Month: May 2007

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Sweet Caroline

There’s no justice in the world. The insipid Cats can run for decades and yet the soulful, Tony Award-winning musical Caroline, or Change only got 136 performances after it transferred to Broadway in 2004. True, reviews of the show were mixed, though generally (and sometimes overwhelmingly) positive. But even the critics who raved about the show’s great potential had a difficult time relating to singing laundry appliances that look like Little Richard and the Supremes. They had an even harder time relating to Caroline Thibodeaux, the show’s gruff and unsmiling central character, whose emotional range has been limited, both by choice and circumstance, from mad to mad as hell. In spite of these nearly universal complaints, there was a consensus that Caroline‘s creators — Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori — had transcended the musical genre to create a unique and important work of art. Playhouse on the Square’s production of Caroline is equal parts grit and sparkle, and it more than lives up to the complex and thoroughly rewarding work’s ever-growing reputation.

Some have called Kushner’s deceptively simple story “humorless,” but nothing could be further from the truth. There’s a sly thematic joke that runs from beginning to end. Simply said, Caroline, or Change is a Walt Disney cartoon in reverse. Like her paler predecessors Cinderella and Snow White, Caroline is a potentially beautiful soul who has been relegated by fate to a life of drudgery — cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry for a paltry $30 a week. Her abusive husband has left her; her oldest son’s in Vietnam. Her daughters are caught up in the youth movement and potentially involved in the disappearance of a Confederate war hero’s statue. In the basement of her employers’ house, Caroline sings to the washer, the dryer, and the radio, all of which spring to ominous anthropomorphic life and answer Caroline with escapist Motown fantasies and dark, despairing blues. Even the cool moon has a baleful melody to share.

Set in St. Charles, Louisiana, against the turbulent background of the civil rights movement and in the days leading up to and following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Caroline, or Change addresses some of the least overt but no less corrosive elements of racism in America, and it does so by bringing many vocal perspectives to what is essentially one long, ever-evolving song.

Caroline’s employers, a Jewish family with their own share of tragedy, are hardly rich. But Rose (Carla McDonald), the family’s newly minted matriarch, knows how galling it must be for the maid to find forgotten change in her stepson Noah’s pants pocket as Caroline’s doing laundry. To teach Noah a lesson in money management and to give Caroline a bonus the family couldn’t otherwise afford, she tells the maid to keep the nickels and dimes she finds. At first, Caroline, who’s struggling to raise her family, resists what she calls “stealing pennies from a baby.” But she gives in and grows to rely on the extra jingle. Rather than being angered by his stepmother’s new rule, young Noah, expertly acted and sung by Sam Shankman, revels in how much his change means to Caroline’s family. Until he accidentally leaves a 20-dollar bill in his pocket, that is. Then he turns.

“President Johnson is building a bomb that only kills black people,” he screams at the maid. “And I hope he drops it right on top of you.”

One has to wonder if the critics would have been so skeptical about the character of Caroline had Playhouse’s Illeana Kirven originated the role. She smolders like the one cigarette she allows herself each day, and the fury she conjures up when calling out in song for God to strike her dead is explosive and dangerous. But her exhaustion is as clear as the self-loathing she takes out on everyone else. Kirven’s Caroline knows that her attitude is as poisonous as the environment that shaped it, and it’s those tragic flashes of self-awareness that make her performance so astonishing.

With Caroline, or Change, director Dave Landis has outdone himself. Landis’ greatest gift has been his ability to stage epic musicals in spaces no bigger than a postage stamp. For Caroline, he has reversed the process, making Playhouse’s ample stage seem claustrophobic. He makes this cramped, humid, Louisiana laundry room, full of cramped, humid emotions and soaring mid-century soul, ground zero in the struggle for racial equality and economic parity. And he does it with a touch so light you barely know you’re being schooled.

