From STAFF REPORTS

CORDELE — Since 1999, Bill Oberst Jr. has been portraying Lewis Grizzard on stage. He is bringing his one-man show featuring the popular newspaper columnist to Cordele in mid-February.

Crisp Area Arts Alliance Executive Director Sunny Lee says Oberst’s local performance is scheduled for Feb. 16 at 7 p.m. in the Crisp County Middle School auditorium. Tickets are $10 and may be purchased now either at the Arts Alliance headquarters or at the Cordele-Crisp Chamber of Commerce.

On Oberst’s website, he refers to Grizzard as “the nation’s most successful newspaper columnist, a best-selling author and a Southern cultural icon.

“When his widow Dedra and his manager Steve Enoch chose me to portray Grizzard onstage in 1999, I was, of course, thrilled,” Oberst says. “The man was an actor's dream: alternately caustic and sentimental, but always funny.”

There was one problem with the project, Oberst admits. Grizzard had only been dead for 5 years. “The same people who had seen him on his popular concert tours would be coming to see me. And they expected to see their old friend again. Let's face it, when you're playing Mark Twain, a guy can cheat a little. With Grizzard, everything had to be right. I had to nail him.”

Oberst who makes his home in California says he was a fat kid, and he started doing imitations of his teachers to entertain the kids who picked on him. "They couldn't hit me if they were laughing," he says. He grew up to become an actor and mimic known for bringing historic figures to life.

His career began with national touring stage roles including Jesus of Nazareth (using a script taken directly from the synoptic Gospels), Mark Twain and John F. Kennedy using the actual words of each subject.

His portrayal of Grizzard has been wildly successful across the South, where he has played hundreds of theaters in every Southern state.

On TV and in films, Oberst has played a Lon Chaney-like array of roles including General William T. Sherman in The History Channel's feature, "Sherman's March," dual roles as redneck father & son in director Tommy Woods' debut feature "Grilling Bobby Hicks," the creepy title role in Perpombellar Productions' multiple film-festival award-winner, "The Street Cleaner;" a German Morovian minister in the bio-pic of the founder of Methodism "Wesley;" an ill-tempered 1940's race-car driver in "Red Dirt Rising;"and an Italian mobster in "Dogs of Chinatown.”

The actor’s story and work have been featured on PBS, in Guideposts magazine and in the 1997 MacMillan Press book on Jesus, "Who Do You Say That I Am?"

When not in front of the camera, he tours in his one-man stage version of "A Christmas Carol." Oberst is a native of Pawleys Island, SC but now makes his home in Los Angeles.