Summer Entertainments

Evelyn C. McDonald
Arts & Culture Reporter
June 30, 2016

Ah, the heat of summer. Wondering what to do? How to entertain guests, grandchildren, oneself? I’m off on vacation but wanted to leave you with a couple of suggestions. Some I’ve written about before but I’ve thrown in some new ones as well.

For grandchildren, the Sally Corporation in Jacksonville makes animatronics for dark rides (think Pirates of the Caribbean). I wrote about them last summer. They have a free, one hour tour of their facility which passed my grandson’s test (pitted against his video games). There’s also Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in St. Augustine, which he pronounced “kind of fun but creepy.” And then there’s Catty Shack Ranch (described in a recent column) where you can get close to big cats and see 600 pounds of chicken disappear in an incredibly short time.

For guests, White Oak would be a splurge but it is a very interesting place. We fed tree branches to giraffes, watched a baby rhino, and saw all sorts of animals. A single cheetah had lost her pack so she was in an enclosure by with no other cheetahs. Her companion was an Anatolian Shepherd dog. He was an attention hog. The cheetah would come to the fence to be scratched and the dog would horn in between her and the visitors.

One of the more interesting, and dangerous, members of White Oak’s menagerie was the cassowary. It’s an unusually marked bird, native to New Guinea and northern Australia. They range from 4 to 6 ft. tall. Supposedly Spielberg’s artists used it as the model for the velociraptors in “Jurassic Park.” Our tour guide was explaining the habits of the cassowary. She told us that females mate, lay eggs, and then leave the eggs for the male to take care of. Several women raised their hands and said if there was reincarnation, in the next life they wanted to be female cassowaries.

If the great outdoors is not your cup of tea, I recommend a visit to the theatre. ACT is offering “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, abridged.” It is running July 8 and 9, and July 14—16. I saw the production in London and it was hilarious. I’m not sure how it will be staged here but in London, the actors moved through the plays at lightning speed even doing part of “Hamlet” backwards. The history plays were done is a series of football scrimmages with the English crown cast as the football. It makes wonderful fun of Shakespeare and makes Shakespeare wonderful fun.

So enjoy your summer. There’s more to do than you think.

Evelyn McDonald moved to Fernandina Beach from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. in 2006. She is a chair of Arts & Culture Nassau, a city commission charged with support of the arts in Nassau County. She serves on FSCJ’s Curriculum Committee for the Center for Lifelong Learning. She is also the chair of the Dean’s Council for the Carpenter Library at the UNF. Ms. McDonald has MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan.