In their shoes

We had a brief and pleasant visit with a couple of acquaintances from the great state of Texas today. Eric and Diana joined us for lunch and then took the five-cent tour of Conway before going on with their Arkansas vacation.

It's always a strange experience to welcome folks to the town where you live, when that town is utterly unfamiliar to them. Our little college burg is unknown outside of the state, by and large, so people visiting have no basis for any particular expectation.

We are well aware of the limitations of our town, but we also like living here and rarely get frustrated with what we don't have. It's when we're showing it to friends from out of town that we wonder if our impression is accurate. Does Conway seem impossibly minor -- or quaintly so? Is there more here than you would think, or less?

Right now we're aware of a certain degree of privation since we're down to six movie screens for a population of 75,000 -- and for a week, after the fire marshall closed those down, we were at zero. Yet we also hear of new restaurants and businesses opening constantly, and the city continues to expand its parks and recreation facilities. On the other hand, the town's Fourth of July fireworks have just been cancelled due to a budget snafu in which a couple million dollars in operating funds evaporated overnight (they were committed to a project but had been mistakenly included in the balance of available funds).

So do we live in a charming village or a one-horse town? And who is the best judge -- the resident or the traveler?

Friday night at the Bijou

Our little town isn't so little anymore. When the 2010 census figures are released, I fully expect that Conway will have more than 75,000 residents. And the college population is more than 15,000.

But for as long as we've lived here, we've had two movie houses, both the kind of strip-mall multiplexes that were long since run out of business in major cities. The Carmike 6 switched to digital projection a couple of years ago, and leapfrogged from worst to first in moviegoing quality. The Cinemark 6 has bigger houses, but in the last few years has lagged behind in technology.

As of January, though, we're down to one cinema option. The Cinemark closed for eight months, with the aim of gutting the place and rebuilding as a state-of-the-art multiplex. The idea is to make it an anchor for an edge-of-town shopping center that has steadily emptied over the past decade and is barely hanging on with temporary outlet sales that swoop in and out.

What I'm wondering is what took developers so long? There are thousands of college students here. A good movie house is a can't-miss proposition in this town. Being able to see 3-D movies without driving an hour round-trip into Little Rock? I'm there. Despite the fact that we're movie people, we see very few movies in the theater -- maybe one or two a month. Put a real theater in this town, and you double that from my family, or more. You'd let me see what right now I can't see -- the 3-D, the stuff that doesn't open here currently because of limited screen space.

It's going to be fall or winter before we get the grand reopening. That's a long summer with only six tiny screens in town. But I hope it will all be worth it when we enter the new Cinemark, and maybe even more so when pressure is put on the Carmike to upgrade as well.

The power of music

On Friday, my student Jacob presented his thesis about the religious power of popular music. Across the parking lot, American Idol finalist Kris Allen performed in one of the show's homecoming events. The town had been covered with supportive signs for the occasion. Every third person I met on campus was wearing a Kris Allen t-shirt. E-mails about ticketing arrangements and schedules went out from the adminstration nearly hourly for days.

When the presentation was over and the floor was open for questions, I asked the obvious one. How did Jacob's analysis -- about the emotional connection, community formation, and transcendent yearnings embodied in popular music -- relate to the events taking place across the parking lot?

Jacob had it covered. Kris Allen is about the citizens of Conway suddenly becoming visible to the world. In the spotlight, we emphasize our commonalities. We celebrate what unites us. We see our American Idol as the figure that represents us on a larger stage.

That explains why I felt anxious -- even disappointed -- that I didn't get to attend any of the events because I was occupied with senior theses, banquets, and graduation activities all day. Even though Kris Allen is nothing like Bill Clinton in terms of historical significance, there was a distinct sense of lack in the knowledge that I wouldn't be participating.

Did that have anything to do with the power of music? I wouldn't buy a Kris Allen album or iTunes download of my own free will. But in the context of the show -- the competition -- I'm a fierce supporter. And I thrill -- yes, I do -- to the visibility and pride he's brought to my town. Maybe that makes me a sap. But there it was, undeniable, just across the parking lot from the singer and his fans, while I watched a YouTube clip of Elvis and hummed to myself: "Hush little baby, don't you cry ..."

Idolization

Tuesday and Wednesday nights have taken on a different meaning in my town this spring. We have an Idol in the hunt. Kris Allen hails from Conway, Arkansas and is a student at my university. And to almost everyone's surprise -- since he was not pegged as a front-runner in the early episodes and made it to the voting rounds with hardly any camera time -- he's in the top five on American Idol.

As the number of contestants has gotten smaller, the Kris Allen fan apparatus here in Conway has gotten more elaborate. From viewing parties at local student hangouts, to events hosted by the campus dining service, to a giant throwdown in the basketball arena with thousands of people and an MTV camera crew.

That's where Noel was tonight. Last week he had the bright idea that if Kris hung on, he would report on the hometown Idol madness for the A.V. Club. So after dinner he strolled over to the Farris Center and sat in the stands surrounded by little kids, college students, and townspeople of every description. The local newspaper handed out official Kris Allen fan banners and slapped stickers on the entrants. Supporters came prepared with T-shirts. Chic-Fil-A broke out the cow costumes.

I'm about to watch the performance on TiVo delay -- the same one Noel watched live on the giant screen. And even though I've been an avid Idol watcher for a long time, I never thought I'd get caught up in the hometown hype. But here I am getting stupid excited, not just because he's one of ours, but because he's got a chance. I've been transformed into a fan.

Small town, small world

Conway is a town of nearly 60,000 souls -- not exactly a bustling metropolis, but not a one-horse main street either. You'd think that I could spend a quiet afternoon in a yarn store and a cafe without running into a steady stream of students, colleagues, and friends-of-friends. But you, my beloved reader, would be wrong.

In a parade seemingly organized to make the Secret Knitter (visiting since Thursday) think that I engineered it purposefully -- to make myself look like a person with a life, presumably -- I met, in the space of four hours:

• the mother of a former student;
• a staffer at a nearby university with whom I have several friends in common;
• a friend on the faculty at my institution, whose class I visited as a guest speaking last semester;
• a favorite former student back in town to finish her degree;
• and a current student with whom I have just a nodding acquaintance.

I could spend a whole week out and about in Conway without so much as seeing a single person I know, but this afternoon, every time I turned around there was a familiar face. The impression it gave to the SK was that I am a well-connected citizen with a wide range of friends among the beautiful people. How did this terrible lie become plausible?

Whatever the tragic misconceptions with which the SK will return to his Secret Location (SL), I've had a lot of fun squiring him around Central Arkansas. Selfishly, I made his vacation my vacation -- taking off work, going to my favorite places, running up the credit cards. He's been a very easy guest, right at home whether wandering through the Clinton Library, sitting next to Cady Gray at library story time, or holding down his end of the sectional sofa during the Braves game. I hope his trip to Arkansas has been a source of renewal first and foremost, with perhaps a little education about our fair state thrown in for free.

The words will make you out and out

Conway's an Arkansas town. That means that for the most part, we're pretty set in our ways. When people come in with newfangled ideas, implying that the way we've been doing things isn't necessarily the best, that gets our back up a little bit. We're liable to say some pretty heated things in defense of a status quo we never liked that much until somebody had the gall to suggest it could be improved.

My favorite recent example of this was a proposed sign ordinance primarily impacting Oak Street, the road that goes through our picturesque downtown and then devolves into fast-food tattoo-parlor shopping strip territory for the next half mile until it hits the freeway. Business owners, looking for the most effective (and that often means obtrusive) way to get passersby's attention, naturally opposed the ordinance. When push came to shove at the City Council meeting where the ordinance was debated, and the city planning director gestured at a photograph of the wires and signs and LEDs littering Oak Street with the comment, "That's ugly," a businessman stood up for a different aesthetic viewpoint. "That's not ugly," he retorted. "That's beautiful. I think that's beautiful."

We've got a new round of changes coming to our little town -- the kind you drive around. The first roundabout on a major thoroughfare in the city opened last year at the intersection of Tyler and Washington streets, hard by Hendrix College. The city's official website promises that more roundabouts are on the way, and they ain't lying. Road construction on Prince Street and Western Avenue, just north of Conway High School and next to the west end of Laurel Park, has progressed far enough to be identifiable as a roundabout.

Now I love roundabouts. I was thrilled when the Washington Street roundabout opened, and I now take every opportunity to drive through there. I've never seen more than momentary confusion or hesitation from drivers navigating the roundabout, even when it was first completed, and I haven't seen anything but absolutely smooth sailing for months (I drive through it 3-4 times a week).

I admit that the concept is something we're not used to. The city felt it might be helpful to include links to educational videos on the subject of roundabout etiquette on its homepage. But it's only one lane and four entrances, people. I think even the oldest stick-in-the-muds here in town should be able to figure it out.

Yet a few months after the Washington Street roundabout was completed, a letter to the editor appeared in the paper from someone apoplectic about the prospect of having more of these abominations constructed. He claimed to have seen daily examples of near-crashes, cars stopping in the middle of the roundabout in utter confusion, and even folks backing up when they missed their exit the first time around. Dire predictions of the apocalypse followed, should the city be foolish enough to expand its roundabout experiment. In fact, the letter writer has the resigned, exasperated tone of those who are certain disaster is right around the corner, but that people with their minds set on absolute stupidity cannot be stopped by plain common sense.

Needless to say, the roundabout of progress kept churning despite the writer's intimations of doom. And ironically, I doubt that his mind has been changed by the failure of fatal accidents (or any accidents that I know about) to materialize at Washington and Tyler. I can't wait to see a fresh round of outrage at the change of traffic pattern on Prince Street, which will fade unremarked and unremembered when we become used to the changes and no longer feel inclined to call ugliness beauty, safety danger, and a circle a square.