Month: May 2005

Categories
News The Fly-By

HOLY SH*T!

Just because they suspended Andy Wise over a bit of overzealous evangelism doesn’t mean that WREG’s opposed to totally bizarre Christ-centric programming. Channel 3 has just devoted a segment to solving an intriguing mystery over 2,000 years old: Where was Jesus hanging out during his tweens? There’s no historical record to pull from and no gospel account either, but that didn’t stop the intrepid On Your Side news team from getting their story. After concluding that the J-man probably spent most of his time at home with Mary and Joseph, WREG proposed a reading list that included The Aquarian Gospel, a book written by Levi Dowling who, in spite of being born in the late 19th century, claimed to have personally witnessed Jesus’ entire life. According to Aquarian scholars, all history is recorded on tiny disc-like plates smaller than atoms that can only be accessed by a person who knows how to focus their “mind-receptors” to the proper frequency.

Can anybody at Channel 3 even spell credibility? — Chris Davis

Plante: How It Looks

Categories
News The Fly-By

HOLY SH*T

Just because they suspended Andy Wise over a bit of overzealous evangelism doesn’t mean that WREG’s opposed to totally bizarre Christ-centric programming. Channel 3 has just devoted a segment to solving an intriguing mystery over 2,000 years old: Where was Jesus hanging out during his tweens? There’s no historical record to pull from and no gospel account either, but that didn’t stop the intrepid On Your Side news team from getting their story. After concluding that the J-man probably spent most of his time at home with Mary and Joseph, WREG proposed a reading list that included The Aquarian Gospel, a book written by Levi Dowling who, in spite of being born in the late 19th century, claimed to have personally witnessed Jesus’ entire life. According to Aquarian scholars, all history is recorded on tiny disc-like plates smaller than atoms that can only be accessed by a person who knows how to focus their “mind-receptors” to the proper frequency.

Can anybody at Channel 3 even spell credibility? — Chris Davis

Plante: How It Looks

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

What’s Brewing?

A friend told me recently that somebody’s opening the first Starbucks in Montana. She said it with a combination of awe and admiration, like the brave folks in Montana had fought off the invasion of the coffee clones and maintained their integrity — or that Montana was such a backwash that Starbucks didn’t even bother with it.

Either way, it didn’t sound right, no Starbucks in Montana. I mean, there’s colleges in Montana and offices and stuff. People need their coffee.

So, being slightly more statistical than romantic, I cruised over to Starbucks.com and plugged “Montana” into their store locator. Turns out there’s 10 Starbucks in Montana. They’re huddled together in three cities, and half of them are kiosks in an Albertsons or Safeway or somesuch. Pioneers, you might say, not wandering too far into Indian Country.

Now, if I were a real statistical dork, I might have gone from there to the official Web site of the state of Montana (State.mt.us), and I might have spent some time (say, half a cup’s worth) digging around for demographic and geographical information, and I might be able to tell you that Montana has roughly 145,000 square miles of land and 927,000 people, or six people per square mile. As they might say out there, that ain’t many folks. And if I happened to keep a calculator in my drawer, I might also point out that Montana has one Starbucks for every 14,500 square miles and 92,700 people. That ain’t many Starbucks.

Tennessee, by comparison, has 5.7 million people. Shelby County has 906,000 or almost as many as the whole state of Montana. Our whole state is just 41,000 square miles, for a ratio of 138 people per square mile. That’s a fair number of folks. We’ve got 61 Starbucks in the state, for a total of one Starbucks for each 672 square mile. Compare all this to Washington State, where the Starbucks madness began: They’ve got 466 Starbucks!

Fortunately, I am not a statistics dork. I am a traveler, a man of the road, a free spirit roaming the highways of our great land. Or, at least, I used to be. And it was on just such a spiritual rambling, at the end of a long day’s drive, when I arrived, yearning only for sustenance, companionship, and a place to lay my head, in the town of Browning, Montana (population 1,065). They have one hotel and one restaurant in Browning, and I was one tired, hungry dude.

The room was 22 bucks, and the restaurant was just a few tables in a closed-off room next to a bar. Bud Girls sprawled in a poster on the wall, baseball was on the tube, and the waitress put down her smoke to take my order.

