Printer Friendly Version - Jo Kelly: Rocking It for the Library

Friends of Essex Library President Jo Kelly is getting ready for a summer of events. With half of the library’s funding resting on efforts such as the Friends’, it’s a serious undertaking, but with events like a performance like Million Dollar Quartet at the Ivoryton Playhouse, it’s also a chance for some serious fun. Photo by Rita Christopher/The Courier

Jo Kelly feels sorry for people too young to remember the glory days of rock and roll.

She remembers watching Dick Clark and American Bandstand when she got home from school, where pony-tailed teenage girls in saddle shoes danced to top 40 tunes with clean-cut high school heart throbs.

Jo, president of the Friends of the Essex Library, is one of the organizers of a theater fundraiser on Thursday, June 1 at the Ivoryton Playhouse that will bring a taste of classic rock and roll to those who only know it only from oldies shows and nostalgic memories to those who remember its heyday.

The fundraiser, to benefit the Essex and Ivoryton libraries, features Million Dollar Quartet, the musical that pays tribute to a magic moment of rock and roll: the afternoon a little more than 50 years ago that four performers who would ultimately be icons of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame found themselves by chance in the office of Sun Records in Memphis. Three, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash were Sun artists; the fourth, Elvis Presley, had been. And on that long-ago afternoon, they did what musicians do. They jammed and that jam session is now the backdrop for Million Dollar Quartet.

When Jo heard that Million Dollar Quartet was going to be one of the Ivoryton Playhouse offerings this season, she knew that was the one for the benefit event.

On Monday, May 22, Ivoryton Playhouse Executive Director Jacqui Hubbard and Million Dollar Quartet Director Sherry Lutken will give an inside look at the production in a program they are calling Behind the Scenes at the Ivoryton Playhouse.

The fundraisers are important to both libraries; the Essex library receives half its budget from the town but must raise the rest of the money on its own, and Ivoryton gets approximately three-quarters of its budget from the town and must also fill the gap by fundraising. Moreover, Jo points out, recent state budget cuts have put increased pressure on library funding. Among the programs currently expected to be affected is the one that delivers interlibrary loans from one location to another.

According to Essex Library Director Richard Conroy, underfunding the delivery program will result in large backlogs of undelivered material. The likely result will be added expenses to local libraries to develop other methods of interlibrary loan delivery.

According to Jo, the friends of the Essex Library have a number of upcoming events in addition to Million Dollar Quartet. There will be a trip to Yale’s recently renovated Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library on Thursday, May 11, and the spring book sale at the Essex library on Saturday and Monday, May 20 and 22. This coming fall will feature the popular swallow cruise to see the large flocks of birds circling down along the Connecticut River and an activity-filled community party, Our Library Rocks. The party has been held in the past, but has not been part of the schedule for the past several years.

The Friends also sponsors a flu clinic at the library in the fall. Visiting nurses administer the flu shots. The Friends group, Jo emphasizes, doesn’t profit from arranging the flu clinic, but she views the event not only as a community service but also as a chance to bring people into the library who might not otherwise go.

Jo was sitting next to former Friends of the Library president Linda Levene at a meeting of the board of the Essex Garden Club when Linda whispered the words that the late comedian Joan Rivers immortalized: Can we talk? What Linda wanted to talk about was Jo becoming vice president of the Friends.

“I told her I needed time to think,” Jo recalls. “But I called the next day to say, ‘Yes.’ I couldn’t say no,” she says.

It was natural for Jo to be around books. She once owned a bookstore that used to be on Essex Main Street, and she describes herself as “a crazy book reader. I read everything,” she says.

Jo now works two days a week at a clothing store in Essex, where her tasks include doing the windows and finding appropriate outfits for the mannequins.

Professionally, she is a retired psychological social worker, who specialized in issues affecting women and children. She worked for the Child & Family Agency doing school-based clinics as well as clinics at the agency’s headquarters in New London. She also volunteered at the Connecticut women’s prison in Niantic, developing a program to help inmates reconnect with their children on their release.

Jo knows about the difficulties of adjustment firsthand. Her father was in the Navy and frequent moves, including four years in Panama, were a regular feature of her early life. She attended 11 different elementary schools.

Adjusting repeatedly was very difficult, but she says an outgoing personality helped.

When her father was assigned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the family settled in Huntington, Long Island, where Jo went to high school. She went to work right after graduation. She says her parents, strict disciplinarians, did not want her to leave home.

“I wish I had gone to college earlier; all my friends did, but I read omnivorously,” she says.

She earned her undergraduate degree in marriage and family therapy at the University of Connecticut and her master’s degree in clinical social work at Tulane University in New Orleans.

As she looks forward to the upcoming Million Dollar Quartet, Jo says that she has a particular favorite of the four singers who are the main characters—”Oh, Jerry Lee Lewis; he was a true rock and roller,” she says.

A fundraiser for the Essex and Ivoryton Libraries on Thursday, June 1 at the Ivoryton Playhouse. Tickets are $70 for pre-performance reception and the show, $30 for the reception alone, and available at the Essex and Ivoryton Libraries.