Caroline, or Change at Playhouse on the Square through June 3rd

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Change of Pace

CREDIT: Milanlj | dreamstime.com

People who are into food and dining culture have surely noticed the words “Slow Food Movement” popping up in news stories and features recently. But it’s not a new trend. The Slow Food Movement was founded by Carlo Petrini after he and other concerned Italian citizens gathered to protest the opening of a McDonald’s near the Piazza di Spagna in Rome in 1986. Soon after, Petrini started the Slow Food Movement, which now has more than 80,000 members in 50 countries. The idea behind the Slow Food Movement is simply the opposite of fast food — swapping convenience and anonymous uniformity for something more fresh and personal.

In Memphis, a Slow Food convivium has recently come together, spearheaded by Melissa and Kjeld Petersen, the folks behind the new quarterly Edible Memphis. According to Melissa, the group has more than 30 members, and they’ve planned a number of events to introduce Memphians to the movement. One of those events, on Saturday, June 2nd, is an “Open Garden” at the Magevney House, where volunteers at the historic downtown home have maintained the garden according to mid-1800s standards, cultivating enough produce to feed a family of four and the home’s slaves. Visitors to the Magevney garden can take a tour and purchase seeds and cuttings as well as get information on the Slow Food Movement.

“Knowing where your food comes from — that’s the big thing,” says Melissa of the movement. “It’s making a conscious choice as to where you get your food. Wait for tomatoes to be in season, make the extra effort to go to a farmer’s market because [you] actually know the grower. I know that it’s better for me, and I’ll get a better-tasting tomato.”

Open Garden at the Magevney House, 198 Adams, 9 a.m. to noon, Saturday, June 2nd. For more information on Slow Food Movement events in Memphis, go to ediblememphis.com.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

The Reagan Mythology

I was amused by Ron Hart’s “Viewpoint” (May 24th issue) concerning the GOP and the mythology of Ronald Reagan. Reagan is now being held up as the paragon of GOP values by right-wingers like Hart. Interesting. I remember clearly in the 1980s how conservatives claimed Reagan wasn’t conservative enough and shills like Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich wanted conservatives to form a third party.

Reagan did not cut taxes; he shifted the tax burden. Whatever tax benefits most Americans received from the cuts in the marginal tax rates were more than made up by having to pay more FICA taxes and the closing of tax deductions in the 1986 tax code. According to the Tax Foundation, the average American was paying more taxes in 1989 than in 1981.

Hart writes of Reagan’s “mantra of limited government.” What government agency did Reagan eliminate or privatize? If Hart wants a conservative role model, he needs to look to Margaret Thatcher not Reagan.

As a financial investor, Hart should know that when Democrats are in the White House the economy does better — not worse — than under GOP management. As Carol Vinzant pointed out on Slate.com, since 1900, Democratic presidents have produced a 12.3 percent total return on the S&P 500. The Republicans have only produced an 8 percent return.

Clarence Murphy

Memphis

The Rant

Last week’s “Rant” by Charley Reese (May 24th issue) started out well enough. Indeed, it was refreshing to read the unvarnished truth for once about the operation of this ghastly war. But I was brought up short to discover that Reese’s greatest villains are “pointy-headed intellectuals.”

Since when? Any intellectual worth his university position could have told President Bush, had he or she been asked, that history indicates the Muslim nations are dangerous to interfere with. Literature warns against hubris. The disciplines of theater and psychology reveal the Oedipus complex (surely operative through Bush 43’s attempt to fix Bush 41’s mistakes at the end of the Iran-Iraq war).

The real culprits are the overly-influential profiteers, who recommended war despite being told by our own intelligence community that they risked disaster. It is regrettable that Reese’s otherwise trenchant observation should have foundered on such an obvious prejudice.

Joanne Malin

Memphis

The War at Home

I want to thank the Flyer and writer Mary Cashiola for the article about Rosine Ghawji (“The War at Home,” May 10th issue).

I have known Rosine for more than 35 years, and she is one of the most courageous and loveliest people I have ever known. Rosine not only paid for Dr. Ghawji to attend medical school in the United States in order to become certified to practice here, she has had the sole responsibility for raising her two sons.  

There has been a great deal of misinformation about Rosine, and because of this she is very grateful, as are so many who know her, for your courage in putting her story in the Flyer. Dr. Ghawji and many of his family members are connected to terrorism and have been for many years.

Rosine has raised two outstanding sons who have excelled scholastically, athletically, and socially thanks to her loving care and attention. Judge Donna Fields has ordered Rosine’s children to be Muslim by a court order, and they must go in September to Saudi Arabia with their father and his family. Fields has also given full custody of Rosine’s younger son, who is still a minor, to his father. This judge is an absolute disgrace to the judicial system.

Thank you again for publishing this article and bringing much of the truth to light in Memphis.

Mary Connelly

Memphis

Relief From Gas Prices

Only one more spring and summer before America gets some relief from gas prices. That’s when the Bush-Cheney team and their friends at the oil companies leave the White House. 

We have been told that it’s the lack of new refineries that has driven up the price of gas. After almost six years of complete control of the government, the president and his party couldn’t manage to get the oil companies to build one new refinery? The oil companies are recording record profits every year, and the administration has stood by while the consumer has been ripped off.

Jack Bishop

Cordova

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall

Art’s Sake

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a conservative think tank, recently released a study cleverly titled 2007 Tennessee Pork Report: Tennessee Government Gone Hog Wild. Not surprisingly, the organization frowns on public funding of the arts, and knowing that you can’t bash The Nutcracker, TCFPR honchos Drew Johnson and Trent Seibert have wisely compiled a list of dirty art made by dirty artists with public money. Five thousand dollars went to Jeff Hand, a sculptor who stitches pillows that look like Viagra and well endowed teddy bears. University of Memphis alum Nate Eppler, who received numerous critical plaudits and awards when his play Keeping Up with the Joneses premiered at the U of M, was also singled out. Eppler used his 5G to produce his latest play, Mr. Greenjeans, which the report describes as “an intentional misinterpretation of a 1970s Japanese play The Green Stockings … follow[ing] the life of a man who has both the stomach of a cow and a suicidal panty fetish.” Congratulations of some sort are probably in order.

Fun with Headlines

Can you guess which of these actual headlines from local media organizations doesn’t belong here?

“South Memphis Neighborhood Happy the Bullets Stopped Flying”

“Police Standoff Ends”

“Woman Shot in North Memphis”

“Three Teens Wounded in Random Shooting in Memphis”

“Commissioner Plans to Propose [Adult] Nightclub Crackdown.”

Even as the bullets zip around our ears and ankles, Shelby County Commissioners like Mike Ritz are devising newer and better ways to suspend liquor licenses and combat the dangerous proliferation of jiggly female nakedness. The latest surge against the skinful enemy is crucial because if you don’t fight these glitter-smeared boobies in their native clubs today, you’ll be fighting them in your kitchen tomorrow. Better buy a gun, y’all.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Falwell’s Legacy

For more than three decades, the Reverend Jerry Falwell guided the white evangelical masses of the South into the Republican Party, culminating in the most outwardly pious presidency in modern American history. Having first gained notoriety as a hard-line segregationist in rural Virginia, he won power as the televised prophet of a political gospel. Scarcely had he gone to his ultimate reward, however, before his friends and allies threatened to dismantle his legacy — and the dominance of the party to which he had devoted his ministry.

The late preacher can hardly be blamed, of course, for the ruinous condition of the Bush administration and the Republican Party. But with the tandem rise of Rudolph Giuliani, a pro-choice Catholic, and Mitt Romney, a highly flexible Mormon, to the forefront of the party’s potential presidential nominees, Falwell’s old flock is feeling deeply alienated. Within days after his death, the leaders of the movement he symbolized began to proclaim a message of dissension.

The most significant voice raised against the notion of a Giuliani nomination belongs to James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, which is now widely reckoned to be the nation’s largest religious-right organization. On May 17th, Dobson declared that he could not support the candidacy of the former New York mayor under any circumstances.

“Speaking as a private citizen and not on behalf of any organization or party, I cannot, and will not, vote for Rudy Giuliani in 2008,” he wrote in an essay on WorldNetDaily, a right-wing Web site. “It is an irrevocable decision.”

Richard Viguerie, the aging but still influential right-wing direct-mail impresario, shares Dobson’s disgust at the prospect of a Giuliani ticket but goes even further in his anathema. Having always preferred to identify himself as a “movement conservative” rather than a party-line Republican, Viguerie is on the verge of urging his right-wing comrades to abandon the Grand Old Party. “If the Republican Party nominates Rudy Giuliani as its candidate for either president or vice president, I will personally work to defeat the GOP ticket in 2008. … It will be time to put the GOP out of its misery.”

As a veteran of the George Wallace campaign on the American Independent Party in 1968, Viguerie certainly knows how to make mischief for the major parties. Back then, the Wallace candidacy badly harmed the candidacy of Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Forty years later, a third-party crusade on the right would do far more damage to the Republican nominee. The same Republicans who encouraged (and financed) Green candidate Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004 just might find themselves facing the business end of a spoiler campaign in November 2008. The most appropriate vehicle is the Constitution Party, a far-right, theocratic outfit that claims to be the biggest of the nation’s third parties.

Still, the Republican apocalypse is not here yet and may not arrive next year. Despite Giuliani’s momentary popularity, the party’s primary voters could find many reasons to reject him — including such colorful episodes as his humiliating flight from Gracie Mansion to the luxury apartment of gay friends who sheltered him from his wronged wife. His personal behavior and associations, notably with the corrupt former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, may be as unacceptable as his issue positions on guns, gays, and abortion.

For Dobson, a ticket led by Mitt Romney might seem like salvation — but other evangelicals are repelled by the former Massachusetts governor’s membership in the Mormon Church, which they have been taught to regard as a satanic cult. Besides, Romney is a recent convert to the tenets of the religious right and one whose eagerness to please is anything but pleasing. His nomination too could provoke a split from the right.

Now this isn’t the first time that Dobson or Viguerie have issued angry warnings to the Republican establishment about dire consequences if the party departs from righteousness. Such jeremiads are always heard in the election-year cacophony and are always dismissed as meaningless cant. Power reliably overcomes principle for these moral absolutists.

But next year might be different. For many of the true believers of the religious right, the nomination of either Giuliani or Romney would represent the ultimate humiliation. Should either of these events come to pass, then the Dobsons and the Vigueries and their followers at last will have to validate their ideological posturing with independent action. They will have to put up or shut up.

Joe Conason writes for Salon.com and The New York Observer.

Categories
Music Music Features

Georgia Rule

With bands such as the Black Lips, Deerhunter, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, Atlanta’s once-underground rock-music scene is on the rise.

 As recently as last year, the Black Lips — notorious for stripping off their clothes and making out with each other, urinating, and shooting off fireworks onstage — would play bars such as the Hi-Tone Café or the tiny Buccaneer Lounge when they’d roll through Memphis. Now, thanks to a label deal with Vice Records, a much-hyped set at the 2007 South By Southwest Music Festival, and exposure in Spin and Rolling Stone, they’re on the fast track to stardom — and Atlanta’s in the spotlight as the next über-hip scene to take off.

 Former Atlantan Alix Brown, a veteran of punk-rock group the Lids and a band called the Wet Dreams, which also featured Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox and the Black Lips’ Jared Swilley, moved to Memphis two years ago, after forming the Angry Angles with Jay Reatard.

 ”I grew up with all those guys in Atlanta,” she says. “The other day, I went to Schnucks and bought a magazine that had a two-page spread on the Black Lips. It’s really strange having people who hardly know them talking about ’em so much.”

 ”Honestly, I think the hype is terrifying,” says Josh Fauver, who pulls double-duty as bassist for noise band Deerhunter, famed for the raucous album turn it up faggot, released on Kranky Records in 2005, and as drummer/keyboard programmer in the lesser-known Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which is playing Murphy’s this weekend.

 ”Once a particular scene gets really huge, everyone’s convinced that everything coming out of there is golden,” Fauver says. “But I’m glad it’s drawing attention. It’s definitely changed things for the bands. I can remember not being able to book a show outside of Atlanta, because no one gave a shit about anyone coming from here.”

 According to Adam Shore, general manager of Vice Records, “This is a meaningful time for Atlanta rock, no matter what happens.”

