Month: March 2012

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Foolishness

This weekend, more than 20 Memphis and North Mississippi bands will deliver sweet melodies at this year’s Fools’ Ball.

The musical festival, considered by some to be a mini-Bonnaroo or Woodstock, will take place March 30th through April 1st at Dirty D’s Memorial Park in Laws Hill, Mississippi.

Bands including Copper Possum, Devil Train, FreeWorld, Agori Tribe, and Chinese Connection Dub Embassy are among those set to jam at the festival.

“The bands do it for the love of life. They volunteer their time and get to be a part of something that doesn’t feel like a gig,” Donna Christiansen says. “These people are giving their heart and soul out there.”

The first ball was an anniversary party for Donna and her husband Mark and was held in their backyard in April 2000. That gathering drew around 50 friends for good tunes and food. Since the initial shindig, the gathering has blossomed into an annual festival of “friends, music, positive energy, fun, and foolishness,” Donna says.

More than 1,000 people are expected to attend the 2012 Fools’ Ball.

Bands will perform on two stages. There will be a bonfire, a large movie screen showing highlights from past Fools’ Balls, camping, and “the best grilled cheese in the world” for sale.

Mark hopes the event provides people with “indescribable good times” and brings more exposure to the bands involved.

“We may not have any Grammy-nominated or Grammy-winning musicians to come out and play at the [ball], but eventually, some of these kids who are playing will end up winning a Grammy,” Mark says.

Fools’ Ball, Friday-Sunday, March 30th-April 1st, 440 Laws Hill Rd., Laws Hill, MS. Admission is $25. Go to Facebook.com and search for “The Fools’ Ball.”

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Two School-Merger Issues

It is difficult to follow all of the mind-numbing discussions that are going on in the 23-member Consolidated School Board and the 21-member Transition Planning Commission. My sympathy goes out to the members who are giving their time and effort to this work, and they should at least get free comfortable cushions for the time they sit there and listen to all the opinions.

I have been thinking about this debate, and I have an opinion on several key questions, one that is currently hot and another that seems to have been put aside and not discussed, at least in the media.

Who owns the school land and buildings in the incorporated cities outside the city of Memphis and in Shelby County? We are talking about Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Arlington, Lakeland, and Millington. The liability for these buildings is on Shelby County government’s books, and the assets are on the books of the Memphis school system and the Shelby County school system.

It seems to me that if, for instance, Germantown wanted these facilities, the remaining liability (bonds issued for the purchase and construction cost of these facilities less the amount paid to date) should be transferred to Germantown’s books and taken off Shelby County’s books. This liability should be for the actual land and construction cost and not include any $3/$1 average daily attendance ratio that might have occurred at the time of construction.

Then the next step in this process, again taking Germantown as an example, should be a reconciliation of the tax rate for that city’s Shelby County taxes.

Germantown residents pay Shelby County taxes, and those taxes include a portion for education and a portion for debt. The portion paid to Shelby County for education should be reduced by the percentage of students that they promise to educate rather than have Shelby County educate them. Also, the portion paid to Shelby County for payment of bonded debt should be reduced to reflect the percentage of debt that they have taken over by assuming liability for the school bonds.

Of course, Germantown taxpayers will see their city tax bills go up in proportion to the new education and bond tax load, plus whatever else the city determines is required to run an educational establishment.

The result of this transfer arrangement would be that Germantown divorces itself from the Shelby County educational system and would be completely independent. Is that a good thing? That will be up to the people of Germantown, and any of the other incorporated cities in Shelby County that do likewise, to determine.

This analysis will no doubt be challenged by people on both sides who keep arguing that the suburbs must pay “a fair market price” or, on the other hand, that they should get the properties for free. I am not a lawyer, and there may be state laws and precedents that would not allow such an arrangement as the one I have proposed, but, as a businessman, it seems fair.

Now as to the other not so public issue: OPEBs. “OPEB” stands for “Other Post Employment Benefits” — mainly health care for retirees. On June 30, 2010, the unfunded OPEB liability for the Memphis City Schools system was $1.53 billion. In other words, they were paying 70 percent of the actual health care costs of retirees on an annual basis but ignoring the future costs. The Shelby County Schools system’s similar unfunded OPEB liability, as of June 30, 2010, was $242 million.

Now, when you consider that the Memphis school system has three times as many employees as Shelby County Schools, the unfunded OPEB liability, to be proportionate, should be in the range of $726 million, not $1.53 billion. The differential leaves $804 million to be assumed by the new combined school system. Is it fair to ask taxpayers to assume this unexpected burden? You have to ask the obvious questions: How and why did this occur?

