“Nancy Cole and Camille Williams have 216 reasons for people to support the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. The two women are co-chairmen of the orchestra guild’s playing card fundraiser,” writes Ron Wolfe in Sunday’s (11/30) Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock; subscription required). “The idea is 216 images of Arkansas…. ‘The cards in each deck reflect a bit of everything that makes Arkansas so amazing,’ Cole says.… One card, the jack of clubs, shows a section of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. The caption notes the orchestra’s 30 Masterworks, Pops! and Chamber Music concerts each year, and that its school programs ‘reach 24,000 children in the state.’ When the symphony plays a concert, Williams says, ‘we’re out in the lobby selling cards.’ Other cards celebrate the Buffalo National River, downtown Little Rock, deer hunting, the Johnson County Peach Festival, Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, Mount Magazine State Park, the ivory-billed woodpecker and the state Capitol…. Their strategy is … to offer the symphony guild’s 300 members—the audience, too—something everybody ‘could get in on at a price point [$10] they could afford.’ … A sketch loosely represents the music director [Philip Mann] on each ‘wild card,’ rounding out the decks for a total of 216.”
Posted December 2, 2014
