Black, Hartman cooked up show biz success
Country music legend Clint Black still recalls his last concert at the Star Plaza Theatre in Merrillville, which was in May 2014. But his best memory of being on stage at Star Plaza, which closed in 2017, was back in 2001.
“I was right about to go onstage at the Star Plaza in 2001, and my wife Lisa was backstage with me, and she had just gotten the results of her ultrasound about our baby that was on the way,” recalled Black, chatting on stage with me by phone last month.
“Lisa said, ‘Well, do you want to know?’ I said I did and she said we were having a baby girl. I stepped on stage with headlights in my eyes, and a big smile on my face, without the audience ever knowing what was going on in my head.”
Black is back in Northwest Indiana, and this time, he’s making history as the first country music headliner to appear in concert at the new Hard Rock Casino Northern Indiana in Gary. He’s there for one exclusive concert at 8 p.m. March 18. Tickets are $49.50 to $84.50 at www.hardrockcasinonorthernindiana.com or 219-228-2382.
Black, who celebrated his 60th birthday last month, spent his November and December holidays touring with actress and singer wife Lisa Hartman, and their daughter Lily, with the show dates themed as the “Mostly
Hits and The Mrs. Tour.” He said his latest spring concert tour, stopping at the Hard Rock Northern Indiana, features himself solo with his band.
My pal Jeff Casey, managing director of the Towle Theatre in Hammond, told me a great story from his previous life career as a catering and events manager in the late 1990s at Radisson Hotel at Star Plaza. Casey also had reason to cross paths with both Black and Hartman, the latter who is now 65, and launched her own career in the 1980s as a singing star and lead character on the hit primetime ABC soap opera “Knots Landing,” opposite another cast newcomer, a young Alec Baldwin.
“Clint launched his ‘Nothing But the Tailgate Tour’ at the Star Plaza and
Lisa was traveling with him,” Casey remembered.
“She called us from their hotel room and alerted that Clint’s February birthday was the next day and she wanted a special sheet cake baked and decorated with a replica of his latest album cover created in frosting on the cake. And doing something like that in the late 1990s was not easy, but we did it. It also had to be a cake big enough to feed his entire crew. It was all hand-decorated and it looked fantastic.”
One of my one favorite Black and Hartman memories is from April 1993, when I was with this first couple of country music when they were still newlyweds (married in 1991) and they were special guests of Dolly Parton at the season opening weekend of her Dollywood theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. At the time, Dolly’s theme park, which had opened years earlier as a Silver Dollar
City amusement park, had only been open for eight years and re-christened “Dollywood” after Parton purchased it.
I joined Dolly, Black and Hartman in the Dollywood Friendship Rose Garden, where Clint donned garden gloves to help plant a pair of rose bushes during a ceremony, with the beautiful Great Smoky Mountains serving as our landscape backdrop. Other luminaries who also had previously joined Dolly in her memorial rose garden included her other pals Marie Osmond, Bob Hope, Lily Tomlin, Kenny Rogers and Burt Reynolds. The garden’s signature flower, of course, was a hybrid rose named for Dolly herself, and prized for its bigger blooms.
While still busy with dual crossover careers, Hartman does find time to cook and spend time in the kitchen, a room she said her mom never cared to spend much time in, though she said her mom had her own specialties like egg dishes and creative artichoke recipes.
Lisa Hartman’s own ages-old specialty is an easy recipe for orange glazed baked Rock
Cornish Hens, which she loves to stuff with seasoned rice.
Columnist Philip Potempa has published four cookbooks and is the director of marketing at Theatre at the Center. He can be reached at pmpotempa@comhs. org or mail your questions: From the Farm, P.O. Box
68, San Pierre, IN 46374.