturally curious, was fascinated by the sticky white sap that oozed out. Thus began an interest in plants that has become the passion of his life. When his grandmother gave him a houseplant as a present, he found he had a natural green thumb — now if his family asks what he wants for Christmas or a birthday, well, they already know the answer. "I made an Amazon wishlist and filled it with plants," Andrew said. "Here's a link, order whatever you want and I'll grow it. ... And ever since I've had any kind of money of my own, I've spent it on plants." Among the plants he's currently growing: several young citrus trees (the lemon tree is his favorite), hot peppers, herbs, ornamental grasses, cacti. Andrew is heading to University of Oklahoma next year where he plans to study, of course, botany. He's also interested in biotechnology and synthetic biology. He recently contributed to a Kickstarter project to genetically modify a plant to glow. "That's the kind of thing I'd like to do," Andrew said. "That is amazing to me and I like to think about all the possible applications of that and all the problems you could solve. Creating transgenic plants that could produce medicines, biofuels, perfumes." Andrew said he loves science because it involves the practical application of math, and numbers have always come naturally to him (he fondly remembers his dad helping him with multiplication when he was just 3 or 4 years old). After finishing every math class on offer after his junior year, eStem had to add math classes this year to keep up with his needs. Andrew also pursued more advanced study in science and math on his own via open-source college courses online. In addition to his success in the classroom and turning his home into a veritable garden, Andrew — National Merit finalist — found time to captain the Quiz Bowl team, intern at the Democratic Party of Arkansas, and play clarinet and piano.

BENJAMIN WINTER
Age: 18
Hometown: Little Rock
High School: Episcopal Collegiate School
Parents: Douglas and Angela Winter
College plans: University of Virginia

Walking encyclopedia

Ben Winter thought it would be cool, he said, to participate in a research fellowship at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences last summer. What he didn't expect: It turned out to be a "life-altering experience that set me on the path to doing science as a career." Working with cutting-edge equipment to research stem cells and cancer, Ben was like a kid in a candy store. "It was wonderful, just a really great environment for me," he said. "It was a place where I can imagine myself being happy in a career and fulfilled — a place where I can just kind of discover and experiment to my heart's desire." A passion for scientific research runs in the family — Ben's grandfather was dean of research at UAMS, where he worked in biochemistry. "He passed away a few years ago but I've gotten to go back through some of his notes and look at what he was doing when it was happening, which was really interesting," Ben said. Getting a peek at his grandfather's work on the sodium-potassium pump from years ago was inspiring to Ben, whose hope now is to eventually do research in biology, too, perhaps with a focus on stem cells. Something else Ben might have gotten from his grandfather: He's more than just a science whiz. "He was just an encyclopedia," Ben said. "He had books all around his home — about architecture, poetry, Dickens novels. I kind of picked it up and I've always had an appreciation for a whole bunch of different things." Ben writes poetry, was the captain of the Quiz Bowl team, runs track and makes chainmail shirts in his spare time. He serves as class vice-president, participates in Student Congress and was elected Speaker of the House at Boys State. A National Merit finalist who scored a perfect 36 on his ACT, Ben managed all these activities while maintaining a 4.5 GPA, first in his class.

ALEXANDER ZHANG
Age: 17
Hometown: Little Rock
High School: Little Rock Central High School
Parents: Xuming Zhang and Monica Cai
College plans: Yale University

Well rounded

Alex Zhang is clearly a brilliant student — an ACT score just shy of perfect, second in his class with a 4.47 GPA — but don't try to pigeonhole him. He is a photographer, a guitarist, a theater fanatic, a poet. He's a star debater, will soon become an Eagle Scout, and has a passion for teaching and mentoring younger students. Alex, who plans to study political science, philosophy and economics at Yale next year, said that though he likes science and math, he rebels against the stereotype of Asian-American students. He sacrificed a potential valedictorian slot to pursue his passions, giving up the additional AP class he would need to secure the top ranking so that he could captain the debate team and take a creative writing class, because those were the things he "really loved," he said. Though he's had a dominant record in Arkansas as well as national success, he said his favorite part about debate is mentoring younger debaters. "It's that feeling of community in our debate squad," he said. "You can't match it anywhere else." As for writing — for which Alex has won several national awards — he said, "Writing lets me explore things that I never get to do in real life." He's written everything from science fiction to poetry about his experiences as an Asian American living in the South (some of his amazing slam poetry is online; check it out). There aren't enough pages in this paper to cover all of Zhang's wide range of impressive achievements. He's been an editor of the Central High Memory Project, an oral history project. Along with three other students, he presented a film on Asian-American slam poetry at the CAAMFest in San Francisco, one of the largest Asian-American film festivals in the country. He's won awards for his conceptual photography projects and is now doing senior portrait photography around Little Rock. ("The camera is like my third eye," he said. "It's about self-exploration. I feel like myself when I take photographs.") He does drama tournaments, solo mime-improv performances and has acted as the lead in plays at the Arkansas Arts Center. "There are never enough hours in the day," Alex said, "but I just do what I love to do."

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The road to Little Rock food truck dominance for The Southern Gourmasian wasn't an easy one. When Justin Patterson first left his job at the Country Club of Little Rock and decided he would open his own gourmet eatery on wheels with a "Southern cooking meets Asian cuisine" theme, many folks had no idea what to expect — and there were fears that the new truck would be an experiment in fusion cuisine gone horribly wrong. After all, Little Rock had never seen the sort of menu presented by Patterson and crew, and it's unlikely that anyone could replicate it easily.

Patterson drew his initial inspiration from David Chang, the James Beard award-winning chef who made his name with New York City's Momofuku restaurant group. Chang's specialty is classic steamed buns served with sliced pork belly — a simple sandwich of pork, pickle and hoisin sauce that was trendy in the early 2000s. Patterson made Chang's buns for a party once, and they were such a hit that friends and family encouraged him to make them part of a professional menu. Coincidentally, Patterson had also been looking for work that would allow him to spend more time with his young daughter, and opening his own business seemed to be the best route toward that end.

The Southern Gourmasian food truck debuted in the summer of 2012 at the now-defunct University Market at 4 Corners and immediately exceeded all expectations among local food truck lovers. Keeping the idea of the steamed bun as the main thrust of his menu, Patterson tweaked the recipe by replacing the pork belly with smoky Southern-style pulled pork, chopped beef brisket and shredded chicken, creating something that combines the best of good barbecue with unique Asian-influenced techniques. This genius is also on display with Patterson's chicken and dumplings, a spicy broth loaded with shredded chicken poured over rice cake "dumplings" that quickly has become one of his most popular dishes.

By the fall of 2012, the University Market had fallen apart, and Patterson's crew had its own internal issues to contend with, including a stolen generator that sidelined them for a time. Running a kitchen from the back of a truck means two things: Having all the problems that come with maintaining kitchen equipment and all that comes with maintaining a work truck — and problems on both sides have grounded the Gourmasian truck several times over the years. Undaunted, Patterson and his crew still seem to be everywhere, popping up for lunch all around Little Rock, serving a breakfast menu at the Hillcrest and Bernice Garden farmers markets, and maintaining a catering schedule that keeps them booked months in advance.

As for the future, Patterson has his eye on several brick and mortar locations, although he won't reveal any specific locations. The transition from truck to storefront brings with it an entirely new set of challenges, especially for a chef like Patterson who refuses to lower his standards on ingredients to squeeze a little more profit out of his food. Given the steady rise in popularity that Gourmasian has experienced since its inception, a brick and mortar store seems inevitable, and Patterson has plans drawn up for how he wants the stationary location to look. While more at home creating menus and executing them, Patterson has proven himself to be a capable businessman, weighing issues of location, lease price and kitchen equipment prices simultaneously as he poaches an egg and crisps up a pan full of his beloved Benton's ham. This new chapter in the story of Southern Gourmasian will see if the ingenuity and resolve that have pulled the yellow truck with the red dragon to the top of the food truck game in Little Rock can see it through when it's competing with established favorites. If the lines that stretch out from the truck window are any indication, success seems almost inevitable.

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Last Saturday, students at Rhodes College in Memphis — some of whom were not yet born in 1993 when three Cub Scouts were murdered in West Memphis — held a mock trial in that case titled "State of Arkansas vs. Terry Hobbs." Hobbs is the stepfather of one of the victims.

Although the trial followed formal mock trial procedures and was overseen by a Memphis attorney who teaches at Rhodes, it differed from competitive events in that it was neither juried nor scored. Rather, this unofficial proceeding was organized by students who wanted to test evidence and arguments that have arisen since the original trials but never presented before an Arkansas court. 

By law, Hobbs is presumed innocent. He has never been charged with the murders, much less convicted of them. And by law, the teenagers convicted in 1994 — Jessie Misskelley, Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols — remain guilty. But doubt, about both their involvement in the murders and the legitimacy of their trials, has burgeoned over the past two decades. Ultimately, an accumulation of doubt led to a bizarre deal on Aug. 19, 2011, in which the men pleaded guilty while maintaining their innocence in order to be freed and state officials accepted that plea.

Lingering questions about the case, including a 2007 DNA analysis that reported Hobbs as the source of a hair found inside a knot used in the crime, prompted the imagined trial at Rhodes. That classroom reinterpretation in Tennessee of a case deemed settled by Arkansas officials was video-recorded and may soon be placed online.

This weekend, a much bigger film about the case will have its U.S. theatrical premiere in Little Rock. "Devil's Knot," a film based on my book by the same title, will open at the Central Arkansas Library System's Ron Robinson Theater two days before the 21st anniversary of the still-troubling murders.

Producer Elizabeth Fowler said she hopes "Devil's Knot" will refocus attention on whether justice has been achieved for the 8-year-old victims: Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore. Here, to accompany the premiere, the Arkansas Times presents two articles relating to the theme of doubt that runs through the film and the case.

The first is an interview with British actor Colin Firth, who portrays Ron Lax, a prominent Memphis private investigator who understood the importance of doubt. Soon after the murders, Lax became the first to question the strength of the state's case against the three accused teenagers — and to volunteer his investigative expertise in their defense. Firth voices his own views on doubt — regarding both the case and his role in "Devil's Knot."

The second is an excerpt from my new book, "Dark Spell: Surviving the Sentence," written with Jason Baldwin, the youngest of the three men who, though free, remain convicted of the murders. This section presents Jason's account of entering the Arkansas Department of Correction at the age of 16, where, as a result of his sensational trial, he was viewed as a satanic sexual predator and child-killer. Without special protections — which he refused — officials doubted he'd survive.

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This section picks up after Jason has heard himself sentenced to life in prison without parole for the 1993 murders of three children in West Memphis.

On that Saturday, March 19, 1994, when Judge David Burnett sentenced Jason to life in prison, the teenager's 17th birthday was still more than three weeks away. The following Monday morning, guards cuffed and shackled him for the three-hour ride from the jail in Jonesboro, in Arkansas's northeast corner, to the Arkansas Department of Correction's Diagnostic Unit in Pine Bluff, about 150 miles south. Carrying his Bible and $35 from his mother and friends at the jail, he climbed into a van with six other prisoners.

Three hours later, the van approached a big brick building surrounded by barbed wire: the prison system's Diagnostic Unit. "My heart starts beating really hard now," Jason said, "and my breathing speeds up. I see the guard towers. We pull up to one and the officer driving speaks to another officer up on the balcony, and he says he's got seven from Craighead County, and yes, Jason Baldwin is one of them.

"At the sound of my name, my heart just stops. This is really happening. I am going to prison for murder. Everything seems to be happening in slow motion. The officer in the tower lowers a milk crate on a rope and the officers up front drop their guns in the basket and it is hoisted away. Then the little bar in front of the van is raised up and we enter the grounds of the prison."

Jason felt the free world slipping away as he moved toward the building. "I am led out, the shackles biting into my ankles," he said, "the chains dangling from my waist to my handcuffs. I hold onto my paper sack that contains a few letters from my mom and brothers, my Bible and the little bit of money that was given to me, and I walk through a gate. Into the building I go. I set foot into prison. It is dark, but my eyes get used to it."

Adaptation, while essential to prison survival, does not assure it. Jason's eyes adjusted quickly. Intuitively, he knew that the challenge ahead would be to discern where he could adapt — and to decide where he would not. "An officer comes and takes the cuffs and shackles and chains off. I am told to wait in line with the other guys to be processed. I wait, and eventually I reach an old man who takes inventory of all that I have. He takes my money and tells me it will be put onto my account. 'My very first account,' I think to myself — so different from what I had planned.

"Then I am in a room standing in front of three people sitting in front of a table with a bunch of papers in front of them. It's some type of hearing board. They are all sharply and nicely dressed. I am conscious of my orange jail jumpsuit. They tell me to get naked. I must not have heard them right. This time it is an order: 'Get naked,' they say. So I take off my clothes until I am in my underwear. 'All of it,' they say, so I take them off too and stand there in front of them and their hateful stares. One of them says, 'You think you're tough, don't ya?'

"I think to myself, 'Yeah, I've got to be tough to survive all of this.' I've got to be and my mantra is born: 'I am tough.' I say that out loud. And then one of them says to the others, 'He won't be tough for long,' and they all laugh. It is humiliating.

"Someone told me to hold out my arms. I couldn't even see who was talking. I know there was one rude voice. He sounded like he probably hates everybody who comes through there. He told me my number — 103335 — and told me not to forget it. Then somebody came over and pretty much looked at everything, looking for tattoos, birthmarks, scars — that kind of thing.

"They asked me my name and my charge and how much time I'd been given. They asked me, 'Did you do it?' I had no way of knowing if this was part of their job or if they were just curious or what, but it was the same at the jail. Everybody always asked that — the inmates, the guards, everybody.

"Then, an old white man, an inmate, comes to me and tells me to hold out my hands, and he pours a foul-smelling liquid into them and tells me to put it everywhere I have hair. It is delousing shampoo, he says.

"Then he points me to a shower spigot in the corner and I am to shower there in front of all of them — the board's hateful stares and now this old man's hungry-looking one. I tell him not to look at me — and I stare directly into his eyes. He bows his head and turns around and I learn then that I will survive.

"After I have showered the old man gives me a clean towel and points to a bench where some clothes are neatly folded: a white prison jumpsuit, some boxers and socks. I dry off and try to put the boxers on and I can't even get them over my hips they are so tight. The old man is looking at me again and smiling that dirty smile.

"I tell him he better get me some boxers that fit and do not play any games with me because I do not play. I was warned of people like him from the guy at the county jail — sexual predators. I tell him I am in here for murder. He asks did I really kill someone. He says that I do not look like a killer to him.

"I tell him that is what I am in here for so he better not mess with me. I wasn't lying. It does not matter that I am innocent; I begin to see that now. It works, and he gets me some boxers that fit. I soon learn that I should stop being shy about getting naked in front of people because it is nothing for an officer to tell you to take off all of your clothes for a strip search."

Entering prison is a form of death — removal from civil society — so it's fitting that a prisoners' initiation includes being stripped naked, cleaned, inspected and finally clothed in white. Prisons themselves have much in common with cemeteries. With walls and gates and rows of cells like graves, they are places set apart from normal life. Prisoners, like the dead, are expected to shed their corrupted pasts.

To leave prison — if they do — they must be legally resurrected, to begin life anew. Like many aspects of law, it reads better than it works.

Part of the entry process included a meeting with a department psychologist. "She tried to put me on some medication which I refused," Jason recalled. "My reasoning was that there wasn't anything wrong with me. The only thing I was experiencing emotionally was because of what I'd been through. There was nothing to be medicated.

"She wanted to put me on Zoloft, which was experimental at the time. She said, 'I want you to take it and tell me how you feel." She said, 'Your family has a history of mental illness and suicide.' But I'm like, 'No. I'm not suicidal in any way, shape or form.'"

Jason reasoned that if he complied with the order to take antidepressants, administrators could claim he was being treated for depression and place him in the Suicide Prevention Unit, or SPU, where he would be under closer supervision. He decided that that was not going to happen.

Before his arrest, Jason had seen the film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" starring Jack Nicholson. And already, in his short time at the Diagnostic Unit, he'd observed men from the SPU walking down the halls, doing what inmates called "the Thorazine shuffle." He didn't want Zoloft because, as he put it, "If they put me in SPU, I had no idea what could have come next."

Sure enough, members of the classification board asked Jason if he would like to stay long-term at the Diagnostic Unit, on the SPU ward. "They told me that Jessie was already there and that I would have my own cell and everything. They tried to make it sound really nice. I didn't trust them.

"They told me that if I didn't go to the SPU, their only alternative would be to send me to the Varner Unit. Then they proceeded to tell me how horrible that unit was and that if I were to go there I would not survive. They told me Varner was Gladiator School.

"It did not sound like a happy place, but I would go if I had to. I'd already heard enough about SPU to know that I did not want to go there. They were already trying to dope me up so I wouldn't be able to think clearly. I could only imagine what they would do if I were in a psyche ward.

"'No,' I said, 'you can send me to Varner if that is what it has come to. I refuse to be so doped up that I cannot even think about fighting for my freedom.'"

"Dark Spell: Surviving the Sentence" will be released early this summer. Sign up at maraleveritt.com to be notified when the book goes on sale and the mock trial video is placed online.

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Knowing that he would not be able to attend this weekend's premiere of "Devil's Knot" in Little Rock, Colin Firth spoke about his role in the film by phone from his home in London. He said he felt a bit daunted after he'd accepted the offer of his friend, Canadian director Atom Egoyan, to play the part of Ron Lax.

Firth understood that he'd be portraying the Memphis private investigator who volunteered to help the defense teams representing the three accused teens. What he did not grasp at first was how contentious the story remains.

He said, "I suddenly realized I was walking into something with which people were not only acquainted, but had opinions about — and many of these opinions were passionately held. I think people would have been forgiven for looking at me and saying, 'Who are you and why the hell would you get involved?'"

On top of that, Firth said, "The whole case was very strange and very complex." And, like the film's title, "Devil's Knot," the story was "hard to untangle."

Firth also faced the challenge of portraying a man who sees a tragedy unfold without being able to avert it. In that sense, he saw Lax, the veteran investigator, as representing many others who, over the years, have come to see in the West Memphis case tragedy compounded — without knowing how to confront it.

"When a case is so traumatic and feelings are running so high, people are going to be very, very sensitive," he said. "I quickly realized that if I had anything going for me, it was that I could cast a dispassionate eye over everything, which it seemed very few people at the time were able to do."

He likened his situation as an actor to Lax's situation after the teenagers' arrests. "If anything, Ron Lax himself came to the case as an outsider, not with any prejudgment. He was not from West Memphis. He was urban. He was not connected with the police. He didn't know any of the bereaved."

He said, "As an actor — a storyteller — my way into the film was to shadow that. Ron came in as an outsider to investigate something. He got involved for legal reasons. My reasons were different — artistic, if you like.

"Nevertheless, he found himself more and more engaged the more he became acquainted with the story. And that's how it was for me."

But the concerns Lax embodied defy Hollywood conventions. As Firth put it, "He doesn't get his man. He doesn't argue his case before a judge. He doesn't have demonstrable victories. And that troubled me in terms of film craft and storytelling. But Atom was convinced that that was important, almost from a Kafkaesque point of view."

("Kafkaesque," Kafka biographer Frederick R. Karl once said, "is when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world. You don't give up. You don't lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don't stand a chance.")

Firth concluded that what Lax represented was doubt — shrewd and committed but powerless. It could be no other way. "When you play a real person and deal with a story that affects real people," he said, "you try to play that part as honestly as possible." Looking back, he said, "I think there's something very humane and critical in the voice of Ron, because he's trying to keep doubt alive. And personally, I believe that the more you do that —the more you recognize doubt — the better chance you have of showing some truth."

Firth seemed to speak about doubt as useful both in acting and in investigations — or maybe they're similar. "Doubt does not go well with rage and revulsion," he said, "and all the things we're likely to feel when crimes are committed against children. It's very hard to be that distressed and horrified and stay with something as impassive as uncertainty.

"And that applies, not just to West Memphis. It applies continually everywhere. Whereas, if you try to be truthful, that resonates. I would like to feel the film opens up questions that might have closed in people's minds."

The actor mentioned meeting Jason Baldwin, the youngest of the West Memphis Three. "I was struck — incredibly struck," Firth said, "by his gentleness and humanity, his decency, and his apparent lack of bitterness, despite being somebody who's lost that many years in prison. I was amazed that he was able to be as compassionate as he was regarding everyone, evidently without any self-pity."

Firth hoped that viewers would find a similar sense of "decency" in the film. Speaking of the murders, he said, "Of course people want to find who did it. But it's important that we don't allow ourselves to become monstrous in the pursuit of the truth.

"I'm hoping that the film, rather than condemning the protagonists, offers some understanding of how this thing got so confused, so derailed — that it actually allows us to understand how these things can happen.

"It's not just about West Memphis, or Arkansas, or even the United States of America. It's about what happens to all people where feelings and fears are running so high. People have reflexive reactions. We presume. Our prejudices kick into play very quickly.

"Instead of demonizing the people who prosecuted Jason and Damien and Jessie, I think it's just a lot more productive if you can understand things properly. If you can see things from all sides, you actually have a better shot at bringing a case to justice."

He finds no justice in the case as it stands. "If you look at Damien, Jessie and Jason," he said, "they're a walking paradox. They're innocent people convicted of a horrific crime, who are walking free, and that can't please anybody."

Firth said he understood that the Alford plea — the deal by which the men were freed — was an attempt at compromise. "But it can't be right," he said.

"Nobody can look at this situation and think it's sorted out. If you've murdered children, you can't be walking the streets. If you haven't, you shouldn't be convicted murderers. It's a legal and logical absurdity."

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After getting his culinary training in Boulder, Colo., and the Provence region of France, Rob Nelson settled about five years ago in Bentonville and, in the summer of 2011, opened Tusk and Trotter, a snout-to-tail restaurant with a focus on charcuterie, the art of curing meats.

"Northwest Arkansas is home, I love it," said Nelson, who grew up in Hope and did his undergrad at the University of Arkansas. The area "was an untapped resource five years ago and now the explosion's happened."

The timing for Nelson couldn't have been better. Bentonville — a once sleepy Ozark town until some guy named Sam opened a five-and-dime there — has recently been getting attention for more than just its status as Walmart Stores Inc. headquarters. With the opening of world-class Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in late 2011, the hospitality industry in downtown Bentonville has boomed. The town has become a cultural destination; the Washington Post highlighted the Bentonville dining scene as its go-to spot on the 2013 "In/Out List" (sorry Charleston, S.C., you're out). The James Beard House in New York, the mecca of good eats, recently hosted a multi-course tasting event featuring only Bentonville chefs, including Nelson.

Nelson had been thinking of his concept for Tusk and Trotter — a French-style brasserie with Ozark flavors, specializing in creative pork dishes — for a while. "My favorite animal in the world is the pig, of course," he said. "We take the entire pig and show its versatility. ... I wanted to do something focused on that, but also local sustainability is also a passion of mine. I've got 25 different [local] purveyors that I use week in and week out." Nelson focuses on getting as much as possible from Arkansas or nearby — everything comes from within 200 miles. "The closer it is, the better the food tastes," he said.

Nelson trained in the art of charcuterie and whole-animal cooking with master chefs in the south of France. It's fitting that he brought this refined training to hog-crazy Arkansas.

"It's been a part of our culture since the beginning," Nelson said. "A lot of people forget — farm to table, the slow food movement — it really isn't something new to the people of Arkansas, who have been farming and ranching for generations. Now we're just trying to refine our cooking and bring it up to the next level, but still try not to stray from ... our roots."

Nelson said he aims to apply the "standards of Old World charcuterie but give it a modern Southern flair."

Nelson and other Bentonville chefs (Matthew McClure at the Hive, Case Dighero at Eleven) have come up with the name "High South" to describe their approach, giving a cultivated touch and creative flourishes to traditional Southern cooking, all with ingredients locally available in Northwest Arkansas.

"It's anything that you can do sticking with the Ozark region," Nelson said. "Lake fish and river fish — trout and walleyes — things that you can get up here. Ducks and pig, of course. All the grass-fed beef. Everything that's indigenous to Northwest Arkansas."

Tusk and Trotter's menu is an extravaganza of carnivorous decadence: pork belly cheese stix, poutine, the Hogzilla sandwich (a wild boar patty with housemade bacon, face bacon jam and boursin cheese), crispy pig ear nachos, pork tongue galette, a charcuterie board featuring alligator sausage and duck pastrami, just to name a few.

"We start with trying to figure out what's a little different, what's unique that the customer hasn't experienced yet," Nelson said. "You can go anywhere and you can get a filet, you can get a ribeye. But have you tried the hanger steak, which is from the diaphragm? Have you tried a pig's ear?"

"We try to take the odds and ends, take the odd bits of the animal and try to elevate it," he said.

The artisanal approach at Tusk and Trotter isn't limited to butchering and preparing meats in house — there are also housemade pickles, jellies and jams, cheeses, sauces and more. Behind the bar, mixologist Scott Baker makes dozens of house-infused liquors for cocktails, including six different Bloody Marys (the bacon-infused version is garnished, of course, with bacon made by Nelson; the ghost-chile infused version is astounding but recommended only for the brave; best of all is the pickle-infused, packed with sharp flavor).

On a recent visit, we sampled the risotto balls, the perfect deep-fried comfort food, and a heaping portion of housemade spicy pork rinds, served piping hot and still crackling from the grease. We also tried the lovely lemon souffle pancakes from the brunch menu and the charcuterie burger, a treat-yourself fantasy sandwich with a sausage patty, duck pate, bacon, pickled vegetables and roasted garlic-red grape cheese — all made in-house — on a perfect brioche bun made by a baker just down the road.

Our only regret was finally running out of room in our bellies. Next time we're eager to try the "lamb four ways"— Nelson uses the loin to make "lamb ham," makes a stock out of the bone for lamb stew, cures a strip of meat from the back to make lamb bacon and finishes off with lamb meatballs.

Sounds like a bravura performance: four ambitiously crafted tastings from the same animal. Of course, the important part isn't just panache and technique, which Nelson has in spades. The real test is simply making delicious food. Based on our recent visit, Nelson has that bit well covered.

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Brunch is a vague and indefinite practice, suspended restlessly between two more traditionally established mealtimes, and what dish better reflects this ambiguity than chicken and waffles? Sweet and savory, neither entirely breakfast nor lunch, the meal marks an almost psychedelic blurring of food categories, an imprecision that extends to its complicated heritage. Though clearly rooted on the soul food spectrum, the combo was popularized in 1920s Harlem and later L.A., leading food writer John T. Edge, in an interview with NPR, to call it "a Southern dish once or twice removed from the South." But as folks in Little Rock know, chicken and waffles have come home.

BOULEVARD BREAD CO.

I can highly recommend the chicken and waffles at Boulevard Bread in the Heights, but it's going to take some strategy and patience on your part. I first found them here by accident, a Sunday special scribbled on a whiteboard off to the side of the regular menu. I was shocked when they asked how I liked my egg — a very unorthodox supplement to a delicate formula — but in retrospect I endorse it. Fair warning: The waffle was a little thin; but I don't know, some people prefer that. Hot sauce was served on the side for dipping and spreading, an intelligent and compassionate move on their part; key to the success of the whole thing.

GUS'S WORLD FAMOUS

Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken dives right into the middle of one of the more polarizing debates in the chicken and waffle community, namely: bones or boneless? At Gus's, you decide. On your table, if you come here for brunch one Sunday, you'll find a small yellow menu with very few and very important options: You can have your waffle alongside two pieces of white meat, two pieces of dark meat, or three tenders. This stumped me; I figured there was no real right answer. Because I love Gus's chicken during the week, and because tenders seem like a cop-out, I went with white meat. It turns out that there is a right answer, however, and it is boneless. I spent the meal arduously disassembling a chicken breast. Great waffle.

B-SIDE

One other Sunday morning, I was shivering in the parking lot of a strip mall on Rodney Parham, looking for breakfast and not finding it, when a friend rescued me by pulling me into a dim sum restaurant called Lilly's. In the mornings, part of it serves as the diner B-Side, an important battleground in the chicken and waffle renaissance, though the only sign indicating this was written in Sharpie on printer paper. Not that it matters — the place was packed. The chicken was loosely breaded and flaky, the waffle crisp and extensive. The portions were generous, so much so that it seemed perverse to serve them on such small plates. It was a constant struggle not to spill the meal in my lap, but that seems like nitpicking. This place is the real thing.

WAFFLE WAGON

On Sundays, you can find the Waffle Wagon outside Stone's Throw Brewing, at Ninth and Rock streets, but I sought it out on a Tuesday and found it, sort of ironically, at the state Department of Health office. A particpant in the food truck festival last October, the Wagon is actually more of a nondescript trailer, but make no mistake, they do important work here. Their menu varies, but $10 chicken and waffles seems to be a staple, and so what if it's served in a box. We can't always sit around leisurely for an hour on plush leather booths drinking mimosas — some of us have to keep moving, to get out into the world. Enter the Waffle Wagon. They don't serve hot sauce on the side here, they lather it on boldly and unapologetically. Their credit card reader wasn't working when I showed up, so they asked me to just write down my card number and leave it with them. Normally that would seem like a red flag, but I trust these guys. And you should, too.

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During a debate last year in the Arkansas General Assembly over the private option, Rep. Sue Scott (R-Rogers), who voted for the policy, explained, "When I look at the numbers, I see faces with those numbers." It was a welcome reminder — the details of health care policy can be confusing (and the heated politics can be exhausting), but this is an issue with major stakes for people's lives. People like Tamara Williams, and the other Arkansans profiled in this story. 

The private option uses Medicaid funds available via the Affordable Care Act (the ACA, or Obamacare as many call it) to purchase private health insurance for low-income Arkansans. The policy is the state's unique version of Medicaid expansion, a provision in the ACA to expand coverage that was left up to the states to pursue or not. Arkansas is one of 26 states plus the District of Columbia to expand coverage, while 24 states have refused the federal money to do so.

Arkansans between the ages of 19 and 64 who make less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level (that's around $16,000 for an individual or $33,000 for a family of four) qualify for the private option. Prior to the ACA and the private option, nondisabled adults without dependent children, no matter how poor, were not eligible for Medicaid in the state. For parents, if you made more than 17 percent of FPL, your income was too high to qualify. For a family of two, making $2,675 a year was too much to qualify for Medicaid; for a family of four, $4,054. If Arkansas had chosen not to expand (or defunds the private option in the future), people who make more than 100 percent of FPL level would be eligible for subsidized insurance on the ACA's health care marketplace, but people making less than the poverty line (or, for parents, people making between 17 and 100 percent) would be out of luck — like the nearly 5 million Americans estimated to be without insurance this year because they fall into the coverage gap in states that refused to expand Medicaid.

More than 150,000 Arkansans (and counting) have gained coverage under the private option. Most beneficiaries are enrolled in plans offered by private insurance companies, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield or Ambetter (around 10 percent of the newly eligible are routed to the traditional Medicaid program because they were screened as medically needy). Beneficiaries do not have to pay anything for premiums and have very little cost-sharing. Another 40,000 Arkansans who make too much to qualify for the private option have purchased their own coverage on the marketplace created by the ACA, with 90 percent of them qualifying for subsidies made available by the ACA to help them with the cost of premiums.

A little more than four months into the private option, the Arkansas Times has been talking to people who have gained coverage to hear about their experiences. Here are some of their stories.

Tamara Williams
40, North Little Rock

For Tamara Williams, a North Little Rock mother of three, gaining health insurance came in the nick of time. Williams had her first mammogram in late February and it came back abnormal. After a follow-up and a biopsy, doctors informed her that she had invasive ductal carcinoma. She had surgery in late March and is scheduled to begin chemotherapy this month.

A year ago, Williams likely never would have gone to the doctor. "The Affordable Care Act saved my life," she said.

Prior to gaining coverage under the private option, Williams had been without health insurance for 10 years. Her kids — an 18-year-old son who has ADHD, a 17-year-old daughter who has sickle-cell anemia, and an 8-year-old son who has chronic asthma — were covered by ARKids, but Williams herself didn't have options.

She has always worked — she's been everything from a lab technician to a cosmetologist — but didn't have coverage through her jobs and made too much to qualify for the Medicaid program under the old state laws. "You have one job that doesn't have coverage, so you try to find a second job, a third job, trying to pay for insurance," she said. "If you're trying to take care of four people, you're already strapped. To figure out how to budget that in, it just wasn't possible."

Due to a pre-existing condition — hypertension — Williams wasn't able to find affordable health insurance. "Because my blood pressure was so high, insurance companies didn't want to touch me," she said. "I just had to pray that I didn't get ill."

She couldn't afford the medicine she needed to keep her blood pressure under control or the blood work she should have been getting to monitor it. She ended up running up more than $10,000 in credit card debt to pay for medical expenses. When she did have her medicine, she would take it every other day "to try to stretch it."

Eventually, she simply avoided seeking the care that she knew she needed but didn't have enough money to pay for. "It's between do I feed the kids or do I get the medicine?" she said. "I knew sometimes my pressure would be extremely high, at stroke level. I would drink vinegar and lay on my side. I taught my oldest son how to take my pulse and make sure I was OK. I told him, 'If it gets too high, just call the paramedics, it's going to be OK.' Thank God we didn't get to that point."

Williams was laid off from her job as a medical records analyst at the state hospital in July and started working full time for $11 an hour as an IPA guide, one of the federally funded outreach workers charged with helping people navigate new options under the Affordable Care Act.

She loves the work, she said, because she loves helping people and is able to share her own experiences to convey the value of health insurance. "I've met people who had to file bankruptcy just because of medical bills," she said. "I'm thinking, wow, and I thought I had it bad. My heart goes out to them."

Williams herself got covered under Ambetter and got her card the first of February. "It has been wonderful," she said. "For the first time in 10 years, I actually have normal blood pressure. I'm actually getting treated, and I don't have to wait and figure out how I'm going to pay for it. The health care system without insurance — you're going through and you're scared and you can't afford things. Sometimes you feel like you're less than human. Now I'm not worried. They asked about insurance and I had my card to give them. I know my insurance is there. If I do get a bill it's not something that's going to take me 10 years to pay off."

Williams is not out of the woods with the cancer but she is feeling upbeat.

"You kind of feel like you're getting the VIP treatment because it was like boom, boom, boom, let's get it out," she said. "I was like, wow, insurance really does mean something. You have good days and bad days, but I'm optimistic. It's mind over matter. If you hope for the best, you have better outcomes."

Williams is hoping that she'll still be able to work four days a week during her chemo treatment.

"That's me being optimistic but I can't be down more than a day," she said. "Life goes on, I've still gotta take care of my kids, I've still gotta work." Williams will likely have to look for a new job soon; the future of the guides program is in flux after the legislature banned the state from appropriating funds for outreach for the Affordable Care Act in the new fiscal year in July.

"I'll be out hitting the pavement every day," she said. "I've always showed my children you have to get out and work. I'll go dig ditches to feed my kids before I stand in line and wait for the government to hand me something." Williams added that she believes that health care is different. She doesn't consider the private option a "handout."

"I think health is something you need," she said. "How can you go to work if you're not healthy? Now that I have my medicine, I have the energy to get out here and do whatever it is I need to do to support my family."

Williams said that she was "sweating bullets" as the legislature debated whether to reauthorize the private option during this year's fiscal session. "It was like getting the breath knocked out of you. I honestly feel like the private option saved my life. Had I not had insurance, I don't know what I would have done. What do people do who find out they've got cancer and don't have insurance?"

"I feel grateful," Wiliams said. "It's about time."

Fetara Amos
22, Little Rock

Fetara Amos broke down crying when an outreach worker helped her sign up for health coverage.

"I actually cried in front of this man," she said. "It felt amazing. I felt like my prayers had been answered."

Amos, 22, hadn't had health insurance since she was 18.

"I had a very serious situation going on that needed to be taken care of," she said. "They were telling me that damage could really be done to me."

Doctors first found tumors and scar tissue on Amos' thyroid in 2008. It had been manageable until recently, when she began experiencing severe pain that at times made it difficult to walk. In December she was taken to the emergency room when she passed out after intense abdominal pain.

"They told me I needed surgery or it could get even worse," Amos said. Amos and her husband, Azel, are hoping to have a second child, but doctors told her that the surgery would be necessary before they could.

Without insurance, Amos had no idea how she would be able to get the treatment she needed. She couldn't even afford the cost of a follow-up visit.

Amos is only able to work part time right now, around 25 hours a week, making $10 an hour as a nursing assistant. Her husband, 21, works at a fast-food restaurant making minimum wage; he's hoping to go to school to pursue a career in asbestos removal.

They make just enough to get by but had been making too much to qualify for Medicaid under the old laws in Arkansas prior to the enactment of the Affordable Care Act and the private option.

When she was uninsured, Amos, who also has asthma and severe allergies, avoided going to the doctor altogether. "I never had the money," she said.

"It changed my life in a tremendous way, because it was so hard for people like me and my husband to get coverage and get insurance before this law," Amos said. "I can't tell you what I would have done if I didn't get this insurance."

For now they have been routed to the traditional Medicaid program but may eventually transition to private plans. Once she was covered, Amos immediately went to the doctor, and they were able to give her medication to manage her pain and set up an appointment for the surgery she needs.

"It felt like a ton of weight was lifted off of my chest," Amos said. "I felt relieved. We could finally get coverage and be able to take care of ourselves."

Amos is having her surgery this week to get the tumors removed. She is hopeful the surgery will allow her to safely have another child. "I pray to God it does," she said. "I've been blessed this far, and He'll keep on blessing me."

Irene Warren
56, Madison

Irene Warren has been without health insurance for around 15 years. Currently unemployed, she has been unable to hold a steady job because of health problems.

"I got congestive heart failure," Warren said. "I got liver disease. I got kidney disease. Arthritis. Gout. I got it all.

"I didn't go to the doctor when I should have gone to the doctor because I didn't have insurance," she said. "I couldn't afford it. Why would I go? I didn't have the money to buy my medications or to pay for the visit."

Things came to a head in 2012, when she had a stroke.

"I did what I could do," she said. She pointed to a stack of papers a foot high. "That's medical bills. I still owe a lot. Then you're just shamed to go back to the doctor because they're going to tell you that you still owe. It hurt, you know? It was a hurting feeling."

In December, Beatrice Malone, an outreach worker who attends Madison Light Baptist Church with Warren, spoke to the congregation about new options under the Affordable Care Act.

"That day in church, that was a blessing right there," Warren said. "I didn't know nothing about it until she got up there that Sunday."

Warren qualified for the private option and is now covered by Blue Cross Blue Shield. In January, Warren went to the doctor for a checkup with her new coverage. "It felt good," she said. "Before, if you go up there and you don't have no insurance, you just feel like, I don't have nothing." Warren is now able to get the medication she needs.

"It changed my whole way of thinking," Warren said. "It uplifted my life. If something happened to me now and I go to feeling bad, I can go to the doctor."

What would Warren do if the private option policy went away?

"Just like I did before," she said. "Depend on the good Lord and make it the best way I can. Keep the faith and it's a brighter day ahead."

Warren said that for the first time since her stroke, she has been feeling better. "I know it's going to be some of them days coming. But at least now I can have something to fall back on to try to help me move back to the light."

Charles Lott
27, Little Rock

Charles Lott works two jobs, one working with developmentally disabled men and another in a maintenance and groundskeeping position at a school in Maumelle, making a total of around $30,000 a year to support his family of four. His wife, Kaitlin, has been unable to work because of health issues. "She should be on disability, but we haven't been able to get her on it," Lott said.

Lott himself hadn't had health insurance for five years before gaining coverage under the private option this year. Complications from Kaitlin's diabetes have led to multiple hospitalizations, so they were desperate to keep her covered.

"She was always declined for private insurance," Lott said. "They'd hear she was Type 1 diabetic and they'd basically laugh her off the phone."

After Lott was laid off from a job with coverage five years ago, they kept his wife on COBRA continuation coverage (a federal health insurance program for employees who leave or lose jobs). Trying to keep up with expensive COBRA premiums they couldn't afford, plus out-of-pocket costs on top of that, they maxed out credit cards and eventually couldn't make ends meet, leaving them no choice but to file for bankruptcy.

They got back on their feet, but medical costs continued to be a challenge. Only after staying on COBRA for the full 18 months was Kaitlin able to qualify for the Comprehensive Health Insurance Pool (CHIP), a state-run health insurance program for high-risk Arkansans that was discontinued this year after the private option Medicaid expansion began. While CHIP gave her catastrophic coverage, the Lotts were still paying more than $5,000 a year (around $3,200 in premiums plus a $1,000 deductible and a $1,000 out-of-pocket maximum).

The Lotts' finances were once again at a breaking point until they were able to sign up for coverage through the private option expansion this year (Lott is now covered by Ambetter; his wife was deemed medically needy and routed to the traditional Medicaid program).

"Even working two jobs, we're still not quite able to make ends meet," Lott said. "But if we still had the $5,200 in medical costs that we had last year and previous years, we'd have to give up our house. We'd have to move in with family and we don't have anyone with enough space for us, so it could have ended up splitting up the family."

In addition to helping his family's budget, Lott, who has a number of physical ailments himself, also now has the peace of mind that comes with having coverage of his own. "It was stressful [when I was uninsured]," he said. "If something major happened, there would have been nothing my family could do."

Whereas before it was simply financially impossible for him to go to the doctor, this year he has been able to get treatment when he's sick. "I've been in for strep throat, and I had to go in for a concern about a whooping cough outbreak," he said. "Both times they got me medicated. I wouldn't have been able to do that before." Lott, whose children are 6 and 4 years old, said the new coverage options under the Affordable Care Act have "affected my ability to be a parent because it's making me able to make healthier choices for myself so I can be there better for my kids. It's providing very needed assistance to the families that need it the most.

"I'm thankful that we have it," Lott said. "I don't want to think about what would have happened to my family without it. It would have destroyed my family."

Dena Kemp
39, Little Rock

"My whole world has changed today," said Dena Kemp last week, on the day that she found out she is covered by Ambetter under the private option. She had first tried to sign up in January but faced frustrating difficulties with the enrollment process.

Kemp has Crohn's disease, a severe and incurable immune-related disease that causes extreme diarrhea, vomiting and abdominal pain, as well as a wide variety of additional symptoms outside the gastrointestinal tract. She has been without insurance for more than two years, after a short-term medical leave from a job at a Walmart warehouse ended and she was too sick to go back to work.

Thus began a vicious cycle: Kemp couldn't afford the care she needed to manage the disease. When things got really bad, she would be forced to go to the emergency room and be hospitalized (at her most sick, sometimes twice a month). She was working waitressing and janitorial jobs, but every time she got too sick, that meant lost hours of work — and the frequent hospitalizations made it hard to convince employers to keep her on. Meanwhile, the medical bills would pile up. Kemp said she owes more than $100,000. "Some they've written off, some they're still trying to collect on," she said.

Twice, Kemp and her 8-year-old daughter have had to stay in a homeless shelter when they couldn't make ends meet. "If I don't have my regular meds, I can't work," she said. "I couldn't pay my bills when I was sick. Not having insurance — that's the main reason we ended up in a shelter."

Kemp has managed to keep a waitressing job at a Mexican restaurant since last August, where she works around 30 hours and makes around $250 a week. Her hours have been cut and they no longer schedule her on busy nights because of her hospitalizations.

Now that she has coverage, Kemp is feeling hopeful.

"I would only go to the ER if I was dying," she said of her years without insurance. "I couldn't get treatment. They would give me enough nausea, anti-diarrhea and pain medicine for two or three days. Now, if I have my monthly meds, I can still go to work, I won't lose my job. Now, I can be a mom, I'll be able to take care of my daughter without help. I can finish school. It's a whole different world."

Kemp is attending the Arkansas College of Barbering and is aiming to become a licensed barber in September. She has a job waiting for her at GoodFellas barbershop.

In worst-case scenarios, Crohn's can lead to colon cancer or a ruptured intestine, potentially fatal. It's been an endless source of stress for Kemp (which itself can exacerbate the disease) trying to manage the disease without the basic care she needed. Now that she's covered, she is setting up an appointment with a doctor, eager to find out about a new medicine that came out last year ("there's no way I could have afforded it before," she said), as well as a GI specialist, who wouldn't even see her without insurance. "I should have been to a GI doctor and gotten a colonoscopy four months ago," she said, when the Crohn's flared up and became active, "but I couldn't. Now I can. Now I have peace of mind."

"For people like me, I don't make the type of money to go buy my own insurance," Kemp said. "For me to have affordable health care, it's like life and death."

***

"They told me I was on the verge of almost having a stroke when they put me on high blood pressure medicine. So I needed it and I needed it bad. Without health insurance, I never would have gone to the doctor to even find that out or to be able to get medication. They would probably be putting flowers on me right now, in my opinion."
--Herbert Denson, 57, of Little Rock, currently working and staying at Our House homeless shelter, had never had insurance in his life before this year.

"I was lost my job in January. Before, when I've been unemployed, there wasn't anything like this. You had to have insurance through your employment or you didn't have it. I'm on blood pressure medication and my prescription had run out. Once I got covered, I was able to go to the same doctor I had before and get my prescription filled. It's lifted a huge burden knowing that even though I'm looking for jobs, I don't have to wait until I have employment to go to the doctor."
--Paula Shatzer of Alexander, a 42-year-old single mother of a 2-year-old daughter, was laid off earlier this year from her job at a tax resolution company. She is now looking for a new job.

"For the most part, I've been super lucky to be really healthy. I was starting to have a feeling of, wow, I'm in my 40s — I couldn't afford to do preventative care without health insurance. I couldn't do things like get mammograms and things you're supposed to be doing at my age. I do construction work and that was always in the back of my mind — what if I fall off a roof or cut my finger off? Through the power of Facebook, I know that just about everybody else I know thinks the ACA was a giant failure. Some people I know who went through healthcare.gov had a way harder time, but here I'm having this great experience. I used the state website and everything went fine, super flawless, no glitches whatsoever. I'm not the person who's super pro-Obama, but I really feel like a politician actually did something that affected my life in a positive way. A good thing happened in government. That's shocking. I'm covered under Blue Cross. There's nothing on that card that says I'm poor. I feel more comfortable using it." I've gone to the dermatologist to get checked for skin cancer, had a gynecology appointment, and had a checkup, where they ran some blood tests and found some problems with my liver. I hadn't been in a doctor's office in so long.  
--Shelley Jackson, 42, of Newton County, is a self-employed construction worker who hadn't had insurance in 20 years.

"I've had a pre-existing condition, Type 1 diabetes, for 20 years. Because of the ACA, I could stay on my mom's plan until I was 26. That was the first huge way that the law affected me. I just turned 26 last October, so I was going to be without insurance for the first time in my life. Because of the private option, I was able to sign up for a plan this year. Like most people, I couldn't get through healthcare.gov at first, but I needed health insurance, I knew I was going to sign up for it. So I was really persistent and finally got it to work for me. I qualified for the private option and signed up with Ambetter. One vial of insulin, which would last me about a week, would cost more than $200. With my coverage, it was $6. It's things like that that make me so grateful that I qualify for insurance that covers my pre-existing condition and really is keeping me alive. It's really reassuring knowing that I can take care of myself the way that I need to. I wouldn't have been able to go to graduate school and pursue my professional path without health insurance. Financially, it wouldn't have been feasible. I wouldn't have been able to afford all of the medicine and the care that I need to keep myself healthy."
--Mara D'Amico of Little Rock, 26, is graduating this spring with a Masters in Public Service at the Clinton School of Public Service.

