Friday’s opening night of Tuesdays with Morrie found the Playcrafters Barn Theatre housing the largest audience I’ve ever seen there. It was almost unbelievable, then, that the intimacy of this two-man show directed by Jeff Ashcraft made me feel like the only person in the room – and I feel fortunate to have been a part of this production's history.

Few likely remember it, but back in 1985, Susan Sarandon starred in a movie titled Compromising Positions, an utterly charming mystery-comedy in which a suburban homemaker becomes an amateur sleuth investigating the murder of her dentist. Director Frank Perry's film is a sharp, funny trifle with an astounding supporting cast of Broadway talents – Raul Julia, Judith Ivey, Joe Mantegna, Joan Allen, Edward Herrmann, Mary Beth Hurt – and totally worth a watch on YouTube. (It's easier to sit through if you can ignore the film's rather blatant mid-'80s misogyny.) But I hadn't thought about that movie in years, if not decades – not until director Paul Feig's irresistible mystery-comedy A Simple Favor kept bringing it to mind.

In 2017, the last three days of September and the first of October brought an unexpected surprise. The All Senses Festival debuted its multi-media enterprise last year with more than 20 artistic performances and was held at Rozz-Tox, the Rock Island Brewing Company (RIBCO), and the Figge Art Museum. Though smaller in scale compared to other regional festivals, in particular Iowa City’s Mission Creek, All Senses had, judging by the number of the acts, its own Homeric air to it.

Beautiful, hand-made, and functional works of art will be both celebrated and sold when the Mississippi Valley Quilters Guild hosts its 2018 Great River Quilt Show at the Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds, the September 21 and 22 weekend event boasting demonstrations, auctions, appraisals, and raffles, with more than 400 locally crafted quilts on display.

Having enjoyed a sold-out sensation with its production of the ABBA musical Mamma Mia!, the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse wraps up its 2017-18 season, from September 19 through November 3, with another stage hit boasting a mother in the title: Mama Won't Fly, a delightful road-trip comedy by the playwriting team of Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope, and Jamie Wooten that Broadway World decreed “moves quickly and never lets up on the laughs.”

Unexpected, dark, and even horrific sides of Scott County history are currently being explored in a 2018 book by John Brassard Jr., and on September 23, the Eastern Iowa author will visit Davenport's German American Heritage Center in order to share real-life tales from his historical offering Murder & Mayhem in Scott County, Iowa.

Touring in support of his 2018 recording Encore – an album the New York Times called a “lustrous revisiting of raucous Southern soul, rousingly delivered and pinpoint precise” – the chart-topping roots rocker Anderson East plays a September 18 concert at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn, displaying the musical gifts that led NPR to deem him “a perceptive record-maker and proven captivator of live crowds.”

An artist who, according to American Blues Scene magazine, “plays a head-spinning variety of styles … never failing to excite the listener,” the Florida-based JP Soars and his band The Red Hots play a September 19 concert presented by the Mississippi Valley Blues Society, their engagement at Kavanaugh's Hilltop Bar & Grill demonstrating why BluesSource.com wrote, “Soars can stroke, persuade, bend, and stretch notes from places other guitarists haven't even heard of.”

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