Despite a title like “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” Flannery O’Connor did not write “chick lit,” unless you count her detailed observations on those cherished peacocks.

Not many female readers (or male ones) breeze through her books at the beach and think: “I wish I had a fun-loving girlfriend like her!” This is the acid-tongued, Southern Gothic curmudgeon who summed up her obsessions with virtue, suffering, and freaks in one famous sentence: “‘She would of (sic) been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.’ ”

Who wouldn’t be afraid to sip Chardonnay and go shoe-shopping with Flannery O’Connor? However, as her painstakingly typed, Milledgeville-postmarked letters reveal, she could be the best kind of friend – a compassionate confidante who honored her pal’s secret, which no doubt would have scandalized most of the “good country people” at the time.

This month, Emory University unveils a collection of about 270 letters that O’Connor wrote to her longtime friend Elizabeth “Betty” Hester, an intense, reclusive Atlanta woman who supported herself as a file clerk but lived and breathed philosophy — the more esoteric, the better. The two women bantered Big Ideas on heavy morality, usually “Romish” in tone, as O’Connor described her militant, blood-soaked Catholicism, and in search of the “Absolute.” They are leavened, though, by folksy, catty gossip; avian updates; and whimsical, out-of-the-blue pronouncements. “I feel lumpish,” she sighs at one point, and that seems a perfect adjective for a certain state of mind. She must have made her pensive correspondent, who suffered “up and down times of elation and depression,” laugh out loud with her dispatches from Andalusia, the family farm in Milledgeville, which, to any native Georgian, connotes the state’s storied mental institution: “I promise a trip to the asylum and the reformatory…can you wait?” It pains modern fans to be reminded, of course, that the author occasionally and offhandedly dropped the ugly racial epithet. Still, gathered together, these intimate writings make for some of the most revelatory, “Christ-haunted” epistles since the New Testament.

Flannery O’Connor

If you can look past the point-counterpoint on Wittgenstein and other high-minded dialogue, there is also fun girl-talk, like a pillow-fight among valedictorians in a very, very smart sorority house. O’Connor bristles when Hester calls her a “fascist,” and in turn accuses her of being a “Romantic.” Visualize them smirking, sighing, and rolling their eyes behind their hornrims. “You will probably find me tricked out in the personality of the GA Farm Girl or Good-Earth-Loving Author or something equally horrendous,” O’Connor writes about a newspaper profile. Then, later, referring to the photo: “There must have been something better than that one of me looking gimlet-eyed across the hog waller with the shack in the background.”

Some of these letters are published in partial, expurgated form in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald, who then donated this archive to Emory in 1987 on the condition that it remain sealed for 20 years. Hester’s name was a fiercely kept secret, even among that most indiscreet of demographics – Southern literati. In The Habit of Being, her contributions – passionate, cerebral treatises on everything from modernism to virginity — are signed simply “A,” for anonymous. The identity of the mysterious “A” finally was revealed, tragically, in 1998, when Hester shot herself in the head, surrounded by 4,000 books and several cats, in her small, musty Peachtree Street apartment. She was 76.

She left behind some unpublished stories and novels, along with her voluminous correspondence. Hester and her famous friend had written to each other almost every week for nine years, until 1964, when O’Connor, 39, died of lupus. (Ironically, in adolescence, both women lost parents to the forces that later would kill them – Hester’s mother committed suicide, and O’Connor’s father also succumbed to lupus.) These boxes stuffed with yellowed sheaves of O’Connor’s discursive observations remained unpublished and under lock and key — until now.

What, exactly, transpired between these unusual pen-pals, who seem to have reveled in some kind of sweet, mutual girl-crush, even if it was sublimely Platonic?

Curator Stephen Enniss hears this question often enough.

“Betty was a lesbian, and at one point in the correspondence, she appears to allude to her sexuality,” says Enniss, who is director of Emory’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library. “At least, that is what you can infer from a close reading of Flannery’s response to Betty’s letter. I’m just guessing here…? It certainly doesn’t sound as if she’s talking about the weather.” He shrugs, pauses, and smiles sympathetically. “I assume it was at least partly because Betty was gay that she did not want the letters scrutinized at the time.”

Signs of Hester’s brave, anguished “coming out” can be detected in an oblique letter dated Halloween of 1956. The normally acerbic O’Connor, whose default mode admittedly was, in her words, “you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you,” crafted a response that is breathtaking in its tenderness:

“…I can’t write you fast enough and tell you that it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference in my opinion of you, which is the same as it was, and that is: based solidly on complete respect. … I have a tendency myself to dismiss other people’s torments out of hand, but this one, being yours, will have to be partly mine too. …You were right to tell me but I am glad you didn’t tell me until I knew you well. … But you wonder whether it makes any difference to me if you drop out of my existence. Yes it makes a difference. It would be impossible for me to let you. You have done me nothing but good… but the fact is, above and beyond this, that I have a spiritual relationship to you; I am your sponsor, self-appointed from the time you first wrote me and appointed by your afterwards, which means that I have a right to stay where I have been put.”

But, she adds with a sly hipness, don’t tell my mother why you “got out of the air force” because she “lives in a world Jane Austen would be comfortable in.” She closes with: “I can see now how very much grace you have really been given and that is all that is necessary for me to know in the matter. What is necessary for you to know is my very real love and admiration for you. Yours, Flannery.”

Betty Hester

An eyebrow-raising passage in one letter alludes to a Milledgeville visit by Hester during which the guest bed clearly had not been slept in, notes Lynne Huffer, an Emory professor of women’s studies who specializes in feminist and queer theory.

“What are we to conclude from this? And why does it matter so much?” Huffer asks. “One of the great things about queer studies today is that it goes beyond sexuality as a question of acts—did they ‘do it’?—to other, more interesting questions. There are other aspects of a person’s life, including sensibility, emotional affinities, taste, and forms of relation, that are equally—even more—important to what we might call someone’s sexuality. I certainly wouldn’t call O’Connor a lesbian, but she has a sensibility that comes through in her letters and fiction that you might call ‘queer,’ although you have to be careful since that word can easily become so capacious that we can use it to apply to just about anyone.”

So was she or wasn’t she?

Grad students long have venerated O’Connor, with her querulously “queer” vibe – somehow ecstatic, doctrinaire, and subversive all at the same time — as a deep-fried Sappho. “Surely she was a lesbian, I told myself,” novelist Dorothy Allison mused, “and took comfort from her stubborn misfit’s life, the fact that she lived with her mama and never married. I did not need her to sleep with a woman to prove her important to me, though I would have been grateful to think of her with a great love comforting her as lupus robbed her of all she might have done.”

In fact, O’Connor’s work figured prominently in a conference titled “Queering the South” a few years ago at Emory.

“This does not ‘out’ Flannery O’Connor,” says Enniss, shifting in his tweed. “There has been a lot of reckless speculation over the years, but it’s pretty clear from these letters that Flannery’s interest in Betty was a spiritual interest. Betty became a Catholic at one point and then lapsed, and Flannery was concerned with bringing her back into the fold.”

Of course, some overactive imaginations might be tempted to read between the lines of O’Connor’s response to her friend and intuit the age-old rebuff of “I just want to be friends.” However, that interpretation also would cheapen the mystery – that vaunted, defining, and consuming force in O’Connor’s life, work, and legacy.

“Henry James said the young woman of the future would know nothing of mystery and manners,” the author grouses in one of the letters. “He had no business to limit it to sex.”

Now that the less-numinous, less-mannered future she envisioned is here, bumper stickers for sale in the gift shop at Andalusia announce, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Flannery O’Connor Said It Best.”

Fortunately, she found true friendship with at least one good woman.

The stage name “Colt Ford” sounds like a blunt-force blow struck for the glory of certain totems in the singer’s back-road, four-wheel drive landscape.

“Nope, it has nothing to do with guns or trucks,” says the country rapper, born Jason Brown, in Athens. “My real name just didn’t sound that cool. My wife, Jessica, came up with it around 2006. We were driving in the car and it just popped up in her head.”

In any case, that handle sets the tone for his music and sends all of the right signals—as recognizably twangy as a hunter’s duck caller—to the Carhartt-and-camo crowd. Ford’s third album, from his label Average Joe, reached No. 3 on the country charts, and, this summer he is scheduled to release Declaration of Independence, packaged as the “Ultimate Trilogy” with projects from his label-mates and touring buddies, the Lacs and JB and the Moonshine Band, all of them busting propulsive rhymes about honky-tonkin’, hell-raisin’, kick-ass women, and other Rural Route delights.

Rapping, just like Hank(?)

An heir to Bubba Sparxxx, Colt Ford performs country rap (his debut featured guest appearances by Jermaine Dupri and Bone Crusher), a trending blend of genres that, to the uninitiated, fosters a sort of cognitive dissonance, with Rebel flags flapping to a hip-hop beat. However, Ford is quick to clarify the parameters: “Recitation and talking records were here long before me, and they’ll be here long after me,” he says, citing Hank Williams’ “Kaw-Liga” and Jerry Reed’s double-talk.  “I’m a country artist and I want people to know how much I genuinely respect this music and my fans.”

Besides, in the South, music always has functioned as a unifying catalyst of reconciliation, along with sports and food. “I reckon I’ve got all those bases covered,” says Ford, who lettered in several varsity sports before becoming a professional golfer, competing in national tournaments and working as instructor.