“I found out that I had arthritis in my spine and two large cysts in my uterus and I needed a hysterectomy. I had to keep putting off the surgery. I couldn’t afford it. I was to the point with the cyst and my spine, I could barely get up. [The private option] was a stopgap. I appreciate it so much. I was so sick and my body was going down fast. I was able to get good health care and I was able to use my same doctors that I had with my old insurance. That’s what the government is supposed to be there for. I am a taxpaying citizen. I’ve been working since I was 13. It’s so abused that it’s just ridiculous but it should be there for the workers. Obamacare, with all the changes, I think it’s made insurance so high [in price]. It scares the hell out of me with Obamacare, you never know what they’re going to pull. But I appreciate that Arkansas did this – it was very much there for me when I needed it.”
--Renita Askew, 52, of Conway, was laid off from her job at New Wave AT&T in December, where she had been covered by her employer. Her husband has a new job and she is planning to transition to his coverage.

“My husband said, ‘You can’t keep living like this.’ I said, ‘Well, we can’t afford what it would cost to take care of me. We can’t do this.’ He said, ‘I’ve been praying about this. We can do something.’ We had been reading about the health care law, but we didn’t think it would affect us. I had been told no so much I just knew that wouldn’t work for me. Ms. Jackie [an IPA guide, one of the federally funded ACA outreach workers] at our church is a trusted name in this community and she helped me. I’m still thanking her, and thanking my husband. It’s a godsend when you think all hope is lost and then hope arrives.”
--Lovie Wofford-Phillips, 48, lives with her husband James Wofford in Brinkley. Currently unemployed, the former schoolteacher suffers from neuropathy — nerve damage to her feet and hands as a complication of diabetes.

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SCHEDULE

Thursday, May 15

10 a.m.: LRFFYouth Films. 90 min. Ron Robinson.

11:30 a.m. "A Night in Old Mexico," dir. Emillio Aragon. Narrative feature. 103 min. The Rep.

12:10 p.m. "Happy Valley," dir. Amir Bar-Lev attending. Documentary feature. 100 min. Ron Robinson Theater.

12:30 p.m. "Killing Time," dir. Jaap van Hoewijk. Cinematic nonfiction feature. 54 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

12:30 p.m. World Shorts 1: "Pieces of Life." Six short films: "The Bravest, The Boldest," dir. Moon Molson; "Looms," dirs. Trevor Funk, Nathan Funk and Morgan Funk; "Lambing Season," dir. Jeannie Donohoe; "The King of Size," dir. Peter Dowd; "Ghosts on the Mountain," dir. Jared Jakins; "June July August," dir. Jason Affolder. 120 min. The Joint.

1:45 p.m. "Valley Inn," dirs. Kim Swink and Chris Spencer. Arkansas-made narrative feature. 119 min. The Rep.

2 p.m. "To Kill a Man," dir. Alejandro Fernandez Almendras. Narrative feature. 82 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

2:15 p.m. "Ne Me Quitte Pas," dirs. Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden. Cinematic nonfiction. 107 min. Ron Robinson.

3 p.m. World Shorts 2: "Cinematic Stories." Six documentary shorts: "Cinephilia," dir. Leah Chen Baker; "The Spymaster," dir. Patrick Tapu; "Last Shot," dir. Greg Popp; "Phil Collins and the Wild Frontier," dir. Ben Powell; "Lomax," dir. Jesse Kreitzer; "A Stitch in Time (for $9.99)," dir. Mu Sun. 120 min. The Joint.

4 p.m. "The Heart Machine," dir. Zachary Wigon. Narrative feature. 85 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

4:30 p.m.: "Living Stars," dirs. Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat. Cinematic nonfiction. 63 min. The Rep.

4:30 p.m. "Fishtail," dir. Andrew Renzi. Cinematic nonfiction. 61 min. Ron Robinson.

6 p.m. "Five Star," dir. Keith Miller. Narrative feature. 88 min. The Rep.

6 p.m. "Little Accidents," dir. Sarah Colangelo. Narrative feature. 105 min. Ron Robinson.

6 p.m. "The Notorious Mr. Bout," dirs. Tony Gerber and Maxim Pozdorovkin. Documentary feature. 90 min. Clinton School.

6 p.m. World Shorts 3: "Askew." Six documentary shorts: "Where the Red Fox Lies," dir. Jeff Ray; "Songs From the Outside," dir. Michael Van Ostade; "The Cyclist," dir. Christopher Bryan; "Minimus," dir. Jonathan Hopkins; "Cherry Pop: The Story of the World's Fanciest Cat," dir. Kareem Tabsch; "Tin & Tina," dir. Rubin Stein. 120 min. The Joint.

6:30 p.m. "E-Team," dirs. Katy Chevigny and Ross Kauffman. Documentary feature. 88 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

8:30 p.m. "Two Step," dir. Alex R. Johnson. Narrative feature. 93 min. The Rep.

8:30 p.m. "Stop the Pounding Heart," dir. Roberto Minervini. Cinematic nonfiction. 101 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

8:30 p.m. "Sympathy Pains," dir. Joe Dull. Arkansas-made narrative feature. 90 min. The Joint.

9:15 p.m. "Metropolis," dir. Fritz Lang. Narrative feature accompanied by a live score from Sound of the Mountain. 70 min. Ron Robinson.

9:30 p.m. LRFF Hootenanny. Crawfish boil with music by Brother Andy and His Big Damn Mouth. 180 min. WT Bubba's.

Friday, May 16

12:45 p.m. "Manny," dirs. Leon Gast and Ryan Moore. Documentary feature. 106 min. Ron Robinson Theater.

1:30 p.m. "Little Accidents," dir. Sarah Colangelo. Narrative feature. 105 min. The Rep.

1:30 p.m. "Ne Me Quitte Pas," dirs. Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden. Cinematic nonfiction. 107 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

1:30 p.m. World Shorts 5: "Multifariousness." Six short films: "Sketch," dir. Stephen T. Barton; "X-Ray Man," dir. Kerri Yost; "Breaking Night," dir. Yolanda Ross; "Yearbook," dir. Bernardo Britto; "Master Muscles," dir. Efren Hernandez; "Pity," dir. John Pata; "One Armed Man," dir. Tim Guinee. 120 min. The Joint.

3:30 p.m. "Kumiko: The Treasure Hunter," dirs. David and Nathan Zellner. Narrative feature. 105 min. Ron Robinson.

4 p.m. "Rich Hill," dirs. Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo. Cinematic nonfiction. 91 min. The Rep.

4 p.m. "Man Shot Dead," dir. Taylor Feltner. Arkansas-made documentary feature. 73 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

4 p.m. World Shorts 6: "Our Time." Six short films: "The Usual," dir. Dawn Higginbotham; "Families Are Forever," dir. Vivian Kleiman; "Confusion Through Sand," dir. Danny Madden; "Distance," dir. Aimee Long; "Little Black Fishes," dir. Azra Deniz Okyay; "Broke," dir. Benham Jones. 120 min. The Joint.

4:30 p.m. Filmmaker Welcome Reception. 120 min. Heifer International.

6 p.m. "Big Significant Things," dir. Bryan Reisberg. Narrative feature. 85 min. Ron Robinson.

6 p.m. "The Notorious Mr. Bout," dirs. Tony Gerber and Maxim Pozdorovkin. Documentary feature. 90 min. The Rep.

6 p.m. "Actress," dir. Robert Greene. Cinematic nonfiction. 86 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

6:30 p.m. World Shorts 4: "Mental and Physical." Six short films: "By the Sea," dir. Robert Machoian; "Le Plongeon," dir. Delphine Le Courtois; "Strike: The Greatest Bowling Story Ever Told," dir. Joey Daoud; "Insomniacs," dir. Charles Chintzer Lai; "Dog Food," dir. Brian Crano; "The Lipstick Stain," dir. Dagny Looper; "Into the Silent Sea," dir. Andrej Landin. 120 min. The Joint.

8:30 p.m. "Fort Tilden," dirs. Sarah Violet and Charles Rodgers. Narrative feature. 85 min. Ron Robinson.

8:30 p.m. "Manakamana," dirs. Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez. Cinematic nonfiction. 118 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

8:30 p.m. "Five Star," dir. Keith Miller. Narrative feature. 88 min. The Rep.

9 p.m. "The Night the Blackbirds Fell," dir. Brian Campbell and Will Scott. Documentary feature. 40 min. The Joint.

9 p.m. Junction Bridge Party. 120 min. The Junction Bridge.

11 p.m. Argenta Place Rooftop VIP Party. 180 min.

Saturday, May 17

10:45 a.m. "Killing Time," dir. Jaap van Hoewijk. Cinematic nonfiction. 54 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

10:45 a.m. "Fishtail," dir. Andrew Renzi. Cinematic nonfiction. 61 min. Ron Robinson.

10:45 a.m. Arkansas Shorts 5: "Lessons in Loss." Four short films: "The Shoes of Hayim," dir. Kenn Woodard; "A Matter of Honor," dir. David Bogard; "Sidearoadia," dir. Bruce Hutchinson; "13 Pieces of the Universe," dir. Tara Sheffer. 65 min. The Joint.

10:45 a.m. World Shorts 6: "Our Time." Six short films. "The Usual," dir. Dawn Higginbotham; "Families Are Forever," dir. Vivian Kleiman; "Confusion Through Sand," dir. Danny Madden; "Distance," dir. Aimee Long; "Little Black Fishes," dir. Azra Deniz Okyay; "Broke," dir. Benham Jones. 120 min.

12:15 p.m. "Manakamana," dirs. Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez. Cinematic nonfiction. 118 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

12:30 p.m. "Point and Shoot," dir. Marshall Curry. Documentary feature. 82 min. Clinton School.

12:30 p.m. "Big Significant Things," dir. Bryan Reisberg. Narrative feature. 85 min. Ron Robinson.

12:30 p.m. "Sympathy Pains," dir. Joe Dull. Arkansas-made narrative feature. 90 min. The Joint.

12:45 p.m. "Manny," dirs. Leon Gast and Ryan Moore. Documentary feature. 106 min. The Rep.

1:15 p.m. World Shorts 4: "Mental and Physical." Six short films: "By the Sea," dir. Robert Machoian; "Le Plongeon," dir. Delphine Le Courtois; "Strike: The Greatest Bowling Story Ever Told," dir. Joey Daoud; "Insomniacs," dir. Charles Chintzer Lai; "Dog Food," dir. Brian Crano; "The Lipstick Stain," dir. Dagny Looper; "Into the Silent Sea," dir. Andrej Landin. 120 min.

2:30 p.m. The Future of Film Tech. Panel discussion with digital media creator Brant Collins and John Steward, physics lab manager at Hendrix College. 45 min. Ron Robinson.

3 p.m. Arkansas Shorts 1: "Adventure Time." Five short films: "In Borrowed Time," dir. Dustin Barnes; "Stuck," dir. John Hockaday; "Spontaneous History Lesson By Evan," dir. Douglas Bankston; "Citizen Noir," dir. Michael Ferrara; "Undercover," dir. Marcel Guadron. 65 min. The Joint.

3:15 p.m. "Life After Death," dir. Joe Callander. Cinematic nonfiction. 74 min. Clinton School.

3:15 p.m. "Korengal," dir. Sebastian Junger. Documentary feature. 90 min. Ron Robinson.

3:30 p.m. "Two Step," dir. Alex R. Johnson. Narrative feature. 93 min. The Rep.

3:45 p.m. World Shorts 5: "Multifariousness." Six short films. "Sketch," dir. Stephen T. Barton; "X-Ray Man," dir. Kerri Yost; "Breaking Night," dir. Yolanda Ross; "Yearbook," dir. Bernardo Britto; "Master Muscles," dir. Efren Hernandez; "Pity," dir. John Pata; "One Armed Man," dir. Tim Guinee. 120 min. Stickyz.

5 p.m. Arkansas Shorts 6: "Unbroken Spirits." Four short films: "A Broken Road to Hope," dir. Nathan Willis; "After the Tsunami," dir. Larry Foley; "True Athlete," dir. Tyler West; "Blowing Smoke," dir. Mike Holifield. 76 min. The Joint.

5:45 p.m. "Stop the Pounding Heart," dir. Roberto Minervini. Cinematic nonfiction. 101 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

5:45 p.m. "Virunga," dir. Orlando von Einsiedel. Documentary feature. 96 min. Clinton School.

5:50 p.m. "The Overnighters," dir. Jesse Moss. Cinematic nonfiction. 100 min. Ron Robinson.

6 p.m. "I Believe in Unicorns," dir. Leah Meyerhoff. Narrative feature. 80 min. The Rep.

6:15 p.m. World Shorts 2: "Cinematic Stories." Six documentary shorts: "Cinephilia," dir. Leah Chen Baker; "The Spymaster," dir. Patrick Tapu; "Last Shot," dir. Greg Popp; "Phil Collins and the Wild Frontier," dir. Ben Powell; "Lomax," dir. Jesse Kreitzer; "A Stitch in Time (for $9.99)," dir. Mu Sun. 120 min. Stickyz.

7:15 p.m. "The Night the Blackbirds Fell," dirs. Brian Campbell and Will Scott. Documentary feature. 40 min. The Joint.

8:30 p.m. "The Case Against 8," dirs. Ben Cotner and Ryan White. Documentary feature. 109 min. The Rep.

8:30 p.m. "Buzzard," dir. Joel Potrykus. Narrative feature. 97 min. Ron Robinson.

8:45 p.m. Mockingbird Don't Screen riffs on "The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant." Comedians Mockingbird Don't Screen poke fun at terrible movie. 87 min. The Joint.

9 p.m. "Living Stars," dirs. Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat. Cinematic nonfiction, 63 min. Stickyz.

10:30 p.m. ACE Glass Warehouse Party. 405 Shall Ave., Little Rock. 180 min.

Sunday, May 18

10:30 a.m. "Rich Hill," dirs. Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo. Cinematic nonfiction. 91 min. The Rep.

10:30 a.m. "Man Shot Dead," dir. Taylor Feltner. Arkansas-made documentary feature. 73 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

10:30 a.m. "Before I Disappear," dir. Shawn Christensen. Narrative feature. 99 min. Ron Robinson.

11 a.m. Arkansas Shorts 2: "Altered States." Five short films. "Origin," dir. Caleb Fanning; "Strangers," dir. Justin Nickels; "Mal," dirs. Joshua Harrison and Michael Armstrong; "An Ode to Angeline," dir. Sarah Jones, "Collection Day," dir. Scott Eggleston. 68 min. The Joint.

Noon. And the "Star" of the Documentary Is ... Panel discussion on cinematic nonfiction moderated by Robert Greene and featuring Brandy Burre, Tim and Sara Carlson and Joe Callender. 40 min. Ron Robinson.

1 p.m. "Point and Shoot," dir. Marshall Curry. Documentary feature. 82 min. Ron Robinson.

1 p.m. "I Believe in Unicorns," dir. Leah Meyerhoff. Narrative feature. 80 min. The Rep. 1 p.m. Arkansas Shorts 4: "Face to Face." Four short films: "Watch the Rhine," dir. Taylor Dan Lucas; "Homefront," dir. Eric White; "Man of God," dir. Matthew Aughtry; "Sacred Hearts, Holy Souls," dir. Mark Thiedeman. 70 min. The Joint.

1 p.m. "Buzzard," dir. Joel Potrykus. Narrative feature. 97 min. Historic Arkansas Musuem.

1 p.m. World Shorts 3: "Askew." Six documentary shorts: "Where the Red Fox Lies," dir. Jeff Ray; "Songs from the Outside," dir. Michael Van Ostade; "The Cyclist," dir. Christopher Bryan; "Minimus," dir. Jonathan Hopkins; "Cherry Pop: The Story of the World's Fanciest Cat," dir. Kareem Tabsch; "Tin & Tina," dir. Rubin Stein. 120 min. Stickyz.

3 p.m. Arkansas Shorts 3: "Arkansas Up Close." Four short films: "The 21 Mile Marathon," dir. Tyler Tarver; "An Uncertain Bill of Health," dir. Eric White; "Flokati Films Presents Red Octopus," Johnnie Brannon; "Glass Eyes of Locus Bayou," dir. Simon Mercer. 67 min. The Joint.

3:30 p.m. "Life After Death," dir. Joe Callander. Cinematic nonfiction. 74 min. Historic Arkansas Museum.

3:30 p.m. "Virunga," dir. Orlando von Einsiedel. Documentary feature. 96 min. Ron Robinson.

3:30 p.m. "Fort Tilden," dirs. Sarah Violet and Charles Rodgers. Narrative feature. 85 min. Ron Robinson.

3:30 p.m. World Shorts 1: "Pieces of Life." Six short films: "The Bravest, The Boldest," dir. Moon Molson; "Looms," dirs. Trevor Funk, Nathan Funk and Morgan Funk; "Lambing Season," dir. Jeannie Donohoe; "The King of Size," dir. Peter Dowd; "Ghosts on the Mountain," dir. Jared Jakins; "June July August," dir. Jason Affolder. 120 min. Stickyz.

6 p.m. Little Rock Film Festival 2014 Awards Gala. 120 min. Old State House Museum.

8:15 p.m. "Devil's Knot," dir. Atom Egoyan. Narrative feature. 114 min. Ron Robinson.

10:30 p.m. Crush Wine Bar Wrap Party. 120 min. Crush Wine Bar.

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'Actress'
Directed by Robert Greene

Devotees to HBO's "The Wire" will remember Brandy Burre as Theresa D'Agostino, the icy political consultant who beds McNulty and helps Carcetti become mayor in seasons three and four. That's the last you've seen of her on-screen. She got pregnant while on "The Wire" and retreated from acting to suburban Beacon, N.Y., where she and her partner, restaurateur Tim Reinke, have been raising two children. In "Actress," filmmaker Robert Greene, who's shown twice previously at the festival —"Kati with an I" in 2011 and "Fake It So Real" in 2013 — tracks Burre through her day-to-day life in Beacon. Greene programmed this year's slate of cinematic nonfiction at the festival, an adventurous collection of films that don't fit neatly into traditional cinematic categories, and though "Actress" isn't included in the collection, it clearly belongs. Greene set out to find out "what happens when you film an actor in an observational documentary," he told the Times in an interview. "Is it a fiction film, or is it a nonfiction film?" The degree of collaboration between Burre and Greene and the extent to which we're seeing Burre, the actress, in the role of Burre, mother and domestic partner, will be fun to talk about with Burre and Greene in the post-screening discussion. Regardless of where you land, it's an arresting character study that captures how corrosive domestic mundanity can be when dreams are deferred. Sound like something that hits too close to home? That it's beautifully shot should help it go down easier. 8:15 p.m. Wednesday, Ron Robinson. 6 p.m. Friday, Historic Arkansas Museum. LM.

'Happy Valley'
Directed by Amir Bar-Lev

The Penn State sexual abuse scandal broke in 2011 and was one of those horrific, news-cycle-dominating events that seemed only to expand, threatening (and arguably succeeding) to drag down an entire college administration in its wake. Most of us were desperate to look away, but documentary filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev, award-winning director of "The Tillman Story" and "My Kid Could Paint That," opted to look closer, traveling to State College, Pa. (the surrounding area nicknamed Happy Valley) and immersing himself in the minutiae of the crisis and the rabid world of Penn State football. "Happy Valley" isn't looking for a new scoop, and it doesn't offer viewers an easy out — it's a meditative and careful film, an examination of the structures and cultures both literal and abstract that allowed for the abuses to go undiscovered. 12:30 p.m. Thursday, Ron Robinson Theater. WS

'Fishtail'
Directed by Andrew Renzi

"Fishtail" is a Western, and a cowboy movie, but there's no gunslinging or noisy action. The documentary, part of the festival's cinematic nonfiction programming, depicts the daily grind of ranching work, following a pair of cowboys during calving season at the 2,000-acre Fishtail Basin Ranch in southern Montana. The cowboys make small talk, horse around with their kids, and do their work. But they are minor figures in the film, which is a love letter to the land and the lifestyle of the ranches of the American West. Shot on 16mm film, the photography is rustic and breathtaking: brown earth, staggering mountains, big sky. The film depicts the cowboys at their daily tasks — gathering timber, transporting hay, tagging and banding the animals, castrating bull calves. In case you're missing the poetry in all this, director Andrew Renzi offers up haunting music, voiceovers and languid cinematography — this is a documentary deeply committed to its vibe. The soundtrack features acoustic guitars and strings with the same cinematic sweep and crackling, dusty feel as the cinematography (suggested soundtrack title: "Explosions in the Big Sky"). The actor Harry Dean Stanton does the voiceover, popping up from time to time to recite Rick Bass and Walt Whitman, or gently sing "Home on the Range." As clouds roll and horses roam, Stanton intones, "Here I am alone and sad like a leaf on the wind." Does it all get a bit goopy? Well, yes. But damn, Harry Dean Stanton's voice. It's like honky-tonk Shakespeare. It sounds like God talking, or maybe just Jimmie Rodgers. The glacial pacing, sun-drenched portraits and meandering poetic voiceovers inevitably call Malick to mind. If Malick's great theme is The Fall, "Fishtail" seems to argue that Eden's still right here on Earth. 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Ron Robinson. 10:45 a.m. Saturday, Ron Robinson. DR

'Little Accidents'
Directed by Sara Colangelo

Starring two Arkansans — Little Rock-born Josh Lucas and Briggsville native Jacob Lofland, who played one of the boys in Jeff Nichols' Arkansas-shot feature "Mud"—"Little Accidents" is an unflinching look at grief, guilt and the way we try to make ourselves whole in the wake of tragedy, set in what appears to be District 12 from "The Hunger Games." Boyd Holbrook does standout work as Amos, the mentally and physically wounded sole survivor of a mine accident that took the lives of 10 West Virginia coal miners. Amos' testimony and spotty recollection of the events leading up to the accident soon finds him pulled in all directions as an investigation ramps up. With the town in the midst of wallowing in grief and blame, the lens soon settles on young Owen, played by Lofland, a poor and sensitive boy who lost his father in the mine disaster, but is forced to carry on while trying to help his harried mother (Chloe Sevigny) raise her other son, James (Beau Wright), who has Down Syndrome. Owen soon finds himself at the secret heart of another tragedy: the disappearance and long search for JT (Travis Tope), a corporate mining exec's son who disappeared in the weeks after the mine collapse, following a spate of anti-bigwig violence. JT's mother, Diana (Elizabeth Banks), destroyed by her son's disappearance and feeling pushed away by her grieving husband, Bill (Lucas), seeks comfort in the arms of an unlikely lover, and it all eventually rushes to some kind of head. If all this sounds bleak, it is. But coal mining and the pain of loss ain't beanbag, friend, and the film handles both with the gravity it should. Shot in the real-life mining town of Beckley, W.Va., the color scheme of "Little Accidents" is almost exactly the blue/black of the coal dust-stained coveralls the miners wear, and the only redemption to be had is when characters are escaping into things they probably shouldn't do, from cheating on a spouse to sneaking into a pitch-black mine shaft. Still, if you don't mind a plot as heavy as 16 tons and whadaya get, it's a good film. Not excellent, but good — a subtle character piece with fine performances from most of the people on screen. Sure, it's not the feel-good hit of the year, but "Little Accidents" does speak with a harsh kind of reverence about the gritty lives of those who do the hard, dangerous jobs no one else wants, while making Amos, Owen, Diana and all the rest more than hayseed saints or sad-sack caricatures. 6 p.m. Thursday, Ron Robinson Theater; 1:30 p.m. Friday, The Rep. DK

'Five Star'
Directed by Keith Miller

Driving through Brooklyn, James "Primo" Grant tells the story of missing his son's birth because he was locked up. Primo, a bulky, tattooed man with a shaved head and a thick black beard, is shot in closeup during his monologue, which runs more than three minutes. His voice is measured, at times lyrical: "I can't recall tearing so hard in my life ... I teared like a baby. Because I missed the most important part of my son's life and that was his coming. And on that day, I promised my kids, I swore to my son and I swore to my daughter: I'll never leave you again." The thoughtful gangster — the tenderness and the violence, the rage and the calculating patience — is a familiar archetype in film and television. The difference in "Five Star" is that Primo is a real-life gang member playing a dramatized version of himself (he caused a bit of a stir at the Tribeca Film Festival when he told the audience during a Q&A that he remains an active member of the Bloods street gang; he'll be in Little Rock for the festival, too). Keith Miller's previous film, "Pine Hill" used a chance real-life encounter Miller had with another Brooklyn resident, Shannon Harper, to build a deeply personal fictionalized portrait of Harper, who played himself. "Five Star" finds similar emotional power in the spaces between fiction and documentary. The film depicts the story of John (played by one of the few professional actors in the cast), a cocky, rail-thin 15-year-old whose father was once a gang leader before he was shot and killed. Despite pimples and peach fuzz, John wants to be a man, and Primo — who was close to John's father — offers to mentor him and give him work in his criminal operation. John is torn between questions about his father's death, allegiance to Primo, a budding romance, and his mother's fears that he will meet the same fate as his father. The narrative can be a bit pat, but the film is at its best lingering on the naturalistic moments happening in and around the story — the bustle of Brooklynites in the background, John's goofy tenderness in puppy love, Primo playing with his kids. The film uses the real-life James "Primo" Grant's real-life family — his girlfriend and his four kids — and these are the scenes that most reward the fiction-documentary blend, as we see the joy and the ache in Primo as he tries to envision a secure future for his family. The film is perhaps a bit too enamored with Primo's O.G. wisdom at times, but Primo himself (the character, the actor, the man) is a tour de force. You can't take your eyes off him. 6 p.m. Thursday and 8:30 p.m. Friday, The Rep. DR

'The Night the Blackbirds Fell'
Directed by Brian Campbell and Will Scott

On the first day of 2011, Arkansans awoke from ringing in the New Year to learn that the apocalypse was nigh. Or at least that's how the mystical-paranoid among us saw it (while others of us made jokes to similar effect). Thousands of blackbirds had fallen out of the sky in Beebe and some 100,000 drum fish had washed up along the banks of the Arkansas River near Ozark, and for some time, officials couldn't definitively explain why either had happened. Naturally, national media descended. Every talking head from Jon Stewart to sitcom-star-turned-crackpot Kirk Cameron weighed in. Paranoid websites and Facebook pages emerged to offer explanations. In this 40-minute documentary, Campbell and Scott create a character that Gustav Carlson illustrates — a vaguely stoner-ish and conspiratorial college student working on a thesis project on the animal deaths — who serves as our guide through the media circus and conspiracy theories. That creation allows the filmmakers to indulge in wild conjecture, something the film's appropriately playful tone makes easy to forgive. Most crucially, they find fantastic Arkansas characters, one of whom tells them that blackbirds falling out of the sky in Beebe was "the second most Googled news items in the history of Googlin'."9 p.m. Friday, The Joint. 7:15 p.m. Saturday, The Joint. LM

'Point and Shoot'
Directed by Marshall Curry

"Point and Shoot," the new film by the Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker Marshall Curry ("Street Fight,""If a Tree Falls"), is the story of the impulsive 27-year-old ex-pat, Matthew VanDyke, who took a 35,000-mile motorcycle trip through the Middle East that led to his ultimately joining the Libyan revolution, where he was captured and imprisoned for six months. Fortunately, VanDyke thought to bring a camera. The film, which won Best Documentary at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, combines VanDyke's footage with animation, and New York magazine calls it "as much a coming-of-age story and an exploration on the ever-evolving nature of filmmaking as it is a riveting tale of war and conflict."12:30 p.m. Saturday, Clinton School of Public Service. 1 p.m. Sunday, Ron Robinson Theater. WS

'Korengal'
Directed by Sebastian Junger

"Restrepo," the 2010 Academy Award-nominated documentary from Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington, was a towering achievement. The film depicted an Army platoon during their 15-month deployment in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan. Perhaps the most intimate portrait of war ever shot, "Restrepo" captured both the lives of the young men (in some cases, boys, really) on deployment and followed them in real-time battle scenes so embedded in the action that it was almost excruciating to watch. We are distanced from the wars our nation fights — and often from our fellow citizens who fight them. Sitting down and watching a movie can't change that, of course, but Junger and Hetherington labored to create the most up-close depiction imaginable of the platoon and their experiences in the Korengal Valley. That kind of reporting is dangerous work, and Hetherington was killed by shrapnel while covering the 2011 Libyan civil war. Junger had so much material from "Restrepo" (they shot over 150 hours of footage during their year with the platoon) that he decided to make a second film, "Korengal," which makes its world premiere at the Little Rock Film Festival. Junger has said that while "Restrepo" aimed to capture the experience of war, "Korengal" aims for understanding. It features more post-war interview footage than "Restrepo" and is structured thematically rather than following the chronological narrative that "Restrepo" did. The original film is a more powerful work, but "Korengal" is an important coda, a deeper look at these Americans tasked with navigating the horror and the boredom and the rush of war, far from home. "Korengal" is excellent as a stand-alone film, but "Restrepo" is on Netflix streaming, so you might consider a double feature. Michael Cunningham and Jason Mace, two soldiers from the platoon, will be on hand after the screening for a Q & A. 3:15 p.m. Saturday, Ron Robinson Theater. DR

'The Overnighters'
Directed by Jesse Moss

Midway through "The Overnighters," Jesse Moss' harrowing look at a conservative North Dakota town in the grips of an oil job boom, the local pastor at the center of the film recommends that one of the men looking for work cut his hair. "Did Jesus have short hair?" the man asks, and the pastor responds patiently, "Jesus didn't have our neighbors." This is the crux of the documentary, which begins slowly and earnestly, and becomes gradually messier and more uncomfortable as it also becomes more beautiful and visually striking. It's a film about class, about work and especially about fear — the fear that results from a sudden collision of values and tax brackets — and there's no question of it ending well. 5:50 p.m. Saturday, Ron Robinson Theater. WS

'The Case Against 8'
Directed by Ryan White and Ben Cotner

Hear that? That's the sound of a whole lot of nothing terrible to report happening in the wake of gay and lesbian couples by the hundreds being married earlier this week at four county courthouses in Arkansas after Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza struck down the state's ban on same-sex marriage. That's right, the milk didn't curdle, plagues of frogs didn't drop from the sky and hetero marriages were as great or God-awful as they had been before. Considering the big doings and plentiful conservative outrage in Arkansas over the issue, it's an excellent time to take in "The Case Against 8," a documentary about the seemingly mismatched team of determined, passionate people — including Arkansan Chad Griffin, who now heads the Human Rights Campaign — who took on the five-year quest to get California's Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage overturned. Watching attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies, who stood on opposite sides during the landmark Bush v. Gore arguments before the Supreme Court in 2000, battle arm in arm for marriage equality gets at the soul of what it is to be an attorney who sees through the political smoke around hot-button issues, striving to reach the place where justice — blind to Republican versus Democrat — still stands. Like 1993's similarly excellent "The War Room," you go into "The Case Against 8" knowing basically how it's all going to turn out, but getting there still manages to be a nail-biting ride. 8:30 p.m. Saturday at The Rep.DK

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Brent and Craig Renaud, the documentary filmmakers who cofounded the Little Rock Film Festival with Jamie Moses and Owen Brainard in 2007, have built the LRFF based on their experience traveling the festival circuit. From the beginning, they made showing visiting filmmakers a good time a top priority. Treat a filmmaker right, they knew from experience, and he'll tell his friends, who'll want to screen their visionary works down the line. The secret sauce in Little Rock's rapid rise in stature in the festival world might be Southern hospitality (free booze, lodging and Bill Clinton wind-up dolls haven't hurt, either).

This year, they've got something even more appealing to offer filmmakers and attendees alike — something few to no other film festivals can boast: a brand spankin' new, state-of-the-art 315-seat theater in the heart of downtown. The Ron Robinson Theater represents the realization of a dream the Renauds talked about at the inception of the festival, but one they never, in their wildest dreams, expected to happen in eight years, said Craig Renaud Monday night in remarks opening the festival. That it did owes to the Central Arkansas Library System's visionary leader, Bobby Roberts, whose foresight and political skill kept the library's funding independent from the wavering fortunes of local and state government. Other cities struggle to buy new books; our library system builds the nicest theater in town.

Since it opened in January, the $2.8 million theater has been tied closely with the Little Rock Film Festival. The LRFF keeps offices in the building's third floor and longtime LRFF managing director Angie Stoffer is theater manager. Concerts, lectures, meetings and all sorts of other functions fill the theater's calendar, but this week it's all movies, all the time.

Another dream of the Renauds and other organizers came to pass last year, but is happening in a more convenient way this go-round: The festival has become a walkable, downtown event. The 375-seat Arkansas Repertory Theatre returns as a venue, as do the Historic Arkansas Museum's more intimate theater and the Clinton School of Public Service's Sturgis Hall. New this year is The Joint, the North Little Rock venue and comedy club, and Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, the River Market area restaurant and venue directly across from Ron Robinson. With few exceptions, The Joint and Stickyz will screen the same short films at different times, so for those not crossing the river, the longest hike — from the Clinton School to The Rep — is no more than 10 or 12 blocks.

After honing a niche by creating a cash award for the best Southern film screening in the festival, the LRFF is adding a new wrinkle this year — a selection of films branded "cinematic nonfiction." Robert Greene, a filmmaker and critic who screened films at the LRFF in 2011 and 2013, programmed the series. He's long been writing about (and making) films that push beyond conventional notions of documentary film and often blur the line between reportage and fiction.

Of course, filmmakers — going all the way back to Robert Flaherty is "Nanook of the North" in 1922 — have long made movies that don't adhere to strict conventions. But with the likes of Joshua Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing" getting attention in recent years, Brent Renaud said the time was right to highlight hybrid films. Greene calls them "cinematic treats."

Greene said that a lot of documentarians view conveying information as their No. 1 goal. The films in his cinematic nonfiction block "are less about bringing information across ... and more about creating a moving cinematic experience," he said.

The series includes everything from "Killing Time," a feature about a family that is waiting for a family member to be executed in Texas that's shot direct-cinema style with no music or effects; to "Fishtail," a Western tone poem featuring narration by Harry Dean Stanton (more on page 17), to "Manakamana," a collection of 11 uncut shots of people riding a cable car to a Hindu temple in Nepal.

"If you watch the film with an audience in a theater, it's a pretty transcendent thing," Greene said of "Manakamana.""It's very moving and funny... It's experimental, but I think a lot of the best art house films are experimental. The trick is, when you go in and watch a fiction film, you know there's control over the material, so you're expect something to happen. With documentary, you need to look for other things. These films are cinematic experiences but they're also dealing with reality in different ways."

For those looking to adjust their reality in other ways, the festival is full of parties as usual. At 9:30 p.m. Thursday at W.T. Bubba's, the delightfully filthy, religion-haunted rawkers of Brother Andy and His Big Damn Mouth perform amidst a crawfish boil. Reliable party-starter DJ/VJ G-force will be projecting videos that correspond with the jams he's playing on paneling that'll be draped across the Junction Bridge, which is the site of Friday's party, beginning at 9 p.m. Joshua from Amasa Hines and Velvet Kente is bound to make the people sweat with what he does on the ones and twos at a dance party at the Ace Glass Warehouse, 405 Shall Ave. (near Heifer International) beginning at 10:30 p.m. Saturday. On Sunday, the Arkansas Times hosts the closing awards gala. This year, it starts at 6 p.m. and takes place at the Old State House Museum, largely on the picturesque front lawn, as long as the weather cooperates.

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Marriage equality arrived in Arkansas at 4:51 p.m. Friday when Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza filed his ruling striking down both a 2004 constitutional amendment and a 1997 statute that ban same-sex marriage in Arkansas.

He cited, as many other judges have, the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down a portion of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Piazza, who'd invalidated the statute aimed at preventing gay couples for adopting, wrote for the ages, with lofty appeals to higher purpose and law. He concluded by invoking the federal court ruling that ended discrimination in marriage against mixed-race couples:

It has been over forty years since Mildred Loving was given the right to marry the person of her choice. The hatred and fears have long since vanished and she and her husband lived full lives together; so it will be for the same-sex couples. It is time to let that beacon of freedom shine brighter on all our brothers and sisters. We will be stronger for it.

Then all hell and happiness broke loose. Perhaps by design, Piazza filed as the Pulaski County clerk's office closed for the week. That turned attention to Eureka Springs, where the western district clerk's office for Carroll County is open on Saturday morning to accommodate people who flock to the Victorian village in the Ozarks for a weekend wedding.

Carroll County was not one of the six named defendants in the lawsuit. It technically had room to deny applicants. And that was the original decision, to shut down the office entirely rather than plunge into that uncharted water. Eventually, Deputy Clerk Jane Osborn, under the pressure of an unhappy crowd, relented. By 1 p.m., the office's closing hour, 15 couples had received marriage licenses and promptly had wedding ceremonies. The images of jubilant couples went 'round the world.

By that afternoon, county officials gathered in a conference call monitored by the Arkansas Times to plot strategy for coping with the ruling. In a discussion led in significant part by some lawyers who in their private lives have distinguished themselves in the cause of evangelical Christian activities (the base for strongest anti-gay-marriage sentiment), county clerks got this message: Only the six named defendants had any liability concerns in continuing to refuse same-sex couples and even those counties could claim some minor technicalities as excuses. While Piazza made it clear it was unconstitutional for clerks to deny licenses to same-sex couples, he failed to specifically list all the many Arkansas statutes that refer to marriage as being between a man and woman. A slim reed to deny service, but Lonoke, Saline, White and Conway counties grasped it.

Pulaski Clerk Larry Crane fixed his software to remove gender references (another glitch that many counties wanted to use to resist) and staffed up for the onslaught that appeared on the county's doorstep Monday morning, along with national civil rights leaders and the attorneys, Cheryl Maples and Jack Wagoner, who'd fought for months with an unwieldy lawsuit and dozens of plaintiffs seeking to be married or otherwise legally married couples seeking full rights in Arkansas. Pulaski County issued licenses to 169 same-sex couples on Monday alone. Washington County also accepted same-sex couples and issued licenses to two dozen. Saline County did a handful before again stopping. Carroll County, which made history Saturday, on Monday decided to stop following the guidance of Piazza's ruling. The clerk in tiny Marion County decided on her own to honor the ruling, but then stopped on Tuesday. One license was issued in Yellville on Monday.

Attorney General Dustin McDaniel immediately appealed Piazza's ruling. He'll continue to bow to the Republican legislative majority (and, he says, his constitutional duty) to defend a law that he has said he personally disagrees with. He also asked for a stay of the circuit court ruling to avoid confusion while the Arkansas Supreme Court hears the appeal.

The Supreme Court said it would take arguments on a stay through noon Tuesday. As we went to press, the timing of a decision was unknown. Meanwhile, the interim gave time for same-sex couples to continue to exercise a newfound right.

Will the Supreme Court overturn Piazza? If it does, will those several hundred newlyweds see their new legal rights jerked away? These and many other questions, including political ramifications, lie ahead. But the happy faces of completed families — several of which we profile below — formed yet another brief of its own for changing public opinion. Judges watch TV, too.

Kristin Seaton and Jennifer Rambo

Seaton, 27, and Rambo, 26, of Fort Smith, became the first same-sex couple to be legally married in Arkansas in Eureka Springs on Saturday. So far, married life is "awesome," Seaton said.

"I feel like we're stress-free about it all," Rambo said. "We don't have to worry about our future family now, or kids. We're taken care of. We have equal rights. It's a relief, honestly."

Seaton and Rambo came to the courthouse in Little Rock on Monday to "support our fellow Arkansans."

On Saturday, they initially didn't realize that they were the first legally married same-sex couple in Arkansas, and in the South. "We didn't even know at first, we thought we were just the first in line [in Eureka Springs]," Seaton said. "It still hasn't sunk in."

"I'm still in shock," Rambo said. "Last night we went home and got a Redbox, turned off the phones and kind of soaked it in for a little bit. It's a great feeling."

Seaton and Rambo, who have been together four years, said they were "keeping high hopes" about the future legal battles ahead.

The timing of Judge Piazza's ruling worked out perfectly for the couple. Seaton proposed in March and they were planning their ceremony for October. "Now it's going to be the real thing," Rambo said. "It's indescribable."

Seaton proposed while they were hiking in Devil's Den State Park. "It was actually her birthday weekend, and I had a whole weekend planned for her," Rambo said. "We stayed in a cabin in Devil's Den, and she surprised me. It was one of the first places we had went after we met: Yellow Rock Trail. We were climbing up to the top, and the next thing you know, it started raining a little bit. She got down on one knee. It caught me off guard. It was the biggest surprise and the best surprise that's ever happened to me."

"I knew it was meant to be when it rained," Seaton said. "The rain was her and her father's thing, and her dad had recently passed. Once it started sprinkling, I was like, 'This is him letting us know he's here.' It was bittersweet. It still gives me chills right now, thinking about it."

Are they going to be together forever?

"Forever and ever," Rambo said.

"Definitely," Seaton said. "We're old-fashioned and traditional about that, believe it or not."

—David Ramsey and David Koon

Zeek Taylor and Dick Titus

Artist Zeek Taylor and retired electrician Dick Titus, partners for 42 years, had a not-so-funny thing happen on the way to the altar: A Eureka Springs deputy city clerk refused to issue them a marriage license.

Taylor, 67, and Titus, 65, were among dozens of same-sex couples who'd arrived at Eureka's Carroll County Courthouse before sunup Saturday to get a license (Eureka, marriage capital of Arkansas, alone among Arkansas cities issues marriage licenses from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday to accommodate wedding tourism). But deputy clerk Lana Gordon announced to the crowd from the entry landing that she would not issue same-sex licenses because she had no authority from the county clerk to do so.

Taylor confronted Gordon, showing her Pulaski Circuit Judge Chris Piazza's Friday ruling and telling her she was now legally required to issue licenses. When she said no, Taylor turned to the crowd and said, "Get in line, we're going in." After they entered, Gordon locked herself in her office, Taylor said. "I can't believe I was such a bad ass," he said. "I'm an introvert really." Gordon then summoned Eureka police to the courthouse and officers ushered out the 50 or 60 people there hoping to get the first same-sex licenses in Arkansas.

The disappointed couples, some of them weeping, were headed back to their cars or already gone when the officers reappeared 10 minutes later and told them a different deputy clerk would issue the licenses. Jane Osborn "was so gracious," Taylor said, "a hero to us all."

Fearful of later glitches, Taylor and Titus abandoned plans to have a garden wedding back at the house and were married immediately after they got their license — the first issued to a male couple in Arkansas — by former Eureka Springs Mayor Beau Satori in an alcove at the courthouse. After pledging their love —"you shall not walk alone," they told each other — Taylor and Titus became husband and husband and filed their certificate of marriage with the deputy clerk.

"Even though I am an eternal optimist," Taylor said, "at my age I was thinking it was not going to happen in my lifetime in any Southern state." But with the legal challenges before Arkansas courts, Taylor and Titus, who'd been thinking of going to Iowa, "got our hopes up enough that we decided to hold out" to be married in their hometown, among friends.

On Sunday, Taylor said, "We woke up ... and sort of laughed. We've been together for 42 years. Nothing has changed ... except we have been part of a milestone for civil rights. We've been part of a movement that stands for love. You know?" Things have changed, however: As legally married, he and Titus now have the same rights heterosexual spouses enjoy, such as the right to visit one another in a hospital, property rights and other benefits. "That has really given us a sense of relief, that we are protected."

—Leslie Newell Peacock

Susan Barr and Shelly Butler

Susan Barr and Shelly Butler of Dallas were the first same-sex couple to obtain a license at the Pulaski County Courthouse Monday morning, and were eventually the first same-sex couple to be legally married in Pulaski County, once the paperwork was finalized. They've been together for 29 years. Butler, who is from Hope, is in a wheelchair. Their entering through the wheelchair-accessible east entrance of the courthouse Monday was a blessing in disguise that landed them at the head of the line. Butler was in Arkansas visiting her mother for the Mother's Day weekend on Saturday when she heard about Piazza's ruling. She immediately got in the car, drove to Texas, picked up Barr and some clothes at their home in Dallas — where same-sex marriages are still not recognized — and drove back to Arkansas.

Asked what the word "married" will add to their relationship, given their long, long commitment to one another, Butler said, "Everything. Everything. It's a long time coming. It's something we've wanted to do for many years, and it's finally a reality. We couldn't be happier... I don't think it'll necessarily change our relationship other than the official recognition from society. It's just going to feel correct, I think."

"It's nice that kids growing up now won't have to hide who they are," Barr replied, looking out at the crowded hallway outside the clerk's office, teeming with happy, young same-sex couples Monday morning.

"Yes," Butler said. "They'll be able to choose the partner of their choice and marry them."

—David Koon

Randy and Gary Eddy-McCain

"I'm a southern gospel fan, so I can't think of anything better than 'I Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now,'" said Randy Eddy-McCain, pastor of Open Door Community Church in Sherwood and a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit challenging Arkansas's ban on same-sex marriage, in a rally organized by the Human Rights Campaign outside the Pulaski County Courthouse on Monday.

"When it comes to marriage, I have a great heritage lived out before me by my parents," Randy said. "They raised me to respect the institution of marriage. They showed me by example how to do it right. They were together for 54 years before they were parted by my dad's death in 2000. My parents taught me that you find the person that God has for you and you commit your life to them. You cherish and love that person in the good times and the bad, until death parts you."

Randy said that he'd found that person in his husband, Gary, who he married in Central Park in 2012. They've been a couple since 1991.

"I've committed my life to him," Randy said of Gary. "I cherish him and thank God for this wonderful, rich experience. My parents called this commitment and so do we. I have been made a better citizen, a better follower of Jesus Christ, a better father to our son, and a better man because of the love that I share with Gary.

"Because of Judge Piazza's right and fair ruling on Friday, mine and Gary's marriage is a now legal right here in this state where I was born and raised. We are blissfully happy today. I have never been more proud to be an Arkansan."

—David Ramsey

James Paulus and Christopher Shelton

Shelton, 25, and Paulus, 26, went to high school together in England (Lonoke County), where they still live. They were Boy Scouts together. They reconnected after school and became a couple.

"Seven years together," Shelton said. "Seven years strong. To the rest of our lives now."

"This is something we've waited a long time for and never thought we'd see in this lifetime," Paulus said.

Shelton said he hoped that "everybody comes to their senses and realizes that we're all equal."

"No matter what the outcome of this case, whether it's appealed or stayed, it doesn't matter, we're married, that's all that matters," Paulus said.

Shelton, gripping his marriage certificate and weeping, agreed: "It doesn't matter what anybody says now, I don't care. We're married."

Paulus said that the marriage showed that "at least someone in the state of Arkansas higher-ups cares about human equality. ... We're all equal and we all deserve the same treatment. That's what this means." Paulus and Shelton said that it was very important to be able to wed in their home state. "We just never thought we'd see the day," Paulus said.

—David Ramsey

Shane Frazier and Curtis Chatham

Frazier and Chatham have lived in Little Rock for the past 12 years and have been together for 12 and a half. Their 4-year-old son, Cory, was there with them at the courthouse Monday to watch his dads get married, the boy all smiles and wearing a smart little bow tie half the size of the ones sported by his fathers. He came into their lives two years ago. He will grow up in a world where bigotry against gays and lesbians is rapidly drying up and blowing off across the wastes of history, dying off, dying out. His children may well grow up never having heard the slurs against gays their grandfathers surely knew when they were children themselves.