 Signing the Black Lips to Vice was, he says, an obsession: “I feel like they bring everything to the mix. They’ve been a band for so long, but they’re still so young. They’re fully formed, but they’re brand-new to so many people. For the last seven years, they’ve written great songs, put on great shows, and toured all over the world, but they never had a publicist or a booking agent. It’s rare to come across an artist like this. I’d compare ’em to [Memphis musician] Jay Reatard. He’s in a similar place. He’s been doing this forever, and he’s so underground but so ready to cross over.”

 ”Vice and our publicist have done a great job getting the word out,” says Black Lips guitarist Ian Brown, who lived in Memphis, off and on, for the last three years. (His gold grill, he brags, came from Regency Jewelers on American Way.)

 ”A lot more people know who we are — that’s the main difference,” Brown says. “The music is still the same, but the shows have a lot more people, and the money is a lot better. We don’t work [day jobs] anymore.”

 ”Lone geniuses can pop out anywhere. The only worry about trying to manufacture a scene out of Atlanta is the expectation that these bands will become superstars and yield massive record sales,” Shore says. “The Black Lips, SIDS, and Deerhunter are too individualistic to put into the mainstream, which is not to say that they can’t have great careers. It’s amazing that they’re selling as many records as they are and that a style of music that’s not the most easily digestible is being championed by a lot of people.”

 Record sales on indie label Rob’s House, which has released seven-inches from all three bands, confirm it: “We only pressed up 300 copies of the Deerhunter seven-inch, and they took six months to sell,” reports Trey Lindsay, who runs the label with the Black Lips’ tour manager, Travis Flagel. “But the band blew up, and now that record’s on eBay. We did 500 copies of a SIDS seven-inch, and those sold out immediately, too.”

 ”When SIDS started, it was kind of a joke band, and we’ve overstayed our welcome somehow. The group was supposed to last a summer, but that was three years ago,” says Fauver, who unhesitatingly credits the Black Lips with jumpstarting national interest in the current Atlanta scene.

 Fauver and Alix Brown, still friends, first crossed paths at an Atlanta house party nearly a decade ago.

 ”It was at a place called Squaresville,” he recalls, “where the Black Lips set up in the living room and the audience stood in the kitchen. It’s funny to think about, because everyone hated the Black Lips. People were like, ‘I don’t know about this band. They’re really rowdy.’ But in reality, they’re legitimately the sweetest kids I ever met. I dunno what happens to them onstage. They get some beer in them and go apeshit, I guess.”

 ”The question is,” Shore says, “if you have 50 kids in a basement, and they’re all going crazy, can that happen when there’s 500 or 5,000 people? I actually believe it can.”

Categories
Music Record Reviews

The Redneck Woman settles down and settles in.

The Curse of the Sophomore Album hit Gretchen Wilson hard. Her debut, Here for the Party, was everything the critics said it was and more. “Redneck Woman” was the big-time sing-along anthem, but there were rich ballads and zesty rockers behind it. Here for the Party also called attention to the Musik Mafia, the Nashville songwriting clique that included Wilson and Big & Rich, the duo that was about to blow up with its anti-Music Row approach that, among other things, paired country with hip-hop.

 But then Wilson released All Jacked Up and everything that seemed so fresh on the first record now came across as stale and forced. “One Bud Wiser” was a novelty song begging for a better punchline. “California Girls” lamented the artificial Paris Hilton and praised Dolly Parton, who’s never been shy about enhancing her, uh, assets. The rest was only better in that it was eminently forgettable. Country fans turned away in droves, and Wilson’s title as the Queen of Country Music was short-lived. 

 Now comes One of the Boys, and the low-key promotional push that’s accompanied its release seems right. This is an album that doesn’t worry about topping “Redneck Woman” and instead just digs up some interesting, well-written songs (many of those co-written by Wilson herself) and delivers them with a quiet and determined professionalism.

 Perhaps the surprise is how traditional the album sounds, with lots of mid-tempo songs driven by pedal steel, fiddle, and banjo. “There’s a Place in the Whiskey” is the sole rocker, but it leaves a sweet vapor trail. “If You Want a Mother” finds laughs by sizing up a poor slob who needs to go back to his mama. “Painkiller,” an aching ballad that can stand among Wilson’s best, is about getting over an ex with a one night stand that will “taste bitter” but bring relief.

 Three albums in, Wilson has become — surprise — a rather conventional country artist. One of the Boys has several excellent songs and some obvious filler (“Good Ole Boy”). But if you’re a fan of straightforward country music, this album should give you reason to celebrate. — Werner Trieschmann

Grade: B+

Categories
News The Fly-By

Hip To Be Square

CREDIT: Joan Gomez Pons | dreamstime.com

Real estate entrepreneur Leland Speed was once told that “certain sermons are best delivered by a visiting minister.” And so it was that the Jackson, Mississippi, native found himself in a Hernando church last week, talking to a visiting “congregation” about selling good design.

“You’ve got to have a town that’s attractive or no one is going to live there,” he said. “Quality sells today. Commodity … Having linear streets and you think you’re creative because you threw in a cul-de-sac, that’s history. That’s 30-years-ago kind of stuff.”

Until recently, Speed was head of the Mississippi Development Authority, a statewide agency charged with economic development. He is also a consultant with the city of Jackson. And, as members of the Memphis regional branch of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) sat on pews, Speed talked about the economic benefits of citywide curb appeal.

When Speed came back to Mississippi after more than two decades away, “frankly, I wasn’t real happy with the stuff I saw,” he said. “I remembered small, vibrant communities. I came back to find dead communities.”

People kept asking him when he was going to bring their town a factory. But, to Speed, that’s the old way of thinking.

To prove his point, Speed told a tale of two towns. One “won the lottery”: An auto assembly plant relocated there. The other didn’t get anything of the sort but eventually had to declare a moratorium on building permits because it was growing too fast. The town with the factory didn’t.

“What are those two towns? Canton and Oxford,” Speed said. “You can say it was the university, but eight out of 10 university towns do not grow inordinately.”

So what was it? Speed traced Oxford’s growth back to the opening of Square Books.

“What it is is the square. The university is an amenity to the square, not the other way around. People go to the square every day,” he said. “The square is magic.”

And Canton? “Canton is not viewed as an attractive place to live so people don’t live there,” he said.

In a world of PILOTs, tax incentives, NAFTA, and the creative class, urban leaders are beginning to understand that atmosphere can be just as important as industry for an area’s fiscal health.

Speed advised communities to deal with their “cruel realities,” “quit worrying about what you don’t have,” and “focus on what you have.” A city doesn’t have the best school system? It might matter less than you think. Citing the rising number of single people in the United States, Speed said, “Where do single people want to live? Do they want an acre lot? … No.”

In fact, Speed thinks the defining factor is whether a city is cool or not. “The trends are in our direction,” he said. “We need to use our creativity and culture as an asset.”

Unfortunately, he was talking about Mississippi, but I think this applies to Memphis, as well. Memphis has an authenticity that can be leveraged in a world of Wal-Marts and Costcos. But Memphis also needs to prove that it’s a great place to live. Or a cool place to live, as the case may be.

Speed spoke of Pascagoula, a Mississippi town on the Gulf with roughly 11,000 shipyard employees.

“Ten percent of the employees live in Pascagoula,” Speed said. “Twenty-five percent live in Mobile. Mississippi residents are paying taxes to bring jobs to Mobile. How long should taxpayers subsidize that situation?”

The converse is if Marion, Arkansas, had won the Toyota plant that eventually went to Tupelo, Mississippi, some of those workers surely would have lived in Memphis. But some of them also might have lived in DeSoto County.

Cities aren’t just competing for companies anymore; they’re competing for workers. For inhabitants. For those people who make a house — or a city — a home.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Be Judicious

That’s our advice to the Shelby County Commission and to other would-be guardians of the public mores a propos past, present, and future excesses of the city’s adult-entertainment industry. We certainly applaud the action of the commission last week in voting to send topless-club entrepreneur Steve Cooper a strong message that his proposed “Italian restaurant” will be held to strict zoning requirements.

