Ron Sowell stands in the new Open Stage space, under construction at the ground level of the new Unity Church at 804 Myrtle Rd., in Charleston, W.Va.

Ron Sowell’s Open Stage open mic night at the Unity Church in North Charleston, W.Va., has launched a thousand songs, hundreds of friendships,  probably a score of bands, and dozens and dozens of rounds of Ron’s “I Love My Tomato.”  As a weekend warrior singer-songwriter,  I honed  whatever chops I know in the supportive environment and cozy confines of the Unity sanctuary. It’s where the late and much-missed Becky Webb and I learned how to sing in tandem  in the duo Doogabeka — we were among a host of  area performers nurtured into bloom as performers under Ron’s amiable care and running of this space.

Now, Unity in North Charleston has shut down. The good news is the church is moving to a higher profile locale in the South Hills of Charleston, just up Bridge Road, in a century-old Presbyterian Church with “a nice vibe,” as Ron puts it. And Open Stage lives on. I stopped by in my capacity as a Gazette videographer and documented the move for a video/story online now at the Gazette Web site. Click on the image below or this link. PS ~ Ron, can I ring the bell the next time I’m there?

This is the last, and perhaps the most offbeat, in a series of audio slideshows I created after a trip taken to Rome and Northern Italy in Summer 2008, with my 18-year-old-son Lucas and his cousin, Neil. The trip was a high school graduation present for Lucas. We had intended to go to an Imbrogno family reunion in the town in Calabria where my father was born. That trip fell through after my essential Italian-speaking aunt needed surgery and couldn’t go. One morning, I was eating breakfast in my kitchen and a printout of Carlos Santana floated down onto the table. My son, resolute in his determination to head to the land of his grandfather, had Googled up a concert by Santana in Verona that summer.

Now, Verona is the town where Shakespeare set “Romeo and Juliet,” but is also home to the world’s most perfect example of a Roman coliseum, the Arena di Verona. So it was, that in early July 2008, we sat our bottoms down into the wide stone seats where a couple thousands years before, the Verona populace had sat their butts down to watch gladiator fights. Instead of lions being slain, we got to watch Santana slay the night in a cool concert in a cool setting. I shot the pictures and compiled the slideshow and set it to a soundtrack of some alt-music by Lucas, who records and performs as The Flow (check out more of his his sounds at myspace.com/awalktothethrone). I should add that YouTube strips out pans and zooms from the SoundSlides program I used to make this. If you wish to view the show in its (preferred) original format with much higher resolution, click here.

Should life permit you the deep and abiding pleasure of a visit to Northern Italy, you must include Verona on your intinerary.  Whether or not the Casa di Giulietta was indeed Juliet’s house, tourists are told it is and so flock to its archway up a Veronese side street. Two traditions predominate: 1) rubbing the right breast of the bronze Juliet statue in the courtyard; 2) and writing love graffiti in the archway, adding to the tens of thousands of scribbles through the centuries. A quite impressive work of mass art.

Casa di Guilietta in Verona, Italy, 2008 | Photo by Douglas Imbrogno | click bigger