Old Enough to Drive

Wizard Academy is now 16 years old.If we could find her birth certificate, we’d take her down to the DMV to get her driver’s license and then she could sport about town in Rocinante (above,) the only vehicle she owns.They grow up so fast.When Wizard Academy is 30, I’ll be 72. At least I hope I’ll be 72. Not everyone who attempts to hike to that mile marker gets there.Will you help us take the impossible dream of Wizard Academy forward into the future?Wizard Academy was launched by accident and grew through the addition of self-selected insiders, as did the Tuesday Group of Stéphane Mallarmé (1880 – 1897,) the Algonquin Round Table of midtown Manhattan (1919 – 1927,) and the artistic salon of Gertrude Stein (1913 – 1939.)The difference between our Academy and theirs is that:1. our group became an official 501c3 educational organization and built a permanent campus, and2. we are not artists who love business, but business people who love art: music and paintings and sculpture and photography and movies and literature and whatever you like that we didn’t mention.“When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money.” – Oscar Wilde, of the Tuesday GroupWizard Academy is here to stay. And if you’re reading this, I’m fairly certain you belong here. You will be amazed, energized, entertained and encouraged by the people you meet. You will gain insights that make you profoundly more successful.The Tuesday Group (Les Mardistes) of Stéphane Mallarmé included writers like André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, Rainer Maria Rilke and W.B. Yeats, along with painters like Renoir, Monet, Degas, Redon, and Whistler. Also to be found among them was the quintessential sculptor, Rodin. Everyone who knew about the Tuesday Group, came.The Algonquin Round Table was a self-selected group of writers, editors, actors, and publicists – about 30 in all – that met for lunch on a regular basis at the Algonquin Hotel a block from Times Square. There hasn’t been another group quite like them in American popular culture or entertainment until now. Just visit the Toad and Ostrich pub in the tower at Wizard Academy any Friday afternoon at 4.The gatherings in the Stein home on Saturday evenings brought together confluences of talent and thinking that would help define modernism in literature and art. According to Gertrude Stein, the gatherings began by accident when,“more and more frequently, people began visiting to see the Matisse paintings—and the Cézannes. Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began.” (Interestingly, that’s also why Pennie Williams launched Wizard Academy.)Self-selected insiders included Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Braque, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, Francis Cyril Rose, René Crevel, Élisabeth de Gramont, Francis Picabia, Claribel Cone, Mildred Aldrich and Carl Van Vechten.A visit to Wizard Academy is like a wonderful vacation in a foreign country. Few people come here only once.Did you know that you have a vacation home high on a plateau in central Texas where rabbits and deer wander the campus, wine flows freely and wedding bells ring 3 times a day?Come. Let your eyes be opened to answers that have been staring you in the face.Roy H. Williams