Friday, August 07, 2009
Summer fun can come with laughs and with family
Priscilla Richardson is columnist The Botetourt View. You can contact her at 981-3430 or via e-mail.
Priscilla Richardson
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There's just enough time for more summer fun. First, get to Attic Productions' "Nunsense."
Based on a dress rehearsal, I can heartily recommend this comedy. You've heard the premise: a convent has four deceased sisters in the kitchen freezer, so they're putting on a show to raise the money to bury them. A surprise plot twist ends the frolic, but not until you laugh a lot. You'll love Sister Amnesia, played by Kris Laguzza. She's forgotten her name, but not how to perform. You have to see this.
And there's still time to follow the lead of Lois Caldwell and set up a family get together. Caldwell's was mostly family and some friends plus one stranger, me. Yours can be any mix you like. She had it at her Mill Creek area home, but a park or church fellowship hall makes another great place.
While the thought of having 32 over for a meal would stop most people, it doesn't have to when you do it pot luck style. Caldwell baked a ham, made a broccoli salad, got a baker to create rolls, and bought baked chicken. Guests added potato, pasta and green salads. Baked beans, corn pudding and macaroni and cheese. Cake, lemon meringue pie and brown sugar pie. And many other dishes I never got around to tasting, worse luck.
Caldwell prepared for such a mob because of her close family alone, and their families. She's the eldest of six. Her next sibling down is Donald Caldwell, the Commonwealth's Attorney for the City of Roanoke. The brother after him, Douglas, couldn't come from Colorado.
The brother after him, John Dennis, lives in Fincastle with his wife Anne, a teacher of French at James River High and Central Academy. John Dennis works for IBM in many capacities, using his home as a headquarters. He also made the lemon pie with a tall meringue on top. How does he get it so high? "I use five egg whites," he said.
The two youngest siblings are Ruth Creasy, a nurse who lives in Roanoke County, and the "baby," Dean, a teacher in North Carolina who specializes in helping troubled teens.
Caldwell lives in the family home her parents bought when she was a child, shortly after her father returned from his World War II service. He worked as the Fincastle postmaster in civilian life. The brothers and sisters grew up in the home, attending Botetourt County schools. More recently, she and her brother Don have done a lot of work on the house.
Caldwell's interest in science arose when she was 8 or 9 from going with her father on Saturdays to his biology lab at Roanoke College where he was finishing his degree. She studied nursing, getting her bachelor's degree from Virginia's Bluefield College in 1967. After a few teaching jobs, including one at Dabney Lancaster in Covington, "it became clear that I needed a master's degree." So she went to the Medical College of Georgia for that.
"While I was there, one of the women there told me about the nursing program she was working in needing faculty. She asked to give my name to her supervisor. I said, sure, why not."
That paved her way to teaching in the Virginia Appalachian Tricollege Nursing program, a consortium of three community college programs. She retired from it in 2005 and came back to Botetourt.
During her career she started her world travels. She's been on all the continents, including Antarctica. Would she want to go back to teaching? No. Even though as a professor emeritus she can park anywhere on campus, she wants to stay in Botetourt.