Monday's lesson for Cory, Frazier said, was to love everyone. "It's not our place to judge anyone," Frazier said. "If what you're doing doesn't impact or hurt someone else, leave people alone."

Frazier said he would challenge anyone to show him how his getting married Monday has harmed anyone by sunrise Tuesday. "Tomorrow, when you wake up, ask yourself: Our being married legally and being afforded the rights everyone else has, did it truly change anything for anyone other than us? No one else lost their rights. No marriages failed because of ours succeeding. So I really don't know what people are afraid of."

They decided to get legally wed for the protections a marriage certificate will afford them, but Frazier was clearly married to Chatham long before the state issued them a piece of paper. They met through mutual friends and fell in love — the same old story that's been played out forever among couples both gay and straight. He and Chatham are on their third home together. They're the beneficiaries of each other's wills and life insurance policies. They've long held a joint bank account. They both wear wedding rings, and have lived through five dogs. Monday night, Cory and his fathers would go home as if nothing had changed. Meals would be cooked. Garbage would be carried out. Plates would be washed and dried. Somebody, Frazier said, would still have to do the laundry. The same as anyone. No one harmed. No one wounded.

"It's our boring life," Frazier said. "Our boring life we love."

—David Koon

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Hours: 6 p.m.-11 p.m. Friday, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Saturday, 1 p.m.-11 p.m. Sunday

Admission: $20 in advance for a 3-day pass, $35 on the website & $40 at the gate for a 3-day pass, children 10 & under are admitted free with a paid adult admission. That ticket price not only gets you into the festival for 3 days, but into every concert each day. All patrons must have an admission wristband. Tickets are sold at Walgreens for $20 for a 3-day pass (while supplies last). Tickets will be exchanged at the Admission Gates for a wristband.

Parking/public transportation: For $4 ($3 with a non-perishable food item to benefit the Arkansas Foodbank) roundtrip, you can ride the Riverfest Shuttle from Riverfest bus stops located in Little Rock on the east side of War Memorial Stadium/AT&T Field at the corner of West Markham and Fair Park (near the Little Rock Zoo) or in North Little Rock at the parking lot at Lakewood Middle School, 2300 Lakeview Road (behind Target on McCain). The War Memorial shuttle will deliver and pick up at the Main Gateway in Little Rock; the North Little Rock shuttle will deliver and pick up at the Clinton Presidential Center Gateway at Third and Kumpuris streets. There is no charge for the return trip. Most shuttles are wheelchair accessible.

Purchases: RiverMoney is the festival currency and is non-refundable. RiverMoney must be used for all festival purchases except souvenir items and some artwork. Checks are not accepted. RiverMoney may be purchased at any Arvest RiverBank located throughout the festival grounds.

What not to bring: Coolers, containers, cans, food or glass bottles, laser pointers, camelbacks, audio recording devices, professional photography equipment, cameras with detachable lenses, video recorders, skateboards, bicycles, roller blades, motorized vehicles of any type, large cane umbrellas or umbrellas with a point, concealed weapons of any type. All bags/backpacks will be subject to a security search.

First aid: Riverfest has two first aid stations on site sponsored by St. Vincent Health System: one located near the amphitheater and one at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock.

Riverfest Recycles: Riverfest Recycles encourages festivalgoers to recycle plastic bottles and aluminum cans, which are typically just discarded. Festivalgoers can stop by the recycling tent, located on the walkway behind the Museum Center between the First Security Amphitheater and the Clinton Library, and pick up a recycling bag. While enjoying Riverfest, attendees are encouraged to fill their recycling bags with at least 20 recyclable items and return it to the Recycling Tent for a chance to win a prize. With each full bag returned to the Recycling Tent, attendees earn a chance to spin the prize wheel. Prizes on the wheel include T-shirts, hats, corndogs, and many more fun prizes, including a few premium prizes. In addition to collecting recyclables, all festivalgoers are asked to make use of the numerous recycling containers located throughout the park. After hours, the Riverfest recycling committee and volunteers, along with the Little Rock Parks and Recreation Department, will retrieve cans and plastic bottles from recycling containers, and any cans that may not have made it to the containers.

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COORS LIGHT/ ARKANSAS FEDERAL CREDIT UNION STAGE

(FIRST SECURITY AMPHITHEATER)

FRIDAY 5/23

6:30 p.m. Goose

8 p.m. Big Dam Horns

9:30 p.m. Chicago

SATURDAY 5/24

11:30 a.m. Rock & Stroll Band Winner

12:45 p.m. Carnie Barkers

2:15 p.m. Charlotte Taylor & Gypsy Rain

3:45 p.m. FreeVerse

5:15 p.m. Magnolia Sons

6:45 p.m. Big Piph & Tomorrow Maybe

8 p.m. Salt-N-Pepa

9:45 p.m. CeeLo Green

SUNDAY 5/25

2 p.m. Beckham Brothers

3:15 p.m. Barrett Baber

4:45 p.m. Andy Frasco

6:15 p.m. Earl & Them

7:45 p.m. The Wallflowers

9 p.m. First Security Fireworks Display

9:30 p.m. The Fray

BUD LIGHT STAGE

(CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL CENTER)

FRIDAY 5/23

6:30 p.m. Elise Davis

8 p.m. Easton Corbin

9:30 p.m. Lee Brice

SATURDAY 5/24

1 p.m. Twelve Tone Elevator

2:15 p.m. Mad Nomad

3:30 p.m. Iron Tongue

4:45 p.m. Steepwater

6:15 p.m. Robert Randolph and The Family Band

8:15 p.m. Buckcherry

9:45 p.m. Three Days Grace

SUNDAY 5/25

1:45 p.m. Blane Howard 9:45 p.m. Hank Williams, Jr.

3:15 p.m. Luke Williams

4:45 p.m. Lucious Spiller Band

6:15 p.m. Clare Dunn

7:45 p.m. Jamey Johnson

9 p.m. First Security Fireworks Display

STICKYZ MUSIC STAGE

(CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL CENTER)

FRIDAY 5/23

6:45 p.m. The 1 oz. Jig

8:15 p.m. Muck Sticky

9 p.m. Big Brown

9:45 p.m. Grandtheft

SATURDAY 5/24

12:30 p.m. Brown Soul Shoes

1:45 p.m. Coyote Union

3 p.m. Jim Mize

4:15 p.m. Grace Askew

5:30 p.m. Quaker City Night Hawks

6:45 p.m. Mulehead

8:15 p.m. Jonathan Tyler

9:45 p.m. Cody Canada and The Departed

SUNDAY 5/25

1:30 p.m. Midwest Caravan

2:45 p.m. Canopy Climbers

4 p.m. SW/MM/NG

5:15 p.m. Knox Hamilton

6:30 p.m. The Tontons

8 p.m. Diarrhea Planet

9 p.m. First Security Fireworks Display

10 p.m. Surfer Blood

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At this year's Riverfest, the colossal live music showcase and all-around cultural spectacle mounted every Memorial Day weekend in downtown Little Rock, there will be fire-eaters, East African acrobats and Hank Williams Jr. There will be face-painting and a rock wall, a fleet of food trucks and a dog circus. CeeLo Green will be performing, as will Salt-N-Pepa and Chicago and Buckcherry. There will obviously be fireworks.

It is the festival's 37th consecutive year, and DeAnna Korte's 10th as its executive director. "It really comes down now to Mother Nature," Korte told the Times in an interview on the eve of the event's set-up. "She really wields the hand. We can plan and do our part to make sure everything's good, but then Mother Nature will decide how the weekend goes. You can't control it, you just have to say a prayer and hope the weather holds out."

The trucks bearing tents arrived last Thursday, May 15, followed by the Little Rock Parks and Recreation Department, who prepared the festival area and shipped in more equipment. The grounds were wired for electricity, and the vendors started moving in on Monday. But as Korte explains, this is just the culmination of a process that began a year ago. "Myself, I'm already thinking about next year," she says. "I think that's what makes the event a success every year, the planning never stops."

It is thanks to a combination of "Southern hospitality" and a "good reputation in the festival industry," Korte says, that Riverfest is able to book artists of CeeLo's and Chicago's caliber, a particularly difficult proposition given the desirability of Memorial Day weekend for big events. But aside from the lineup of celebrity performers, a list that also includes groups like The Fray, Three Days Grace, The Wallflowers and Lee Brice, Riverfest also marks one of the biggest local music platforms of the year, a rare opportunity to see Arkansas favorites like Big Piph, Mulehead, Iron Tongue and Jim Mize on a huge scale.

Moreover, Korte emphasizes, "it's not just about the music." Parents and grandparents are honored guests here, and kids are at a special advantage. The Family Stage, in Heifer Village, will feature the Jesse White Tumbling Team, an iconic Chicago institution since 1959, and the Kenya Safari Acrobats, who jump through hoops, narrowly avoid all manner of flaming objects and contort themselves in fantastical displays of imaginative athletic prowess — all to a Benga beat. The Yarnell's Kidzone Stage will host a range of all-ages attractions (ventriloquists, ice cream eating contests, kazoos), as will the Deltic Timber Kidzone area (animal-themed arts and crafts, toddler drum circles, bubbles).

There will be a 5K "fun run" downtown (8 a.m. Saturday), a beer and wine tasting at the River Market Pavilions (5:30 p.m. Thursday), a bag toss at Heifer International that costs $100 (the grand prize is $1,500), a poker run and bike show for the leather vest set (10 a.m. Saturday) and, as Korte reminded us, "Everyone loves a Ferris wheel," so there's one of those, too. Darren McFadden will be on hand signing autographs, and we've already mentioned fireworks, but again: fireworks.

The festival also features a dizzying, curiously extensive number of dog-related activities, from Jonathan Offi's "World Famous" team of "canine athletes" (rescue dogs with an impressive repertoire of tricks and stunts, performing every day of the event) to the Crown Championship of the Super Retriever Series, essentially a diving event for dogs, who are persuaded to repeatedly leap into a swimming pool for our amusement. Also don't miss the well-titled "'Cirque du Pup' Pooch Parade" Saturday morning at 9:30, which will be followed by the "Weenie Dog Derby." Don't be thrown by the name, either: As Korte explained, "We don't discriminate, so any short-legged dog can participate." And she means it. According to the Riverfest website, last year's winner was a Pomeranian.

"We're opening Arkansas and Little Rock up to a lot of people who may not have had another reason to come down here," Korte said, and at this they've already succeeded, selling tickets in 30 different states (and as far away as Toronto). "It's the usual stress," she said, musing on the enormity of the enterprise facing her and her team. "I think one of the amazing things is that it takes 10 days to set up, and then it's all going to come down in one. When you come back to work on Tuesday, you won't even be able to tell that we were here."WS

FRIDAY 5/23

EASTON CORBIN
8 p.m., Bud Light Stage
(Clinton Presidential Center)

Riverfest has served as a launching pad of sorts for some of the now bigger names in country music. Remember when an unknown Carrie Underwood performed on the Main Stage? Jason Aldean has made a few visits. There are plenty more. Easton Corbin may be that next country music star you can say you saw at Riverfest. He signed his first record contract at age 27 in 2009 and one year later had two No. 1 country hits, "A Little More Country Than That" and "Roll With It." Corbin followed that up with the album "All Over the Road" in late 2012, and that record spawned two more singles for the Florida native. The TV show "Hee Haw" was Corbin's initial inspiration, and he was fortunate enough to get guitar lessons from session musician Pee Wee Melton when he was 14. Not long after that, he was landing music festival slots. When Nashville took notice, it put him on tour with Brad Paisley. Corbin has a third studio album due out this year, "Clockwork."JH

LEE BRICE
9:30 p.m., Bud Light Stage
(Clinton Presidential Center)

Lee Brice has paid his dues over his 34 years to get his chance at being a Nashville hitter, and he made the most of it in 2012 with his first No. 1 single, "A Woman Like You." Before that, his "Love Like Crazy" was Billboard's Top Country Song of 2010 and charted for 56 weeks on the Hot Country Songs list. Brice followed up "A Woman Like You" with chart-toppers "Hard to Love" and "I Drive Your Truck," all off his second album. His writing work with Garth Brooks, Adam Gregory, the Eli Young Band and Tim McGraw has led to singles that also bolstered his growing rep in Nashville. Brice (like McGraw or Trace Adkins) looks like a football player or someone who could serve as his own security; it was an arm injury suffered playing college football at Clemson (he was a long-snapper) that ended his athletic career and turned him toward music. He had already been writing his own songs on guitar or piano since he was a kid, though, and he'd developed his voice singing in church. Turns out football's loss was country's gain. JH

CHICAGO
9:30 p.m., Coors Light / Arkansas Federal Credit Union Stage
(First Security Amphitheater)

When Chicago first graced these parts in 1973 or thereabouts, they were among pop's power groups of the day, but they approached playing live like they were a pops orchestra, all inwardly focused, all their hits played rote, then off the stage to the next show. What changed through the years, what made Chicago a more vital stage band and not just a recording phenomenon, was the suddenly shifting lineup — for better or worse. Underrated rock guitarist Terry Kath, who seemed to be in his own world on stage, accidentally killed himself at about the time Chicago first fell from being pop favorites in the late 1970s. Producer David Foster took over and emphasized Peter Cetera's syrupy-sweet "new" sound; the ballad-heavy Chicago marked the band's restoration atop the charts in the first half of the 1980s. Cetera then went his happy solo way, and others helped Chicago's originals forge on. The core of the band, though, is still in place and, as you'll know if you saw the Grammys in February, still driving the band: pianist/keyboardist Robert Lamm, trombonist Jimmy Pankow, trumpeter Lee Loughnane and sax/flautist Walter Parazaider. When you cut away all that has been Chicago for 47 years, what still remains is this foursome, the heart of a band that grew up mostly at DePaul University, then blew up on the national scene with its pumping brass section and catchy, often thought-provoking, politically-tinged songs, many written by Lamm or Pankow. As one of music's biggest sellers of all time, they've topped 100 million records sold, and they're at Riverfest as the event's annual big nostalgia act, to appeal to the graying hairs (like this writer). It figures they'll know to trot out a long set of classics that still resonate 40-plus years later: "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is,""Saturday in the Park,""Beginnings,""25 or 6 to 4,""Feeling Stronger Every Day," etc. JH

SATURDAY 5/24

ROBERT RANDOLPH AND THE FAMILY BAND
6:15 p.m., Bud Light Stage
(Clinton Presidential Center)

There was some thought among music aficionados back 10 years or so ago that Robert Randolph was blowing up nationally and might end up being this generation's Sly and the Family Stone, if not a Dave Matthews or Ben Harper-type big festival act, one that by now would be out of reach for performing a Little Rock concert. Not that RRFB has underachieved or anything, it's just that Riverfest and medium-sized festivals are what they do best, bringing together the masses for a rocking funk jam. Outside of "Ain't Nothing Wrong With That," hit songs haven't really been this band's thing, but the show is still as spectacular is it was to anybody that saw Randolph and crew open for Eric Clapton here years ago. Randolph, of course, rocks the pedal-steel guitar in a very soulful and un-countrified sort of way, and that powers a band that connects to a crowd ready to get up and move. Expect a raucous version of "Shake Your Hips" during their Riverfest show, maybe with the ladies encouraged to join the band on stage. T-Bone Burnett produced the band's 2010 album, "We Walk This Road."JH

BUCKCHERRY
8:15 p.m., Bud Light Stage
(Clinton Presidential Center)

Riverfest is designed as a crowd pleaser. That means booking all the most popular genres. But it's also designed with a relatively small talent budget, which means that the lineup is a mixture of name stars (CeeLo Green) and acts whose peak has passed and now play county fairs and festivals you've never heard of? Judging by past experience, this won't temper the enthusiasm of the Riverfest crowd. Can't get The Black Keys or AC/DC? There's always Buckcherry. They come with plenty of rock 'n' roll bona fides. They're named for a spoonerism of Chuck Berry. Or rather a drag queen named Buck Cherry. Lead singer Josh Todd and lead guitarist Keith Nelson performed for a while with ex-Guns N' Roses members Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum in a band that would later become Velvet Revolver before Slash fired Todd and Nelson and hired Scott Weiland. Their most popular songs are called "Crazy Bitch" ("You're crazy bitch / But you fuck so good, I'm on top of it") and "Sorry" ("Cause everything inside it never comes out right / And when I see you cry it makes me want to die"). What else could you want? LM

THREE DAYS GRACE
9:45 p.m., Bud Light Stage
(Clinton Presidential Center)

Three Days Grace is a rock quartet from Ontario fond of leather, black and facial hair. Consisting of Neil Sanderson, Brad Walst, Barry Stock and Matt Walst, the band favors melodic yet lyrically dark alt-metal. Their biggest hit, "I Hate Everything About You," should be familiar to those who were anguished, Hot Topic-loving high school students in the mid-2000s. Other stand-outs include "Break" and "Animal I Have Become." The band recently underwent some changes in lineup, with Matt Walst replacing longtime vocalist Adam Gontier in March, and it recently released the single "Painkiller," its first recording with Walst. Fans of introspective alt-metal should check these dudes out. MS

SALT-N-PEPA
8 p.m., Coors Light / Arkansas Federal Credit Union Stage
(First Security Amphitheater)

Salt-N-Pepa, the stretchy-pant-loving and doorknocker-earring-sporting trio of ladies from Queens, N.Y., is responsible for jams that we all know and love: "Whattaman,""Shoop,""Push It" and "Let's Talk About Sex." Salt, Pepa and their DJ, Spinderella, conquered the charts (and some challenging fashions) in the late '80s and early '90s as one of hip-hop's pioneering acts, male or female. Notable for injecting a little feminism into their booty-shaking as they parsed some rather raunchy topics from a woman's point of view, they secured American Music Award nominations, a Grammy and something a little more elusive for women in hip-hop: respect. The trio disbanded in the late '90s, but reunited in 2009 and have since shared the stage with everyone from Biz Markie to Public Enemy. So don't even pretend you don't know the words (I've seen what happens in an adequately drunk room when "Push It" comes on) and watch some of rap's trailblazers do their thing. MS

CEELO GREEN
9:45 p.m., Coors Light / Arkansas Federal Credit Union Stage
(First Security Amphitheater)

Back when "Dirty South" was the name of a song instead of a catch-all brand, Outkast and Goodie Mob brought a jolt of creativity and regional pride to rap in the mid-'90s. Goodie Mob was a great group (if not historically great like Outkast), but it was clear even then that CeeLo Green's talents were bigger than one group, or even one genre. He sang and slurred and rapped his way through scene-stealing verses with country swagger and something too often lacking in the rap and R&B of the time: soul. (His contribution to an Outkast song still stands for me as one of rap's most jarringly tender opening lines: "I don't recall ever graduating at all / Sometimes I feel I'm just a disappointment to y'all.") The rest is history: five Grammy awards for solo work and Gnarls Barkley, his soul collaboration with producer Danger Mouse; the hit "Crazy," which at times has felt like the most ubiquitous song on the planet; a solo track with such infectious Motown vibes that it was a mammoth hit even though it was called "Fuck You"; reality television stints and a Super Bowl halftime show with Madonna. He's also a dynamite live performer, a bundle of manic energy — I was once on the receiving end of a CeeLo stage dive in the Goodie Mob days and collapsed beneath his weight. He's a big dude, so watch out. DR

SUNDAY 5/25

JAMEY JOHNSON
7:45 p.m., Bud Light Stage
(Clinton Presidential Center)

Jamey Johnson could easily be confused with one of the "Duck Dynasty" brothers with long gray-tinged beard, flowing hair and his outdoorsy appearance. He's a sometimes-storyteller on the stage with music likened to that of Trace Adkins, John Michael Montgomery, Arkansan Joe Nichols and other country standouts who've played Riverfest in recent years. His second album (and first with Mercury Nashville) was the well-received, gold-certified "That Lonesome Song" in 2008. Included on the record was the Top 10 hit "In Color" and another single, "High Cost of Living." The southeast Alabama native and former Marine has since released two more albums, the critically acclaimed "The Guitar Song" in 2010, then 2012's "Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran," which was nominated for a Grammy award. He also penned "I Got My Game On," which served as Trace Adkins' return to the top of the country charts in 2007 after a 10-year absence. Johnson has toured with Adkins, as well as Kid Rock; he'll handle opening for Hank Jr. JH

HANK WILLIAMS JR.
9:45 p.m., Bud Light Stage
(Clinton Presidential Center)

What do you do when you're a legend's son? If you're Hank Williams Jr., you create a caricature of yourself so vividly compelling that you become a legend in your own right: a whiskey-drinking, gun-toting cartoon in a cowboy hat, hamming his way through what turned out, almost in spite of himself, to be some of the best country songs of the last 40 years. Bocephus brought a kind of punk-rock teenage fury to country music (his various takes on the "Country Boy Can Survive" theme actually remind me of Tupac's anger and anthemic pride on a slightly different outlaw identity theme). Is that carrying on the "family tradition"? Yes indeed: By going rogue, Hank Jr. turned out to be every bit the American original that his father was. Sometimes, yes, a dude that committed to the joys of being a redneck will lead to some uncomfortably retrograde territory. But Bocephus at his best is rollicking fun and a sly songwriter: honky-tonk good times, hangover despair and salt-of-the-earth spirit. If you can't drunkenly sing along to "All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)," I can't help you. DR

THE WALLFLOWERS
7:45 p.m., Coors Light / Arkansas Federal Credit Union Stage
(First Security Amphitheater)

If as teenager in the late '90s, in the days just before the Internet started working well, your only source of escape was your car, and you listened to the radio in that car (this being the pre-Internet-working-well era, when music was expensive and difficult to steal), and you fooled around with your girl/boyfriend in the backseat of that car, The Wallflower's "One Headlight" was a part of your soundtrack. It was played more often and for a longer time than any pop song in modern history, according to my memory. It was about cars, which made it a good song for driving around. Or rather it was about a dead girl who left the singer heartbroken and reckless, which made it a good song for making out in the back seat. Considering all these factors, plus the fact that schools in parts of Arkansas at the time (and probably still to this day) taught abstinence rather than sex ed, if you were a teenager fooling around in a back seat and your abstinence learning didn't stick and you ended up with a love child, he/she was probably conceived while "One Headlight" played from the car stereo. Hopefully things have worked out for you and your backseat lover and the son/daughter that resulted from Jakob Dylan's jangly angst. Regardless, congratulations, your son/daughter is nearly grown up! Maybe even a new high school graduate! You should celebrate by taking him/her to Riverfest to celebrate, where for old times' sake The Wallflowers will surely play "One Headlight."LM

THE FRAY
9:30 p.m., Coors Light / Arkansas Federal Credit Union Stage
(First Security Amphitheater)

The Fray, hailing from Denver, Colo., are purveyors of piano-driven modern rock that everyone from your 14-year-old cousin to your otherwise disapproving grandmother can find palatable and everyone else, at least recognizable. Favoring mid-tempo arrangements and ballads, the group (consisting of Joe King, Isaac Slade, Dave Welsh and Ben Wysocki) formed in 2002. They are perhaps best known for their omnipresent soft-rock anthem from 2005, "How to Save a Life," a song I seemed to encounter in every waiting room ever during its reign. It was an international sensation, hitting the charts in a diverse swath of countries including the UK, New Zealand and Sweden. The fellows reportedly met and connected while leading worship services at their church, and their discography includes acoustic renderings of Christmas carols (and also, perhaps incongruously, a collaboration with Timbaland). They're currently in the midst of a national tour to promote their latest album, "Helios."MS

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By the early 1970s, with the Age of Aquarius rapidly succumbing to a thousand cuts — at the Lorraine Motel, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Spahn Ranch, Saigon, Altamont Speedway and eventually the Watergate Hotel — large swaths of the generation that came of age listening to the Beatles had resolved to try something different. For some, spurred by the growing environmental movement and the rise of publications like "Mother Earth News," that something different was the back-to-the-land movement, which called on adherents to drop out of the urban life and head to rural America, where cheap land, a low cost of living and scant government regulation promised the kind of utopia many had dreamed of but few had accomplished. A lot of them ended up in Arkansas, where wooded, spring-fed acreage in the Ozarks could be had in those days for as little as $50 an acre.