“That was 100 pounds ago,” he says, his woolly goatee widening into a grin. Nowadays he is, as one fan put it (alluding to bluesman Howlin’ Wolf) “a big ’un built for pleasure, not speed.” He has lent his name to a line of vodka and Georgia-distilled moonshine (“an 85-year-old recipe from some ol’ boys in the mountains I won’t name”), and he partnered with the Santa Fe Cattle Company to design the substantial, bacon-laden “Mr. Goodtime Burger,” billed as “hotter than Alabama asphalt.”

Heartfelt and Coronary

Victuals—preferably washed down with something high-test—and varsity sports turn up in his lyrics; his biggest hit, so far, is “Chicken and Biscuits.” “Boy, my mama makes the best cat-head biscuits,” he says, pushing back his cowboy hat with barbed-wire trim. (If you play his song “Waffle House” on the jukebox, don’t expect a syrupy ditty; it is the noirish dramatic monologue of a drunken cuckold plotting, over grits, to shoot his wife, who has been messin’ around with the sheriff, the preacher, and the judge, among others.)

Ford likes to say, “I didn’t get into music; music got into me.”

“The songs I was writing with the priority of being marketable just didn’t feel authentic,” he says. “Finally, I realized when I wrote from my heart and my experience, fans responded to the honesty,” he says, noting that after his first real gig in 2008—an outdoor, Fourth of July concert that drew a crowd of 5,000 in Valdosta—he stayed past midnight signing autographs. “I know exactly who I am. I believe in God, family, good times and America. I pray before I eat, and I take off my hat during the national anthem. I like a tailgate party in a pasture—gimme barbwire instead of some fancy velvet rope at a nightclub.”

And, he adds, “You can tell, I love to eat.”

Whenever Little Richard’s hollering and piano-playing grew too boogie-woogie rowdy for the church services of his Macon upbringing, some choir matron would swat him with her pocketbook. Those righteous blows, intended to enforce the old “play for the devil or play for the Lord” dictate, sent him reeling for the rest of his career between gospel and rock ’n’ roll.

However, sacred and secular music are not nearly as contradictory as they seem, argues the father-daughter writing team of Don and Emily Saliers in “A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice,” a mix of memoir and musicology published earlier this year by Jossey-Bass.

“If playing loud music in a dark, smoky dive late at night sends your soul to hell, then mine was lost a long time ago,” Emily says matter-of-factly. As one-half of the Grammy-winning, Atlanta-based folk duo, the Indigo Girls, she has enjoyed her share of neon-lit, dancing-fool fellowship. “Music is the language of the soul made audible, and it’s also a deep part of our physicality – our heartbeat, the sound of our breath, the tension and release of muscles, the tempo of our bodies. It’s the rhythm of life, moving within us as well as moving us from the outside. It doesn’t have to occur in church to be spiritual.”

Adds her dad, “Music can make us come alive, provided we bring our lives to the music.”

Both Salierses have done just that, noting that a joyful noise thrums in “our family DNA,” albeit to different beats. Emily is an out-and-proud lesbian engaged in a “lover’s quarrel” with organized religion; Don, a theology professor at Emory University, serves as a Methodist minister, organist, cantor and composer of liturgical music – an old-school psalmist who knows his Bach. Writing in contrapuntal harmony, father and daughter bring a “Saturday night and Sunday morning” appreciation to the “communion through music” that sanctifies juke joints and honky-tonks just as surely as cathedrals, as long as it “draws inspiration from honest encounters with the mysteries of life.” The resulting volume proves lyrical in every sense of the word.

“Music that moves toward the good, the true, the just, and the beautiful often brings a sense of transcendence to hearers,” Don writes. “The plain fact is that the church can often hide from God simply by uttering the words of unreflective piety. The appearance of religious words is no guarantee of authentic praise. Some nonchurch music that truly expresses the heart’s torment, the soul’s lament, or the ecstatic joy we experience within the beauty of creation may be more religious than hymns with poor theology sung without conviction.”

Since strumming guitars together as Emory students more than 20 years ago, Emily and her Indigo Girls partner, Amy Ray, have attained Sapphic heartthrob status with a repertoire of hits – “Closer to Fine,” “Galileo,” “Shame on You” — that fall into that particular “nonchurch” category, emphasizing social justice and soul-burnishing introspection in a warbling lilt. During their early, pass-the-hat days, they reigned affectionately over bohemian Atlanta, packing the house at the Little Five Points Pub and scruffy Decatur taverns where the air hung thick with cigarette smoke and angst.

“When I was playing in bars every night, music really held everybody together, and it was a motley, ragtag crew,” Emily says with a laugh. “There were drug addicts and all kinds of hard luck stories among these novice songwriters and ‘freaky people’ – and me, the PK (preacher’s kid). But music made us a community. Everybody came, night after night, swayed to the music, shared a meaningful part of themselves, felt they belonged to something bigger. It was like a church, and the way music shaped our consciousness and made us want to go out into the world was like a benediction.”

