THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, April 25, 1995 TAG: 9504250285
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
Thoughts while strolling:
A recent column dealt with a visit to the Virginia Zoo that began with an elephant tossing around a huge tire for fun, and it closed with the sight of a wild rabbit crouched in dwarf willows in front of the spider monkey's quarters.
That reminded Grace L. Hunt of Norfolk of ``a silly little riddle,'' which she passes along in a note.
What do you get if you cross the Easter Bunny with an elephant?
A rabbit that goes hippity-BOOM hippity-BOOM hippity-BOOM.
Lots of bounce there.
The riddle came to Grace from her niece, Arlene Thomerson, ``a child,'' said Grace, ``of 58.''
What a nice compliment! All they say of me is, ``Friddell, grow up!''
And strolling along Colley Avenue in Ghent I drifted into an exhibition of teapots in Artifax, one section of which is devoted to sculptures by students at the Old Donation Center of the Gifted and Talented.
There is something comforting about teapots, God wot - with their jolly spherical shape, brew that our mothers were wont to make when we were ill, and their place in verse - ``I'm a little teapot, short and stout. Tip me over, pour me out.''
(Someone must know the rest.)
Of the 270 students in the center, 70 have been sculpting teapots.
When the staff at Artifax gift shop, preparing its display, heard about the students' work at the center, it invited them to take part.
Art teacher Bob Karl selected the work of nine students for the display. One may gaze upon a yowling ebony cat by Krysta Elmore. Its head, which can be removed, is the mouth.
Drew Becker devised a globe teapot with dynamite sticks and a functioning time clock at its base, suggesting that if violence and mistreatment of the Earth doesn't cease, the world might.
Under Karl's eye the students first engineered clocks that worked, and then let their imaginations loose in interpreting the forms.
Others exhibiting are Logan Davis, Nick Hall, Bono Herrera, Colleen Naughton, Cristina Visco, Jhawn Jones, and Pheak Ok. Their work will be on view until Sunday.
Karl, a teacher for nine years at the center, is a graduate of East Carolina University who looked at Atlanta, Charleston, Raleigh, Durham, and Baltimore.
``I visited Norfolk on the Sunday of the Ghent Art Festival and realized here was a place I could grow in,'' he said Monday.
How long has he practiced art?
``Since age 5 when I got upset and would go to my room and cry a lot and, after a time, emerge with a drawing which expressed how I was feeling and what I was going through. And it would all be over.''
Regarding pictures, Thomas E. Bie was ``wounded to the quick'' by my deploring the picture that heads this column. ``You see,'' he writes, ``I have more than once been mistaken for you in public. What am I now to think?'' by CNB