Clockwatchers is a film comedy about the special hell on earth occupied by temporary office workers. Professional and personal conspiracies are imagined when numerous personal items disappear and suspicion falls on the temps. Clockwatchers (photo at left) stars Parker Posey (Margaret), Alanna Ubach (Jane), Lisa Kudrow (Paula) and Toni Collette (Iris) as temp workers and friends. Clockwatchers runs through Sept. 13 at the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater.

Three Legends: Gershwin, the Lincoln Symphony and Maureen McGovern Sept. 19 at Lied

This is the centennial birth year for George Gershwin, the American composer who married classical and jazz idioms, forever changing our view of serious music. No singer working today is more adept at presenting the Gershwin repertoire than Maureen McGovern.

This vocal wonder joins the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra for "George and Ira Gershwin: A Centennial Celebration," at 8 p.m. Sept. 19 in the Lied Center for Performing Arts.

The Lincoln Symphony, under the baton of McGovern's music director/pianist Lee Musiker, collaborates with the Lied Center in presenting McGovern in concert.

With a four-octave range, McGovern is a certified diva of the pop music world. While she says her vocal inspirations are Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, McGovern has been praised by the likes of Mel Torme, who says she is "simply the most glorious singer to come down the pike."

McGovern has just completed a national tour of the Rodgers and Hammerstein favorite The King and I, where her definitive performance as "Anna" won ecstatic reviews.

In the 25 years she's been in show business, McGovern has earned gold records in several categories, including the chart-topper "The Morning After" and "We May Never Love Like This Again."

Her love affair with Gershwin" music has earned praise and fans galore. She performed Gershwin on the PBS-BBC Emmy-award winning special, "Celebrating Gershwin," marking the 50th anniversary of the composer's death. She also starred in concertized revivals of Gershwin's musicals "Of Thee I Sing" and "Let 'Em Eat Cake." She has performed with Torme, the late Buddy Rich and the late Henry Mancini. Symphony concerts are a staple in her repertoire - McGovern has appeared with the Boston Pops, the New York Pops, the Dallas Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony and the National Symphony. She last appeared in Lincoln in 1991, taking the Lied Stage with the Omaha Symphony.

While her performance may vary, McGovern lists the following tunes in her repertoire: "Things Are Looking Up/Beginner's Luck," "By Strauss," "Love Walked In/Embraceable You," "My Ship/The Man I Love," and "Gershwin Medley."

Pre-performance talks, part of the Lied Center's ongoing education programming, begin in the Lied's Steinhart Room 55 minutes and 30 minutes prior to curtain.

Tickets for the performance are $35, $31 and $27. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska Wesleyan University and Doane College students and youth 18 and younger with proper identification can purchase tickets for half-price.

Call the Lied Box Office at (402) 472-4747 or toll free, (800) 432-3231 for ticket availability. Box Office hours are 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. weekdays. On performance weekdays, the Box Office is open from 11 a.m. through the first intermission. For evening performances on weekends, the Box Office opens at 3 p.m. For more information about this performance or other Lied Center programs, see the Lied Center's web page at http://www.unl.edu/lied.

The concert is sponsored in part by the Marjorie and Gene Eaton Lied Endowment Fund.

Beyond the Horizon: Keith Jacobshagen's Rain in June

Robert Sudlow's Sun Nest at right

Sudlow, Jacobshagen Landscapes at GP Art Collection

Landscape paintings by nationally acclaimed artists Robert Sudlow and Keith Jacobshagen will be featured in Beyond the Horizon: Robert Sudlow and Keith Jacobshagen, which will run Sept. 2 to Oct. 14 at the Great Plains Art Collection.

The Friends of the Center for Great Plains Studies will sponsor an opening reception in honor of the artists from 7:30 to 9 p.m. Sept. 9 with talks by the artists to begin at 8 p.m. This special event is free and open to the public.

The Great Plains Art Collection is the first venue for this exhibition which was organized and will be toured by Exhibits USA. The show represents a survey of recent works by two of the Great Plains region's contemporary masters of the genre and will include 10 paintings by each artist. It is curated by Mary Kennedy McCabe, director, Exhibits USA, and Brian J. Bach, curator.