Though the true numbers of how many young people decamped to the boonies in the heyday of the back-to-the-land movement will likely never be known, sociologist Timothy Miller, in his book "The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond," says the exodus could have been more than 1 million people nationwide. How many of those people actually stayed on the land is just as hard to pin down, but it's clearly a tiny percentage of those who set out for greener pastures. Living in the backwoods miles from where the paved roads and power lines stop isn't for the faint of heart, and in many cases the ideals that sent a lot of young people looking for nirvana in the hills seem to have lasted just about as long as their first hard winter, their first pregnancy miles from a hospital, or their first long spell of intermittent hunger because they had no reliable income.

There were some who stuck with it, however, often because they mastered a traditional craft that allowed them to earn a semi-reliable living. All of the people we talked to for this story live either mostly or entirely "off the grid," relying on solar panels and banks of batteries for their electricity. Several of them haven't had air conditioning or indoor plumbing for decades.

While that might seem primitive to someone sitting in a suburban house, every one of those we talked with said they feel they have a more meaningful existence unplugged from the world, more in touch with nature and themselves. The question is: Would you trade your flush toilet and curling iron for fulfillment?

ROBERT RUNYAN
Near Winslow

The first thing you notice about master cabin builder Robert Runyan is his beard and ponytail, a mountain man's spill of off-white hair, usually framing a smile and a twinkling set of eyes that have a good bit of devilment still left in them at age 64. Then you notice his hands and forearms, corded with muscle, the hands and arms of a man who has sweated his way into being the best at what he does.

Runyan, who was named an Arkansas Living Treasure by the Arkansas Arts Council in May, is one of the state's greatest living practitioners of the only traditional art form you can live inside. His white oak cabins — like the one he built on a ridge of Mt. Gaylor near Winslow for a Fayetteville surgeon over the course of two years in the 1990s — are a revelation of detail, skill and craftsmanship. The timber is set using a technique called "Scandinavian scribe," in which each log is painstakingly coped until it fits exactly into the natural contours of the log below it. The resulting joints are so tight that you'd be hard pressed to find a place you could slide a credit card between the two logs. Maybe even more amazing is that — with a few exceptions — Runyan normally uses no power tools or mechanized equipment in his constructions, relying instead on hand tools, ropes, blocks and tackles and a matched set of giant mules.

Originally from Newport, where his father ran a small architectural firm, Runyan always had a sense of being an environmentalist, even before the term was popularized. In high school, he worked part time as a surveyor, and was struck by the waste of clearing the land for farming. "We'd go out and survey big blocks of woods," he said, "and the next day they'd go in, push it up in a big pile and burn it — 300 acres, 160 acres."

Though a football knee injury saved him from Vietnam, many of his friends joined the Army or Marine Corps and were shipped off to war. The world had changed by the time they got back to the states. Disillusioned with life in conservative Northeast Arkansas, Runyan said, dozens of young people he knew migrated to Northwest Arkansas over a two- or three-year period in the early 1970s. He moved to Northwest Arkansas in 1971, working as a stonemason on projects by the famous Arkansas architect Fay Jones and his proteges.

"Northeast Arkansas was a whole different world from Northwest Arkansas back then," he said. "We had a mass exodus of people who came up here in the late '60s and early '70s. I'll bet there were 40 or 50 of us that migrated up here from the Jonesboro/Newport area. ... Jonesboro was pretty rigid and still is, so we had our bumps and bruises along the way." 

Though Runyan's wife, Dorothy, has a more conventional house that's hooked to the power lines near the top of Mt. Gaylor on U.S. Highway 71, Runyan is working on a cabin on property he's owned for years a few ridges away in the watershed of Lake Fort Smith. That property is completely off the grid, with electricity provided by solar panels. While Runyan eventually got interested in the environmental aspects of solar power, he said its first appeal to him was the cost.

"They wanted $10,000 to run a power line in," he said, "and that was back in the '70s. So I backed off. Right now to this day, I might have $10,000 invested in my [solar] system. It's set up now so you can run power tools, refrigeration, fans, lights, freezer. Plus they wanted to put a power line through the most pristine part of the property. ... I said, 'No, I'm not going to go there, either.'"

After most of a lifetime spent as a steward of the forest in Northwest Arkansas, Runyan is saddened by the environmental waste he sees creeping into the area. A lot of the old-growth timber there is spontaneously dying, he said, possibly because of prolonged summer heat and drought in recent years leaving the woods susceptible to disease. Logging, he said, has become slash and burn, with high-dollar operations requiring high-profits and speed, neither of which allow for preserving the smaller trees that get in the way.

"What I call the old-time loggers — which is a couple of generations in front of me — they were fairly conservative," he said. "They knew they could go back in 20 years and go through it again and make a living. Now it's [cut] everything: from pulp, to crossties, to high-grade lumber. It's everything. It'll take a long time for one of these clear cuts to come back."

As has been his habit over the past 40 years, however, Runyan is working to push back against what's fast and modern. "I've got a couple hundred white oaks I've started," he said. "They're in pots right now, but when they get big enough, I'm going to put them out."

DON HOUSE

Hazel Valley near Durham

When we drove out to Don House's place near the little dirt-road enclave of Hazel Valley, he was picking an herb related to chamomile out of the middle of the driveway. He planned to make tea from it before bedtime. It's soothing, he said, and gives him interesting dreams.

A professional photographer who once ran a studio on Dickson Street in Fayetteville before moving to Hazel Valley in 1998, House, 62, is originally from Detroit. He said he fell in love with the area in the early 1980s while visiting his sister, who was teaching at the University of Arkansas. He moved to Fayetteville in 1984.

"A number of people that I was meeting had made the decision to change their lives," he said. "It seemed like everyone I met had been educated or trained to do something different than what they were doing. They had made a decision to give up lucrative financial rewards and come to an area where minimum wage was the common salary. But what they got in return was the ability to do what they wanted to do — to live the lifestyle that they wanted to live. They were happy."

House's cabin and studio are set in hilly, wildflower-strewn terrain, at the end of a winding driveway. The entire property is off the electrical grid, powered by a small solar array House put together himself with guidance from Jimis Damet (page 19). When House and his then-wife built the 700-square-foot cabin there, they'd originally wanted to bring in electric lines but soon ran into a problem that's familiar among those who went to solar as a plan B.

"They wanted to cut a 30-foot swath up the mountain for the poles, no exceptions, and it really would have ruined a beautiful view and the woods there," he said. "You have to give them the right to do whatever they need to do to maintain it, including herbicides. So we decided to look at other options."

That option is mounted on a post at the bottom of the hill: a series of solar panels, hooked up to several 6-volt forklift batteries, with the power run through an industrial inverter that converts it from DC to 110 volt AC. House said it cost him around $5,000 to set up the system originally, and the only major repair he's had to do in 14 years is to replace a set of batteries that went bad. He totaled it up once, and figured that he spends around $30 a month for electricity. Though he doesn't have air conditioning, he does run commercial photographic lights in his studio, along with computers, printers and large scanners. He has a small propane refrigerator. His house, with windows set against the high ceiling to let the heat rise up and out, was ten to 15 degrees cooler than the outside when we visited.

Behind a folding door in the kitchen is a small meter that shows him exactly how much electricity is in his batteries and how much electricity he is using at any given moment. When it was installed, he said, he was amazed at how much electricity normal appliances and electronics — radios, TVs, chargers — use when they're not turned on or in use. Now he has cutoff switches for everything.

A lot of people take the wrong approach to the idea of going solar, House said, asking how many panels it would take to live as they do now, instead of trying to consume energy in ways that are better suited to the technology. "They're asking the question, 'How can I get all this electricity from solar?'" he said. "Instead, they should look at, 'How can I reduce the amount of electricity I'm using first, and then get the panels to fit that?' That's a much healthier and less expensive approach to getting off the grid.'"

Living where he does and how he does allows him to think more deeply about his craft, House said, paring away distractions and lending a "spiritual quality" to his life that helps him in his work. Though House is clearly living a simpler life than most Americans, he resists the label of "simpler" because of the connotations.

"You say simpler and they might picture me and my sweetie sitting around a candle on a table trying to read," he said. "I would say that instead of a simpler life, it's a more conscious life. You're more conscious of the energy that you're using. It's not an inconvenience of it at all once you're more considerate of it."

JIMIS DAMET

Near Red Star

Red Star, around 50 winding miles north of Clarksville, might well be the dim singularity at the middle of nowhere. From there, drive until you hit a washboard road that snakes through the woods for four miles. Turn, then head down a narrow trail rough enough to make you imagine punching a hole in the gas tank followed by a spark and explosion, trees pressing in so tight in some places that the branches touch the car on both sides. A mile and a half of that, and you'll finally emerge into a fair and sunlit glade, crowned with the rambling dome house owned by Jimis Damet and his wife, Patricia Powell.

Damet, the owner of the solar installation business Rocky Grove Sun Co., is the sole remaining member of a commune that fled civilization in 1973, the group paying $8,000 for 80 acres of some of the most beautiful and least-accessible land on God's green earth. One by one, his partners cashed out. Most of them live comfortable suburban lives now, having left their dalliance with communal living behind 40 years ago like a handful of wild oats.

Damet, 65, was born in Tulsa and attended college at the University of Arkansas. By the time he graduated, the back-to-the-land movement was kicking into high gear. He and five other idealistic compatriots went in together and bought the property, moving their families to the property near Red Star.

"It's really fun for the first two years," he said. "Everything's novel and nothing is too serious at first. You're just out there, and you've got so much energy that first year. But once people get down to how comfortable this lifestyle is going to be, and how they're going to have to be in charge of their own comfort, and maybe they don't think that can do it, it gets old quickly. The other thing is economics. Most people who lived out here two years being broke eventually got the reality of making money. Some of them had babies pretty early, and that made them move away."

It was the reality of making money that pushed Damet into the solar business. By the 1980s, he'd gotten a few photovoltaic panels, intending to start building furniture for a living. When other off-the-grid people heard about his solar system, however, they started asking whether he could help them set up their own or help them acquire parts. So he started his company. The first few years were very hard, but as costs dropped and technology improved, so did his business. These days, Damet has three employees, and installs 20 to 40 systems per year all over the state.

While living so far out and off the grid is a "higher maintenance lifestyle," he said, "you've got to like all that. You've got to like the purity of it. There's got to be something that makes you satisfied that you're doing something in a kind of zero-emission way. You're not contributing to consumption or pollution necessarily."

Damet and his wife recently installed a very efficient AC unit to cool one room of their house on hot days. He said he has everything he wants on the property. They're comfortable there after 40 years, he said, in a world created by their own blood, sweat and tears. It's difficult at times, but it's clearly preferable to the alternative.

"A lot of people end up spending their time in a job they don't like," Damet said. "Maybe they like the money they're making, but they don't like spending all that time. So it's all about doing what you want to do. It's not about money."

SAGE AND TOM HOLLAND

Near Fox

In the tiny studio she shares with her husband behind Mellon's Country Store in Mountain View, Sage Holland heated a blob of glass until it glowed a dull red, then deftly touched it over and over with a thin wire of colored Italian glass, turning the bead in a blue cone of flame as she worked. Slowly, as her husband and I talked about their life off the grid 20 miles west near Fox, the world-renowned artisan, who has been making glass beads for over 25 years, added glass layer on layer until she'd fashioned something like a nebula captured in a drop of water.

Right now, when they aren't in their studio or on the road to shows, Tom and Sage Holland live in what they unapologetically call a shack — a tiny cabin with no indoor bathroom on 44 acres, only connected to the outside world by a telephone line run three-quarters of a mile over the ground. They have a bank of four solar panels and several batteries. They're working on a larger house with a cistern in the basement, a flush toilet and 20-plus solar panels. They hope to have it done by next winter.

Tom, 60, a well-known beadmaker in his own right, was raised in Cape Girardeau, Mo., while Sage, 55, grew up in Southern California. They met at a bead-making conference in Washington, D.C., in 1990, and Sage moved to Arkansas from Bellingham, Wash., in 1993. Tom said that living an off-the-grid lifestyle has been an aspiration of his since he was young.

"I read a book when I was a freshman in college called 'Replenish the Earth,'" he said, "and it stated that one American uses as many resources to survive as 45 people in India. It's only gotten worse since the '70s. ... I always wanted to go down kicking and screaming, at least being part of the solution instead of part of the problem."

Tom said that the Baby Boomers are a "freak anomaly in the history of mankind." Being born after World War II allowed them to reap the benefits of an economy powered by the fact that most of the rest of the world's economic might had been destroyed.

"You have a generation of people who had time to stop and think," he said. "Then, all of a sudden, you had an unjust war like Vietnam that unified us into one common cause. ... We were on this youthful, idealistic fun trip. But when it came for the down and dirty of it, we realized it was a lot of work and we became disillusioned with it. The same with the back-to-the-land movement. There was disillusionment. People realized how hard it was."

Tom said he can tell story after story of idealistic people who crumbled in the face of the reality of living out in the boonies. "I can take you to unfinished foundations way out in the woods where people had this grandiose dream, and they never got any further than the foundation," he said. "But there are a few of us that have held on."

Sage said the enemy of living off the grid is the "comfort zone" that tells people they have to exist in a world never hotter than 85 degrees or below 70. She said when people visit their property, she has found that many of them are downright afraid of nature.

"You have to have a hearty spirit," she said. "You can't be a wimp. It's not for the weak of heart down here on the creek or anywhere in Arkansas in the woods. We'll bring people from the city who are wanting to learn in an environment that's away from everything. If they're the kind of person who is afraid of a tick or afraid of a snake, everything goes to a mode of trying to coddle them."

There is, Sage says, a certain kind of person who has an open place in their mind that allows them to handle the pressures of being self-sufficient. "I'm sure most people don't even know it's possible," she said. "So they close their minds to it. If they ever visited a place that's totally solar that was comfortable, then their minds would be open. But they have to see that place and experience it, and they don't."

The lifestyle, Tom said, is well suited to how they want to live: low impact, environmentally sound, close to the culture and the earth. Part of what drew him to the Mountain View area, Tom said, was the feeling that the world was becoming all the same. He's a bit wary now that there's a McDonald's in town. "When I first moved here," he said, " I lived next to an 85-year-old lady who had never been more than 45 miles away from where she was born. That's why I moved here. I saw this country becoming homogenized — same, same, same. And, by golly, Stone County had culture back in those days. It was a different part of this nation that had identity, and I loved that because I saw it being lost."

Sage said she feels like she's doing something positive by living the way they do. She feels like they're doing something good for the earth, and setting an example.

"You feel like you're helping further an alternative energy future," she said. "You don't have to worry about the power company coming and tearing the woods up. And it can be fun. It's good for your brain to not surrender to the way people tell you it has to be done. You have to be a bit of a rebel to live this way, I suppose."

OWEN REIN

Near Mountain View

Another long, rough trail through the mountains near Mountain View brings you to the cabin of Owen Rein, who has devoted his life to making traditional while-oak baskets and masterful rocking chairs. Now 58, he moved to Stone County in 1980. Before that, he'd been living in Massachusetts. Unemployed, in the middle of a recession, with no other prospects, he said he tried the only thing he could think to do, trekking into the middle of the forest and building a 12-by-20-foot log cabin, where he would live for the next three years. For him, he said, going back to the land wasn't an ideology, it was just a lack of options.

"I remember being on unemployment lines that went out the door and down the block," he said. "I didn't have any other opportunity, and I couldn't pay rent — out of college, sharing a house, $60 bucks a month, and I couldn't pay rent. What was I going to do? So I ended up going back to my childhood idea of building a fort in the woods. I built a log cabin in the woods. That was plan B. That was all I could come up with, and it worked." Everybody brings up Thoreau when he tells them that story of a cabin in the woods, Rein said, but he reminds people that Thoreau's mom brought ol' Henry David dinner every night. Nobody was bringing him dinner at his cabin, Rein said with a laugh.

After a few years of living "hard and primitive," saving money where he could, Rein bought land near Mountain View — where the acreage and taxes were cheap and the oak and hickory trees were plentiful, he said — and built a cabin. His current house, a 900-square-foot clapboard cabin situated in a clearing in the dense woods, sits just up the lane from his workshop. Inside the workshop are only two large pieces of equipment: a homemade foot-treadle lathe for turning the tenons on stretchers, and a long, narrow shaving horse, where Rein spends his days alone by the stove with a drawing knife, sighting down a stick of wood with a practiced eye as he shaves down a chair part, cleaved minutes before from the heart of a log outside, until it is ruler straight and square. His rocking chairs, hand-whittled with the grain of the wood for strength, sell for $1,200 each. Both former U.S. Sen. David Pryor and President Bill Clinton own Rein rockers.

"Part of the plan of moving here and setting up here in the method I use now was to set up my own business without the financial pressure of a traditional woodworking business," he said. "That's really high, and it's really hard to make a go of it. It's very competitive and you need a lot of capital to invest in power tools if you're going to compete. With the traditional methods I use, it's a few simple hand tools and the technique gives me access to the timber. I can go cut a tree down by myself with simple hand tools, take it through the whole process."

His resolve and that method was tested during the Great Recession of recent years, including one spell in which he didn't sell a single chair for nine full months. Owning his property and having access to the materials — being "vertically integrated" as he calls it — allowed him to use that nine months to focus on new designs and getting inventory done instead of sweating about where his next paycheck was coming from.

Rein said that he feels he's doing good and valuable work. His property is powered by solar panels, but that's only since 1989. Up until then, he'd lit his world with kerosene lanterns. These days, his only bills are his phone and Netflix. He used to have a computer, he said, but he got rid of it when he found he was wasting too much time.

There's a peacefulness about living the way he does, Rein said, a feeling that he's not hurting anybody. While driving to see his daughter in Conway a few summers back, he noticed that he saw only a handful of people outside the whole way. Now, he can't not see it when he's driving in the hot months: the un-air-conditioned world, full of beauty, but emptied of people. As for him, Rein said, he tries to give and take the way all the rest of nature does, from the birds to the bees to the termites.

"When I go cut down a tree, I see the hole I make in the canopy," he said. "I see the other, smaller trees that I crush if I don't land a tree right. That's the warehouse for my business. So it's profitable for me to try to get the most out of what I take from the forest without diminishing it. It's not an ideological concept. It's just a very practical business thing. I'm making chairs and the trees are growing wood. We work together to achieve each other's needs."

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It's a fool's errand to put a limit on the number of artists whose work you'd urge people to dash out and see. Once you start naming names, someone will be left out, and that someone will be miffed. But who could possibly, in one story, write about every Arkansas artist who creates work of enduring quality? Especially in a newspaper.

So, for the sake of brevity and the cost of newsprint, I decided to limit myself to writing about five artists whose work, I believe, bears close attention. Why five? I don't know. Maybe I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold.

To narrow down the field I decided not to write about emerging artists — though one profiled here has not exhibited in Arkansas yet. They aren't laurel-headed either, like David Bailin or Anita Huffington or George Dombek or Warren Criswell or Robyn Horn. (Or Kevin Kresse or Aj Smith or Marjorie Williams-Smith or V.L. Cox or Evan Lindquist ... see how much trouble you can get into when you start to name names?) They are not sculptors, ceramicists or contemporary craftsmen. They are not photographers, though Arkansas has an abundance of terrific photographers. They aren't conceptual artists — I could have written about Rachel Trusty (her wonderful stuffed baby-faced chicks, for example) or Holly Laws (her dog-tag project) or John Salvest (a huge talent who deserves an entire book for his conceptual work), but didn't. Other Arkansas artists will have their day in the sunlight this paper beams, but it's not this day.

Instead, I have chosen five narrative artists. The South (and I'm not saying Arkansas is particularly Southern, but we share some characteristics of our neighbors east and south) has a strong storytelling tradition and the artists I write about here tell stories visually. It doesn't matter if the viewer can read the artist's mind; interpretation is welcome. One artist is a slight exception to the narrative theme, but his body of work, scenes of present day Little Rock, is creating a historical narrative that future generations will cherish. Let's start with him.

John Kushmaul
Painter

John Kushmaul, 42, is well known to, he guesses, 2,000 people who live in and around Little Rock, those moving in the sphere of art and music. That's too small a number.

Kushmaul has had a studio over Vino's Brewpub for 16 years, where he turns out often large paintings of what he sees around him: buildings, bridges, the trolley, the River Market district. A fire escape. The skyline. The view of I-630 from Woodrow Street. Things we might consider banal. Thanks to his painterly style, his well-handled colors that may be scumbled here, saturated there, the paintings are not banal. Kushmaul's not a new kid on the block; he sells one to two paintings a month, he says, and is affiliated with several galleries. He has made a living on his paintings alone, but bookending that time he has worked in television, at KTHV, KARK and FOX 16, sometimes as a producer, sometimes as a weekend assignment editor. He works in TV now because he was "burned out on the crushing poverty" of making a living on art alone. His studio — a true garret encompassing two rooms and a hallway with bad ceilings and worn, ancient linoleum — is packed with paintings in various stages of completion. The black-eyed pea aroma of fermenting hops from Vino's below fills the rooms where Kushmaul is creating an urban narrative: Little Rock of the late 20th and early 21st century. Some structures he's painted no longer exist. He is the only painter I can think of who has painted a demonstration at a congressman's Little Rock office (Blanche Lincoln's).

Kushmaul says creating a record is not what he's after. "I'm not trying to create the story of Little Rock in paint," he says. Nevertheless, he is painting pictures whose appeal to future generations will be more than aesthetic, in the way we enjoy not just the style of Impressionists but the beauty of their period in time.

Kushmaul's thoughts are as varied as the colors of his palette. He says he's a "little bit proud" of his work, and pleased that he's "built a nice little life for myself." But he professes insecurity and sometimes wonders if he is doing all he should be doing. He worries that he's poor at promoting his work (he posts few images of his paintings on Facebook and doesn't maintain a webpage). He is in, he says, "the midst of a great, wonderful failure." But, Kushmaul adds, "all of life is failure eventually." Yes, we'll all shuffle off the mortal coil, but Kushmaul's paintings will live on.

You can find his work at Gallery 26, the Butler Center Galleries and Stephano's Fine Art.

Delita Martin
Printmaker

When Delita Martin was a child in Conroe, Texas, her grandmother lived with the family, taking care of Martin while her mother worked. While Texana Williams entertained Martin with stories, Martin cut out squares of quilting fabric for her grandmother.

Some of the stories were about a little girl named Luna who lived on the moon. The Luna tales would change with the phases of the moon. As Martin aged, she came to realize that her grandmother's stories were parables, a way of teaching her about life.

Martin, 41, pays tribute to her grandmother with her series "I Come From Women Who Could Fly," now on exhibit at the Arts and Science Center in Pine Bluff. The large works mix multiple layers of inked linoleum images; handmade silkscreened papers are sewn to the surface to represent clothing. (Her grandmother taught her the stitch she uses.) The resulting works are complex, beautiful drawings in vibrant color. The series took her a year to complete (and took over the dining room floor, where, absent a big enough press, she stood on the plates to print the works). The exhibition embodies the "magical realism that happened to me as a child. ... I've pieced together the stories like she [her grandmother] pieced together the quilts." And because the time spent with her grandmother was often at night, many of the works "have a blue, evening quality," the artist said.

One day after school when Martin was only 12, her father, a painter and carpenter, met her, packed up her drawings between two pieces of heavy paper —"a sad portfolio," she described it — and drove her to Texas Southern University in Houston to meet famed African-American muralist John Biggers, who founded Texas Southern's art department. "John Biggers gave me my first critique," Martin said, smiling. She was thrilled to see Biggers' images of African-American women. They were "wearing head scarves ... like crowns. It wasn't this mammy image," but dignified, and it was something she had not seen before, she said. Biggers was "very animated," praising her style and giving her advice she took to heart: "Do not ever miss an opportunity to uplift your people through your work."