I have been studying and writing about the operation of local government for a number of years, and I have come to one simple, obvious conclusion: Shelby County government and Shelby County Schools have been much better run from a financial standpoint than have city of Memphis government and Memphis City Schools.

I make no judgment on the educational achievement of the two systems, and I hope for a resolution that will be good for all the children. It seems obvious to me, from my background of 40 years in competitive business, that competition improves products and forces innovation and lowers costs. I say, let the competition begin.

Joe Saino follows public issues and writes about them on his Memphis Watchdog blog and in other venues.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Invitation to Chaos

CREDIT: Danziger

Time was when the Memphis City Council had the patent locally on eccentric conduct and discordant ways, while, across the downtown government plaza, the Shelby County Commission had a reputation for reserved, even staid behavior. No more.

In the last several months, the council has been made to seem a Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Society by comparison with the commission, whose members have gotten themselves involved in near fistfights, censure resolutions, and, most notoriously, an endless disagreement on what should be the simple matter of redistricting themselves.

The Census of 2010 has been in the books for a while, and the redistricting plans of other governmental bodies have long since been concluded. The county commission, unable to agree, has an April 5th date with Chancellor Arnold Goldin, who will be asked to act in the role of Solomon.   

The problem is not that the commission, which has debated the issue ad infinitum over the last several months, has deadlocked on a given hot-button matter. The points at issue have proliferated and varied wildly since discussion began last fall. To convey some sense of how kaleidoscopic disagreement has been: Last fall a distinct majority of commissioners favored an updated version of the current plan, one involving four districts of three members each and one swing district with a single member. Sentiment has shifted to the opposite viewpoint. Whereas only one member was holding out for 13 single-member districts in December, that position now represents the consensus, with only a distinct minority publicly favoring multimember districts. The breakdown now is over just how the lines are to be drawn, dividing the 13 districts-to-be. Every kind of motive — personal, political, racial — has intruded to prevent the achievement of the nine-vote commission supermajority which the county charter mandates.

And therein, for a body which loves above all to disagree, lay the opportunity for an ultimate disagreement that could lead to profound institutional crisis.

Given her responsibility to represent the entire factionalized commission, county attorney Kelly Rayne availed herself at year’s end of a sensible remedy: the appointment of seasoned lawyer Ron Krelstein as special attorney. Both because he believes that state law, which requires only a final majority of seven to achieve redistricting, trumps the county charter and because such an interpretation allows him to actually take into court a plan of some kind, Krelstein proposes to argue for “2-J,” a single-member plan that has successfully passed three readings with a majority of at least seven.

At this week’s commission meeting, however, dissenting commissioners prevailed on a majority to pass a resolution directing Rayne to force the county’s representative in court to defend the county charter’s requirement for a nine-vote supermajority. Krelstein has made it clear he will not act against his own best legal sense, embedded in a pleading already entered, and will resign from the case if required to. It is now up to Rayne to decide, among other things, whether the commission can legally enjoin her to enjoin Krelstein.

As if Chancellor Goldin, who will probably have to decide that matter, too, didn’t already have enough to unravel.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

New (and old) work from Brian Pera and Kentucker Audley

Memphis filmmaker Brian Pera landed a notable cult actress, Ann Magnuson, for his last film, the under-recognized Woman’s Picture. And he’s done it again for his next feature project, casting the terrific veteran character actress Grace Zibriskie for Only Child.

Zibriskie, now 70, might be best known for recurring roles in the television series Seinfeld, Big Love, and Twin Peaks (where she played murder victim Laura Palmer’s mother), but she has also appeared in films ranging from Norma Rae (her debut) to indie classics from Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho) and Twin Peaks‘ David Lynch (Wild at Heart).

For Pera, Zibriskie will be playing the mother of Amy LaVere’s wounded, mysterious Loretta, a character spun off from Woman’s Picture. But Only Child isn’t so much a sequel to Woman’s Picture as a continuation of a series Pera has vowed to explore in both feature and short films.

To raise funds for the project, Pera has set up a Kickstarter campaign at kickstarter.com (search for “Only Child”), where those offering donations can get items related to the film or the local arts scene. The Kickstarter campaign concludes Thursday, March 29th, with a live video podcast interview with Zabriskie and LaVere, at 6 p.m.

On Friday, March 30th, Memphis actor and filmmaker Kentucker Audley will release his feature Open Five — which won multiple awards at the 2010 Indie Memphis Film Festival before getting strong notices from outlets such as The New Yorker and The New York Times — on DVD and as a digital download and stream. The release will be preceded by an online premiere at 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 29th, which will include a streaming Q&A session with lead actors Jake Rabinbach and Shannon Esper. The online premiere and ability to purchase the film in all formats can be found at kentuckeraudley.com and Audley’s nobudgefilms.com site.

Audley is also prepping the film’s sequel — Open Five 2, natch — for release and recently garnered strong notices for his co-starring work in the indie Sun Don’t Shine, which premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival earlier in March. Also debuting at SXSW was Pilgrim Song, a new film by Indie Memphis veteran Martha Stephens that was produced by the Memphis-based Paper Moon Films (which also produced Open Five) and which co-stars Memphis actor Timothy Morton. One would assume all three of these new Memphis-connected films would be good bets for Indie Memphis this fall.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Danger Games

The Hunger Games has a number of flaws, which will be enumerated shortly, but the take-away is it’s a film of considerable entertainment value, with a fantastic lead performance by Jennifer Lawrence and more thematic meat to digest than might be expected from another big Hollywood tentpole.

The film is based on a young adult novel by Suzanne Collins. It features Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence), a tough girl in Appalachia forced to be the breadwinner for her family after her father dies in a coal-mining explosion. Katniss hunts wild game and cobbles together meals and household staples by bartering with similarly impoverished neighbors. Lawrence likely got the Katniss role because of its similarity to her part in the excellent Winter’s Bone.

This is a futuristic Appalachia, however. We can tell because even though there’s no running water, there are imperial overlords wearing ugly monochromatic attire reminiscent of some 1970s sci-fi cinema.

Now called District 12, the region is subservient to a distant Capitol that rules with an iron sense of humor. As punishment for a rebellion decades before, a boy and girl are chosen at random from each of the 12 districts and forced to fight to the death in a televised spectacle called the Hunger Games. Katniss is the girl representative from District 12, joining a boy named Peeta (Josh Hutcherson, also giving a strong performance). They travel to the Capitol, get shown off for the TV cameras to immense ratings, and then enter the field of battle where only one can emerge victorious.

Stripped of its mythology, the premise is kinda asinine. So, a treaty was signed by defeated revolutionary leaders and it’s both a punitive measure and also the greatest form of entertainment in the society? And it’s such a stable system of amusing oppression that it has continued without interruption for 74 years?

But the mythology and characters are precisely what does make it work. Who cares about the ridiculousness of a setup when it has given you someone as resourceful, resilient, and generous as Katniss Everdeen to root for?

Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, Pleasantville) directs and is in command of the material. The opening section of the film, set in District 12, references the Great Depression photography of Dorothea Lange, particularly her photo Migrant Mother — wretched poverty devoid of color.

When we get to the Capitol, the future really kicks in. We’re shown a dystopia where fashion and pleasure are king, and callousness for humanity is the norm. This is when the film is most in danger of flying apart, but it pulls it back in with finality when Katniss, Peeta, and 22 other children enter an arena and start murdering each other.

Where The Hunger Games is at its most problematic is in wondering how self-aware it is. In criticizing a society that enjoys watching kids kill kids, it provides thrills where you, the audience member, are twisted into rooting for kids killing kids. And when a romance between Katniss and Peeta develops — one that’s knowingly acted out for public consumption in the Capitol — the artificiality of the relationship didn’t stop the tween girls in my audience from tittering excitedly.

Ross’ action scenes are a bit hyperactive and claustrophobic, and you can’t always tell who’s hurting whom. That probably helped secure a PG-13 rating, along with ditching a truly creepy element to the last battle as it’s depicted in the book.

Sure, The Hunger Games is a patchwork of Battle Royale, The Running Man, The Lottery, Lord of the Flies … . But there are worse obvious cultural influences to have. And it drives at classical Roman politics and appeasement, and that more than anything gives The Hunger Games any flush of realism that it has. The futuristic post-American civilization is called Panem, the “bread” part of the Latin for “bread and circuses,” or systematic public diversion like gladiatorial blood lust.

In the film’s most moving sequence, a sweet black girl is tragically killed, and we’re shown her home region, District 11 — aka the South — responding with a riot of despair and helpless rage. The uprising is violently put down, and President Snow (Donald Sutherland) frets about the lower classes thinking they can raise a hand against the wealthy, ethnically homogenous Capitol. Anyway, the baseline lesson of The Hunger Games is don’t trust whitey, and I think that’s a good one to teach kids over the course of a $152.5 million weekend.

The Hunger Games

Now playing

Multiple locations

Categories
Music Music Features

GrowMemphis benefit at the Hi-Tone Cafe

A handful of local acts band together at the Hi-Tone Café this week to raise money and awareness for GrowMemphis, a nonprofit organized to support urban farms and gardens in Memphis and to advocate for local food policy. Formerly a program within the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, GrowMemphis has recently spun off into a separate entity.

Headlining the benefit show is the Wuvbirds (pictured), an enjoyable new-ish band made up of a pair of couples with notable Memphis music backgrounds. Corey and Kate Crowder were in Two Way Radio, an indie-pop band that had a bit of a moment in the wake of Kate’s co-starring role in Craig Brewer’s $5 Cover. Jared McStay is a local scene veteran who fronted the beloved ’90s band the Simpletones (late Simple Ones), and his wife Lori Gienapp McStay was the original drummer in the garage-blues band the Porch Ghouls and partnered with Alicja Trout in the ultra-fun Ultra Cats. Together, as Wuvbirds, the quartet concocts a warm, welcoming, finger-snapping pop sound rooted in mid-Sixties soul, girl groups, and Phil Spector-style pop. The band released a debut single last fall.

Rounding out the bill are Jeffrey James Hulett (of Snowglobe and his spinoff band, the Haul), Chris Milam, and the Near Reaches. The GrowMemphis benefit is Saturday, March 31st, at the Hi-Tone Café. Doors open at 9 p.m. For more information on the organization, see growmemphis.org. — Chris Herrington

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Reuters | Joshua Roberts

Old Dick Cheney has finally had a change of heart. Even though the former co-president has suffered five heart attacks and has been kept alive since 2010 by a small pump powered by special batteries worn in a fanny pack, he underwent successful heart transplant surgery last Saturday. The Cheney family thanked the anonymous donor, who was rumored to be an illegal alien and gay activist.

Some doctors and ethicists are already questioning the wisdom of granting an organ implant to a sick 71-year-old man, but if I was on Cheney’s death panel, I’d say more power to him. Give him a new heart, a fresh kidney, a clean lung — whatever it takes to keep his vital signs ticking. I want to see Dick Cheney healthy and hearty so he can be alert for his war-crimes tribunal. It would be inhumane to have him show up trembling and frail, unable to defend himself. So what if the average heart recipient is in the 50-to-60-year-old range? This man has a rendezvous with destiny, and destiny’s pissed off. In Cheney’s defense, he had waited 20 months to receive a donor heart. I understand that he was on the recipient’s list just above Joseph Kony. In a single year, this man had a quadruple bypass, two angioplasties, and a pacemaker surgically implanted. No wonder he was so bitterly opposed to medical malpractice litigation. His doctor’s assistant is a hunchback named Igor. 

According to Transplant Living, the cost of a heart transplant has gone up from $658,800 in 2007 to approximately $997,700 today. Of course, Cheney has the government’s gold-plated health-care plan, the kind that you can’t get, so taxpayers will pick up the tab for cracking the old man’s chest. This means I’m paying to keep Dick Cheney alive while going without health insurance myself. I have to wait until 2014 when a provision in the Affordable Care Act, affectionately known as “Obamacare,” kicks in and prevents insurers from discriminating against “preexisting conditions.” I made the mistake of seeing a psychiatrist once, so now no organization of any sort will insure me because I’m insane, you know. If it weren’t for the generous people at the Church Health Center, who offer discounted medical services to the working poor or otherwise uninsurable, I’d be lying in the back room on a ventilator and an IV drip, writing my last check.

Dick Cheney gets to promenade around like the Energizer Bunny while 49 million people lack access to the most basic care. Yet the right-wing propaganda machine has convinced the proletariat that Obamacare is a government takeover of health care, when it’s really just an effort to rein in the cut-throat insurance industry that makes its profits by denying care to the sick.

The controversial law will finally see a courtroom this week, when the Supreme Court decides the constitutionality of Obamacare. Why is it that I don’t trust an impartial decision from virtually the same court that stopped citizens from counting votes in 2000 and gave the presidency to George W. Bush? At issue is the “individual mandate,” which was originally a Republican idea. It assures that public health is a shared responsibility, requiring those not already covered by employee-based programs, Medicare, or Medicaid to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty if not exempted by a religious objection. The provision is waived in cases of financial hardship and subsidies are granted to lower-income customers.

It’s a windfall for insurance companies, but the conservative position is that the government should not have the right to force you to buy anything. As I said, I’ve been begging to buy insurance for a decade, so for me, money was never better spent; and they have to sell it to me. Millions of people will be able to afford to stay alive without taking out second mortgages, and parents of special-needs children will no longer be denied coverage. To me, it sounds like a Republican wet dream, because everybody profits. But religious extremists don’t believe contraception or women’s birth control pills should be covered with your other prescriptions.

The Republican presidential candidates grabbed the religious exemption issue and pounded that wedge like John Henry hammered steel. Suddenly bills were stampeding through state legislatures limiting women’s access to contraceptives. In Arizona, they actually passed a bill that exempts an employer from covering birth control pills if they’re not being used for “medical purposes.” If a woman wishes the cost of her contraception to be covered by insurance, she has to “submit a claim” to her employer stating the reasons for its usage. In other words, you can still have intercourse in Arizona, but you’d damn well better not be having any fun.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Obamacare isn’t expected until June, but right-wingers are already licking their chops and taking a victory lap. If Obamacare is struck down, it wounds the president just in time for the national political conventions. Imagine the crowing in Tampa if the individual mandate is struck down. There will be stemwinders over the tyranny of a government mandate; even though if you plan to operate a car, you must first have a driver’s license, then are required to procure insurance, and register the vehicle. Or, if you ride a motorcycle or bicycle, you’re required to wear a helmet. Even your pet schnauzer needs rabies shots and a license, so don’t say the government never mandates a purchase.

Think of it this way: If an uninsured person gets sick, they go to the emergency room and the cost is passed on to you. If everyone were required to purchase some form of health insurance, the insurance pool will grow larger, costs will go down, and you will be responsible only for your own care. As it stands now, you’re paying for Dick Cheney’s heart surgery, when I believe he got the wrong procedure. What he really needed was a soul transplant, but that’s considered a preexisting condition.

Randy Haspel writes the blog Born-Again Hippies, where a version of this column first appeared.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from The Editor: Memphis in March

CREDIT: Dreamstime

Years ago, a friend told me about her favorite Memphis day of the year. It wasn’t a specific date, but she knew it when she saw it. It’s the day when all the trees have leafed out fully, fresh and green, before the depredations of summer heat and insects have begun to take their toll. “Usually,” she said, “I’ll be driving along Peabody Avenue in late April and look around and realize, it’s here, the ‘perfect day.’ Everything’s come back for another year.”

This year, the perfect day is going to get here at least a month early. In my yard, petunias, snapdragons, and sage are blooming profusely. I planted them last spring, and they survived the winter — a definite first. Everything is ahead of schedule — azaleas, redbuds, dogwoods, roses — the result of one of the warmest winters on record in the U.S.

How warm was it? It was so warm that more than 7,000 temperature records were broken around the country, sometimes by 30, 40, even 50 degrees. So warm that the cherry blossoms are out in Washington, D.C., a month ahead of schedule. So warm that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s site that records temperatures crashed, because the software couldn’t handle the huge number of high-temperature records being set.

So is it just freaky hot weather or climate change? The scientific consensus is that climate change is upon us. Science writer Andrew Freedman: “In a long-term trend that has been found to be inconsistent with natural variability alone, daily record-high temperatures have recently been outpacing daily record-lows by an average of two to one, and this imbalance is expected to grow as the climate continues to warm. … If the climate were not warming, this ratio would be expected to be even.”

There is, of course, less consensus — at least, politically — as to whether climate change is a result of the “greenhouse effect” caused by increased burning of fossil fuels around the world. But in my mind, at least, that argument is moot. There are few indications that humans are going to reduce emissions in such a way as to alter what now appears to be a done deal: The ice caps are shrinking, extreme weather events are increasing, the planet is getting warmer. In Memphis, summers are going to be increasingly hellish. So, enjoy the perfect days of March and April. Fertilize your petunias. Plant a palm tree. Why not?

Sure, we may end up having to change Memphis in May to Memphis in March, but the alliteration still works.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Theme On

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Drive by Sweet Grass Next Door Thursday, March 29th, and you will find all the windows blacked out.

Next Door patrons, decked in “hats, spats, and pearls,” will be celebrating the anniversary of the end of Prohibition (a few months late, owner Ryan Trimm notes, as Prohibition was repealed on December 5, 1933).

While speakeasies and Great Gatsby parties are trending right now, this isn’t just another theme party; it celebrates the Fee Brothers line of bitters and syrups becoming available in Memphis.

Fee Brothers has a long history, one that predates Prohibition. It began as a fruitful liquor and wine distribution company, then shifted its focus to altar wine and home-brew kits during Prohibition. (Making small quantities of alcohol at home for household consumption was not illegal.) And in a move that would change the face of the company, Fee Brothers also began selling flavored syrups to make the taste of bathtub gin more tolerable.

Following the repeal of Prohibition, the Fee Brothers’ array of flavors and syrups and bitters grew, until non-alcoholic mixers became the company’s sole focus.

“We sell a lot of syrups, but the bitters are the most interesting,” says Joe Fee, who now co-owns the company with his sister. “We’re up to 13 flavors of regular production bitters.”

“Seeing that bitters were becoming popular, we went off the reservation and took a chance on flavors like rhubarb,” Fee says. “If you look behind the bar, there aren’t any spirits that represent rhubarb, and working with fresh rhubarb is difficult because it’s a stalky thing. So rhubarb has become a very popular flavor of bitters. It’s about the only source of that flavor in a drink.”

Intrigued? Try the Boulevardier. It’s made with rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, Aperol, and rhubarb bitters.

Fee Brothers has also revived flavors that virtually disappeared after Prohibition.

“Celery bitters, cherry bitters, and peach bitters — they were made pre-Prohibition but have fallen out of production because during Prohibition the best and brightest bartenders [went to] work elsewhere. What was left was not a skilled bartender, and they weren’t using the more unusual items,” Fee says. “It wasn’t until the internet that people started to talk to each other and relearn these old skills and use these old products.”

Sample these flavors in the New Yorker, a mix of lemon, rye whiskey, Luxardo cherry syrup, and cherry bitters; the Vanilla Beach, made with mango rum, vanilla vodka, peach bitters, and soda; or a Bloody Mary with celery bitters.

The party starts at 7 p.m. For your $30 ticket, you will be free to sample from a special 12-cocktail menu and enjoy heavy hors d’oeuvres by Chef Trimm. But Trimm isn’t sticking as closely to the theme.

“We looked back to see what was being eaten back then, and it’s really not very creative,” Trimm says. “Beef was popular, but it was also around the Depression, so the speakeasies would serve a lot of chicken and vegetables and starches like potatoes. I don’t want to fill people up on that. I just want to make some good food and not worry about the theme.”

Sweet Grass Next Door, 937 S. Cooper (726-0015)

sweetgrassmemphis.com

Also on Thursday, March 29th, Capriccio Grill in the Peabody is hosting a Jack Daniel’s Whiskey Tasting and Dinner — complete with a tasting of four types of whiskey (including a “Peabody Select” single-barrel whiskey) and a four-course meal. The menu incorporates Jack Daniel’s in each course, from whiskey-glazed meats to candied nuts and a honey whiskey banana pudding. Tickets are $65 plus tax and gratuity. Reservations are required.

Capriccio Grill, The Peabody Hotel, 149 Union (529-4199)

peabodymemphis.com

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

She’s the Boss

Dog trainer Camilla Gray-Nelson didn’t set out to specialize in helping women teach their dogs to be obedient. But when she realized the majority of her clients were ladies struggling with disobedient dogs, Gray-Nelson found her calling.

“If I had a dime for every time a woman said to me, ‘The dog is fine with my husband, but he just doesn’t listen to me,’ I could have retired by now,” Gray-Nelson says.

Her new book, Lipstick and the Leash: Dog Training a Woman’s Way, teaches women how to use female traits to get their dog’s attention, as well as what mistakes women should avoid when attempting to show the dog who’s boss. Gray-Nelson will be signing her book in two locations on Saturday, March 31st.

“Loss of emotional control is the mark of a faux leader. Yelling reveals a woman’s weakness, not her strength,” Gray-Nelson says. “Once a dog believes you’re weak, they’re dismissive of you.”

Instead, Gray-Nelson suggests that women call on their natural strengths, such as persistence, patience, and empathy to gain their pup’s respect.

“I always tell women it’s not how fast you get a response from your dog but the fact that you actually get a response. Women can be really good at persistence. We need to use that to compensate for the fact that we’re not big and strong.”

Lipstick and the Leash also addresses specific methods women can use to encourage their dogs to sit, lie down, walk on a leash, and other basic skills.

Booksignings by Camilla Gray-Nelson, Saturday, March 31st, at Three Dog Bakery (2136 West Poplar, Collierville) at 10 a.m. and the Booksellers at Laurelwood at 1 p.m.