Near the end of our recent interview, I ask David Casas a question that, I think, most people would want to ask a professional magician who spends much of his time making doves appear and disappear: "Has anything really awful ever happened during your act?"

He smiles and replies: "The only thing that's really happened was at one of my first shows. Every time I used to produce a bird, I would always hold them close to me. So I was doing that at one show, and people started laughing, but I didn't know what they were laughing at. So I just kept going with my act, and they kept laughing, and I think I went to grab a silk or something ... . And then I see this big line of bird poop running down my coat.

"And I was like, 'Oh-h-h-h ... now I get it,'" says Casas. "I just shook my head and said, 'That'll happen with birds,' and kept going, you know? And I learned that when I produce the bird, I need to hold it out."

Music

Rittz

Rock Island Brewing Company

Saturday, April 18, 9 p.m.

If you're blue and you don't know where to go to, why don't you go to RIBCO? It's ... puttin' on the Rittz!

That intro's probably more clever if you sing it in rhythm to the Fred Astaire song. Please don't make me tell you which one.

Originated in Italy in the 16th Century, the theatrical form commedia dell'arte traditionally finds a group of actors participating in a comedic scenario featuring slapstick conceits called mécanisme. And for his original commedia dell'arte presentation at St. Ambrose University, one fittingly titled Commedia Dell'arte, director Daniel Rairdin-Hale insists that he and his cast have come up with some mécanisme doozies.

Prior to her career - or rather, careers - as a jazz vocalist, composer, author, and actor, Nnenna Freelon was employed in the worthy but far less glamorous field of health-care administration. She says, however, that in her late 20s, while working as a North Carolina-based administrator in the early 1980s, "I suddenly had an epiphany that I was not happy, even though I loved working in a hospital environment. Because even in that job, I used to find myself in patients' rooms singing.

"I just had a nay-saying kind of narrative," she continues. "You know, 'I want to sing, but I don't want to live in New York or California ... .' It just didn't seem attainable. But I remember whining, blah blah blah, to my grandmother about it, who was 93 at the time, and she said something to me that was very profound. She said, 'Bloom where you're planted. If God wants you to sing, He can handle wherever you are and whichever situation you're in - what you know, what you don't know - and nothing is too hard."