2/3/00

Diane Clifton, 334/844-5117

'LONELY EAGLES' TO BE PERFORMED ON AUBURN CAMPUS

AUBURN --³Lonely Eagles (The Tuskegee Airmen Meet Josephine Baker),² a two-character drama with music and dance, will be performed at Auburn University on Feb. 13.

The play will be at the Foy Student Union Ballroom at 7 p.m. There will be no admission charge.

³I've always wanted an opportunity to bring it to the campus," says Dyann Robinson, AUıs associate professor of theatre who wrote, choreographed, directs and portrays Josephine Baker in the performance.

"Lonely Eagles² is based on a true story when Baker, the American-born dancer dubbed the "Queen of Europe" in the 1920s and 30s, entertained the first of the famous Tuskegee Airmen (the 99th Fighter Squadron of the Army Air Corps).

Baker, star of the Follies Bergere in Paris, went to Fez, French Morocco in North Africa to entertain the 99th just days after the airmen arrived to prepare for their mission in World War II.

State Rep. Johnny Ford, D-Tuskegee, co-stars as Lt. Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., commander of the squadron.

"I canıt tell you how pleased I am that we have been able to coordinate and help sponsor this special performance by Dyann Robinson and Johnny Ford," said Stauffer. "Auburn University is fortunate to have a faculty member of Dyannıs calibre, and it would be a shame not to showcase her talents during this time.²

The ³Lonely Eagles² performance is sponsored by AU Outreach, the College of Liberal Artıs Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Office of Multi-Cultural Affairs.

AU Outreach has sponsored the play in four rural Alabama Schools because ³. . .it offered a unique combination of education and entertainment that we felt would be appealing and most beneficial to our rural public high school students, most of whom are African American,² stated David Wilson, associate provost and vice president for University Outreach.

The play, according to Wilson, exceeded expectations.

³The students that witnessed the performances for the most part have rarely, if ever, had the experience of seeing live professional African-American actors perform a play about historical African-American figures, whose heroic lives are recognized by the whole world.²

To Robinson, however, Bakerıs fight for freedom ­ from prejudice in America and from Nazi-occupied Europe ­ goes largely unsung.

Born Josephine Carson in St. Louis in 1906, Baker slept in shelters of cardboard and ate out of trash cans. She left her parents ³home² and married at 13. After working as a waitress for a while, she joined a group of performers, and by age 18 had been discovered in New York. But it was in Paris that Bakerıs fame flourished.

As a member of the French Resistance, Baker was awarded the Legion of Honor for her work as an underground agent. Being an entertainer, ³She was very handy because she met all these people from different countries.²

Robinson, a wealth of information about all things Josephine, recounts that the Nazis were aware of Baker's work in the resistance when they occupied her chateau in the South of France. They planned to poison her food, and did. But Baker learned of their plans and made plans of her own.

³She ate the meal, which was laced with arsenic,² says Robinson, ³and went up and threw herself down the laundry shoot, and the resistance people rescued her.²

But Baker suffered internal injuries from which she never fully recovered., and was still ailing when she first performed for the Tuskegee Airmen.

"Lonely Eagles" was performed recently in Columbus, Ga., for a group of former airmen, said Robinson.

³Most of them had been at that performance (in North Africa) and remember her. It's very interesting, everybody just remembers what a beautiful person, physically and spiritually, she was," Robinson said. "That's the word they use for her, that she was such a gorgeous woman and, at the time they saw her, she was sick. But she gave a very exciting performance."

Robinson says was a quirk of fate that Baker, who fought for equality, met the Tuskegee Airmen, who also struggled for the right to fly.

³Thatıs why I named it Lonely Eagles," added Robinson, who first set out to do a one-woman show about Baker's life. "Because they (Tuskegee Airmen) were called lonely eagles, and she was a lonely eagle."

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CONTACT: Stauffer, 334/844-5100.