Connect: The Story, by ‘Easter City’

CURTIS — They love to tell The Story — and share six decades of tales about telling it — every Palm Sunday in Nebraska’s “Easter City.”

Most of the Curtis Easter Pageant’s founders, having left life’s stage, will watch its 60th anniversary edition from somewhere above the 20-foot-high cross illuminated from Christmas to Easter atop the hills south of town.

But at 3 p.m. this Sunday, more than 100 descendants and newer arrivals will once again be singing in the choir, presenting the pageant’s 17 “living pictures” or making sure all goes as it should.

And Sheila Fink will likely grow misty-eyed with memories of her mother, Lela Russell, a choir member in the inaugural pageant on April 4, 1958, in the old gym at the Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture.

Fink, 66, has left Curtis and moved back a couple of times. She’s helped with preshow publicity. And she makes sandwiches for the single dress rehearsal the Friday before Palm Sunday — just like her mother, who died in 2006.

“It was just the love she had for the pageant, for the Lord,” that kept Russell coming back, she said. “I get teary-eyed every year because of what the pageant represents.”

“It’s like a fall festival — something that brings us together,” said 26-year-old Tacy Hatch, Fink’s successor as publicist. “People come down here every year from Maywood, Gothenburg, all over the place.”

A few hundred local and regional residents are expected at Medicine Valley High School, the pageant’s home since 1970. Admission is free, with

Article source: http://www.nptelegraph.com/connect/connect-the-story-by-easter-city/article_bd1d0d1c-2cb8-11e8-9ad1-9b54f1474745.html