Bayou Sid: The Magic Man of Cajun Flavor!

One of those people is Tina Kunzer-Murphy, former executive director of the Pioneer PureVision Las Vegas Bowl.

“It was important to watch the way she handled herself,” says Setters. Kunzer-Murphy was the only female executive director of a bowl game in 2006 when Setters became executive director of the I-Bowl by unanimous vote. Being one of only two female bowl executive directors for a time isn’t something Setters even thinks about now.

“At first, I’m sure there was a novelty to it,” she says. “Now, it’s just part of the deal.”

“I think it’s enjoyable to watch it evolve over time,” she says. “I think you’ve got a really good group now. There is a lot more diversity in the room now, and people are getting incredible experience.”

If Missy Setters ever gets any downtime, husband Ross says she enjoys working in the yard. He says she doesn’t get to play as much golf as she may like, but at least she still gets to keep up with it.

She is always watching to see how her local LSU people are holding up, like Shreveport native Sam Burns. I asked Setters what she had planned for the rest of the day. She said she had an executive committee meeting at noon. But we’re eons away from kickoff! Again, that’s the only thing a casual fan like me considers. I don’t see all the behind-the-scenes upkeep and philanthropy that Missy Setters and the Independence Bowl Foundation put on year-round to benefit our community and give back to teachers and kids. Setters says she looks forward to the teams coming into town and kickoff because then, it’s about the game. But there is no game without Missy.She’s the blueprint. She sets the standard. She also sets a really great example for kids, adults, players, and our community.

The good news is you don’t have to wait until kickoff to get involved. If you have kids, check out the free Youth Football Clinic in June or any of the other I-Bowl events.

And be sure to go to

radiancetechnologiesindependencebowl.com

for more information.

Suddenly, the young man who had played multiple sports from the age of 5 without even a broken bone was unsure of his situation.

“I was so naive to the injury that when they said, ‘You’ll be back,’ I thought I would be back playing by the playoffs,” Taylor said. “I was 15. There was not as much information about stuff like that back then. I was oblivious to how severe the situation was.”

Taylor had surgery to repair his damaged spine and then made arrangements for rehabilitation at Our Children’s House at Baylor in Dallas.

“I left for Baylor Oct. 1, 2008,” he said. “I spent 2 months and 22 days there. I came back Dec. 22.”

“Out of the nine classes I took, I probably passed three,” he said. “I wasn’t taking it seriously. You can tell somebody something all day. But when you’re immersed in it, you realize by the time it’s over, ‘Yeah, this is real.’”

He finished that semester with a 1.11 GPA. “I think they were generous with the .11,” he said. So, he transferred to Southern University, where he found a good fit.

“It’s more like a small family, as far as people reaching out to you, saying you should probably do this,” he said. “Even if you don’t know what you’re going to do.”

Taylor received an associate’s degree from Southern, then returned to LSUS, where he received his bachelor’s degree in humanities in 2018.

Taylor set art aside after high school. When he picked it up again after college, it started out as just a pastime. But it ignited a spark in him. He continues to study art the way he once studied football.

“I realized I was still pretty good at this,” he said. “It went from there to watching YouTube videos. I said, ‘I can probably get better.’ Asking other artists how they did things. From there, it starts becoming a thing you’re obsessive with. It’s kind of like football. You get to where you actually like it. You’re not just out there playing.”

Taylor’s competitive nature kicked in, too. Instead of competing against other artists as he had competed on the football field, he began competing with himself to become a better artist. So, as he did in football, Taylor immersed himself in practice.

“I honestly don’t know what’s next,” he said. “If I knew I would tell you. The wind would have to blow very hard for me to know.”

Reflecting on his life, Taylor has a bit of advice for young people, especially young athletes.

“Don’t play to not get hurt,” he said. “That’s dangerous. You’re putting yourself in more danger. Don’t cheat yourself or your teammates. Or the sport. The injury isn’t the hardest thing to live with. I would think that regret is.” 

He also wants to remind anyone to always remain a student of the game, regardless of what their game might be.

“You want to make everything easier on yourself,” he said. “That’s what a lot of people don’t want to do. With any profession, you have to learn about it. You have to learn what makes it easier for you. If you’re working yourself to death and there are easier ways out there, you’re just being stubborn.” 

Taylor is glad that art has written a new chapter for his life.

“For the longest time, I was the young man at Byrd who got injured playing football,” he said. “Now I am Norman Taylor the artist. That’s what I am most proud of, switching my identity to, ‘This is who he is now.’ That’s just a part of the story.”

“This is not about me. This is about the people of Shreveport you know. We have tonight looked beyond historical barriers and distinctions. We have a new future in the city of Shreveport. It will look different than it has looked in the past and that new future means that everyone has a seat at the table. It means that we build consensus, and it means that we will move forward together…This was not about winning an election. It never has been about winning an election. Winning an election is simply the first step that we have to take to get on with the work of making our city the great city that it can be. We can build a common future, a future that all of us can enjoy and appreciate and we can have a city that all of us can be proud to say, “I LOVE SHREVEPORT!”  

Mayor Tom Arceneaux, excerpted from his election night speech 

Different neighborhoods have different manifestations of issues. Sometimes you have to address those manifestations differently in different neighborhoods. There’s not a one size fits all solution. Unless you have a diverse group of people that are advising you and that are participating, you’re going to miss some of that by thinking this one solution is the solution for everybody.  

A mayor is not a savior. A mayor is a facilitator of people learning how to make their community work. It’s the people who make it work, not the mayor. But the mayor has to create an atmosphere and an infrastructure that allows that to happen. That’s what I’m hoping to do, and that takes everybody in the community. You can’t just think ‘if I get this group of people then I win the race.’ When you do that, you’re alienating the other folks and you’ve created division rather than cooperation. So I hope that by listening to people that come from different neighborhoods and have different backgrounds we will learn a lot about each other, so that we may dispel some of the generalizations or assumptions that we make about people that have a different background from us—we’ll find out that we have a whole lot more in common than we have not in common.

What are the difficult decisions you anticipate? 

I think that when we look at our operating budget long term, we’re going to find that in a handful of years, we’re likely to face some difficult financial decisions and the revenues that are going to come in are not going to be sufficient to fund the services that we have. We’ll need to be honest about those things.

I plan to develop a long-range outlook for our operating budget. We have a five-year capital plan. Capital plans are relatively easy to deal with because you have bonds that you’ve sold to fund those projects, and those have already been approved or they wouldn’t be in the plan, or you’re getting capital outlay money from the state or some money from the federal government. But when we’re picking up garbage and we’re having sports programs, other recreational programs, those things are funded by local taxes. 

We ended last year I believe, with approximately a $30 million operating reserve. The budget for 2023 suggests that we’ll have a $20 million operating reserve at the end of 2023. Well, that means we’re budgeting to spend $10 million more than we’re taking in, right. If you have $20 million in reserves, you can only do that for two more years. And of course, you can’t completely do away with your operating reserve. So, we’re going to have to look at the ramifications of that and see what it is that we can do to address it. 

And I think it’s very important to be completely transparent about finances to give the public information so that they can digest where we are and where it is that we’re likely going. We’ll have a picture of where we are today. What happens if we don’t change anything? And where will we be in two years, five years, 10 years so that people begin to understand. This is where we are headed. I mean, the numbers just tell the story. What will be our response to the story?

Shreveport has an amazing arts community. We have a really good symphony, we have an opera company, we have ballet, we have all kinds of live music, we have local artists, we have live theater. You can hardly go through a weekend without being able to go see high quality community theater and get to know the people who are doing it. There are musicals that you can afford to take your family to, and you don’t have to go out of town to do it. And if your child decides, ‘I might like to try this,’ there’s an avenue for the child to try that. That’s just not true in most communities. We have wonderful athletic facilities and teams but not every child is going to be an athlete, and so you need to have different ways that you can expose your children to other opportunities to develop themselves. Because they’re going to need to be productive adults. 

And it’s so critical that we that we provide those opportunities and Shreveport has those opportunities. We need to enhance them so that not just the affluent have those opportunities, but children from all kinds of economic backgrounds are able to participate and grow and fulfill what I believe is God’s destiny for their lives.

What makes a community is the opportunity to have friends. It’s nice to have places to party but when it gets down to it, the reason you party is because you’re trying to be with your friends. So, if you have a city that has the atmosphere of creating friendships and relationships then you can have a successful city.

What are your plans for the transition team committees?

I’m envisioning those lasting for 60 to 90 days, for some assessment and to help me further plan. I have ideas about what to do about violent crime. I have ideas what to do about economic development. I have ideas what to do about blight. I have ideas of what to do to bring communities together. I have an idea of where our finances are going. Those are the five groups. But we need hard data on that. 

I also want to get some additional community input to finalize a plan. But in the meantime, I’m going to be acting. There are several pieces of legislation that we’ll be moving forward with early on in the term to set the stage for those other things, so it’s not wait and see what these groups come up with, it’s wait and see what else they come up with. I think it’s important that we show immediate progress on cleaning up the city, on addressing violent crime and on figuring out how to use every tool that’s available to us to eliminate blight in our city. I already know some of the steps that I want to take, and we will be taking those steps right away.