Her grandfather probably felt the same way at times.

Don was the son of Hal Saliers, a Midwestern hepcat who moved to New York in the 1920s to play sax and violin with major acts such as Jack Teagarden and Paul Whiteman. By the end of his life, “he was a Saturday night *and* Sunday morning guy,” Don writes, explaining that as the high times of the Jazz Age gave way to the Great Depression, his father struggled with alcoholism and finally moved back to Ohio to work at a factory. Eventually, though, the elder Saliers found a redemptive sense of purpose when a Methodist pastor tapped him to lead a church orchestra.

“Taking on that responsibility somehow began to change Hal’s own self-image from that of a musically gifted drunk to that of a musically gifted Sunday morning fixture,” according to “A Song to Sing.” “Saturday night music had almost taken Hal away from his family, but Sunday morning music gave Don his father back.”

So Don, understandably, became a music scholar and theologian. He has written several respected books about congregational life, including “Worship Come to its Senses,” exploring the four “senses” of God: awe, delight, truth, and hope.

His most recent collaboration with his daughter contains references to philosophers such as Simone Weil as well as rappers like Notorious B.I.G. The authors muse about the creative tension found in the predictable generation gap in tastes; the power of a well-placed silence; a revitalized interest in chants, such as the ancient harmonies of the Taize community in France; and the use of music as a galvanizing agent for causes around the globe. When Russia pulled out of Estonia, a quarter of a million people joyfully gathered in a stadium to sing a setting of Mass in what became known as the “singing revolution.” And the solidarity of the American civil rights movement, of course, owes a debt to “We Shall Overcome.”

“Whatever people can say with passion and in heightened speech they will end up singing in some form,” observes Don.

Consequently, music also can divide us.  Richard Wagner’s stirring operas always will be associated with the Holocaust because of their use in Hitler’s propaganda. Don also recalls a skirmish in the so-called “worship wars” over modern church music. (Guitar-driven Christian contemporary or stately pipe organ? “Mankind” or “humanity”?) In the 1980s, his committee deleted “Onward Christian Soldiers” from the Methodist hymnal because of its militaristic overtones, but restored the song after a barrage of protest.

“We must make musical judgments but not in a judgmental manner,” Don and Emily urge.

Mostly, though, father and daughter marvel at the echoes and similarities, the ongoing dialectic of the sacred and profane, encompassing Elvis and the black church; “string theory” and faith (is that God plinking those vibrating subatomic particles like a Stradivarius?); and classic hymns that began as secular, if not downright bawdy, ditties. Bet you did not know that the Holy Week standard “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” was a 1601 rewrite of “Confused are all my feelings/A tender maid’s the cause.” Don concisely sums up that age-old “crossing over” impulse, which can drive salty bluesmen and rebellious rockers back and forth between the Baptist altar and the barrelhouse:

“The more one learns to express awe and thanks and to cry out for mercy to God, the more one is plunged into the depths of what it is to be human,” he writes. “At the same time, the more one sounds the depths of human experience, the more one finds the mystery of God unfolding.”

No wonder “the tremendous power and poetry of Biblical images have landed comfortably in many an Indigo Girls song,” Emily points out. The duo’s ballad titled “Everything in Its Own Time” contends that, in this mean, strife-torn world, “music whispers to you in urgency” and that one source of hope is to “hold fast to that languageless connection.”

Pass that hymnal, and a tambourine.

Each mouth forms a perfect “O” in its serious, little face. Then an eerie, pristine peal of high notes rises from the Atlanta Boy Choir. If innocence has a sound, this is it.

Even the most jaded listeners – especially those, actually – are transfixed.

“After all this time, I still get choked up hearing this particular choir do ‘Ave Maria,’” says Adisa Nickerson, an Atlanta Boy Choir alumnus and its current executive director.

Imagine the Pied Piper, in reverse.

The Grammy-winning choir, regarded as one of the country’s best, was incorporated in 1957 by Fletcher Wolfe. It became Atlanta’s first musical organization to perform outside the United States, as part of John F. Kennedy’s entourage. This year, it celebrates its fiftieth season with gigs that range from the Oprah Winfrey Show to a tour of Russia and Ukraine.

“It’s neat to go places you never dreamed of!” says Thomas West, a gimlet-eyed 12-year-old who especially relishes Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”

Thomas is one of 120 boys who meet every week for intensive rehearsals at the choir’s Druid Hills campus, which has stained-glass windows and navy and mustard walls, like a Brooks Brothers cathedral. The ABC takes boys as young as four and, until recently, retired them at puberty’s first crackle. “Singing past the voice change used to be thought unhealthful, but it can be done with guidance,” says artistic director David White.  Hence the formation last year of the Atlanta Young Men’s Ensemble for those whose downy cheeks have developed stubble.

