Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2009 > February > 17
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Music teacher, UT Tower shooting survivor Lana Kay Leeds Swanson, 1945-2009
Austin teacher, musician and University of Texas Tower shooting survivor, Lana Kay Leeds Swanson, 63, died of pancreatic cancer late Sunday night.
Not content with bringing children and young adults up to professional standards, she also organized Christmas shows for senior citizens at the Summit Home.
Most recently, Leeds worked with stage director Jacki Loewenstein as music director of “Wanda’s World” and the upcoming “Willy Wonka Jr.” at Zach Theatre.
An alumnus of the University of Texas music department, she was known as Lana Phillips when, at age 21, Charles Whitman sprayed the UT campus with gunfire from the Tower. Hit outside a clothing store on Guadalupe Street, her shoulder was gashed, keeping her from playing the organ, her primary musical instrument, for a time.
“I wasn’t scared until I got shot,” she told a newspaper reporter in 1966. “I was watching the Tower and watching people get shot. I didn’t think I was within range. Plus I was standing behind some other people and I thought they would get shot before I would. I was wrong.”
Leeds also conquered advanced lymphoma when her now-adult children were still very young.
“She always had a strong survival instinct,” Loewenstein said. “She loved life and felt a need to live life to the fullest. She was the most spirited, positive, warm teacher I’ve ever worked with. She motivated so many students to find their voices.”
She is survived by husband Murrey Swanson and her children Megan and Stuart Mitchell, sister Marsha Hogue and father, Marshall Phillips. Services are planned for 2 p.m. Friday at Weed-Corley-Fish Funeral Home on North Lamar Boulevard.
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Are you an Austin flâneur?
The French have really hit the conceptual jackpot with the word “flâner,” a truly wonderful word in that it means simultaneously to walk and not to walk. It can indeed mean to stroll, but it can also mean the act of simply hanging around, staying right where you are and not walking at all. There is something gloriously perverse about this, and it is, of course, the root of “flâneur.”
Are you an Austin flâneur? I believe I am. Let me know how you walk and not-walk.
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The Murder of Leo Tolstoy
Harper’s Magazine runs erratic most of the time. But right next to a flabby, interminable article on the health-care system in the February issue is a bit of comic exuberance. Elif Batuman is a first-time writer for Harper’s, but “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy: A Forensic Investigation” shows a gentle satirist in the making. I especially appreciated her thumbnail sketches of Tolstoy scholars assembled at the novelist’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana. Good stuff.
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Upcoming live interviews with Mark Erwin, Rob Faubion
At 2 p.m. Thursday, check this space for a double interview with Mark Erwin, whose second-generation social media site, StandardAnswer, has everybody chattering, and Rob Faubion, who just launched, Austin On Stage a Web guide to local arts and entertainment.
You’ll have a chance to comment and ask questions in real time.
Meanwhile, Out & About Rewind is back in action after our Surfside sabbatical. I only made five social events last weekend, but some spiffy snaps came out of the short tours.
Speaking of some of those images, consider the one attached. Don’t you feel some Austinites have been camera-ready their whole lives … then a lucky social columnist comes along.
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