All performers were paid through the support of local businesses and merchant organizations. More than 50 businesses contributed to PARTY ! Please support (and thank!) our local independent merchants. They are treasures that few cities have.
(Who are these arts-loving businesses?)

This year, we commissioned new flags for PARTY from Cleveland Heights fiber artist Susan Skove. Her brilliantly colored hand-painted silk flags marked the locations of the Thursday concerts, as they moved from Cedar Lee to Coventry to Cedar Fairmount. You'll have the opportunity to buy her silk scarves at our annual Holiday Store, opening November 18 at the gallery, 2173 Lee Road.

HeightsArts volunteer Jane Wood spent some time with Susan, and wrote the following:

Where Skove likes to play is in a two-room subterranean studio in the basement of her Cleveland Heights home (she has another one upstairs, but that's for oil painting). The larger room contains two wooden frames to stretch the silk, lots of cupboards, a table and stools, a day bed, a hutch, a rocking chair and a portable crib that's used as a shelf. In the smaller room are 45 different bottles of French dyes lined up over a sink. Skove mixes the dyes with water and rubbing alcohol to create the particular colors she wants. But although she says she could do what she does with just six dyes, she has 400 swatches.

Before she starts working, usually very early in the morning, Skove says she has already "visualized what I want to do." Then she begins, using a Japanese watercolor brush to draw the design on the silk, which is stretched horizontally; after it dries, she draws the design again using "gutta," a substance that keep the dyes from leaking into other areas. Now the fun begins: Using plain alcohol and a brush, Skove paints fanciful details, quickly blowing them dry with a hair drier. "I usually go through two [hair driers] a year," she confesses. Her current project is a wall hanging celebrating the Jubilee of a Carmelite nun.

Skove has always been artistic, but has not always practiced her art. She studied oil painting at the now defunct Cooper School of Art in Cleveland, then ceramics at Cleveland State University. After teaching at Cooper for a while, she became one of the owners of Cleveland's first Arabica coffeehouse. (Coventry aficionados can thank her for the café mocha and carrot cake recipes.) She has lived in Cleveland Heights all her life.

Skove is unpretentious and down-to-earth. She is 52 years old (Heights High Class of 1969), the wife of Tom (an environmental attorney with Roetzel and Andress), the mother of two children (Sam, 14, and Lily, 23, who just moved to New York) and housemother to two cats (Jeremiah and Isabel). While she works, Skove is sometimes treated to a concert, with Sam and Tom (formerly the piano player with the Mr. Stress Blues Band) on electric guitars. Tom is also a poet, whose work has been published in "Main Street Rag" and "The Anthology of New England Writers;" he's writing his own poetry anthology, whose working title is "The Book of Lawyers."

After Lily was born, Skove trained and earned a diploma as a Montessori teacher, founding Forest Hill Montessori School with her best friend, Jane Brown; they ran it for seven years. She says she hadn't abandoned art-"there was a lot of art involved" at the school-but when her son was born, she realized "having a newborn and running a pre-school were not compatible." She also missed her art, and says she "didn't have enough creative juice to do it all."

Skove has designed scarves for the Taft Museum's ceramic collection (Cincinnati) and for the Cleveland Museum of Art's pre-Raphaelite exhibit. Her work is in art galleries and museum shops around the country, from Toledo to Cincinnati to Chicago to Mendocino (California) to London (England). One of the few places you can buy her creations locally is at Jim Dickson's shop on Fairmount Boulevard in Cleveland Heights, and the Cleveland Museum of Art and The Gathering Place. But although she loves making "special scarves for special people," Skove is ready for "the focus to shift. I want to make a lot more wall pieces," she says.

Like many of the artists who have contributed to the color of the Cleveland Heights landscape, Skove is having the time of her life. "It's play; it's fun," she says of her work. And she means it.

~Jane Wood

Exhibition and Poetry Reading
6 pm to 9 pm

A Matriot's Dream: Health Care for All
Photographs by Kira Carrillo Corser
Poems by Frances Payne Adler

A powerful exhibit of beautiful oversized black-and- white framed photos and poems which tell the stories of real people who do not have health insurance.

Poetry reading at 7 and 8 by Adler, who will also sign her new book The Making of a MATRIOT

A Benefit for Universal Health Care Action Network of Ohio (UHCAN Ohio)

Suggested donations:
Students with I.D. $10
Individuals $30
Couples $50
Matriot Dream Sponsor $100

For information and to R.S.V.P.:
Deborah Nebel 216-241-8422, ext. 21 or Jean Kradlak, ext. 11
jkradlak@uhcanohio.org

Universal Health Care Action Network of Ohio (UHCAN Ohio)
2800 Euclid Ave., #520
Cleveland OH 44115-2418

Matriot(ma¹-tri-at) noun 1: One who loves his or her country. 2: One who loves and protects the people of his or her country. 3: One who perceives national defense as health, education, and shelter of all people in his or her country.

Here are opportunities in the Heights, most of which are fairly recent. HeightsArts provides this list as a service, but does not have any formal affiliation with the following:

Center Art
Art classes for adults, teens, and children
1930 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights
216-320-1459

Studio MPK
Art classes for children
3964 Mayfield, Cleveland Heights
216-544-4908
Als o offering events during the presidential debates
Also offering photography services, including portraits

Clayworks Cooperative
Classes for adults, teens, children, and families
1925 Coventry, Cleveland Heights (basement of Coventry Branch Library)
216-371-4130

Inlet Dance Theatre
Dance classes at Severance Athletic Club, Severance Circle, Cleveland Heights
216-382-0201

Kalliope Stage
Theater classes for children and teens
2134 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights
216-321-0860

Joan Southgate is a 72-year-old Clevelander who walked The Underground Railroad in Ohio and Canada during the last few summers. Along the way she stopped and gave talks at schools and community centers to educate citizens about this era in American history. In Their Path: A Grandmother's 519-Mile Underground Railroad Walk is the book that she and journalist Fran Stewart have written detailing Joan's walk. The new book describes Joan's travels and is also an historical travel guide describing the landmarks of the Underground Railroad in Ohio. This hybrid memoir/travel guide will have great appeal to anyone interested in Ohio travel and history or African- American history.

See the day's schedule