“It was very traumatic for me when my voice changed,” Nickerson recalls. “To have the adulation of singing before those crowds and then, all of a sudden, lose it. It’s still bittersweet when a chorister graduates to the young men’s ensemble.”

Before that “Peter Brady moment,” followed by other texturizing traumas of aging, there is that unearthly pitch, clear and true. Boy choirs emerged in the Middle Ages, when women were forbidden to make a peep in church, and today many social critics decry their single-sex exclusivism. However, a boy’s voice is considered a unique physiological instrument that peaks in timbre before puberty, while female vocals enjoy a postadolescent prime. So it is not necessarily a matter of “no girls allowed in the treehouse.”

Besides, that would be rude, and the ABC hews to a code of politesse in its “Rules for Living,” 72 protocols, with a subset of 26 table manners, outlined by White and stringently enforced when the guys are not behaving like, well, choirboys. (No. 29: “The top of your pants belongs at your waist. Nobody is interested in seeing your boxers.”)

“I believe there is an overemphasis on self-esteem and an underemphasis on self-respect,” White says in a soft Carolina lilt. “In order for us to perform at the level we strive for, the boys start with externally imposed discipline, which eventually becomes self-discipline and real respect for others.”

In these times of hand-wringing over “the trouble with boys” – the so-called “Ritalin generation” – the Atlanta Boy Choir sounds that much sweeter.

When Scotty Barnhart began composing and arranging his first independent jazz album, he recalled some practical advice from the preacher who baptized him.

“My mother used to tell me that Daddy King was always instructing Martin, ‘Keep it simple, and say it plain,’” says the Grammy-winning trumpet player, referring to the Civil Rights dynasty that galvanized his upbringing in the pews of Ebenezer Baptist Church. “That’s how I envisioned this CD — accessible and uplifting, with something to move everybody.”

Barnhart, 44, has toured and recorded with the Count Basie Orchestra since 1993, and he is expected to assume leadership of the seminal big band this year. “Say It Plain,” his solo project released this month by Unity Music, swings with melodies that are “unusually hummable and danceable for jazz,” as Barnhart notes, but with ethereal contributions from Wynton and Ellis Marsalis, Clark Terry, and Marcus Roberts, it is anything but simplistic.

“They all create what some call ‘tall smoke,’ heat reaching up to the sky,” writes critic Stanley Crouch in the album’s liner notes. “One hears deep feeling, tonal variety,

di­fferent kinds of swing and equally different kinds of wit, from the broad joke to the sly observation in the way a note is colored or bent.”

The title song, dedicated to the King family, especially jumps with jubilation.

“I was trying to evoke what takes place after a sermon, the opening of the doors of the church, when the music turns upbeat,” Barnhart says. “So I got Herlin Riley (a Marsalis percussionist) to play tambourine to give it that old Baptist feeling. We recorded that song in one take, and — oh, goodness, the gyrations going on!– everybody was dancing, trying not to knock over microphones. It was a deeply spiritual thing.”

On the album, Barnhart, who has been dubbed “a young Walt Whitman of the trumpet,” also draws from the brassy Second Line tradition of New Orleans jazz funerals, and ever-mindful of roots, pays tribute to author Alex Haley. After years of hepcat adventures playing behind legends such as Frank Sinatra, Nancy Wilson, and Joe Williams, Barnhart says his family takes  pointed pride in the myriad ways that he always comes home, riff after riff, to the call-and-response cadences of Ebenezer.

“I was mesmerized by the walking bass lines that the organist would play while the choir literally rocked the foundation of the church,” Barnhart says  “That music became part of me early on and never left.”
Now it function as a benediction for the rest of us.

     In a photo from his later years, a publicity shot for his publishers, Hughes looks very much the eminence grise. His arresting, leonine face turns serenely into the camera, as if to say he has nothing else to prove. Now that the rehabilitation of Hughes’ image has begun, many of the already-converted hope that researchers will use the Emory archive to broaden their knowledge of his post-Plath career, which was long and multifaceted.
Hughes’ poetry, which enjoyed a more favorable reception abroad than in Plath’s home country, draws on themes of myth, shamanism, the occult and the feral beauty of animal life. It earned him the poet laureate’s post in 1984.
“I was attracted to his work early on because, as Hughes described it, it celebrates the warriors on either side in the war between vitality and death,” says Schuchard, who has championed Hughes-related acquisitions at Emory for 30 years.
Hughes’ energetic poetry with its swooping birds of prey, sharks, and pacing jaguars suggests that we can draw strength from the urgent rhythms and realities of nature.
Hughes also wrote several whimsical and affecting children’s stories, one of which was made into the movie “The Iron Giant” last year, and a book on how to memorize a poem using images instead of the rote method. Hughes was known for his prodigious memory, as well as his astrology (he did charts for his friends); environmentalism (he crusaded to clean the streams in Devon); and his support of poets repressed by totalitarian governments. His letters show that he eschewed the usual writerly rivalries and instead energized his associates with magnanimous encouragement. Among the treasures in the archive is his voluminous correspondence with Heaney, which is credited with expanding the Irish poet’s work beyond its nationalistic themes.
“In years to come, we expect that correspondence to be as important as the letters between Wordsworth and Coleridge,” Schuchard says. “Hughes’ rootedness inthe English soil was strong, but his consciousness was worldwide and attuned to the great intellectual traditions of mind, memory, and especially imagination.”
Hughes still is leaving something to the imagination he cherished by not yet  revealing
everything. One trunk in this sprawling archive must remain sealed for 25 years. Schuchard speculated that it could contain the Plath papers allegedly burned by Hughes.
“He didn’t want his children to see the notebooks, but I doubt he would have destroyed them because of their literary value,” he says. “It wouldn’t surprise me if they surface when we have the distance to use them in an objective way, to look at them with ‘disinterest,’ which is not the same as ‘uninterest.’ To be disinterested means to be interested but without emotional attachment.”
Then Schuchard scratches his professorial beard for effect.
“We are not yet disinterested in Plath and Hughes.”

Miss Brenau Contest Turns 75

Miss renau Contest Turns 75

This Women’s College tradition is not your grandmother’s beauty pageant anymore. But, hey. There’s still a tiara. by Candice Dyer

“Miss Brenau,” in all of her well-groomed incarnations over the past 75 years, could illustrate a timeline of how women’s roles in society have changed, along with their hairstyles and hemlines.

She first bounded on to the campus lawn as an Olympian “goddess” and then became a “beauty queen” and a “pageant winner” before her current reign, in snappy business attire, over what is now termed a “scholarship competition.”

“We’ve taken the traditional, physical beauty component out of the judging qualifications,” says Deborah Thompson, director of the Center for Greek Life and Campus Traditions and coordinator of the pageant. “Not totally out – we want an attractive person to represent the university – but that’s a much broader definition that emphasizes self-confidence, poise, leadership, talent, heart – inner beauty. We’re looking for someone who embodies the ‘Brenau Ideal,’ in other words.”

So contestants are graded according to four equally weighted criteria – essay, talent, interview and onstage presence – with the numbers tallied just before the grand finale and the winner awarded a scholarship of $3,000 for her sophomore year. The event, open to all freshmen, was scheduled for Feb. 1 and 2 during Winter Weekend to entertain prospective students and their families with a lively display of school spirit.

The 2013 theme, in honor of the event’s 75th anniversary, is “Then and Now,” featuring a short, historical presentation about the state of the world in the late 1930s, including the rumblings of World War II and the advent of the March of Dimes, Thompson says. For the essay component, contestants will compare and contrast the strengths of today’s ever-expanding university with those of the small women’s college of the past. “We didn’t want them to write an essay just about their feelings – we wanted them to do a little research and homework,” Thompson says. “A big part of the Miss Brenau experience is touring our landmarks, meeting the university’s president, and learning more, in depth, about Brenau and its rich history, and, in the process, making new friends.”

The first mention of the contest was in 1936, when the campus was distinctly influenced by classical literature and sensibilities. Photos from the era look like a set designed by Isadora Duncan, with toga-clad students strumming lyres and sporting leafy laurels woven into their flapper-ish bobs. The yearbook blurb is worth excerpting here, for its breathless prose:

The memorable night of October 9, 1937, brought forth in full regalia the ‘plurissimus pulchritudinis’ of the Brenau community – most prominent in the Freshman Quarters – Parisian fashions, Grecian head dress – ‘apeissimo’ poise, and hidden beauty! Miracles were wrought in a few short hours – Venuses, Dianas, Junos, Minervas, all arose in a conclave as goddesses – all as a challenge to our famous Greek remnant depicted on our auditorium ceiling. Nay! Even Aeneas, perchance moved his unerring eye from his ever beloved Dido to note the consummate beauty collected on the platform.

There are also mentions of a golden apple, sundry swift-footed “gods,” and “fearless deceits produced by war paint” on “supple Grecians.” The phrase “going Greek” clearly held worlds of untold meaning then. Unfortunately, the archives hold no record of that winner’s name.

By 1940 the contest was sponsored by the Athletic Council, and by 1942, it was held in the Henry Grady Hotel in Atlanta, where 36 “beauties” swanned around the “Mrs. Roosevelt Suite” and the “Paradise Room,” which was billed as the “most beautiful room in the South,” in an event that was “fortuitously timed” to coincide with an influx of Y chromosomes from the Georgia Tech-Florida game, according to The Alchemist, which also noted many “sighs, shouts, and squeals of delight.”