Sudlow, a leading painter of the Kansas prairie and Flint Hills, has drawn inspiration primarily from three counties in eastern Kansas: Chase, Wabaunsee and Douglas. His views reflect the color, light, and weather patterns of a region whose distinctive type of beauty is sometimes lost on those who are unacquainted with it. Although not an abstract painter, Sudlow is far from a strict realist. His work in some ways draws upon the romantic, impressionistic 19th century American landscape tradition. He edits and transforms elements of the landscape, capturing the spirit as well as physical reality of his environment.

In a similar vein, Jacobshagen, once a student of Sudlow's, creates paintings that celebrate the vast scale and scope of the Great Plains. A professor in the department of Art and Art History at NU, he is well known not only in Nebraska, but across the country. Jacobshagen employs landscape as a means of metaphor. While in one sense, his paintings explore the topographical and geological features of the landscape, in another, his works exemplify the use of the genre to explore the artist's relationships, memories, and conversations.

UCLA Musicologist McClary Is Geske Lecturer Sept. 15

Susan McClary, chair of the UCLA Department of Musicology, will present the next Geske Lecture at 7 p.m. Sept. 15 in the Sheldon Gallery auditorium.

McClary will present "Rap, Minimalism and Structures of Time in Late 20th Century Culture." A reception will follow the lecture in Sheldon's Great Hall. Both the lecture and reception are free and open to the public.

McClary earned her Ph.D. and A.M. degrees in musicology from Harvard University She earned her bachelor's in music (piano) from Southern Illinois University.

She specializes in the cultural criticism of music, both the European canon and contemporary popular genres. In contrast to an aesthetic tradition that treats music as ineffable and transcendent, her work engages with the signifying dimensions of musical procedures and deals with this elusive medium as a set of social practices.

She is best known for her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender. and Sexuality (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), which examines cultural constructions of gender, sexuality, and the body in various musical repertories, ranging from early 17th-century opera to the songs of Madonna. McClary's more recent publications explore the many ways in which subjectivities - cultural notions of selfhood, of how emotions "feel," and so on - have been construed in music from the Renaissance onward.

McClary was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1995.

The Norman and Jane Geske Lectureship in the History of the Arts was established in 1995 through the generosity of Norman and Jane Geske and will feature noted scholars in the history of the visual arts, music, theatre, dance, film or architecture

The lectures are intended to advance the understanding and appreciation of the arts with creative writing and thinking that reflect the importance of historical perspective of the arts. The invited scholar presents a public lecture open to the campus and the community, focused ideally on a single work, art form, or artist, that will subsequently be published and distributed to major research libraries throughout the United States.

Wednesday Walk Sept. 16 Looks at German Prints

The next Wednesday Walk at the Sheldon Gallery features Charles Robbins, who will discuss the current exhibition of German expressionist prints.

Robbins, a private Grand Island collector of works on paper with a special interest in German Expressionist prints, will share his knowledge and research with visitors as they tour Angst on Paper: German Expressionist Prints, from 12:15 to 1 p.m. Sept. 16.

The exhibition continues through Sept. 20.

Robbins is a longtime collector whose collection reflects his personal interest in German Expressionist prints. He is a member of the Sheldon Gallery Board and an avid advocate for the arts.

Emerging from the many cultural, political and social crises in Germany during the first two decades of the 20th century, German Expressionism was an attempt by two artistic communities to respond aesthetically to the inhumanity of the modern world. These two communities were Die Brücke (The Bridge), which was founded in Dresden and lasted from 1905 to 1913, and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), which was founded in Munich and lasted from 1911 to 1914. The artists in these communities attempted to develop an aesthetic language sufficiently "modern" to express the perceived horrors of the 20th-century world.

Angst on Paper features the work of such important Die Brücke members as Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Der Blaue Reiter artists Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Other artists such as Otto Dix, Paul Klee, Ernst Barlach, and Kathe Kollwitz are part of the broader orbit of German Expressionism that gravitated around several important avant-garde journals, including Jugend (Youth) and Der Sturm (The Storm).

