“I just remarked one day that it wasn’t working right; I didn’t mean for him to do anything about it,” she remembers. “But I came home later and my sewing machine was in pieces on the floor. He’d taken the whole thing apart to see what was wrong. And he fixed it. It worked better than it had before after that.”
The Hecht family: Always an adventure
This was a typical occurrence in the Hecht household of five brothers and one sister; they didn’t watch a lot of television. Betty and her husband, Richard, raised their family on a farm and were always shooing the kids outdoors to play, explore and experiment.
One day Janet got a phone call: Kim had written a play and needed help with editing.
“I read it and liked it and wanted to work on it with her,” Thomas recalled.
The play, Unboxing in Biloxi, was based on Sandstrom’s own experience with sexual violence and assault, and it brought her friend to tears.
“We were great friends, but she felt she couldn’t tell anyone about it. So I knew nothing of what happened to her until then. Like many other survivors, she boxed it away,” Thomas said.
The plan was to produce the show onstage and then make it available for other theater companies; two were already scheduled to perform it on the West Coast.
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Kerry and Betty Davis didn’t set out to become art collectors, much less amass a significant and renowned anthology of African American works by a diverse array of artists and sculptors. But their decades-long labor of love has yielded one of the most comprehensive and eclectic libraries of such unique works, 62 of which will be on display at the Appleton Museum of Art in “Memories and Inspiration,” which runs from Saturday to March 28.
Built over 35 years, the Davis Collection boasts works by African American artists from the modern to the classical, with paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures reflecting a breadth of nearly a century of different styles and mediums. Kerry, a retired Atlanta postman who also serves as a church deacon, and Betty, a television producer and director, began the collection for the most relatable of reasons: They simply wanted to decorate their home with interesting things. It became a lifetime’s work together.