For much of the last century, Brenau was known for its fabled, genteel accessories: “Yes, we wore white gloves and pearls, hats on Sunday, had teas all the time, and couldn’t leave campus without a written invitation from a host,” recalls Judy Huston Rogers, WC ’67, who was Miss Brenau of 1964. “There were ways around that, of course. I used a blanket invitation from my grandmother in Atlanta to leave campus. We all believed that everything would be all right if we had our string of pearls.”

One of her interview questions during the pageant, posed by a panel of ministers and military leaders, was: “Do you have trouble finding dates? Does it bother you that there are no boys around?”

“I told them, no, I didn’t mind,” she says, affecting an innocent tone. “Of course, I had a beau; I was already pinned to a Sigma Chi at Georgia Tech, but I didn’t tell them that. I figured it was best that I seem single.”

Brenau President Josiah Crudup himself placed the crown on her head.

Brenau would not remain isolated from changing times for long, and, gradually, the crown of Miss Brenau grew weightier.

“I think people looked around and thought, ‘The Peach Queen has something to do all year ’round,’ so maybe Miss Brenau should have a larger profile,” Rogers says. “I was lucky to represent Brenau during a very interesting time in history – the 1960s.”

Over the decades Brenau women turned out in their finery, like 1964′s Judy Huston Rogers. And it often lead to bigger and better things for those genteel southern ladies, like dressing up like Scarlett O’Hara for Japanese TV and presiding over a coon hunt.

She did more than just wave at parade crowds; Rogers greeted President Lyndon Johnson’s entourage when he visited the campus and then accompanied him on a leg of his “poverty tour” of Appalachia.

“I gave a bouquet of roses to [the president’s daughter,] Lynda Bird, who then went to have tea at the Zeta house – she was a Zeta. LBJ was sitting there with a whole bunch of dignitaries, including the mayor of Atlanta and Congressman Phil Landrum,” Rogers says, referring to the author of the Economic Opportunity Act, which was a key piece of Johnson’s War on Poverty. “The Secret Service people fingerprinted me. Then I got on the bus with the president, and we rode around and looked at some of the more deprived areas, the decrepit shacks of Gainesville, looking at what he called ‘the poor, neglected people.’ He gave me his spiel on civil rights and social welfare – he was really into those issues, you know.”

She pauses.

“Those are wonderful memories, but I was so young then that I didn’t realize the historic significance of it at the time,” Rogers says. “I reminisce to my grown daughters about it now, and they just say, ‘Oh, Mother, really?’ Honestly, I doubt LBJ and those dignitaries went quite as deep into Appalachia as they claimed, but I guess we’ll never really know, will we?”

Rogers, who lives in Roswell, is still married to her Sigma Chi. She worked as a neurotechnologist at Northside Hospital before retiring.

In the 1980s, contestants still were selected by clubs and residence halls. “That was an honor in itself, but it added to the pressure,” recalls Monique Morris Webb, WC ’87, who represented Phi Mu sorority and won the crown in 1984. The pageant was judged by B-list celebrities. “I think the most famous judge for my year was an actor named Byron Cherry, who replaced the blond-headed guy on the ‘Dukes of Hazzard,’” she says with a laugh. “Miss Brenau was a quintessentially Southern event.”

It involved a sportswear and eveningwear competition.

“I wore a red wool suit, black stilettos and huge ’80s hair,” says Webb, who kept up the Miss Brenau tradition of hiding the crown in her underwear drawer for the rest of the year. “I was shocked that I won, and I think my eyes welled up, but I didn’t bawl. My parents were in the audience, busting a stitch with pride.”

Webb went on to win “Miss Roswell,” “Miss Atlanta,” and “Miss Georgia Holiday,” a curious post with the state which required her to dress as Scarlett O’Hara on Japanese television. “All of my pageant experiences gave me an education about Georgia,” she says, “because I went to every podunk town in the state, going to the rose capital, the camellia festival, riding a bull, presiding over a coon hunt. I had a short run, but I won some scholarships, and then worked for nine years as a teacher.”

In fact, Miss Brenau of 2002, Leah Duncan Bleisath,
WC ’05, tried to affiliate the pageant with Miss America to bolster scholarship opportunities. “That didn’t work out, but my Miss Brenau experience really set the tone and made me want to get more involved and take on more responsibilities,” she says. “I credit it, and the specialness of the place, with turning me into a leader. I don’t think I would’ve been senior class president if I had gone to UGA or somewhere larger.”

Bleisath, who is a life sciences teacher and department chair – and frequent “Teacher of the Month” at Teasley Middle School, recalls wearing a black dress for the eveningwear competition; dancing en pointe while dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz; and forming friendships that endure today.

In 2006, the contest dropped the word “pageant” from its identity. In 2010, the eveningwear component was replaced by “business attire.”

