To the editor:

The Journal-World article on KU’s Wilcox Classical Museum brought back wonderful memories of the Lawrence community theater’s production of my play “Flesh, Flash and Frank Harris” in April of 1980, and then again Off-Broadway in New York in 1983-1984. Harris was a student at KU who was devoted to classics professor Byron Caldwell Smith, a friendship which he wrote about extensively in his scandalous five-volume autobiography “My Life and Loves,” banned in Europe and America as pornography until the 1960s.

My play was set in Nice, France, where Harris lived in his old age and where he was supposed to have had a life-sized statue of the Venus de Milo in the apartment. For the production of the play in Lawrence, I remember theater director Mary Doveton and I going out to some dilapidated barn in the outskirts of Lawrence, where we were told KU kept its collection of life-size plaster reproductions of Greek and Roman statues, among them the Venus de Milo. We were able to borrow her for our show, the cast of which included KU history professor Amby Saricks as the elderly Harris and KU student Craig Swanson in his memory as the young Smith, along with other Lawrencians like Jeannie Averill, Charles Whitman, Darcy Schild.

We were not able to use the Venus de Milo for the Off-Broadway production, and New Yorkers had to settle for just a framed picture of the naked lady on the set.

Paul Stephen Lim,

Lawrence