TRANSITION TEAM COMMITTEES
Administrative Transition Committee
Chair Tom Dark, William C. Bradford, Jr., Arthur Thompson, Sherricka Fields-Jones, John Nickelson.

Public Safety Transition Committee Chair Jim Roberts, William C. Bradford, Jr., Sarah Giglio, Bill Flanagan, Theron Jackson

Blight Abatement Transition Committee
Chair LeVette Fuller, Lydia Jackson, Tim Magner, Mike Moore, Hilary Wooley

Business and Economic Development Transition Committee
Chair Rich Lamb, Linda Biernacki, Dr. James Hobley, Taylor Jamison, Francesca
Moreland, Grant Nuckolls, Scott Ward

Community Building Transition Committee
Co-Chairs Wendell Delaney and Waynette Ballengee, Elizabeth Arceneaux, Gabriel
Balderas, Mario Chavez, Charles Johnson, Jimmy Jones, Camille Tharpe McCall, Havard Scott

Finance Transition Committee
Chair Robert Dean, Tom Dark, Brittney Dunn, Sherricka Fields-Jones, Bobby Jelks, Steve Walker

Photos courtesy of Tom Arceneaux for Shreveport Mayor Campaign.

BY SCOTT ANDERSON

Jennifer Carsillo loves to share her passions whenever and wherever she can.

“I saw how much fun she was having onstage, but I could kind of feel I was a little more into it for her than she was,” Carsillo said. “She loved it, but I was SO into it. I decided I should pay attention as to why.”

Bunny was homeschooled while Carsillo and Butterman both traveled the country for performances. When Bunny decided to attend public school in the eighth grade, that necessitated Carsillo to stay in Shreveport with her. Without homeschooling duties, she had a lot more free time during the day, but found she couldn’t physically add seven more hours of violin to her routine.

Carsillo was asked by the Shreveport Opera to play the title role in “Fiddler on the Roof.” She enjoyed her experience so much that she prepared a monologue and answered an open call at Shreveport Little Theatre. John Daniel cast her as the lead in “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” a play by Sarah Ruhl. “It was like coming home,” she said of being on stage again. “It was so comfortable. I had been out of that whole scene for so long. I don’t know what made me think I could do it. But it all came back.” Carsillo has been in seven theatre productions at SLT, including starring roles in the musicals “MAMMA MIA!” and Steve Martin’s “Bright Star.” She also won Bravo! Awards for Best Leading Actress and Best Supporting Actress in the 2018-19 season.

Carsillo also began hearing about something called Film Prize. As with everything else in her life, she dove straight into the deep end. She worked with fellow “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” actor Camille Gladney to create the short film Gloria for the 2018 Louisiana Film Prize.

Anatomy of a Selfie: Los Angeles-based actress Iris Almario (Tales of The Walking Dead, NCIS) coming out to support friend Jennifer Carsillo for her appearance as “Angel” in the Hollywood premiere of Hard Up. (Photo credit: Ilja von Nagel, Valley Film Fest 2022)

 It won a Founders Circle award that year. It also launched Carsillo into an even broader array of creative outlets.

Since 2018, she has acted in twenty films to date (more are in the works), including several shorts that have been Official Selections at Film Prize. Carsillo has performed a variety of on and off-screen roles for a number of other Film Prize (and feature length) projects. In 2019, she starred as her great-grandmother in St. Esther Day, which she co-wrote with Gladney. The following two years, Carsillo appeared in and composed/ performed the music for writer-director Abigail Kruger’s films, Green’s Alley and Amber the Acrobat, part of a trilogy of films that premiered at Film Prize. Amber the Acrobat has screened in film festivals around the world, including the Berlin Short Film Festival, Berlin and Amsterdam Lift Off Film Festivals, Wisconsin Film Festival, and Berlin Art Film Festival. Carsillo will soon represent the short at the Hollywood Florida Film Festival. Attending film festivals is something Carsillo enjoys greatly, as it allows her to meet other filmmakers and “see all the creativity in independent film, which is really inspiring.”

For this year’s Film Prize, she played a British character, Corporal Shawcross, in the Top 5 Film Bamber Bridge, a World War II-era short film that explored the issue of racism, by 2021 Grand-Prize winner Mark Bonner. And Carsillo received a special gift herself as she was altering the costume Bonner provided, a genuine World War II uniform. “I found some secrets in the pocket,” she said. “That was the coolest thing ever. I reached my hand in and I pulled out this art deco lighter. I just burst out crying. It was so emotional to think that was actually used by a soldier. I also pulled out an old British coin from the breast pocket. I just popped them back in and said, ‘This is for the next person that gets to wear this costume.’”