Nyari Chanakira Miss Brenau 2010

“Some girls had worn their prom or quinceanera dresses,” says Thompson. “We realized that many were spending a big part of their budget on gowns, and we didn’t want to exclude anyone for financial reasons. We have tried to make it as open and inclusive as possible for all students. And you don’t have to be able to dance ballet or sing – you can read a children’s storybook. We work with everybody to develop their talent and leadership potential.”

Gone with the times is any lingering image of Miss Brenau as a latter-day Scarlett O’Hara. Recent winners and contestants have included international students and students with disabilities. The contestant field represents a slice of the cross-cultural student body.

A few old-school traditions die hard, though. “We tried replacing the crown with a medal or a pin, but – what can we say? – most students just like that crown and sash. Some things change faster than others.”

Adds Bleisath: “My interview question back then was: ‘If you could visit the Brenau campus during any decade, which would it be?’ I said simply ‘the future’ because I wanted to have three daughters and send them all to Brenau. I now have two daughters, and I’m expecting my third in January. My dream is the same now as it was then.”

by Candice Dyer | The Atlantan magazine | December 27, 2011

Dressing Dolly Parton requires some tricks that, on the spangled surface, seem counterintuitive.

“She has such a larger-than-life personality that your brain tells you to go big and over-the-top at the outset,” says Steve Summers, the designer behind Parton’s signature rhinestones and Swarovski crystals. “But, at 5-foot-2—or 5-foot-7 in heels—she’s an unbelievably tiny person that could easily be swallowed up by her clothing,” Summers says. “So I’ve learned to start very small—refined and fitted—sticking with monochromes to elongate her, and then I add that Dolly sparkle.”

Photography by Zack Arias

Summers, 47, began sharing the stage with the famed country music star in 1991 as a singer and dancer at Dollywood. But the country music legend quickly discerned additional talents in his set-dressing. “Dolly liked my eye, so she had me design Chasing Rainbows,” he says, referring to the theme park’s hallmark museum.

Eventually, Parton sent Summers to F.I.T. in New York and appointed him creative director of Dolly Parton Enterprises—making her image coruscate on several fronts. “I read her scripts and coordinate photo shoots and interviews—anything that involves her public persona, which relies heavily on exaggeration. But she is even kinder and more modest behind the scenes than she is onstage—that part of her is very real.”

Summers divides his time between Nashville and Atlanta, where his partner, Mark Williams, heads an architecture firm. They live in Midtown and often shop at St. John Boutique because the “unconstructed suits are easy to alter.”

“Most people don’t have a clear and accurate body image,” he laments, “so they don’t know how to dress to make the most impact.” Unlike his indelibly defined employer, who remains “spectacular and such a beautiful figure to decorate.”

Summers’ Hots
Classically tailored 1950s-era suits, Prius hybrids, lunch at MetroFresh, making your own coffee

Summers’ Nots
Lateness, safari prints, ponchos, reality TV, micromanaging

When Inda Allen died at 16 from a blood clot, Bean Creek, a historically African-American neighborhood in the mountains of northeast Georgia, lost not just a scholar, athlete, fashion model, and soul-stirring vocalist, but also a symbol of hope.

Social harmonies

“Inda was way beyond her time in realizing that black and white people need to work together as a family,” says Sabrina Dorsey, who received the first scholarship from the fund established in her friend’s honor. “Because of Inda, who extended her generosity and loyalty to everybody, white and black friends could go to each other’s homes, really for the first time. She was a bridge that unified us. We were still riding separate school-buses at the time.”

The high school junior died in 1987; the White County school system did not desegregate its bus system until 1990.

Allen was quick to lend clothes, money, and comfort, and she once won a talent show by singing “We Shall Overcome” in a crystalline, a capella voice that hushed the rowdy cafeteria. She was a choir stand-out at Bean Creek Missionary Baptist Church, which established the Inda Allen Scholarship Fund to support African-American students with ties to the community’s families.

A way to heal

Administered by a board of eight members, the fund provides annual scholarships of $1,500 to a recent high school graduate; $1,000 for vocational-technical instruction; and $1,000 to a nontraditional student who is going back to school later in life. Among the largest local awards at White County’s academic banquet, they are underwritten by churches in the Sautee-Nacoochee Valley and an annual pot-luck dinner and silent auction for Thanksgiving — “when we eat together, pray together, and reflect on the past year,” says board member Nara Sellers Allen.

“Inda was academically motivated and committed to giving back to her community,” she says. “So we look for applicants who demonstrate her ideals and ambition. Part of the criteria is an essay about what education means to them and what they plan to give back. We also like for them to update us later on with progress reports, to let us know how they’re doing.”

A legacy of pride

Dorsey used her scholarship to study computer processing.

“I think Inda would be amazed and proud that, all of these years later, her memory is still helping people better themselves,” she says. “She was so dedicated to helping people. I miss what she stood for.”

Inda Allen’s legacy still lighting the way