You can find Martin's work at Boswell-Mourot Fine Art.

Guy Bell
Painter

Guy Bell, 34, is a mostly self-taught artist who always enjoyed drawing and painting — T-shirts in high school and political cartoons at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He began to get serious, however, when someone put a gun to his head — literally — several years ago. It was a home invasion, a case of mistaken identity. One of the intruders aimed at Bell's head and pulled the trigger. "The gun didn't go off," Bell said. "It was a turning point" in his career as an artist. "Over the next year I got my act together." His first painting after the experience was an oil he calls "Solitude," depicting a man walking away from a chair and a nearby skull and into the horizon. Bell has worked for a wine distributer and for UPS and other odd jobs; but he quit all that about a month ago to devote his time to painting. His formal training is limited to a couple of classes he took from neo-Renaissance artist Stephen Cefalo on mixing paint. Much of his work is what he calls "idealized landscapes"—not actually of real places — in which a bit of the always man-made intrudes, usually in the form of cell towers or other towers affixed with blinking lights — commenting on the loss of untouched nature. Not all of his work is narrative — though his dogs in the back of pickup trucks, the motion indicated by the dog's flying ears, are a scene from our Arkansas story. And some of his narratives are hidden: He writes words into the underpainted layers, words he said he'd "better not" reveal. We'll leave that to future restoration workers.

"Mostly I like showing a moment in dreams ... the place between conscious and unconscious" where the impossible and the real coexist. He is a talented colorist, his skies pink and blue and orange, and he sees in his work an element of abstraction (a good example: "Hillside Vineyard," in which a pink and aqua sky is separated from deep blue-green red fields below by a garish complementary horizon of orange and blue — a Rothko-like division of the picture plane into three).

Bell got a berth at Greg Thompson Fine Art by approaching painter William Dunlap after a talk Dunlap, also represented by Thompson, gave at the Arts Center. Bell showed Dunlap pictures of his work on his cell phone. Did the trick.

Neal Harrington
Printmaker

Neal Harrington, 40, and his wife, Tammy, "like a couple of geniuses," he said, got the same graduate degrees — in art, from Wichita State University in Kansas — but lucked out. Neither had to give up art to maintain the marriage: Arkansas colleges had a place for both. He's at Arkansas Tech and she's at University of the Ozarks. Neal Harrington is a printmaker, using both linoleum and woodcuts, and his style is exaggerated and linear, jumping off from graphic art into fine art. As an undergraduate, he wanted to do cartoons, which he said was a "dirty word" when he went to college. "It was kind of a scarlet letter." You can still see influences of R Crumb in his narrative series, such as his "Hard Working Man" and "Bootlegger Series." If you went to the 2013 Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center, you saw a work from the Bootlegger series, "Snake Shaker's Shack," and two of what he calls his "giant naked ladies." ("The Abduction of Europa" is 89 by 48 inches. Like Delita Martin, Harrington has to improvise to work big: He created a 400-pound drum by pouring seven bags of Quikcrete into a cardboard tube used for footings. He rolls his prints out on his basement floor.)

When you go to the 2014 Delta, you'll see another Harrington, the 32-by-24-inch woodcut and India ink wash "Delta Oracle." The oracle is a nude woman rising from a fiery still; the bootlegger has been knocked back by the vision. Nudes, stunned men — is this what Warren Criswell's work would look like if he took to making woodcuts? "He's a hero of mine," Harrington said, if not a muse, and Harrington said he's careful not to look at his stuff, which he described as "a lot of ladies doing supernatural" things. (Harrington and Criswell are friends and fellow members of the Arkansas Printmaking Society.) Harrington's work can be played to music — American roots, Preservation Hall jazz, bluegrass, murder ballads. "I want to bring this visually to people," Harrington said, by portraying "the human condition — just being alive, the love and hate in those songs, jealousy, drinking, fornicatin'— I want my art to be a visual representation of the music."

Cantrell Gallery represents Harrington.

Grace Mikell Ramsey
Painter

As a 29-year-old who has not exhibited in Arkansas before, Grace Ramsey might be called an "emerging" artist, except for the fact that she has emerged elsewhere, in Louisiana, where she got her MFA from Tulane University, and Alabama, where she has also exhibited. She was one of 15 national artists in 2012 to receive the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant Award of $15,000. Ramsey moved to Arkansas in 2012 with her husband, David (who writes for the Arkansas Times); she now teaches at the Arkansas Arts Center. Her work — flat, hard-edged and edgy — employs a highly symbolic, fantasy narrative for the viewers to work out. Raised Southern Baptist, Ramsey thought religion answered all her questions; it "provided me with stories" that explained life. But she lost her faith and then "I had to figure out new stories," which she expresses with her art. On a three-month "art tour" of Europe, Ramsey found herself drawn to early Renaissance paintings about martyrs —"so gruesome and so powerful"— including depictions of the tortured St. Agatha, holding her breasts on a plate. That inspired Ramsey's painting of a woman seated at a table across from her infant; her severed breast lies on a plate. For Ramsey, the work expresses a fear of motherhood, which, to a lesser degree than poor Agatha, involves a bit of martyrdom. Others have seen it as a portrayal of the pain of breastfeeding. "That's what I love with narrative work," Ramsey said. People bring their own stories to it. Another of Ramsey's paintings, of a woman seated on a couch beside the severed head of a unicorn, its blood seeping into a corner of her dress, could be read as the death of girlhood dreams. But in either case — severed breasts or unicorn head — the work rises above storytelling thanks to the precision of Ramsey's line, her unusual palette, and the juxtaposition of flat areas, like cutouts, against otherwise normal perspective. "I'm interested in seeing how far I can pull away from reality but retain a sense of reality," Ramsey said.

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"During daytime a great clap of lightning / Ill omen from the bearer of tidings"

— Nostradamus, "The Prophecies"

The lights went out in Cabot one morning last August, and the only person who knew why was a 37-year-old self-employed pool guy named Jason Zebulin Woodring.

Heavyset, bald and bearded, Woodring lived with his mother in nearby Jacksonville, in a house that one person who knew him described as a "maze" and a "hoarder's junkyard." He'd long been fascinated by engineering, but had recently taken a special interest in the mechanics of electricity, and for the better part of a month had been making the trek to a particularly impressive high-voltage transmission tower by a wooded stretch of railroad track outside the Cabot city limits. For a number of reasons, most of which he would keep to himself, it had become apparent to him that the tower would have to come down. The only trouble was how he'd do it.

The enormous metal structure was secured to its concrete base by 125 thick steel bolts, which he began removing, a few per visit, until there were only five left. He then strung a steel cable from 25 feet up the tower to the top of a tree on the other side of the tracks, a tree he scaled by nailing slabs of wood into the trunk to make a ladder. With some blue plastic hose, the type he used at his day job, he insulated the cable so that it wouldn't trigger the track's defect detector as he pulled it over the tracks, but this didn't do the trick. The cable wasn't strong enough; it was snapped by the first passing train. This is how Woodring found himself climbing to the peak of the transmission tower, 100 feet in the air, in the early morning hours of Aug. 21. With a hacksaw, he sawed away at the connectors holding up one of the power lines until he severed them, and the line, still live and carrying 500,000 volts of electricity, fell draped over the track. He dropped the saw, climbed down, got back in his truck and drove home. It was the day before his birthday.

That same morning, a Union Pacific freight train struck the downed power line and burst through it, causing immediate outages in the area and damage that investigators would later estimate at over $100,000. The FBI, speculating that whoever caused the attack must "possess above-average knowledge or skill in electrical matters," offered a $20,000 reward for any information leading to an arrest. But no information was forthcoming. And as far as Woodring was concerned, he'd failed: The tower didn't fall.

***

A few years earlier, Gerald Mabrey was driving down Jacksonville's John Shelton Road, coming home from work, when he came across a pile of garbage in the street blocking his way: a box-spring, a ripped mattress, several other odds and ends. It was directly in front of a house that he recognized immediately as belonging to his neighbors, the Woodrings. He was hesitant to do anything that might provoke them. There were the gunshots and loud music at all hours of the night, the ominous black plastic tarp that circled their property and the huge, inexplicable circus tent in the back yard, visible from the street and somehow unnerving to most who noticed it. Mabrey had heard strange stories.

The junk was too vast to get around, so he got out and started dragging things off the road. Right away he heard cursing coming from the darkened house, and an angry voice rang out: "Quit throwing that stuff in my ditch." He got back in his car and drove the rest of way home. Frustrated by the unfairness of the situation, though, he decided to go back and confront his neighbor, and so climbed up on their porch and knocked on the door. As soon as it opened, he launched into his prepared speech, saying that he shouldn't have to deal with this kind of thing in the middle of the road. Jason Woodring stood back, surprised and pale, and withdrew quietly into the clutter of the house.

Other altercations would follow. Mabrey's girlfriend's daughter was visiting one afternoon when she ran into the house and announced that there was a man shouting at her from the trees. He went outside and, sure enough, Woodring had climbed a tree on his property and was yelling something incoherent at them through a megaphone. This time Mabrey decided to call the police. When they arrived, the officers seemed, if anything, unsurprised. They warned Mabrey against confronting his neighbor, and admitted it wasn't the first time they'd been called about him. They told him of the steadily escalating rivalry between Woodring and some of the local kids: They'd been painting insulting comments about him on the street in front of his house, and in response, most recently, he'd thrown a glass of urine at them. He'd also set up a new sign in his yard that read, "If I catch you speeding up and down this street I will stab you in the face with a soldering iron."

Mabrey decided at this point that he'd be better off letting it go, leaving his neighbor be. He was unsettled, but he also felt something else, something like sympathy. "I'm sure he drew first blood," he said, "but people can be driven over the cliff if they're already close to it. And there is two sides to every story. For all I know he could have been a Vietnam veteran or something of that nature."

Jason Woodring isn't a Vietnam veteran. He was born in 1976, a year after the war ended, in Fallbrook, Calif., a city not much bigger than Jacksonville and situated near the lower tip of the state, in that region sometimes called the Inland Empire. His father, Ed, worked construction, and his mother, Jeanne, worked mostly for debt collection agencies. One relative described him as a "happy little clumsy kid."

The trouble started when he left home after graduation and enrolled in a local tech school. He couldn't hold down a job and became briefly homeless, living out of his van. His friends mention "drama with his girlfriend," and the Riverside County, Calif., Sheriff's Department cites an outstanding warrant for vandalism and criminal trespassing. He dropped out of school before finishing his second year, and when his mother decided to follow his older brother to Arkansas in the mid-'90s, it didn't take much to convince Jason to join them. It would be a fresh start.

One person who knew Woodring in these years remembers him as "talented" and "book smart." He liked to read, to research and be knowledgeable about things. "If he set his mind on something, he would go and try to figure out as much as he could about it." He played lead guitar and sang in a band, and fell in with a group that bonded over a shared love for heavy metal. Also, crystal meth. Woodring had been into drugs since high school, and rural Arkansas presented new opportunities in this realm.

"He could be a lot of fun," his friend remembered. "He just didn't know when to stop." One night, when he was living and working as the pool maintenance man at Eastwood Apartments in Jacksonville, he decided to throw a party in the complex's pool. He invited all of his friends, and bought fireworks for the occasion. They got stoned and the fireworks got progressively more ambitious. He set off the grand finale by the back door of an elderly disabled woman who lived in the building. Frightened, she fell and broke her arm.

"He's arrogant," his friend said. "I remember he'd get wasted and tell us he was God. Everybody called him Fat Bastard."

***

The second attack came a little over a month after the incident with the train. Woodring knew the FBI was involved at this point, but this didn't concern him. At around 4:30 a.m. Sep. 29, he broke into an Extremely High Voltage switching station off U.S. Highway 165 outside Scott, one of those fenced-in compounds that holds transformers, reactors and other devices used to regulate power flow. He'd scouted the substation for several days before he acted, parking his truck nearby, waiting and making sure it was the right spot for his purposes.

When he'd made up his mind, he used bolt cutters to break through the fence and to cut two padlocks at the door to the control house. He'd brought along a gallon jug of E85 ethanol gas and motor oil, and when he was inside he splashed the mixture all over the control panel and the floor. By now, he would have known that the alarms had already been activated and that the power company, Entergy, had received a series of intruder alerts. He would have had to move quickly.

When the local sheriff's deputies arrived at the scene, the station was in flames and Woodring was gone. The control house was, as the FBI would later report, "consumed" by the fire, and damages this time exceeded $2 million. The deputies also found a message Woodring left behind, scrawled on a metal panel near the entry gate in black marker. He wrote it with his left hand, to disguise his handwriting. It seemed to combine a slogan for Anonymous, the mysterious network of Internet activists, with an oblique reference to the federal government, a kind of paranoid double entendre.

It said: "YOU SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED U.S."

***

Woodring's life in Arkansas hadn't worked out the way he had hoped. His brother got a divorce, joined the military and was stationed in Germany. His father, who had separated from his mother years before, moved to Missouri, where he lived off disability from a bad back. Pool maintenance was OK in the warmer months, but for much of the year he was forced to find work elsewhere. In the winter, he worked at grocery stores and video rental shops and gas stations earning minimum wage. He moved in with his mother.

One bright spot came in 2007, when his girlfriend had a child, a son they named Jason. His mother often took care of the boy, but noticed right away that something was off. The boy didn't look like him. In fact, though his name was on the birth certificate and he volunteered to act as the boy's father, Woodring wasn't, according to someone close to the family. That September, at barely a month old, the child died in its sleep. The cause of death was Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. "I know he always wanted a kid," one friend said. "He wanted to be a dad."

Woodring's drug use got worse. He'd spend as much as $500 a week on meth, which he'd started taking intravenously. The friend describes him as becoming "vindictive" and "very unpredictable." There are stories, the friend said, about him cutting the brake lines on someone's truck, chasing after someone else with a cattle prod, throwing rocks and sticks at an acquaintance's windows in the middle of the night after a bar fight. There were DWIs. By 2009, he was in court for credit card debt, and soon after that he was sued for writing a bad check.

Meanwhile, Woodring kept up on his reading. He read the Bible. He was always surrounded by books on engineering, and had become increasingly fixated on various conspiracy theories, on "subliminal messages coming from the TV" and other plots. "He was really stuck on the whole Nostradamus thing," his friend said, referring to the 16th century French seer who supposedly predicted all manner of contemporary world-historical events in his "Prophecies."

His fits of rage soon started flaring up even with strangers. He was arrested in 2010 for taking a shovel to someone's truck in the parking lot of a Walmart in North Little Rock. The truck's owner claimed not to know him, that it was "very bizarre." Early last year, a woman filed a restraining order against him after he kicked in the fender of her car at a Lowe's because he didn't like her parking job. The day before he was supposed to show up in court for the arraignment, she woke up to find someone had poured green paint all over the car. According to the prosecuting attorney in the case, Hugh Finkelstein, they found no direct evidence linking Woodring to the paint. "Just coincidence," Finkelstein said, laughing.

***

A week after the fire at the substation, Woodring struck again. The FBI reward had been raised to $25,000, and Woodring's court dates for the criminal mischief cases were stacking up and fast approaching. There was a certain route he took sometimes while walking his dog in the miles of fields around Billy Lane and Phillips Road behind his house. He must have looked up one day, out on one of these walks, and noticed the power lines.

He borrowed a chain saw and tried cutting through one of power polls, right there in his own neighborhood. He cut the guy wires and splintered the pole, but it didn't fall. He went home and got an axe. He would have been sweating, his pupils likely dilated from the meth and the effort. He walked to a second pole nearby and swung the axe as hard as he could against it over and over, to force it down. He tried a splitting wedge, too, bashing it into the pole to break it apart, but it still wouldn't fall.

Across the street from his house, the power company had left a tree-trimming vehicle called a Kershaw SkyTrim, a kind of tractor with large treaded wheels and a long boom with a rotating saw at the end that could be extended high into the air. It was perfect, so Woodring stole it. He drove it off-road, back into the fields, and used it to finish the job, dragging down one of the poles and immediately thrusting 10,000 local customers of First Electric Cooperative into the dark.

A few days later, at around noon on Oct. 11, someone reported an explosion in the neighborhood. Sheriff's deputies responded to the call and found blue hose lying by the road, the type used by a pool maintenance man.

That afternoon, Gerald Mabrey was coming home from work again on John Shelton and noticed a line of cars along the street stretching for about a hundred yards. There were police cars and South Bend Fire Department trucks and a black, unmarked van with a crime lab in the back. The block was swarmed by men in bulletproof FBI vests. "They told me he'd done it," Mabrey said, "and I said, 'OK, it don't surprise me none.'"

Inside the house, Lt. James Kulesa of the Lonoke County Sheriff's Office made his way through the mess and found Woodring's room. There was a sawed-off shotgun under the bed and a plastic wrapper filled with white powder on a shelf nearby. He kept looking and found a glass jar filled with "reddish powder," one with "dark liquid" and a tube attached to the lid, countless boxes of matches, a plastic funnel and a bottle of iodine. Outside, they found acid, a grinder, a jar filled with more white powder and various bottles of chemicals. There were two rifles and two more shotguns. There was a boat behind the house that had been reported stolen months before.

***

Woodring was charged with five felonies in Lonoke County and indicted on eight counts by a federal grand jury. Appearing in federal court in November, he wore a dark blue shirt and shackles. According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, U.S. Magistrate Judge Joe Volpe asked him a number of questions, beginning with his name, but Woodring stayed silent.

"I'm not really sure what to do here," Volpe said. He moved on to another defendant, and then came back to Woodring, who once again refused to answer any questions. "Is this an issue of defiance, or has Mr. Woodring got a mental problem?" he asked, and then, "Is there some reason you're not speaking?" Woodring shook his head and said, "I have the right to remain silent, do I not?"

Among the federal charges Woodring faces, domestic terrorism is the most serious. He appears in this context, as a terrorist, in the FBI's new budget request for 2015. "Woodring claimed he committed the acts alone," the document reports, "and stated his motivation was anger with the direction of the country and a belief his actions would garner attention and get people talking." (The FBI declined to comment for this story.) He is set to stand trial Oct. 14, and if convicted on the terrorism charge, he'll face life in prison. For now, Woodring is in Little Rock, in the custody of federal marshals at the Pulaski County Jail. Mental evaluations were ordered at both the state and federal level, though the state psychologist began his report by noting that Woodring refused to speak during his interview. A federal psychologist was more successful. The evaluation, which was held in Los Angeles earlier this year, concluded that he doesn't suffer from a mental disorder, that he's fit to understand his charges, stand trial and defend himself, but it's a strange, bleak document.

Woodring and the examiner talked about his childhood, about the time he cut a boy's hair off with scissors and threatened to throw him out of a window. The report claims that as a child, Woodring "kind of" tortured animals. That with his friends, he would throw mud balls at passing cars, urinate in Laundromat dryers and put "'nasty things' such as pee, dog feces, vomit, in people's cars who had their windows open." They would "bow hunt and corner animals to do 'bad things' to them."

They discussed his relationship history. "In his longest relationship of 4 years," the examiner writes, "his girlfriend had four abortions against his will." They discussed his son. "He reported that he had a relationship with a 'drug addict' who killed his 5-week-old son in September 2007 because she was taking medications while breastfeeding the child."

The evaluator also interviewed Woodring's mother, who "spoke at length on [Jason's] beliefs about the government and the current state of the world, including his lack of interpersonal interactions and intense focus on technology." Jeanne Woodring told them that the first time she visited him in jail, his eyes were clear. "He smiled," she said, and "looked alive for the first time." She said it was "like having my son back."

Gerald Mabrey still drives by the Woodrings' house every day. "I see his red truck sitting in his driveway right where he left it," he said, "and I can't help but feel compassion for the man knowing he's in an 8-by-10 cell somewhere. It's sad to see his truck still sitting there day after day after day, and knowing he probably won't ever get out of prison. In spite of it all, he's one of God's children."

Woodring's friends just wonder what else he could have done with his life, had he devoted his energy elsewhere. "He could have been in a popular band," one said. "He could have been an engineer."

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When Bruce "Sunpie" Barnes arrived in New Orleans almost 20 years ago, he felt an uncanny recognition when he heard people speaking Creole French.

"I picked it up right away," Barnes said. "When I was a kid I used to have all these dreams in Creole. I didn't know what it was, I just knew it was some kind of different language. When I moved to Louisiana, I knew."

Barnes has always been attuned to dreams. He was born in Benton in 1963 under a prophet sign, according to his grandmother, a Louisiana-born "fix-it lady" who did traditional healings and read stars for people in their community. "She told me I would have dreams and visions, and she taught me how to interpret them," Barnes said. Laughing, he added, "and she told me not everyone would believe me, or understand."

Whatever the cause, it's hard to deny that Barnes has found his path. Nowadays the boy who used to dream in Creole in Benton sings in Creole in New Orleans as one of the most prominent musicians in zydeco, a traditional music form originating in southwest Louisiana. Barnes — a multi-instrumentalist who plays accordion, harmonica, rub board, piano, talking drum and more — fronts Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots. Though Sunpie is a popular mainstay on the zydeco circuit, Barnes' music isn't contained by a single genre — he mixes in Delta blues, gospel, boogie woogie, R&B, and West African and Caribbean influences. He calls it "Afro-Louisiana."

Barnes, in addition to being a musician and composer, is a naturalist, a full-time National Park ranger, a black-and-white portrait photographer, a television and film actor and a former professional football player with the Kansas City Chiefs.

"I'm not interested in being restricted," Barnes said. "I'm interested in life."

***

Bruce Barnes, 51, grew up in Benton's Gravel Hill community, the 10th of 11 children. His family traces their roots across southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana. His parents were sharecroppers who worked various farms in southern Arkansas and the Delta before escaping from a plantation in the middle of the night to take work at an aluminum plant in Bauxite, working open-pit aluminum ore mines. They initially lived in tarpaper shacks along with Hispanic migrant workers in what was known as Mexico Camp, but later settled in Gravel Hill, along with others who had escaped sharecropping plantations. Barnes' parents often helped other sharecroppers escape, in what amounted to a post-bellum underground railroad.

"They created a whole community by stealing people off the plantation," Barnes said. "Gravel Hill was our little community. Pretty much the all-black section, south of the tracks, you know how it is in Arkansas."

Barnes spent a lot of time hunting and fishing, or just playing all day in the woods. "We used to always fantasize about being out in the world on some kind of adventure," Barnes said. As a kid, he would climb out the window at 1 or 2 in the morning and take walks in the woods for miles. "I'd just sit down and listen and see all the animals that were moving and coming through," he said. "I just felt like I needed to be out in the world. That was a driving force for me for whatever reason, to devise a plan to get out in the world."

Barnes' father, Willie Barnes Sr., was a blues harmonica player. "He was raised around people like Roosevelt Sykes and Bill Broonzy — they lived and worked in the same plantations he did," Barnes said. "That's what he was exposed to and that's what he loved to play."

Bruce Barnes loved it, too. "I had a very firm idea in my head even when I was 4 or 5 years old that I was going to make music," Barnes said. "I thought music was magic. I'd see my father play, he used to play this old song called 'The Coon and the Hound' on the harmonica, he was barking like a dog and all that. He played a lot of old country blues. I was like, man, I can't wait to get old enough to make some magic. That's what really got me hooked on it, just sitting on his knee and listening to him play that tune."

Barnes begged for piano lessons, but his father was skeptical. He had paid for piano lessons for Bruce's older siblings. "You'd go to piano lessons across the tracks in Benton over there and you would learn to play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," the "Leftbridge Overture," something like that. Back home, he wanted some blues coming out of it." None of his older siblings had stuck with the instrument, so by the time Bruce showed interest, "He decided he wasn't wasting no more money on piano lessons."

