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pickleball, soccer and boxing. He wants to“ pack out Alma” for Celebrity Flag Football with the idea of bringing more competitions to town.

“ I’ m from Oklahoma, and the four-state region is home,” Parker says.“ So I like to bring things back home.”

There’ s lso a new producing theater company kicking off its season in Alma, and it’ s home grown, too. PAC’ d House Productions is the brainchild of Chuck King, executive director of the Alma Education and Arts Foundation, and this season, he’ s partnering with his daughter Jessye King- Wooten, who is program director with Arts on Main in Van Buren.

“ We have been a presenting theater for 24 years here in the River Valley,” says King of the Foundation’ s Skokos Performing Arts Center.“ There are a number of great opportunities for children’ s theater in the area, but we saw a gap we could fill by offering theater experiences for all ages and shows that would appeal to audiences of all ages.

“ It’ s a new thing for us, because we’ re used to presenting touring shows, but we found that doing it ourselves has been rewarding on a number of different levels.”

Arts on Main goes way back in Crawford County, having been founded as the Center for Arts and Education in 1976. With its move into a renovated building on Van Buren’ s

Main Street in 2022 and a relationship managing the King Opera House next door, Arts on Main was all about a collaboration with the Alma Education and Arts Foundation. Both groups had experimented with producing a little bit of theater—“ The 39 Steps” last year, for example, along with“ Bedlam at Beard and Lady”— and“ with Chuck being my dad, creative collaborations are kind of inevitable,” King-Wooten laughs.

PAC’ d House Productions will be offering stipends to actors in lead and supporting roles for three shows in its 2025 season.“ To Kill a Mockingbird” kicks things off July 26-Aug. 2, directed by Audra Bocksnick, at the Skokos Center. King will direct“ Nevermore: The Poe

Experience,” an immersive indoor-outdoor dinner event Oct. 30-Nov. 2 at the new Rudy Ruins venue just up the road in Rudy; and King-Wooten will helm“ The Miracle Worker” Nov. 14-23 at King Opera House.

The goals, King and his daughter agree, are to serve the educational mission of both organizations; to present classic American literature like“ Mockingbird” and“ Miracle Worker”; and to offer opportunities to both actors and audiences right in Alma’ s front yard. Season tickets for PAC’ d House Productions will be available through skokospac. org. Tickets will also be available for each show separately. Tickets for Celebrity Flag Football are available at celebrityflagfootball. ozarkstix. com.