Carsillo said she is grateful to Shreveport for giving her the opportunity to embrace all of her artistic interests. “There are so many motivated people here, and it has been fun to pool our talents to create art, be it for the stage or screen. I have been so fortunate to do so many different things: story writing, scriptwriting, producing, costumes, helping with art design. And in the world of performing, acting, dancing, singing, violin, and composing. I’m thrilled to have really unique opportunities here in Shreveport.” But since the pandemic, Carsillo says that acting auditions are mostly taped, so she’s been able to take advantage of callbacks and projects throughout the country. Case in point, Carsillo just booked a beauty campaign for Bambu Earth, a brand she has admired for its safe ingredients and belief that beauty shines through healthy, natural skin.

Whatever role she is playing, Carsillo has one goal when it comes to her audience. “The thing that has been important to me—in whatever endeavor—is to infuse my passion for the activity into it,” she said. “I want them to feel how important it is.”

Michael Butterman and Jennifer Carsillo at their home in Shreveport. (Photo credit: Neil Johnson)

Jordan’s All-American upbringing didn’t include shows at the Louisiana Hayride, but like Hank Williams Sr. and Hank Jr., country music and songwriting were a family tradition.

“My uncle was singer-songwriter,” Davis said. “Country music was always part of the family. I didn’t get into it until after college when I saw Don Williams at The Strand. But you can’t love country music and not know how Shreveport impacted the genre.”

Jordan’s family not only loved country music when he was growing up, but all styles of music. It’s another element
of his upbringing he credits to his hometown. “I don’t think I would have grown up in such a musical household without living in such a rich musical city,” he said. “From an early age, my dad would talk about the Hayride. He was a big Elvis Presley fan. He had so many Elvis stories, about him being in Shreveport. As I got older, I was close enough to pick up Pat Green in my middle school years. And being in Louisiana, the Southern rock’n’ roll — the Allman Brothers and Tom Petty. Being around a musical family, there was always some I was dipping into that I’d never heard.”

Davis said he remains a fan of many of the artists his father introduced to him, including Elvis, Kris Kristofferson, and Jim Croce. Looking back, he recalls the one artist he would have liked most to see in the historic Municipal Auditorium. “My dad was big John Prine fan,” Davis said.
“He got me into Prine early on. Seeing someone like that there would be really cool. There’s such a storyteller vibe to that room.”

said. Jacob moved to Nashville in 2010, and Jordan followed his brother there in 2012 with his dream of becoming a songwriter.

“He loved his brother,” Luwanna said. “The boys were two years apart. They were always best friends. Whatever Jacob did, Jordan wanted to do too.”

But performing was something of an afterthought, Jordan said. “I never dreamed I’d be an artist,” he said. “But after six years and no money, I needed to figure something out. I was bartending at night and writing songs in the day. I said, ’I don’t know how to do this, but I’ve got to start playing shows. I am going to do this artist thing and see if it works out.’”

“I was fortunate enough when it hit
that I was already a few singles in,” he said. “It didn’t affect me as much from a professional standpoint. I think, for me, it put me in a weird headspace. I’d never been home that much. It was a weird transition, even for my wife for me to be around that much. Not to mention dealing with a pandemic and the shutdown. It was tough for us.”

To cope with the pandemic, the social unrest at the time, and an unprecedented election cycle, Davis turned to writing again. The result was his follow-up EP, Buy Dirt. The title track is a collaboration with Luke Bryan, a contemporary he listened to on the radio growing up. Their friendship grew through the years as they ran into each other at awards shows and golf courses. The lyrics reflect their shared values about life, Davis said, and he is proud of the results. “I am hoping to win a CMA with that one,” he said. “To be able to have a song with him is really cool.” Buy Dirt also features Davis’ short version of Prine’s song “Blow up Your TV.”

“The best is John Prine,” he said. “He’s the reason why I fell in love with the art. If I had never found him, I don’t know that
I would have pursued music. He passed before I could meet him. I start ‘Buy Dirt’ with my way of thanking him for the influence he had on me. It made me feel good to pay homage to him.”

And he still stays true to those roots in his work. “I’ll be sitting in a songwriting room with someone, and they’ll write, ‘We’ll be flying out past that county line.’ I’ll be like, ‘I’m from Louisiana. We don’t have counties. I can’t sing that.’”