Bruce started teaching himself at home, partly inspired by his uncle, who would come up from Bastrop, La., and play blues piano. Half Blackfoot Indian, this uncle went by the name Sunpie. He had lost the top half of his fingers in a sawmill accident, but that didn't stop him on the piano.

"He'd be working these nubs, wearing the piano out," Barnes said. "His face was completely shaved clean. No eyebrows, eyelashes, nothing. He was an interesting character. I thought he was fascinating."

Barnes followed him around so much that his aunt started calling him "little Sunpie." The name stuck: "When I got older, I kept the Sunpie, just not the little," Barnes said.

In junior high, Barnes started working night jobs at an ice plant to save up money for a trombone so he could play in the band. Barnes discovered he had an ear for music, and by high school he made first chair. He was also a track and football star. At football games, Barnes never got a rest: He played offense, defense and special teams — then at halftime he would take off his shoulder pads and helmet and march with the band.

Toward the end of high school, Barnes approached his father, then almost 80 years old, wanting to learn blues harmonica.

"He thought I was crazy," he said. "The only place he knew about blues being played was in juke joints, in pretty dangerous places. He said, 'I'm not going to teach you how to play no blues so you can go out and get yourself killed.' Eventually I convinced him, and he found out I could play a little bit."

His father was crazy about Sonny Boy Williamson, the legendary blues singer and harmonica player who had lived in the Arkansas Delta not too far away. The younger Barnes got hooked on Sonny Boy, too — Williamson remains one of his strongest musical influences. Barnes began to develop his chops as a blues harmonica player, and a knowledge and love of Delta blues music that stays with him today, even as he has added musical elements a long way from the Delta to his eclectic style. "My father gave me the passion and the fire for it, for sure," he said. For Barnes, it's a connection that runs deep, rooted in generations before him. His father's father — born in 1847 in Oak Grove, La. — played violin, accordion and pipe organ. "My people have been playing music for years and years," he said. "I knew I would play music for the rest of my life."

After graduating high school, Barnes went to Henderson State on a football scholarship. He was a star on the field — an NAIA All-American as a defensive end — and also formed a blues band, playing for tips in Arkadelphia and Little Rock. Meanwhile, he studied biology, with a focus on ichthyology (the study of fishes), doing fieldwork in lakes, rivers and streams across the state, including the Saline River, where he used to fish as a boy.

Like music, Barnes' lifelong passion for nature sprung from his years growing up in Gravel Hill. He loved to set traps in the woods and hunt for birds. To make money, he would dig up a particular pink ribbon clay that black and Indian women in his community would eat as a kind of natural supplement. He also caught poisonous snakes to sell them — $20 a snake — to venom hospitals.

"Being from Arkansas, it's all in the back yard," Barnes said. "In Saline County, we had all these unique geological formations together. Gulf coastal plain, Mississippi Delta, Ouachita Mountains, Ozark Mountains. We'd find strange things out in the field. A giant clam shell or conch shell — we didn't know why they were there. We used to dig up crystals all the time. For me, I became somebody who was inquisitive and wanted to investigate that kind of thing."

"I loved catching fish, but I wasn't only catching them to eat. I had to know what fish it was, where the fish lived, what its habitat was, the whole nine yards. Later, when I got to university, I didn't realize how much I knew. I found out when I took my first zoology course, I knew a lot of these animals."

While in college, he got his first job with the National Park Service, working three seasons on the Buffalo River, stationed out of Buffalo Point. He was doing canoe tours when word came that the Kansas City Chiefs of the National Football League offered him a contract. The team was a bit taken aback when he didn't immediately head up to sign. "I said, man, just send it to me in the mail — I'll sign the thing and send it back," Barnes said. "I can't come up there because I got a canoe tour on Saturday. So they sent it to the ranger station at Buffalo Point."

Barnes lasted a season with the Chiefs (during which time he continued playing the blues, picking up gigs in Kansas City). The following year, his agent said he had lined up a spot for him in the Canadian Football League.

"He said, 'You can go to Saskatchewan or Winnipeg, take your pick," Barnes said. "I looked at it, thought about it — I said, 'You know what, I'm going to go back to canoeing.'

"I decided right there that football wasn't really my dream. I had dreamed about playing music. And my dream was to work in nature."

To be precise, his first big dream, since he was in second grade, was to work with Jacques Cousteau. "I was going to be the first brother on the Calypso. I had studied fish in school, took a 21-month course in scuba diving, night diving, open-water diving, you name it. I'd done it all. I either wanted to work for Jacques Cousteau or Marlon Perkins [the zoologist and host of "Wild Kingdom"]. The one faulty part of my plan — by the time I was done with university, those dudes were in their 80s."

With Cousteau and Perkins no longer hiring, Barnes turned back to the National Park Service. He wanted to land somewhere where he could play music. Barnes blindfolded himself and threw a dart at a map of the United States three times. Two out of three hit New Orleans, right on the dot. When a job offer came to work at Jean Lafitte National Park, working as a park ranger and naturalist in the Barataria Preserve just outside of New Orleans, he took the gig.

Barnes arrived in the city in 1987, on the Sunday before Mardi Gras. "I had no clue of anything about what Mardi Gras was, what Carnival was. There were parades everywhere, people all over town. I was like, damn, I don't know if I can handle this town."

Barnes settled in to a new routine: During the day he'd put on his hip waders and get in his canoe, doing tours and educational programming over 23,000 acres of wetlands.

At night, he went out in search of music and soon became as enamored with zydeco and New Orleans R&B as he was with the blues. "I would take a lot of adventures," he said. "You could go to Clifton's [as in Chenier — the "King of Zydeco"] house, you could go to Boozoo's [as in Chavis — another zydeco legend] house — these people would just open their door up for you. If you were really interested in the music, they would show you."

"I loved to dance and I was in heaven," Barnes said. "I would go listen to Fats Domino play Sunday night at the Grease or you name it — Ernie K-Doe, Jessie Hill, Johnny Adams. They all would play these little bars on Basin Street. It was free and the food was free. They would have a huge buffet with everything — gumbo, yaka mein, turkey necks, meat loaf. All that was free, beer was 50 cents and mixed drinks a dollar fifty. That fit my poor humble park service budget."

At the time, there weren't many harmonica players in New Orleans, so local musicians took a shine to the new guy in town from Arkansas.

"I became good friends with Fats Domino and all those folks because I was playing straight-up blues," Barnes said. "It was all I knew, and they loved that. There were just very few harmonica players around or people who had that Delta sound."

Barnes started playing rub board and harmonica in some zydeco bands but at that time he didn't know the first thing about the instrument he's probably most known for today: the accordion. He had been in New Orleans for two years when he started having a dream that he was playing an accordion, the same dream five nights in a row. One day, he wandered into a music store to buy a new harmonica. On the wall was the very same accordion he had seen in his dreams. He had $200 to his name at the time, but he knew he had to have it and bought the $1,500 instrument on a finance plan, with an interest rate liable to make him broke.

That night he started fiddling with it; the keyboard came naturally, but he wasn't sure what to do with all the little buttons. A buddy called to tell him about a Sprite television commercial to audition for the next day. When Barnes mentioned his new accordion, his buddy said, "Oh, bring it, they love those." Barnes stayed up all night teaching himself a song. He got the part, which came with a $2,000 check that allowed him to pay off the accordion right away. That one led to another job for Barnes later that same week, a McDonald's commercial looking for an accordion player.

"That one paid another $2,000," Barnes said. "All of a sudden, my poor broke self — I was like damn, I couldn't believe it. I gotta go and learn how to play this thing!"

Barnes is mostly self-taught, but he went to Cajun country in Lafayette Parish to get some lessons from Clayton Sampy, the legendary French Creole accordion player.

"At first, he kept looking at me sideways," Barnes said. "He said, 'Man, I can't show you nothing — you got it upside down!'"

Sunpie, left-handed, had been playing the accordion upside down and backwards for several months before Sampy set him straight; he had to train himself to play right-handed (accordions are only built one way).

Barnes found that he had a knack for accordion, and, perhaps remembering the dreams of his childhood, singing in Creole French came easily to him. By 1991, he formed Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots, one of the only zydeco bands based in New Orleans at the time. Even as he moved more toward zydeco, Barnes stayed anchored in the music that his father had taught him back in Arkansas.

"I never put the blues down because what I realized is that zydeco had all this blues in it," Barnes said. "That's what I loved about Clifton Chenier, Boozoo Chavis, John Delafose. Everybody was playing blues and a lot of it, they just do it the Creole way."

"My music is still based off of the blues. That's what it's rooted in. It's a combination of music from the Delta, music from the city of New Orleans, and the rural Creole sound. I do them all."

The result is a music as rich and diverse and adventurous as Sunpie's life. Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots have become a fixture at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the Louisiana Cajun-Zydeco Festival. They've put out six albums and played in more than 30 countries, from Europe to Africa to Central America. Recently, Sunpie was asked to accompany Paul Simon and Sting on a two-month tour (when Simon called him to ask him to come, Barnes initially thought it must be someone playing a prank).

"Bruce is without doubt the best-known zydeco bandleader who calls New Orleans home," said Scott Aiges, director of programs, marketing and communications for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation. "He travels the world playing both blues and zydeco — sometimes in the same set ... and he's one of the more popular musicians in New Orleans."

Barnes still works as a park ranger by day (the National Park Service was nice enough to grant him a sabbatical for the tour with Paul Simon and Sting). After more than 12 years on the Barataria Preserve, in 1999 he moved to the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park in the heart of the French Quarter, where he does education and programming related to the music and cultural history of his adopted home. He developed a program to teach young people traditional New Orleans jazz and brass band music; his latest project is a forthcoming book with conversations between the students and their mentors about how to have a life in traditional music (and features photographs by Barnes of both students and mentors, taken wherever they started playing music).

If Barnes has a passion for preserving traditions — whether it's the endangered language of Creole French or the etiquette and rules of playing a jazz funeral — it is clear from his music that he means to stake a claim for new traditions of his own.

"The thing I try to do is, I love to try to take the traditional sound and move it in different ways," Barnes said. "I want to keep it alive and pass it on, but my main thing is to bring something to the table that will have some staying power and that will last. That's what all my elders taught me. My daddy and my Uncle Sunpie, my mama, grandma, grandpa. To create something that is simply yours."

That attitude — preserving cultural traditions but insisting on making them funky and singular — makes a pretty good manifesto for New Orleans. Those darts Barnes threw at the map years ago seem to have landed in the right spot. His dreams seem to be pointing him in the right direction. "I think I'm at home now," Barnes said. "This is a good place for me."

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At the start of any attempt to correct the injustices of a society, the right side of history is the narrowest of ledges, hovering over a terrible drop. Though that ledge may eventually grow into something that encompasses the whole nation, in the beginning, it's a bare toehold, buffeted at all times by the howls of zealots. Ask the Little Rock Nine about the narrowness of that ledge. Ask the Stonewall Rioters or Abraham Lincoln, or Susan B. Anthony.

Still, thank God, there are folks willing to step out there. For the past year, one of those folks in Arkansas has been Little Rock lawyer Jack Wagoner III. Last June, soon after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in U.S. v. Windsor — which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act's prohibition on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional — a spur-of-the-moment Facebook post entangled Wagoner in the fight for LGBT rights in Arkansas, territory he'd previously visited before. Since then, Wagoner, along with Searcy attorney Cheryl Maples and others, has provided both behind-the-scenes legal expertise and impassioned and sometimes emotional courtroom argument in support of the right of gays and lesbians to marry. Those efforts led to Pulaski Circuit Judge Chris Piazza's May 9 ruling that struck down the state's ban on gay marriage. With that ruling since stayed by the Arkansas Supreme Court, Wagoner is gearing up for the next court fight, one that he's confident he, Maples and the plaintiffs they represent will win.

It's a long way from where Wagoner started: a near-burnout kid from Little Rock, bounced from school to school, who graduated with a GPA that wouldn't buy you a king-sized candy bar if it was dollars and cents. His outspoken zeal for the issue of gay marriage springs from a belief he's had since he was in college: The reason the Constitution exists is to protect the minority from the whims of the majority. Mixed in with that, however, is a heaping spoonful of something else that drives him: He just doesn't like the majority all that much, especially when they're waving around a Bible.

'Philosophy, 5 cents'

Wagoner was born in 1961, the son of a Little Rock doctor and a homemaker. Though his father, Dr. Jack Wagoner Jr., was somewhat conservative in his thinking, he opened the first integrated medical practice in the state in 1969, partnering with a black physician. That decision-turned-statement on equality has stuck with his son.

"That was a bold move for a white doctor with four kids, coming out of medical school in 1969," Wagoner said. "He did the right thing, rather than think about how it was going to affect his livelihood, his practice, what people thought, or any of that. I've always been really proud of that."

As a kid, Wagoner acknowledged, he was a troublemaker, skipping so many classes that his parents eventually sent him to Pulaski Academy for two years, thinking that would help. By the end of the ninth grade, though, he was on the verge of being kicked out. "If you got nine detentions, you were expelled," he said. "Three tardies was a detention hall. I got down to eight detention halls and two tardies in the ninth grade. My parents said, 'If you'll just shut your mouth and not get expelled, we'll let you go to Hall next year,' so I behaved completely for the next three months."

Wagoner didn't do much better in high school, graduating from Hall High in 1979 by the skin of his teeth with a 1.53 GPA. As a young man, he delivered flowers, and lived a wild life of partying with friends. "I didn't want any part of this normal adult world," he said. "I pictured myself working in a pizza place in Boulder, Colo., or California, drinking beer and hanging out, having a little apartment in the mountains."

A friend of his started classes at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and to Wagoner's amazement, the guy was soon pulling down straight As. Wagoner enrolled soon after, and found that the educational freedom afforded to college students worked for him. He eventually graduated with a 3.6 GPA, his course load heavy on religion and philosophy classes. After college, he was again conflicted about what to do with his life. "I thought about opening up a little Charlie Brown stand with a sign that said: 'Philosophy, 5 cents'," he said with a laugh.

Returning home from a Grateful Dead show in Texas in 1983, Wagoner literally flipped a coin to decide whether to go law school or try for his Ph.D. in philosophy. He said that even if the coin toss hadn't been in favor of law school, he probably would have overruled it. "I never set out to be a lawyer," he said. "But I always knew that I hated people telling other people what to do. I have a strong distrust for authority —those in control and those in charge."

Taking courses at what would eventually become UALR's Bowen School of Law, Wagoner said the classes quickly divided between those who believed the law should be a check on authority and those who believed getting bad people off the streets trumped all else.

"There was a group of us who thought, 'If some guy gets let go with a hundred pounds of cocaine in his truck because they pulled some monkey business to make up an excuse to search him, then it was better to let that guy go than to just start shirking the rules.' The other side had a feeling like, 'The end justifies the means. If we cheat or cut corners, it doesn't matter about that as long as we got the bad guy.' That way of thinking leads to a breakdown of constitutional protections."

Wagoner worked for Bill Wilson, who would go on to the federal bench, during law school and served as a clerk for Pulaski Circuit Judge Ellen Brantley after he graduated in the top 5 percent of his law school class. That performance could have easily landed him a job with a corporation or a big firm, Wagoner said, but that just isn't his thing. "That's where most of the stuff that pisses me off occurs," he said. "I didn't want that."

It was from Wilson, Wagoner said, that he learned the passion of fighting for those without power. "He wanted to fight for the little guy against the insurance companies and the cops," Wagoner said. "I don't like calling it the Democratic side or the progressive side. I like to call it 'The Side of the Little Guy.' That's what I see in progressives and the liberals and the Democrats."

Moral man of the year

In a two-lawyer firm in a storefront in Riverdale, in a cluttered office with a portrait of The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia smiling beatifically down from the wall, at a desk adorned with a large coffee cup that says "Like I Give a Fuck," Jack Wagoner takes on the world. Most days, unless he's got to be in court, he dresses like he's on his way to a Jimmy Buffett concert: blousy shorts, sandals, loud shirts. His bicycle leans in the hallway, so he can hop on and head down to the river if he needs to clear his head. He'll commonly do 20 miles before work. He's his own boss, and can say whatever damn fool thing that pops into his head. That's the way he likes it.

He makes a good living with his family law practice but still finds time to tilt at the occasional windmill. He said he was the first lawyer in the state to bring a class-action lawsuit against nursing home owners. He's filed class actions over fees levied on customers by banks. In the early 1990s, he sued the diocese of Little Rock for breach of fiduciary duty after a priest ran off with the wife of a Catholic client. Wagoner eventually took the case all the way to the state Supreme Court, losing 7-0, with one judge recommending that sanctions be brought against him. Asked if he'd do that one again, knowing how it turned out, Wagoner flashed a big grin and said, "Yeah." Last October, he sent a $158 check to Bryant Police Chief Mark Kizer — $58 to pay for Kizer's unreimbursed dinner tab at an Orlando steakhouse Kizer visited while in town, and $100 to offset the loss of income after being suspended for five days by Bryant Mayor Jill Dabbs over the question of whether the steakhouse was also a strip club. "It wasn't like 'support the cops!' or anything," Wagoner said. "It was just me telling the morality police to suck it. That's what stirs me."

His current crusade for gay marriage isn't his first foray into LGBT rights. Wagoner was one of the attorneys for John Moix, a divorced father who had been forbidden by the courts from cohabitating with his male partner of seven years on nights when Moix's 12-year-old son was visiting. In November 2013, the Arkansas Supreme Court reversed a lower court's ruling in the Moix case, striking down the blanket law that had forbidden unmarried people from having romantic overnight guests when minor children are present.

Wagoner had been following the Windsor case, and when the decision was handed down June 26, Wagoner said the sweeping language — with Justice Kennedy's opinion clearly opening the door to gay marriage nationwide — gave him goose bumps. As he usually does at times he probably shouldn't, he soon turned to Facebook.

"I opened my mouth, like I always do. I often find myself standing behind my mouth, thinking: 'I wish it would SHUT UP!'," he said with a laugh. "But I posted on Facebook that if you go to the Pulaski County Clerk for a marriage license, and you're a same-sex couple, and they won't give you one, you've got a free lawyer." Later the same day, Wagoner made another Facebook post, referencing the Arkansas morality group that pushes a conservative agenda on issues ranging from abortion to marijuana legalization: "Suck it Family Council."

"I missed the civil rights movement in the '60s," Wagoner said. "I think I would have been on the right side then. But I thought, 'This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of something. This change is coming, and I can be a part of it.'"

Wagoner soon hooked up with Maples, who had also been moved to file a lawsuit in state court on July 2 after reading the Windsor decision, beating Wagoner to the punch by a few days. Since then, Wagoner and Maples have combined their efforts. He said that their cooperation on the case has been invaluable. "Cheryl is more involved in client contact and client management, and I was more involved in just the nuts and bolts of the legal arguments," he said. "But she contributed greatly to those as well."

Wagoner, who has been agnostic since college, said that a lot of his passion for the issue of same-sex marriage comes from a dislike of those who would seek to use the Bible as a tool to control others. It's annoying, he said, to have one side of any moral argument claim that the Bible is the be-all-end-all authority on the issue, especially given that carefully chosen passages from the Bible could be used to make the case for almost any practice or belief. On the issue of same-sex marriage, Wagoner said, the other side can't separate their religious convictions from civil law and can't seem to recognize that the same First Amendment that prevents the government from forcing churches to marry gay people also forbids the government from discriminating against same-sex couples who want to get married.

"They want to bring out the Biblical basis for it," he said. "They want to point to Leviticus, 'A man shall not lie with a man, and he ought to be killed if he does.' They say they're Christians, but they're skipping the New Testament, man! The message of Jesus was unconditional love. It was, 'Don't judge people, and don't condemn people.' These that are labeling themselves as Christians are persecuting the very people Jesus would be putting his arm around and saying, 'Sweet child, I love you. You're loved.' It's backwards. It's crazy."

Though the other side often frames the argument in terms of a slippery slope, saying that if gay marriage is allowed, people will soon be filing suit for the right to marry their dog, computer or more than one spouse, Wagoner said it boils down to a matter of choice: Gay people are born gay, with no choice in the matter. Nobody, on the other hand, is born a polygamist, or wanting to marry their dog or computer. Discriminating against people for things they have no control over, Wagoner said, is no better than bullying.

"You want to bully people who commit murder, or people who are engaged in child pornography," he said. "Those are moral actions that people have a choice about. By all means, hold them accountable."

Another thing those on the other side of the gay marriage argument do, Wagoner said, is to frame sexuality as a moral choice. "One, why would somebody make that choice [to be homosexual] given everything you'd have to deal with?" he said. "And, two, I'm not sitting here heterosexual because I'm up for the Moral Man of the Year Award. I'm not restraining myself from running out and engaging in homosexual sex. ... [Heterosexuality] is a part of my basic identity. You've got to wonder how intelligent somebody would have to be to believe it's some kind of moral choice."

Asked about his thoughts on state Sen. Jason Rapert, Republican of Bigelow — who has repeatedly questioned Pulaski Circuit Judge Chris Piazza's authority to strike down state law, and who authored and pushed through a resolution June 20 that affirmed the Arkansas Legislative Council's support for Arkansas Amendment 83, which outlawed gay marriage — Wagoner said he considers him an embarrassment who uses select passages from the Bible to justify discrimination while depicting himself as being "in some higher, better, more moral category."

"That way of thinking is an embarrassment to the state, and to the opportunity to have us viewed as decent, caring, progressive people," Wagoner said. "His stance is on all fours with Orval Faubus standing in the doors of Central High to keep black students from entering."

Dominoes

Heading into oral arguments before the state Supreme Court, Wagoner said he expected the court would reach a decision this year. He'll not guarantee it, he said, but that's his feeling. When the case was first filed in state court soon after the Windsor decision, Wagoner said, the arguments were kind of out on a limb, with no legal precedent to build on other than the broad, sweeping language in the Windsor opinion. As more and more states have scuttled their bans on same-sex marriage, however, Wagoner's confidence has grown.

"The more dominoes that fall, the harder it is to see [the state Supreme Court] as the only court that doesn't follow suit," he said. "Right now, in the federal arena, we're going to start seeing the first federal appeals court decisions — the courts right below the Supreme Court. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals already has two cases they've heard oral arguments on, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has one that's pretty far along. We're going to start getting decisions out of those courts pretty quick."

With all the celebrations surrounding Piazza's decision and all the work that's been put in, Wagoner said that in a few years, the last word on same-sex marriage will be the U.S. Supreme Court's. He's heartened by the language in Windsor, though, and the speed at which courts across the country have tolled the bell for marriage equality. He's got a gut feeling about the case, he said, buttressed by his belief that it'll be hard for opponents of same-sex marriage to find legal backing for their arguments.

"I've had cases where I felt certain in my gut that my assessment of the facts and the law was correct and that we should win, but somebody's been on the other side who's giving me a version of things that doesn't square with my gut and what my eyes are seeing. I sometimes think, 'What am I missing here?' But I have never, ever lost when I had that feeling. I kind of have that feeling about this. It's so hard to envision it. Even if there was a motivation and somebody told me, 'Write an opinion overruling Judge Piazza based on existing law,' that would be a hard row to hoe." 

In the end, it all goes back to fighting for the underdog. He said that the most patriotic movie he ever saw wasn't "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" or "Saving Private Ryan," or "Top Gun." It's "The People vs. Larry Flynt," a large part of which is about an idealistic lawyer who steps up to defend the much-reviled publisher of "Hustler" magazine after he was charged with indecency. Seeing someone defend the rights of those who the majority seeks to crush is what makes him feel patriotic, Wagoner said.

"This is the United States," he said. "We're supposed to be tolerant. We don't have to like what other people want to do, and they don't have to like what we do. But if there's not some demonstrable harm to somebody that's coming of it, people ought to be left alone." 

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