ARLINGTON ROCKS: Grits and Glamour tour features Lorrie Morgan and Pam Tillis

The upcoming appearance of blockbuster country stars Lorrie Morgan and Pam Tillis at Arlington Music Hall this Friday marks the continued emergence of the downtown Arlington music scene.

Morgan and Tillis are just the newest addition to the list of Music Hall performers, which this year alone includes Willie Nelson, the Oak Ridge Boys and a host of other topliners.

 Morgan and Tillis, two of country music's most notable female artists, have joined together on the Grits and Glamour Tour Friday, May 3, 7:30 p.m. t the Arlington Music Hall.

Sharing the stage in a way that lets them tell stories before they launch into their hits, such as Morgan's "Something in Red", "What Part of No", "Watch Me", and Tillis' "Maybe it was Memphis", Don't Tell Me What to Do", and "Shake the Sugar Tree."

Pam Tillis hit the country scene in 1990 when her first single hit the charts. Since then, she has earned 14 top five hits including six that hit number one, and has sold over six million records. Tillis, an accomplished songwriter, has worked with artists including Chaka Khan, Martina McBride, Highway 101, Juice Newton and Conway Twitty.

In 1994, she was awarded the coveted Female Vocalist of the Year by the Country Music Awards. A few years later, in 1999, she showcased her versatility by being the first female country entertainer to ever star in a Broadway musical when she appeared in Smokey Joe's Cafe. Tillis was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry and signed with Sony Records in 2000. In 2006, she launched her own record label, Stellar Cat Records, to release her own music.

  Lorrie Morgan made her first appearance in the country music scene when she performed “Paper Roses” with her dad, country star George Morgan, on the Grand Ole Opry. After her father passed away in 1975, Morgan continued to carry on her father’s legacy and hit the road with her father’s band. In 1994, she made history when at age 25 she was the youngest person ever to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry. Shortly after, Morgan was offered a recording contract with RCA and later with sister label BNA.

Morgan’s hits include “Five Minutes,” “Something in Red,” “Watch Me” and “What Part of No.” She has earned fourteen top-ten hits, twelve albums, seven of which have gone gold and platinum, and four Female Vocalist of the Year awards.

More information: www.arlingtonmusichall.com

The theater is located at 224 N. Center St.

TEEN ALCOHOL ABUSE: Researcher advises early dialogue with children

Early, substantive dialogue between parents and their grade-school age children about the ills of tobacco and alcohol use can be more powerful in shaping teen behavior than advertising, marketing or peer pressure, a University of Texas at Arlington marketing researcher has shown.

The findings of Zhiyong Yang, an associate professor of marketing in the UT Arlington College of Business, are published in a recent edition of the Journal of Business Research. Similar findings were part of a 2010 study he published in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing of the American Marketing Association.

Yang’s current work, “Demarketing teen tobacco and alcohol use: Negative peer influence and longitudinal roles of parenting and self-esteem,” argues that parental influence is a powerful tool in dissuading children from smoking and drinking in their later teen years.

His 2010 article, “The Impact of Parenting Strategies on Child Smoking Behavior: The Role of Child Self-Esteem Trajectory,” shows that dialogue between parents and teens is effective in combating risky behavior, such as tobacco and alcohol use, and that parental influences buffer the impact of other external factors such as social media and peer pressure.

 Zhiyong Yang

“First, our conclusion is that parenting styles can be changed, and that’s good news for the parents and the teens,” said Yang, who joined the UT Arlington in 2007 and specializes in “consumer misbehavior,” a branch of marketing that attempts to change undesirable or risky behavior.

Yang further elaborated, “Second, our study shows that parental influence is not only profound in its magnitude, but also persistent and long-lasting over the course of a child’s entire life. Effective parenting plays the critical role as a transition belt to pass normative values of society from one generation to another.”

Rachel Croson, Dean of the UT Arlington College of Business, said Yang’s research sheds important light on what drives behaviors and misbehaviors.

“Marketers often study how to sell more products,” Croson said. “Dr. Yang’s work answers some important and thorny questions about how to sell less, and what parents may be able to do to help improve their children’s health and well-being.”

Each day about 3,900 people under the age of 18 begin smoking in the United States, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control. An estimated 1,000 youth will become daily cigarette smokers. About 30 percent of youth smokers will continue to use tobacco and will die early from a smoking-related disease, the agency says.

Yang earned his doctorate from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, and has based his research on national Canadian surveys of residents from childhood to 25 years old. Because the sampling was so large, comparable results would occur in the United States, Yang said. Canadian teen smoking statistics practically mirror those of the United States, he noted.

