'Neon Man' play earns creator a Groucho Award
Roanoke Times
Miranda Puckett
January 19. 2006

Slash Coleman's play about his relationship with his best friend Mark
Jamison, "The Neon Man and Me," has come a long way since it
premiered at Mill Mountain Theatre in October.
Since then, it has won a Groucho Award for Best One Man Play.

The Groucho Award is given by the Comedy Sportz Improv Theater.
It honors the Richmond playwrights and comedians who have
graced the theater's stage each year.

The Groucho was quite a surprise for Coleman. At the black-tie
awards ceremony, he had decided to leave early, but as he was
saying his goodbyes, "Everyone was telling me, 'You can't leave,' "
Coleman said last week.

Soon afterward, he was presented with the award.
Coleman met Jamison -- known to 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.

"The Neon Man and Me" has raised more than $5,000 in funds for nonprofit
groups, as well as benefiting an education fund for Mark Jamison Thomas, the
son Mark Jamison never knew.
Jamison's girlfriend, Lisa Thomas, found out that she was pregnant the week
after Jamison's death.
Coleman has plans to take the play on the road. He is scheduled to perform in
New York and San Francisco, and hopes to take the show off-Broadway.
He would also like to have the show return to the Star City, in perhaps a year or
so.
Best One Man Show of
2005 awarded by Comedy
Sportz Improv Theater
© Slash Coleman 2006