These would seemingly preclude the facility’s conversion into yet another “adult” club — this one set smack dab in the middle of suburban Cordova, in close proximity to churches, schools, and other established community venues. The windowless concrete-walled facility, now under construction, bears little resemblance to your usual rustic Italian villa, and suspicions of Cooper’s motives seem entirely justifiable, especially in view of the fact that his son has publicly confided his father’s ultimate intent to convert the building into a topless club.

We are not so certain, however, of the wisdom of another initiative coming before the commission — this one from Mike Ritz, a normally thoughtful member, who has, among other things, advised a moderate approach to the pending establishment of a second Juvenile Court.

A key provision of Ritz’s proposed ordinance would, in effect, end the sale and consumption of alcohol at strip clubs and at other adult-entertainment facilities. Memphis police director Larry Godwin has expressed concern about the proposed measure, and we, too have our doubts. It would seem to us that enough laws already exist to limit excessive behavior at the clubs — it is these, after all, that resulted in the recent series of arrests — and an ordinance as strict as the one proposed could have a dampening effect not only on free expression per se but (let us tell it like it is) on the city’s convention trade.

Tiger Baseball

Memphis-area sports fans are normally well-informed about the progress — or lack of same — of the University of Memphis’ major athletic teams. In the case of the basketball Tigers, we all know that Coach John Calipari’s team got into the Elite Eight of the NCAA tourney this spring and has been picked by several astute observers as the team to beat for the collegiate season to come.

It is needless to say, too, that the football team that has generally done well under Coach Tommy West, going to three consecutive bowl games, had a down season last year and that we (and West) can only hope for better things come fall.

What many of us may not have been paying proper attention to, however, is the fact that the university has a baseball team that is suddenly vying for attention and respect with the Tigers’ pigskin and roundball contingents. Coach Daren Schoenrock’s team survived a late-season slump to win a bid as one of just 64 teams invited to compete in this year’s NCAA baseball tournament.

Despite complaints from the other end of the state (where the Vols failed to get a bid), the Tigers have managed to win the respect of the collegiate baseball world — this at a time when NCAA baseball, as a prime feeder of Major League Baseball, is rapidly achieving enhanced stature in its own right.

It’s nice having something else to growl about.

Categories
Living Spaces Real Estate

In Focus

On a recent Saturday, I bought a tree. I never thought a tree could be something you would ever have to have ASAP, but it turns out I was wrong. I needed to get that tree planted inmediatamente.

When my house was built in 1950, there was a small porch on the side. At some point in the next 15 years, the original owners closed it up and made a room out of it. Unfortunately, they didn’t add a window to the front of the house where the porch had been, leaving a third of the house without any windows — a vast, white vinyl-siding wasteland. Instead, they put some shutters up where a window would logically go.

The free-floating shutters looked goofy, but my wife and I lived with it while we dealt with more pressing home improvements. Then, a few weeks ago, we took the shutters down.

If unattractive sights had smells, this one would be “stank.” The siding had been faded by the sun except where the shutters had been, which left two giant rectangles that looked like eyes — eyes that seemed to track you, judge you, and find you wanting. (Or maybe that’s just me. I’ll ask my therapist.)

So, yes, a tree was needed right away, to break up that expanse of windowless house and to hide the unsightly business beneath.

My wife, daughter, and I traveled to a local nursery, and, after looking at lots of trees and getting advice (based on the amount of sunlight available where the tree would be and the amount of space it would have next to the house), we settled on a Stellar pink hybrid dogwood, a tree that would grow two-dimensionally — horizontally and vertically but not toward the house.

The purchase seemed significant. This tree was something that I could put in the ground and that might very well outlast my time as owner of the house, that might even outlive me, period. I can look up at the giant oak tree in my front yard, planted the year the house was built, 57 years ago. Might some future homeowner look at what is now my humble little dogwood and wonder about the people who planted it?

Later that same Saturday came some bad news: My best friend’s dad, John K. McCarthy, had died that day.

I thought about my humble tree again and about the big oak that was planted just four years after John was born. It struck me again how things we do have a way of living on independent of us. John is survived by a wife, four kids, and two grandkids, among a slew of other family members and loved ones.

The people who planted the oak are long gone. But the tree remains a testament to their lives.

Greg Akers

greg@memphisflyer.com