www.roanoke.com
New Play Lights up Old
Memories
October 12, 2005
By Greg Esposito
Slash Coleman knows his best friend
wasn't perfect. So his play isn't an
attempt to deify him.

He knows his friend's life wasn't
simple and tidy.
So his play isn't meant to be an all-encompassing biography.

"It was just the way I felt when I was around him that was special,"
Coleman said. "He made me feel like Nicholas Cage in 'Wild at Heart.' "

And Coleman hopes he can give his audience that same feeling for 60
minutes when his play, "The Neon Man and Me," debuts Friday at
Roanoke Mill Mountain Theatre.
"I really hope this play will encourage people to, like, go home and kiss
their father," Coleman said. "Go home and hug their best friend."

Coleman met Mark Jamison -- known by many Roanokers as "The
Neon Man" -- while a student at Radford University in the late 1980s.
Jamison, a Franklin County native, opened a neon shop in Roanoke in
1999. His artwork ranges from Roanoke landmarks such as The
Grandin Theatre to Burger Kings. Businesses throughout downtown
Roanoke are adorned with glass tubes he bent and filled with neon
and argon gases and pigments.

Jamison died in January 2004 when he brushed a high-voltage power
line while installing a sign at a West Salem restaurant. He was 35.
Coleman's one-man, nine-act play consists of monologues about their life together during and after their years at Radford.

The two men played together in a band named "Vegetation Information" while in college and kept in touch as Jamison pursued a career
in neon design while Coleman chased girlfriends and odd jobs all over the country while pursuing his writing. Coleman, a Richmond
native, would return to Virginia to visit Jamison occasionally, but as they grew older, much of their relationship consisted of phone
calls. Coleman said he was on the phone with Jamison nearly every day as the two men helped each other deal with divorces.

Embellished vignettes of their relationship move the play from their first meeting at a party, where Jamison entertains people by
speaking in tongues, to the final act in which Coleman visits Jamison's neon shop a week after his death.
Known as much for their eccentric shenanigans as for their music, the two men approached their
gigs -- and much of their lives at Radford -- as performance art.

"We were both wildly eccentric and had a very similar sense of humor," Coleman said.

The second act takes place in an administrative office at Radford University as the two men are
lectured by the university's president for bizarre getups they're wearing around campus. The play
gives the audience a glimpse into Coleman's mind and eccentric sense of humor.

In addition to playing himself and his friend, Coleman takes the stage as John Coltrane and a
French reality TV show host.

"I feel like Mark's spirit will enjoy the embellishment and the eccentricity rather then getting
everything right because he did endorse so much of that uniqueness in himself," Coleman said.
Coleman, who was living in Massachusetts and touring the country performing another play when Jamison died, returned to
Richmond after his friend's death and began working at his family's upholstery business. That December, Coleman read an article in
The Roanoke Times about a grandfather clock that sprang back to life as Jamison's girlfriend gave birth to their son, Mark Jamison
Thomas, who was conceived shortly before Jamison's death. The mother, Lisa Thomas, found out she was pregnant about a week
after Jamison died.

It was then that Coleman began collecting mementos in a cardboard box -- notes and letters Jamison scribbled and recordings of
their music -- to give to Mark Jamison Thomas. But he quickly scrapped that idea and began writing.

"It seemed like such a cold way to make an introduction to his father," Coleman said about his first idea.

Instead, Coleman's first draft was 230 pages. He had to cut it down to 30 pages to make it into a 60-minute play. Anything not
specific to Jamison's relationship or experiences with Coleman had to go.

He decided the play's profits would go to Mark Jamison Thomas, though he said he recently had a conversation with Jamison's father
who told him that wasn't necessary.

"But I don't want to come across as someone who is selling a product to benefit from his friend's death," he said.

Last week, Coleman recalled events that seemed to foreshadow Jamison's death.

His first attempt at a novel shortly after college included a scene where a man is electrocuted on power lines in much the same way
Jamison was.

A Pentecostal Christian, Jamison once told Coleman that a woman at his church said the two of them would perform in front of
millions of people one day.

Coleman now hopes that this play is what the woman's prophecy was alluding to.

After debuting in Roanoke, he's scheduled to take it to Richmond. His grander plans include him going to San Francisco, New York
and Scotland to perform.

But Coleman himself may have made a promise he's unwittingly keeping.

Jamison frequently ended their conversations by asking his friend to come work for him.

On the day Jamison died, Coleman left him a message.

"I'm coming home, dude," he said. "And we can do the neon stuff if you'd like."
© Slash Coleman 2008