it's rather exciting actually - the unitarian universalist church in chatty (does anyone else affectionately refer to them as "unicorns?") decided to produce the play after seeing it at their last national conference ... the producer/director is the wife of the minister and she is an adjunct teacher of theater at a local university (i think i got that right)...
so joyce house, the mother of paul house whose case is of national interest and being argued before the us supreme court, will be there for the first two of what will be five performances over two weekends... she will be there to participate in the afterplay talk-backs... she's also a member of our board...
for the event (and for a different production of the same play next weekend in knoxville) we created a couple of new table displays to work with ... like this one on innocence and highlighting paul's case...
as to the national weekend of faith in action (nwfa) we in tennessee are very proud of the concrete organizing we have done around the event... in other words, we feel that for the first time ever we have adequately seized upon an organizing tool provided to states for their own benefit and maximized its utility based on our organizational capacity to do so...
last year we registered 3 communities as participants... this year we set a specific goal and developed an outreach strategy to achieve the goal... we set a goal of 30 registering communities and organizations and if i'm not mistaken we registered 31 AND we have 9 events posted on the aiusa-padp-nwfa web site... 
the other display we made is for our emergent campaign on "stopping the legal killing of the mentally ill" which we are moving forward with as we develop a "wall of opposition" to the scheduled february 7th execution of greg thompson here in tennessee... we are working with nami to move other mental health care advocates, providers, consumers, and social workers to take a lead public position in challenging his execution... one expert says he's mentally incompetent and shouldn't be executed... meanwhile the state says it doesn't matter so long as he passes the threshold test... and then a witness says she couldn't kill him but if someone else will do it then okay - but she's conflicted about it...
cases can be of vital importance... especially one like this that has multiple issues we want to work with... we're fortunate here in tennessee, we've only had one execution since 1960 but we continue to flirt with the floodgates of disaster...
but in the final analysis, due to focused work, an ever increasingly active board of directors, and a second staff person in the form of a jesuit volunteer, it appears that indeed, things are gettin' better all the time...
peace out...
<3
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