The Wednesday Walk series allows gallery visitors to view featured exhibitions during informal walkthroughs with the Sheldon Gallery director, curator, or special guest lecturer, as they discuss the exhibition and respond to questions. Following each Wednesday Walk, gourmet coffee is provided by The Mill. The Wednesday Walk series is free and open to the public

Upcoming dates and topics are:

• Oct. 21, Dan Siedell, curator, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Legible Forms: Contemporary Sculptural Books.
• Nov. 18, Magdalena Garcia, director, El Museo Latino, Omaha, The Latino Spirit. Hispanic Icons and Images.
• Dec. 16, Neil Munson, craftsman, Working with the Grain: Wooden Bowls and Boxes.
• Jan. 20, 1999, Shelley Fuller, associate professor, Department of Art and Art History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Selected Acquisitions in Photography and Prints.
• Feb. 17, Siedell, Studio Faculty Biennial.
• March 17, George W. Neubert, director, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Robert Rauschenberg.
• April 21, Larry Schwarm, artist, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Larry Schwarm: Prairie Fire.
• May 19, Siedell, Jam: C.S. Wilson and John Gierlach.

EduCable Special Explores Welfare

In 1996 sweeping federal legislation rewrote the American social contract, ending six decades in which families who could not support themselves were guaranteed federal assistance. How will these vast changes affect the 10 million adults and children receiving welfare benefits?

Ending Welfare As We Know It, a 90-minute documentary airing at 4:30 p.m. Sept. 13, on EduCable, the cable television service of the Nebraska ETV Network, chronicles the lives of six welfare mothers during the course of a year.

Putting a human face on this subject, the program follows the women as they struggle to comply with new work requirements, find reliable childcare and transportation, battle drug addiction and depression, confront domestic violence and try to make ends meet.

Some of the mothers gain new skills and confidence and are able to leave welfare for the first real jobs of their lives. Others sink further into poverty, become homeless or lose their children to the foster care system.

By profiling families living in Wisconsin, Florida and New Jersey - states that implemented their own reforms before the passage of the federal bill - Ending Welfare offers the public a view of welfare reform as it unfolds throughout the rest of the country.

Welsch Focuses on Midlands Immigration

Learn about the mission of the Nebraska/Iowa Office of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service as its director, Jerry Heinauer, appears at 8:30 p.m. Sept. 18, on Roger Welsch & on the statewide Nebraska ETV Network.

Welsh comments, "You may find it surprising that the I.N.S. is very busy here in Nebraska - not just at the border of the U.S. and Mexico. How much do you know about the federal agency that's charged with the responsibility of servicing those who choose to migrate to our country?"

The weekly television series features humorist and author Welsch in discussion with a variety of Nebraskans - from authors and educators to historians and prominent citizens - whose contributions to the good life in Nebraska make for interesting conversation.

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Perils and Pleasures of Raising Grandkids

While some of our country's grandparents are anticipating the lifestyle changes that will accompany their retirement, others are assuming parental duties all over again. Revisiting the routines of diaper changes, cub scout meetings and conferences with teachers, the circumstances of five Nebraska families are profiled in the hour-long documentary, Raising Grandkids: a Love Story, which encores on Grandparents Day, at 5 p.m. Sept. 13 on the Nebraska ETV Network.

With a 40 percent increase over the last decade that equates to 3.2 million American children that live with their grandparents (according to the U.S. Census figures in 1991), there is a significant shift in familial roles. Unfortunate realities of our society - such as substance abuse, divorce, crime, homelessness, mental illness and death - are some of the reasons that have contributed to this increasing change.

Raising Grandkids goes beyond the statistics to chronicle the sacrifices, challenges and joys experienced by grandparents who become the primary caregivers for their grandchildren.

The program seeks to stimulate reflection on the meaning of family, responsibility and love, and to demonstrate the success that can be achieved through this nontraditional family structure.

"I've gained a lot of admiration for the families I worked with in the course of making this documentary," said Lori Maass Vidlak, the Lincoln-based producer and director of Raising Grandkids. "I have a real respect for what they're doing and how they're able to keep things together."