This program helps spread the joy of Argentine tango. It features stunning dance segments from video films of international tango shows. While giving a brief history of tango music and dance, William McNeill explores its growing popularity in NC. In addition to demonstrating the musical elements—pulse, rhythm, and melody—he illustrates a few dance steps. He explains how tango involves not only the body but also the soul. McNeill aims to intrigue and delight all those who are fascinated by tango’s beauty and mystery. The program concludes with the six-minute documentary Tango Octogenario, a poignant film about an elderly couple who connect through tango. While encapsulating McNeill’s conviction that art has the power to transform individual lives, the documentary celebrates the curative powers of art through music and dance.

This lecture/slide presentation focuses on Anna Whistler's life in 19th Century America, Czarist Russia, and bohemian London, where she lived with her eccentric son, the brilliant and provocative artist James McNeill Whistler. The presenter, a relative of Anna, traces the history of the portrait from a nineteenth-century masterpiece to a twenty-first century American Icon and popular culture object of caricature. Behind Anna's calm and serene countenance lies an amazing story- the story of a courageous woman born in Wilmington, NC, who raised two sons, lost three in infancy, sailed across the Atlantic at least five times, lived in luxury in the barbaric fairyland of Czarist Russia, survived the civil war and risked her life to run the Federal Blockade to be with James in London, where she managed his household and served as his representative and agent. Through extensive reading and research, Mr. McNeill has pieced together a portrait that contradicts the popular conception of Anna as a dour Puritan and stern matriarch. Instead, he shows her to be a devoutly religious but indulgent mother, an educated and cultivated woman whose life was full of adventure and paradox.

Part performance art and part show-and-tell, William McNeill celebrates a vanishing relic of Southern Americana: the handheld church fan. While showing his large collection of vintage church fans, he explores their place in Protestant Christian art and reveals how the fans have served as devotional icons. He also illustrates the important role church fans have played in the world of advertising and in the kitsch visual culture of the American South. The fans trigger brief anecdotes that capture the flavor of the 1950s congregation of Singletary Methodist Church, the country church of his Bladen County youth. Offering fragments of a vanished world, this informative and entertaining program resurrects a time gone by--a warmer and more innocent time before the cooling breezes of air conditioning.

Requirements for Programs: For Fanning the Heat and Outside the Frame–two 20-foot extension cords, an AV cart
For Tango!–30” TV (or larger) with DVD player and remote control