“I’ll go for the ribeye and baked potato,” I said, forever sticking with the local specialties. “And what kind of beer do you have?”

“All of ’em,” she said.

All of ’em. Well, okay, I thought, I’m in the Great Northwest …

“I’d like a Sierra Nevada,” I said. A fine, California pale ale.

“A what?” asked the waitress.

“A Sierra Nevada,” I said.

“We don’t have that one.”

“How about, um, a Bass?”

Blank stare. Shouldn’t have gone with the English beer.

“Henry’s?” That one’s from Oregon.

“Nope.”

Hmmm. This is where you hit the “reset” button.

“Okay, so which beers do you have?”

“All of ’em,” she said. “Bud, Bud Light, Coors, Coors Light, Michelob, Miller Genuine Draft …”

Her voice trailed off, and she looked at me with the perfect waitress stare: expectant, not rushed, somewhere between patient and not so patient. Ready. We understood each other perfectly now. I was a guy from out of town she’d never see again, and she was going to bring me meat, a potato, and an American beer. We aren’t going to act like we enjoy each other’s company or that one single thing beyond food-for-money is going to occur here. No cultural paradigms will be shifted tonight in Browning. There’s a purity about it, a perfect simplicity.

“MGD,” I said, and she was gone.

I confess, I used to tell this story as an example of a poor, sophisticated traveler trying to get a real beer in a backwash province. Somehow, though, putting the words “Starbucks” and “Montana” in the same sentence changed my attitude.

I didn’t notice it at first, but when I heard about Starbucks expanding their operations in the Treasure State, I fell over to the romantic side. Now, when I think about that (by the way, tough) steak in Browning and that (tough) waitress selling (tough-to-drink) beers, I kind of hope she’s still there, still smoking and handing out $8 ribeyes under the watchful sprawl of the Bud Girls. I’d hate to think she’s been replaced by a college freshman smiling at everyone and offering Norah Jones’ favorite tunes on a CD.

No doubt that waitress has seen her first espresso-machine salesperson by now — like me, on his way somewhere else, never to be seen again, but taking a shot at life in Browning for a night. I wonder what kind of beer he had, and I wonder if they’re serving lattes in the bar yet.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Gift Horse

That unanimous vote on Monday by the Shelby County Commission to “fully fund” the educational needs of both the city and county school districts was a triumph of feel-good politics, but it remains to be seen what the lasting effect of it will be.

Even in the immediate aftermath of the vote, a glowing Carol Johnson, superintendent of Memphis schools, was cautious about claiming too much.

“I think that there’s a high likelihood that we will get additional resources,” the superintendent said. “Whether we’ll get them at the level that we think we need them, I’m not sure about that. But I was truly encouraged today, and to see the unanimous feeling among the commissioners was really exciting.” Asked whether the word “intent” should be interpreted liberally, Johnson answered, “Yes.” She continued: “But I think the intent will result in additional funding, and I think that’s good news for Memphis and Shelby County schools as well.”

That was it in a nutshell. As Johnson’s key words indicated, the outcome was wholly conditional, about as binding as my promise to gift each of you with some nice change for your Christmas socks if I happen to win the Tennessee lottery this week — as I fully intend to do.

To be sure, there were those among the commissioners who intend, come what may, to vote for the additional sums — $11.5 million for the city schools; $5.5 million for the county schools — that the two systems evidently require.

There is Cleo Kirk, for example, the commission’s longtime budget chairman, who made the motion for what was formally no more than a resolution of intent. There was commission veteran Walter Bailey, like Kirk a perennial champion of school-funding needs, who sought to reassure an auditorium packed with students, teachers, administrators, and other school supporters.

“You don’t have to worry about me. I’m there,” Bailey said.

But almost unnoticed amid the general celebration was the fact that such aye voters as Bruce Thompson and John Willingham put much of the onus on Shelby County mayor A C Wharton for following through on the funding requests.

Offering his congratulations to the two school systems for their “follow-through” on commitments made to the commission last year to hold down costs, Thompson went on to say that the commission’s statement of intent was “not necessarily a commitment to new taxes.” He went on: “What that means is more difficult decisions, more difficult efforts for us — and cuts. We have to practice what we preach what we imposed on you.”

Willingham was even more direct in an interview after the meeting: “If the mayor doesn’t make some cuts in his budget, we can’t do this,” he said flatly.

Commissioner David Lillard had also offered his dose of cod-liver oil. To keep the promise, to fund the schools “at the levels that we all desire,” required either raising taxes or cutting a general budget that has already been significantly pruned.

In any event, as everybody acknowledged later on, no part of Monday’s vote required the commission to do anything or was binding in any respect whatsoever. In some ways, the affair was reminiscent of the ambitious state reading program proposed some years back by then Governor Don Sundquist, who hoped to use it as leverage to enact the income tax legislation he was then backing.

What happened was that the General Assembly indulged itself in happy-days rhetoric and endorsed the program with virtual unanimity, then went about its business, neither passing a tax increase that year nor bothering to fund the reading program — which never came to be.

Still, as Thompson noted after the meeting, “There may be seven votes.” Meaning seven commissioners (though not Thompson himself, in all probability) willing to vote at some point later on for a property tax increase to fulfill Monday’s pledge.

That vote, if it happens at all, won’t come nearly so easily as the one taken Monday.

n One spin-off of the commission vote was it seemed to offer encouragement to opponents of a current proposal to privatize the county’s correction facilities.

Both Jeff Woodard and Warren Cole, spokesmen for the county’s jail personnel, have become regular fixtures at commission meetings, making statements, usually at the end of the agenda, against the privatization proposal.

On Monday, Woodard and Cole joined in congratulating the two school systems for their budgetary efforts and suggested that similar economies practiced in Shelby County government at large would preclude a need for privatization.

Cole went so far as to blame much of the county’s budget crisis on “these private contracts” and challenged a routine item on the commission’s consent agenda, one calling for purchase of a tractor-flatbed that Cole suggested might be overpriced. (It turned out not to be, as he later acknowledged when figures were discussed, but Cole suggested that, even so, the commission was generally overlooking the need to vet such items.)

n Both Monday’s commission meeting and last week’s regular meeting of the Memphis school board were characterized by a challenge on another front, one not wholly substantiated by reality.

In testifying on behalf of school funding Monday, board member Stephanie Gatewood repeated a contention made last week by board president Wanda Halbert: That was the categorical statement that “no member of the media” had attended any of the city system’s graduation events during the last two weeks.

Not true. Both as parents and reporters, media representatives were on hand for several of the ceremonies. A report by the Flyer‘s John Branston — though perhaps not of the uncritical sort desired by the two board members — is published in this week’s issue. And The Commercial Appeal and several TV stations have provided coverage of graduation events as well.

n Though it ended with a predictable Democratic victory, the special election held earlier this month in Memphis’ state Senate District 33 has ended up on the bragging board of the national Republican Party.

That contest, in which state representative Kathryn Bowers defeated the GOP’s Mary Ann McNeil and two independents, was one of six special elections featured in a memo composed by Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman.

“Local races and, in particular, special elections, give the RNC the opportunity to test new and improved targeting and tactics that we have been working on to improve since the 2004 election,” Mehlman wrote, in extolling the outcome in District 33, along with results in local races in Missouri, Pennsylvania, New York, and Nebraska.

What made the District 33 race worth celebrating, according to Mehlman and RNC communications director Brian Jones (both quoted in the Washington insiders’ publication The Hill), was that the GOP was able to up its vote in the predominantly Democratic district by 10 percent. Shelby County Republican chairman Bill Giannini had made the same claim in the local party’s newsletter, Trunkline News.

Said Giannini: “Republican candidates have ranged between 21 percent and 24 percent within District 33, while Mary Ann was able to get 36% of the vote.” Local Democrats had noticed the increased Republican effort, especially in District 33’s Collierville precincts, and had intensified their own efforts.

Commenting on the RNC’s nationwide effort in special elections, Jones said that the aim had been to “take what worked in 2004 and modify it and use some of these races where we can test new, best practices with an eye on 2006 and 2008. The goal is that when an individual becomes the nominee in 2008, we will be able to hand off to them a ground game.”

n Former Memphis congressman Harold Ford Sr., who celebrated his 60th birthday last week, was cited by another Washington insider publication, Roll Call, as a principal in what the periodical termed one of the 10 most important congressional races to have taken place since 1955, when Roll Call began publishing.

That race, in 1974, pitted Democratic challenger Ford, then a state legislator, against Republican incumbent Dan Kuykendall in what was Tennessee’s 8th congressional district at the time and is now the 9th District. In 1974, African-American voters were 47 percent of the district’s total — still a minority.

Yet Ford was the winner by some 744 votes. “Observers said Ford probably would not have won had it not been for the Watergate scandal,” Roll Call notes, though the periodical concludes, no doubt correctly, that a black Democrat would have won the seat shortly thereafter under any circumstances.

In any case, Ford, who went on to form a local political dynasty, became the first African-American congressman elected from Tennessee and only the third ever from a majority-white urban district in the South. Another milestone noted by Roll Call: “To this day, 1974 was the last time a Tennessee Congressman lost a re-election bid.”

Categories
Opinion

Mixed Bag

As a parent of a member of White Station High School’s Class of 2005, I was hoping for obvious reasons that Sunday’s graduation ceremony would be orderly, at least until the roll call got through the B’s.

It was, but barely. The announcement of at least a third of the subsequent graduates’ names was met by a chorus of whoops, cheers, and even dancing in the aisles by pockets of — what? — friends and family members in the audience at the Mid-South Coliseum. One boisterous group sitting behind me must have an awfully big family, because they roared so many times I finally got tired of turning around.

The 400 graduates, who behaved well and whose class president and valedictorians spoke well, couldn’t stop it by their example.

The pleas, letters, and annoucements from the principal couldn’t stop it.

The teachers and assistant principals scattered throughout the crowd couldn’t stop it.

The glares from the parents who couldn’t hear through the din couldn’t stop it.

Not even the presence of special guest Superintendent Carol Johnson, who sat on stage and shook every graduate’s hand, could stop it.

It’s easy to make too much of this. Fogeydom comes easily to some of us who are suddenly ex-public-school parents. There was a lot to admire at Sunday’s ceremony. White Station grads, as speakers noted, were offered more than $17 million in college scholarships (projected over four years) to some of the best colleges in the country. The number is inflated because of Hope Scholarships from the Tennessee Lottery, but it still works out to better than $40,000 per graduate. For the second year in a row, White Station made Newsweek’s list of the top 1,000 high schools in America.

It is no easy thing to get 400 people on and off a stage in 90 minutes. Nobody got hurt or left out. There were no fights or shouting matches in the stands, perhaps because the standard for crowd behavior at graduations has been lowered so much that it is no longer a problem to be fixed or fought. It is a simple fact of life. Schools have tried throwing people out and giving each graduate a limited number of tickets. It didn’t work. The rowdiness is old hat. The acceptance of it is what’s new.

So another little battle has been lost. That’s one more small consideration to add to the list of pluses and minuses that parents and students consider when weighing their school options. Parent involvement, motivated students, advanced-placement classes, good teachers and principals, and a reasonable chance that your kid will get more good teachers than bad ones keep White Station in the nation’s top schools. But after seven years as a White Station parent, I’ve seen that the best academic high school in Memphis is a mixed bag, and the scholarships and awards mask problems that are getting worse.

There is not enough innovation in the curriculum. Graduation requirements for college-bound students seem aimed mainly at producing high test scores. Calculus is important because that is what high school students do, never mind that the vast majority of them will never use it. Too many reading lists include the same “classics” that have bored students for generations and make them hate English.

Some sections of health, foreign language, and science are so hopelessly bad that even honor students routinely sleep through them or listen to music. They know after the first week of class that they are about to waste 180 hours of their life.

The high school building is attached to a converted elementary school to create a makeshift campus so crowded that hallways are an invitation to hassles and fights.

A fight during a basketball game at Ridgeway High School spilled out of the stands, marring what should be a classic rivalry.

School dances are out of the question, and all-school assemblies and programs are endangered because behavior is so hard to control. And if rude behavior bothers you, then bite your tongue at graduation.

If you have children, you add it all up and make your choice. You can get a free education and a chance at a college scholarship to Yale or Tulane or Vanderbilt or Tennessee or Memphis. Or you can opt out, knowing you might just be trading the ulcers you have for new ones.

When I read the thoughtful editorials and columns about improving public education in The Commercial Appeal on Sunday I just shook my head. For the first time in 15 years I was no longer a stakeholder in the Memphis public school system. And the only people who can improve the public schools are the parents and teachers and administrators of the 163,000 students in the city and county schools.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

postscript

Bright Ideas

To the Editor:

Because my family will be relocating to Memphis this fall, I read with interest your article entitled “Bright Ideas” (May 19th issue). While there were some terrific suggestions put forth, I wanted to take issue with some of the comments of Carol Coletta.

Coletta states that “Memphis is likely the most logical choice for people without children in their households, immigrants, people who go out frequently, people who want a more maintenance-free lifestyle. If so, let’s develop a deep understanding of their needs and serve them.”

This type of thinking is a major misstep in creating and sustaining a revitalized city, where people live near where they work and support local businesses and become involved in the neighborhoods.

One of the many challenges facing cities is that this type of engineering has created “childless cities.” The urban pioneers who created these vibrant downtown communities do not remain invested in the community they helped build once they have children. Our family (including two children) plans to pay the premium to live in the city and strive to help make the community and the city a vibrant place for those with children, as well as those without them.

My “bright idea” for Memphis is to learn from the mistakes of Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland, and to keep kids in the city.

Courtney Miller Santo

Vancouver, Washington

To the Editor:

We have too many people who don’t take pride in Memphis or their own lives. If you are poor, work to change that; if you live in a crappy neighborhood, make the best of it by picking up trash and maybe even doing some painting. When something is given to you, like a community center, don’t cover it in graffiti and other acts of vandalism. Parents need to concentrate on their children and encourage education as a goal instead of being either a rapper or professional athlete. These are simple truths that people ignore on a daily basis.

Chris Reynolds

Memphis

Editor’s note: We have received numerous responses to our request for your “bright ideas” for Memphis. (My favorite so far is to put The Pyramid on eBay.) We plan to publish the best (and most interesting) in a future issue, so keep those letters coming.

— Bruce VanWyngarden (brucev@memphisflyer.com)

Protocols?

To the Editor:

Protocols, protocols, protocols, protocols, protocols, protocols, protocols, protocols, protocols, protocols, protocols, protocols, protocols, protocols, protocols. In his defense of President Bush’s disengagement from a response to the threat of a plane near the White House, Scott McClellan cited “protocols” some 15 times (Verbatim, May 19th issue). He mentioned “situations and circumstances surrounding the situation” eight times.

These robotic responses reveal the press secretary’s vapidity of thought, but they also show the lack of confidence this administration places in its own president. As Jay Leno quipped: “The president was reading a children’s book during 9/11 and was riding his bicycle when the plane threatened the White House. What is he, 12 years old?”

Paul B. Brown

Memphis

Age of Aquarium?

To the Editor:

I recently attended a pitch for the proposed AquariaMemphis as the attraction that would save The Pyramid. The literature I received assured me that the aquarium would contribute to a “more family-friendly downtown.”

I asked if there were surveys of Memphians and tourists regarding their interest in visiting an aquarium here. There were none. I recently relocated here from Southern California and have been impressed by how much local entertainment venues relate to the culture of the city. Aquariums make sense in California, but Memphis? With no market research? Something seems fishy.

Linda Granell

Memphis

CORRECTION: An article in last week’s issue stated that a 45 percent cost savings could be obtained by using emulsified diesel. The actual savings is 4 to 5 percent.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Baptism in Dark Waters

For the current exhibit at Art Forms at Grace Place, nine sculptors from around the country deliver “Duende,” a concept that Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca described as a dissolution of ego and “a baptism in dark waters — where volcanoes, ants, gentle breezes, and the enormous night, straining its waist against the Milky Way, abide in tenderest intimacy.”

These sculptors have studied with master artists and artisans around the globe. Their art is quirky, multi-cultural, and complex. For example, the figure of Linda Cares’ Le Petit Prince has muscular legs and slender dancer’s feet that leap with joy. His crown is a wide-open vessel and his face an erupting volcano. This is a face before language, before thought. Cares was trained in the Middle East and in Korea, where fierce-faced deities fill museums and shamans expel evil spirits. She believes that artists are conduits of intense energies, and so it follows that Le Petit Prince looks like a primordial dance, like something that has flowed from her.

Another notable work is Celtic Passage IV, Paul Braun’s pitted and textured blue-black steatite that simulates a menhir, a prehistoric stone slab that marked sites possessing special powers. Then there are Pam and John Wagner’s evocative totems made out of 19th-century baking tins, early-20th-century wooden barbells, croquet balls, weathered scythes, and African corn mashers (and more), which they find in European and American Southwestern flea markets.

Sandra Ehrenkranz’ clay, mixed-media Circus Woman is an overweight 40-something with missing body parts and tiny wires, lights, and beads radiating out of her body. Fortune Dance is a laser-eyed, flushed cheeked dancer with mangled arms who is posed so that she appears to be endlessly turning. These scrappy, enchanted circus performers — one decorated like a Christmas tree and the other spinning out of control — are fitting metaphors for life’s hardships and exhilarations.

Using techniques she learned from potters on Africa’s Ivory Coast, Helen Phillips coiled and pinched clay into Exquisite Egret, which shows both hope and regret. The egret’s beak dips over the edge of a bowl, the inside of which is cracked like parched earth. His top knot of feathers are frazzled copper wires, and his silky white face is hardened and grayed like African savannahs during drought. Portions of this beautifully crafted stoneware sculpture are glazed and polished with encaustic, while other areas are mushroom and smoky gray. The vessel, while durable, is also breakable and serves as Phillips’ homage to devastated wildlife.

Bin Gippo carves grace out of the hard earth. In New York in the 1960s, Gippo studied with Noguchi and Nizuma and learned to push her materials to the limits. Today she is noted for her ability to convey movement in stone and metal. Light shines through waving folds of alabaster in Joy in Motion. In Black Swan Presence, huge bronze wings ripple over the long neck and head of a swan that is being startled out of slumber.

In The Offering, Lisa Jennings envisions herself as cedar, sycamore, and stone. Her seven-foot cedar torso arches up. The layered quartz veins in her perfectly oval stone face suggest the layers in the artist’s psyche as well as in nature. Jennings hoists a twisting sycamore branch whose wood has decayed into patterns resembling feathers. Using Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent of music, art, and education and the only Aztec deity that did not require human sacrifice, as a guide, Jennings offers herself to creativity and life.

Sculptor and painter Anton Weiss, who was educated in Europe and New York, explores earth from the Big Bang to present-day. In Pangaea Column, a series of increasingly large orbs are carved into the center of a nearly six-foot copper column. On top sits Pangaea, an ancient land mass splitting into earth’s continents. In Balance 2012, another monolith tilts precariously on a metal log, and in Pangaea Universe, Pangaea floats in nuanced stains of raw sienna. Whether we see environmental devastation, social/political turmoil, apocalypse, and/or the end of an epoch (the year 2012 marks the end of the Mayan calendar), Weiss’ powerful sculptures remind us of the earth’s balancing act.

“Duende” at Art Forms at Grace Place through June 4th

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Foreign Affairs

Larry Shue, a 39-year-old actor and playwright, was well on his way to having a brilliant career when his commuter plane crashed in 1985, killing everybody on board. As a performer, he was acting in plays from New York to L.A. and appearing regularly on One Life To Live. As a comedy writer, he’d found success off-Broadway with his play The Foreigner, and his follow-up, The Nerd, was Broadway-bound. Shortly before his death, Disney tapped Shue for several projects, including a film adaptation of The Foreigner. The screenplay was never completed, and Disney never made the film. But The Foreigner didn’t disappear down the memory hole. It ran through regional and community theaters like a nasty cold. It has visited Memphis on countless occasions, having been produced by virtually every company in town. Last Friday’s opening marked the fourth revival of The Foreigner at Germantown Community Theatre. According to director Jo Malin’s program notes, there was a general public demand for the show’s return.Why in the world?

The Foreigner looks like cake: the easiest play in the world to produce. But it’s a bit of a high-wire act for performers. Set up like a TV sitcom– real Three’s Company stuff minus the witty banter and zinging one-liners — its broadly drawn characters threaten to explode into full-blown cultural stereotypes at any moment. Action and drama are replaced by improbable games of mistaken identity, which gives Shue’s play an appealing, nearly improvisational quality. The Foreigner‘s chief villain is a cartoon Klansman, so the message “Nobody’s like anybody” — if you can call that a message — isn’t subtle. In the right hands, however, it can be a sweet, fun ride through the prettiest parts and most desolate reaches of the Georgia boondocks.

Poor Charlie Baker is a boring old Brit. He’s spent the last 24 years sitting behind a boring gray copy-editor’s desk, reading science fiction and generally boring everyone he comes into contact with, especially his wife who’s been looking for an excuse to get rid of him for a while. Charlie is acutely aware of his terminal boringness, and the possibility of being lured into any conversation brings on nasty panic attacks. His concerned friend Froggy arranges for a peaceful American vacation, setting his nervous friend up in a Georgia hunting lodge. Froggy tells everyone that his friend is a foreigner who speaks no English, but the plan backfires. Nobody thinks twice about dishing his or her secrets in front of a foreigner, and so a zany farce, which begins with a sweet Chaplinesque pantomime and ends with a failed lynching by the KKK, is set into motion.

Actor John Rone, who wowed GCT audiences twice last season — first as Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock’s Last Case and later as the haunted lead in The Woman in Black — is taking his fourth stab at the role of Charlie. His grasp on the role’s requirements are, needless to say, firm, and he fleshes out his character with wonderful physical detail. But Rone’s performance seems overly declamatory, and at times he can’t quite connect with many of the other actors — or else the other actors can’t quite connect with him.

Mick Vinson is eerily convincing as Owen Musser, a no-account redneck who, though as dumb as a barrel of monkey hair, has used his Klan connections to enter the political arena. Taking advantage of Charlie’s perceived handicap, Owen delights in saying the most horrible things he can. For sheer creepiness, however, Chris Cotton outdoes him. The fresh-faced actor plays the Rev. David Marshall Lee — a swindler and bigot of the first order — as a true lover and an earnest man of God. Even after his dark side is revealed Cotton pours on the scrubbed-heartland smarm, making his character thoroughly despicable. As his rich fiancée and intended victim, Amy George is feisty, sweet, and sympathetic.

The big question: With so much going for it, why does GCT’s production of The Foreigner seem to drag on and on? Some of the responsibility rests with Rone who has evolved his already depressed character into a whining sad sack of such epic proportions that he’s almost impossible to root for at times. Perhaps if Rone — who really does have some wonderful moments — could pick up the pace and temper his Eeyore with a little Woody Allen, things might finally start to click.

Through June 5th

Categories
News The Fly-By

Tough Questions

Where did you attend school? Where were you born? What is your last name?

For most people these questions are routine, but illegal aliens often fear that answering such questions could get them deported. The issue got more complicated last week when the federal government approved health-care reimbursement payments to hospitals and doctors across the country to help recoup the expense of providing services to illegal immigrants. Costs for these services have skyrocketed in recent years, hurting hospitals financially and forcing doctors to provide services free of charge.

Under the new plan, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will distribute $1 billion over the next four years. Two-thirds of the money will go to health-care providers based on the estimated number of undocumented aliens in each state. The remaining third will be distributed among six states with the highest number of undocumented alien arrests, including the border states of California, Texas, and Arizona.

But there’s a catch: To receive the quarterly reimbursements, hospitals must prove that they are treating illegal immigrants by questions such as those above. But the questions can frighten patients who are in the U.S. illegally and make them less likely to seek treatment.

“Word will get out to the immigrant community that the funds are there and that these are the questions that the hospital is asking,” says Dr. Stuart Polly, chief medical officer at the Regional Medical Center of Memphis (the Med). “It’s going to be uncomfortable for our staff to ask them, and it’s going to be uncomfortable for the patients to answer them. I’m sure they would like us to recover the money, but at the same time they don’t want to jeopardize their personal status.”

Polly is no stranger to immigrant issues, having spent years at a border hospital in El Paso, Texas. “I think it’s a good thing that the federal government has now realized that it costs to care for this population and is willing to put some money into emergency care,” he says.

According to the federal Division of Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), more than seven million illegal aliens live in the U.S. Approximately 46,000 illegal immigrants live in Tennessee.

The Med is one of several Tennessee hospitals vying for a share of the state’s $1 million allotment for fiscal year 2005. While the Med has no way of knowing what percentage of its patients are in the country illegally, the foreign patient population has increased exponentially. In 2004, the number of Hispanic patients — the Med’s largest foreign-born population — almost doubled from 2003.

(The Med is also seeing an increase in Asian and African patients. The federal government requires that translator services be provided for non-English-speaking patients. Those who speak a more common language, such as Spanish, are assigned interpreters. For more unusual languages and dialects, translations are done by telephone.)

CMS payments only reimburse hospitals for the “stabilization” of patients. Costs for treatments and follow-up hospital visits are not covered. This exclusion has spurred protests from health-care providers, who say they need additional funds for follow-up care.

“No hospital is going to release a patient before they’re ready, and there’s much more to treatment than stabilization,” Polly says. “The emergency room visit or the trauma center bills will be considered if we bill them correctly and if we have collected the indirect information on a patient’s immigration status. The remainder of their hospital stay will not be covered, nor will the cost of returning the patient to their home country if that is necessary. It’s kind of a mixed message.”

The Med staff has not yet developed a protocol for the indirect questioning and subsequent filing of forms to receive CMS payments.

“I think hospitals across the state will look at the impact for them and decide whether it is worth participating [in the program],” says Polly, adding that the Med will continue to provide care for all patients, regardless of immigration status. “There’s no question about that,” he says.

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Editorial Opinion

EDITORIAL

To be sure, the compromise on the filibuster issue reached by 14 moderate senators of both parties — and imposed, ipso facto, on the Senate — is an imperfect solution. Most solutions are. But the virtue of the agreement announced in Washington late Monday afternoon was not just that it preserved, however tenuously, the viability of the filibuster, but that it took the play away from Majority Leader Bill Frist.

For his own good as well as the country’s, we might say. Beguiled by presidential ambition, Tennessee’s overreaching senior senator seemed hell-bent (pun intended) on following his new pals of the Christian right down their primrose path, at the end of which lay either political Rapture or constitutional Armageddon. More likely the latter than the former.

Frist’s strategy was called the nuclear option, in recognition of the fact that pursuing it would lead both parties to a devastating no-holds-barred conflict in which the operative concerns would be those of absolute domination on one side (the Republicans) and bare-bones survival on the other (the Democrats). Whatever the outcome, the very traditions of the Senate as the world’s foremost deliberative body were under dire and imminent threat.

This catastrophe was averted by seven Democrats and seven Republicans who came to the saving agreement Monday night by altering the mathematics of the confrontation and forcing the warring sides to a truce.

Yes, three questionable judges have been given a pass, while two others seem about to be thrown overboard. Perhaps a few more will be able to walk into their lifetime jobs under cover of the armistice. It’s not an ideal outcome, by any means, but it does preserve the opportunity for a filibuster in case President Bush attempts to dictate the choice of an unacceptably right-wing appointee to the Supreme Court sometime next year, when ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist seems certain to leave the court, one way or another.

The agreement presents both sides with legitimate grounds for discontent. The right-wing Republicans aligned with the majority leader see their hopes for unfettered hegemony dashed, while the give-no-quarter Democrats have had to — well, give a few quarters.

But we are grateful for the intercession of the 14 Senate dealmakers. For the record, they are Robert Byrd of West Virginia, John McCain of Arizona, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, John Warner of Virginia, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, and Ken Salazar of Colorado.

As for Frist, the onetime moderate turned zealot whose enthusiasm for the agreement was notably less than fervid, he is left holding a bag with a clear and conspicuous hole in it. All we can say, courtesy of the Rolling Stones, is that, if he couldn’t get everything he wanted, he may have gotten what he needed — a modest comeuppance. It was high time that the dangerous game of all-or-nothing came to at least a temporary stop in Washington.