Yang said his findings are counter to common perceptions that parents have little influence on children’s behavior after they enter adolescence. Conventional wisdom suggests that peer pressure and targeted marketing and advertising are of paramount influence on teen decisions to use tobacco and alcohol or engage in other risky behaviors.

“What our research determined is that parental influence is a far greater factor than those,” Yang said. “Parenting starts from birth. What could have a greater impact than that?”

Less effective, Yang said, are parenting strategies that employ negative reinforcement, such as belittling a teenager, threats, physical discipline or using negative consequences if the teenager’s behavior does not meet parental expectations.

“In fact, our research shows those negative strategies, like withholding affection, drive a teen toward smoking,” Yang said.

The research also shows that parents could have a positive impact on discouraging their teen from using tobacco by sharing their own experiences.

“There’s something to be said in telling a teen how you’ve suffered if you’ve smoked or engaged in a bad behavior when you were a teen,” Yang said.

He said the ideal next step in the research would be to partner with local school districts to teach parents a battery of parenting strategies that can be used to curtail teen misbehaviors.

(Article written by Kristen Sullivan, UTA)

FIGURING OUT TRUANCY: UTA helping AISD get a handle on the problem

The University of Texas at Arlington’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice is partnering with the Arlington Independent School District to try to better understand and reduce the district’s teenage truancy rates.

Jaya Davis, UT Arlington assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice, and 10 of her students are spending two to four hours a week with a school district attendance officer and assisting in home visits with truant students and their families, court preparation and data analysis.

“Truancy can have a significant impact on our community and the students and families most affected,” said Alex del Carmen, professor and chair of the UT Arlington Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. “We’re committed to serving the needs of the community while providing for exciting service-learning opportunities for our students.”

Under state law, a student is considered truant after missing more than three days of school within a four-week period or 10 or more days during a six-month period of the same school year. Truancy can lead to suspension, expulsion, dropping out of school, delinquency, poor self-esteem and even legal consequences.

Sylvia Nichols, AISD grant coordinator, contacted UT Arlington’s Center for Community Service Learning last fall as district administrators contemplated ways to encourage better attendance rates. Center director Shirley Theriot recommended the project to Davis, former service-learning faculty fellow at UT Arlington.

Jaya Davis

Davis’s students will submit weekly reports about their experiences and discuss their observations with classmates. A final paper will help prepare them for employment in the criminal justice and juvenile justice fields, she said.

Davis said she hopes the partnership with the district will evolve into an internship with district attendance officers, with AISD using the service-learning component as a preventative measure in junior high schools.

Michael Hill, AISD assistant superintendent of administration, considers the UT Arlington project a model platform.

“The AISD and our attendance officers are looking forward to working with UT Arlington juvenile justice students as we partner to ensure that AISD students attend class in order to be successful in their journey toward college and career,” Hill said.

(Article written by Bridget Lewis, UTA. Top photo for illustrative purposes only)

DOCUMENTING WHAT HAS BEEN LOST: UTA grad works to archive missing art

The 2003 war in Iraq left more than human casualties. Also lost were thousands of pieces of modern Iraqi art.

“With the loss of the works themselves and chaos in the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art and Baghdad in general, there was a direct and real fear of losing the history of the art since it was neither written nor documented,” says Nada Shabout, who earned four degrees at UT Arlington, including a humanities Ph.D. in 1999.

So she embarked on a mission to collect information on the lost works through intensive research and interviews with artists, museum personnel, and art gallery owners. The result is the recently launched Modern Art Iraq Archive. The website, artiraq.org/maia, makes the works available as an open access database to raise public awareness and encourage interested individuals to help document the museum’s original and lost holdings.

Dr. Shabout, now an art history professor at the University of North Texas, received two fellowships from the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq to conduct the first phase of data collection. In 2009 she teamed with colleagues at the Alexandria Archive Institute in California to win a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities to create the Modern Art Iraq Archive.

 Liberal Arts Dean Dr. Beth Wright

“The goal of the archive is first and foremost to provide a record of Iraq’s modern art for the Iraqi people specifically and for humanity in general,” she says.“Secondly, it is to provide access to modern Iraqi works of art and related text for researchers and art historians.”

 After the 2003 war in Iraq, Nada Shabout (UTA class of 99) embarked on a mission to collect information on thousands of pieces of lost modern art. The result was the Modern Art Iraq Archive, which provides a record of the works and makes them available as an open access database.

The daughter of an Iraqi father and Palestinian mother, Shabout credits UT Arlington College of Liberal Arts Dean Beth Wright with nurturing her passion. “Many at other institutions had discouraged my pursuit,”she says, “but not Dean Wright.”

(UTA release)