The Chautauquan Daily

During a summer storm in Cleveland a few years back, the conditions knocked branches from their trees — much like many storms nationwide. The result of this one was very different. Branches struck power lines, making a regular storm into something much worse. Fifty million people were left without power, some of them for days. By the end, the economies of the U.S. and Canada lost almost $10 billion.

Benjamin Elijah Mays’ earliest memory was his father pleading for his life before a lynch mob. His formative experience with race relations would affect the path of the rest of his life.

The buzz around the young conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya is that he’s in the running to succeed the departed Stefan Sanderling as the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra’s music director.

Elaine King will deliver her lecture, “Artists, Nature and Environmental Change” at 7 p.m. tonight in the Hall of Christ. King, who is an art critic and historian and a professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, said her lecture will focus on artists’ portrayal of nature within a historical context. But the discussion will not focus strictly on paintings or pastel colors — it will be a broader dialogue about the evolution of the natural world and current environmental problems.

Equipped with a brand-new, lemon-yellow wagon that matches his famous lemon tarts, Herb Keyser is back in business for the season. Every Monday morning, Keyser marches up and down the brick path in front of the post office selling his homemade lemon tarts to those waiting in the ticket line for the Logan Chamber Music Series. With his lemon tarts, Keyser found a fun and creative way to fundraise; he donates all of the proceeds to the Chautauqua Fund, sometimes multiplying his initial investment in ingredients almost five-fold.

The Chautauqua Golf Club regularly hosts a variety of charity events, most notably the Office Depot Pro-Am Tournament and the Sports for Kids Golf Tournament. Last Friday, both frequent and occasional golfers gathered at the Golf Club to support local hospital care in the Westfield Memorial Hospital Foundation 19th Annual Golf Tournament.

Members and friends of the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra will perform at an hour-long, open recital at 4 p.m. today in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall. The third annual recital is sponsored by the Symphony Partners — the CSO’s volunteer and support organization. Donations to the Symphony Partners will support future events, including Meet the CSO, Musicians Brown Bag lunch and post-symphony Meet the Sections events.

The band is cosmopolitan, but that’s not why it’s called Pink Martini. This “little orchestra” founded by politician-turned-musician Thomas Lauderdale in 1994 is difficult to categorize. Each of its six albums span a world of musical cultures, from Brazilian lounge music to Parisian jazz, and represent just as many languages.

Filmmaker Bestor Cram is no stranger to Chautauqua. “I consider myself the George Washington of Chautauqua,” Cram said, “because I’ve slept in almost every house here given the number of years that I’ve come here.”

Writer-in-residence Ron MacLean has high hopes for art. It can open the imagination, expand our feelings and even make us better people, he said.

There are times these days when I really miss the Soviets. I don’t miss their Gulag, or their massive military occupation of Eastern Europe, or many other aspects of their totalitarian and highly oppressive system. But I miss having them as our central enemy.

Three weeks before President Richard Nixon’s inauguration in 1969, R. James Woolsey attended a friend’s engagement dinner party. A man well versed in politics, Woolsey unsurprisingly entered into a discussion about the Vietnam War that evening. Somehow, that conversation managed to turn into a loud and rather angry argument with none other than Paul Nitze, the Deputy Secretary of Defense and father of the bride-to-be.

From makeshift jail cells across the U.S., Al Staggs brings to life the letter that a distraught Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his German prison in the early 1940s. “We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled — in short, from the perspective of those who suffer,” the letter states.

When David Ignatius was trying to get his first novel, Agents of Innocence, published, he found himself rejected by a dozen companies. The book started as nonfiction, but it became fictionalized as he wrote. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., finally approved the novel, but only on the basis that they wanted a nonfiction book next.

The Rev. Frank Chikane pays the salaries of his former torturers because of the influence of anti-apartheid leaders like Beyers Naudé. Chikane is the president of the Apostolic Faith Mission International and a member of the African National Congress. His 2 p.m. lecture, “Daring Death to Save a Nation,” was the third in the Week Three Interfaith Lecture Series “Spies for God.”

SLIDESHOW: Scenes of The North Carolina Dance Theatre in Residence performance with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra.