The Clarion-Ledger Thursday, September 22, 1994 Miracles can come true Mystical touch influences artists creations Prevent Blindness Mississippi's Celebrity Waiters Dinner will be held Oct. 2 at Dennery's By Clay Harden "With your help, we make miracles." The theme is quite fitting. Two of the artists who contributed works for the silent auction Celebrity Waiters dinner at Dennery's Oct. 2 bear witness to the event's theme with the miracles of their own lives. Linda Johnston of Clinton survived a terrifying traffic accident and was given a look at paradise by her guardian angel. Her painting depicts the hands of an angel against the darkness. Courtney Smith of Byram, blind since the age or 4 1/2, is a 17-year-old artist who hopes to become the first blind actress to make a name on either stage or screen. Smith, a Hinds Community College freshman and the valedictorian of her 1994 class at Mississippi School for the Blind, created a space-time tapestry. Herbert Johnston was driving his wife to Methodist Medical Center to get treatment for a cut on her wrist Sept. 27, 1992. A car rear-ended there small truck, causing it to flip over once end-to-end and then roll over on its side and estimated seven times on the pavement of I-220. ‘I was thrown out of the truck and it was then that I died and felt myself lifted up like in an elevator," Johnston said. "I was my body on the pavement with the blood all around it and my leg twisted out of shape. "An angel came out of the darkness and asked me, ‘Do you want to come with me?' but I said I wanted to stay with my husband and children. That is when I went back into my body. "The angel was bathed in white, robe-like clothes that moved even though the wind wasn't blowing. Its voice was very calm, distinct, soothing and assuring." It wasn't the last brush with the divine for Johnston. When she was in intensive care four days later recovering from two broken legs, a shattered right hip and three compressed vertebrae, her heart stopped beating. The angel again appeared to tell her "everything will be all right." "It has given me a feeling of great peace because I know there is life after death and what it will be like," Johnston said. "We will be able to think because I was thinking how beautiful everything was. And there was a fragrance that smelled like magnolia and honeysuckle." Smith has an equal faith despite the misfortunes of her life. She was born with retinal blastoma in her right eye and doctors didn't discover until she was 4 that she had cancer in the left eye as well. Shortly after her mother, Kathy Smith, carried her to MSB on a visit, she lost her sight and became a student at the school. Smith, fascinated with space and time, has as her ultimate goal to act with Patrick Stewart of Star Trek: The Next Generation frame. Her tapestry portrays her interest in space and time. A silver line is punctuated with arrows, each representing 1,000 years. "We have all experienced moments that we wish would last for ever, " Smith said, acknowledging that the days when she could see and her days at MSB were such times. "But we can't do that because it would undo what we have been, are and will become. So we have to be contest with the memory, and go on with our lives." The silent auction will begin at 6:30 p.m., just after the 20 celebrity waiters arrive by limousine at 6:15. The dinner begins at 7:30. WJTV-12 news anchor Melanie Christopher will serve as emcee.

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