This month has me thinking green, to be sure – but not because of St. Paddy's Day – although there will be plenty of the wearin' of the green around here on March 17.

What I'm picturing is bright-green, freshly minted, "Elvis bucks," which will be the legal tender for buying treats like "All Shook Up Popcorn" and "Chaffee Taffy" at the Beard Elementary economics carnival for students and teachers on March 21.

Beard teacher Jan Honeycutt and her homeroom students will host the carnival in honor of the 44th anniversary of Elvis Presley's first GI haircut at nearby Fort Chaffee on March 25, 1958.

The celebration will be held a few days early this year, due to the school being closed the 25th for spring break. At this year's "E's for Economics" carnival, Honeycutt's classroom will be a blast from the past, circa 1958. Many students will wear 1950s style clothes and purchase Elvis bucks for 35-cents each to spend on Blue Hawaii Punch and American Dillogy Pickles. They can also play games like You Ain't Nothin' But a Golf Ball (just puttin' all the time) Putt-Putt, Elvis Bingo, and Elvis has Left the Building Bean Bag Toss.

All proceeds from the carnival will be deposited into the school's ÔBlue Suede Cut of Economics" savings account. Honeycutt's students started the account nearly seven years ago in order to buy the old Fort Chaffee barber shop where Elvis got his Army hair cut and donate it to the City of Fort Smith for use as a downtown tourist attraction and revenue source. The students have also earmarked part of their savings for the establishment of a memorial for the two Fort Smith children killed in 1996 by a tornado that devastated parts of Fort Smith and Van Buren.

Renewed interest in Beard student's Elvis Barber Shop tourist attraction plan by the city and its tourism director was reported two months ago in this column. Stay tuned for new developments.

• After wowing basketball fans with its state of the art gymnasium last month, the newly opened Stubblefield Convocation Center at UA Fort Smith has demonstrated it is a terrific place for music concerts, too.

Christian supergroup Point of Grace filled the 3,100-seat convocation center to capacity with fans of all ages at the first concert held there. Production, sound and lights for the show, which was opened by the popular group FFH, were all top notch. Hopefully we'll be seeing lots more concerts there. I'll bet Stacy Jones is already fielding calls from savvy promoters wanting to book their popular artists into the new venue.

• Alma School District debuted its grand, new Alma Performing Arts Center with a blitz of concerts and theatrical performances that started in mid-February and carried over into this month.

The two-story, $8 million theater, with its tasteful dŽcor, comfortable seating, huge stage, great acoustics and high tech sound and lighting systems, is a real jewel. There are 1,501 seats – and not a "bad" one in the house. The theater and performing arts center crowns the school district's flourishing drama program headed by Jeff and Amy Beaver. She teaches high school drama students. He is the technical director and manager of the theater.

There was plenty of talent and variety among the theater's opening performances – five-time Grammy winner B.J. Thomas, Country Music Hall of Fame singer Ray Price, the spectacular "Diavolo" dance and tumbling troupe and the classic Broadway musical "Porgy and Bess."

Of course your hot pepper-addicted Hot Stuff columnist opted for the performance with a pepper in its name – "Dona Rosita's Jalapeno Kitchen," a one-woman national touring show starring delightful actress Ruby Nelda Perez. Entertainment Fort Smith calendar editor Annie Shaw and I thoroughly enjoyed watching Perez perform and meeting her after the show.

"Rosita" is a fiercely independent Mexican woman refusing to sell her neighborhood restaurant to a developer who has already bought out all her neighbors. The developer plans to bulldoze the barrio and build a "tourist shopping mall" there. Rosita is his only remaining obstacle.

She keeps the audience spellbound with her non-stop patter about food (she brews vanilla coffee and whips up a flan while describing her life as a young girl in Mexico), her customers, her dreams, her children, her neighbors and her adversaries. Without a single costume or set change, and only a sprinkling of sound and lighting effects, she convincingly becomes, with various speech and physical mannerisms, all of those characters – who range from a senile old man to a teenage girl to the devil himself.

Annie and I laughed the most when "Rosita" described a dream she had about dying and going to heaven, and discovering to her absolute horror that everything there, including all the food, is white and there are no chiles! No jalepenos. No chiles of any kind! Nothing hot to eat – nada. Not even a little bowl of salsa or pico de gallo. She begs St. Peter for "just one jalapeno."

But while I was laughing at Rosita, I was also thinking. I eat hot peppers of some kind with every meal and it had never occurred to me there might not be any hot peppers in Heaven, where I plan to spend eternity. In her dream Rosita talks St. Peter into taking her to see the devil so she can "borrow" just one jalapeno." You can imagine how that turns out!

After the play, though, I decided Rosita's dream was really just a nightmare. I'm convinced paradise will surely provide for those who seek it, the heavenly taste and white hot heat of one of God's greatest culinary gifts to man (and woman) – chile peppers!

Linda Seubold, editor of Entertainment Fort Smith Magazine, can be reached at lindaseubold@efortsmith.com. Read her archived columns and articles online.

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