Month: August 2018

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Crazy Rich Asians

If you want to make a hit movie in 2018, here’s how you do it: Pick a genre of film, then find a group of people who are underrepresented in Hollywood and cast them in it. You can call it the Black Panther Principle (although you should call it the Tyler Perry Principle, but whatever.)

There’s nothing in Crazy Rich Asians that Shakespeare wouldn’t have recognized as a good romantic comedy move. You could re-set the whole thing in Mississippi and only have to change maybe 1,000 words in the script. The story is universal. Here’s an old, conservative society that’s been chugging along very well for a hundred generations, thank you very very much, that is suddenly confronted with a member of another, younger, more open, society. The silly, out of touch, yet enormously powerful aristocracy must react to a powerless, yet wise, peasant. A young couple finds themselves torn between pursuing their passions and their duty to their families.

Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) describes herself as “so Chinese, I’m an economics professor with a lactose intolerance.” Her relationship with Nick Young (Henry Golding) is nothing remarkable in cosmopolitan New York. They’re both young professionals from somewhere else, obsessed with their careers. Then Nick invites Rachel to be his date to his best friend’s wedding back home in Singapore.

Awkafina gets most of the laughs in Crazy Rich Asians

Rachel knows that Nick was raised in his grandmother’s house, but what she finds out is that Nick’s family is one of the biggest real estate developers in Asia. The first inkling Rachel gets that her boyfriend’s people are of the insanely wealthy variety is seeing what trans-Pacific air travel is like in silk pajamas.

Everyone in Singapore is rich. At least, everyone who matters. But the Youngs are the kind of rich the other richies wish they were. When her college friend Peik Lin (Awkwafina) hears that Rachel’s potential fiancee is the scion of the Young fortune, she freaks out and begs to tag along to the rehearsal dinner at grandma’s house. Nick says his family is like anyone else’s, half people you want to spend time with, and half people you don’t want to talk to. His mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) is icy and traditional. His cousin Alistair (Remy Hii) is a womanizing Hong Kong film director. He’s only really close with his regal, glamorous cousin Astrid (Gemma Chan), who at least has the noblesse oblige to run a charity foundation. The rest of the family, along with most of the people in their orbit, are snotty society types who would rather gut a fish in your bed and call you a gold digger than look at you. Those are the ones Astrid calls sharks.

It’s tempting to call director John M. Chu’s adaptation of a satiric novel by Kevin Kwan a conventional film, when it’s really the kind of well-made, mid-budget picture that used to be Hollywood’s bread and butter but has become increasingly rare in the age of superhero-themed tentpoles. The advantage of using a formula — like moving The Philadelphia Story to Singapore, for example — is that it frees you to focus on execution to a certain extent. Chu’s leads, Wu and Golding, are unthreateningly charismatic and good looking enough for the audience to project themselves onto. Everyone else is playing a type, led by Awkwafina as the free-spirited (read: weirdo) best friend. She gets the lion’s share of the laughs by bouncing one-liners off the straight-laced Wu. Also excellent is Yeoh, who is one of those rare people with the gift to command a screen just by standing still and staring at you. Yeoh’s Eleanor is both a victim of the stifling upper class social order and chief perpetuator of it — in other words, she’s one “Bless your heart …” from being a Tennessee Williams character. When Chu stages his showdown between modernity and tradition, it’s Yeoh who speaks quite convincingly for the latter, and it is she who must change the most when the virtue of Nick and Rachel’s love wins the day.

As you might expect, Crazy Rich Asians engages in a fair amount of lifestyle porn, even if Chu plays it for laughs most of the time, like the subtle bit where the security guards at grandma Young’s house turn out to be actual Gurkhas with “knife guns.” Who hasn’t wanted to sail a container ship out into international waters to party with drugs, models, and rocket propelled grenades? But the film succeeds because Chu and company are strongly empathetic toward the targets of their comedy. The foibles of the Crazy Rich Asians are just like ours, only more expensive.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Station Break

CREDIT: WEVL/Facebook/Paul Stackpole

Friends of WEVL made public last week its hopes to bring changes to the volunteer radio station, but the station’s board said the original group was moving too fast.

More than 150 “Friends of WEVL” have added their names to the group’s public list of supporters at friendsofwevl.org since the page was launched early last week. That page says WEVL needs new funding sources, a new and diverse crowd of programmers, and less dead-air time. The group called WEVL “a Memphis institution” and says it’s a “source of great pride for music lovers and musicians in Memphis and beyond.

WEVL/Facebook/Paul Stackpole

Marcella & Her Lovers play Blues on the Bluff

“But with the changing landscape of the way people listen to music and the growing collaborative music and arts scene in Memphis, we feel WEVL can do better (can’t we all, really?)” reads the Friends of WEVL website. “At the base level, we’re trying to make WEVL financially, operationally, and culturally stronger — celebrating its incredible heritage, but also working toward solidifying its future.”

The founding Friends group found their voice working in a WEVL-board-sponsored group called the Development Exploratory Committee. That group was “comprised of three WEVL fans who are driven to securing a healthy financial, operational, and cultural future for the station” and three WEVL board members.

The committee was dissolved by the WEVL board but after the board reviewed and approved some of the committee’s initial recommendations, said WEVL board chairman and Swing Shift Shuffle host Timothy Taylor.

“There was concern that possible efforts and projects discussed by the committee with third parties could be mistaken for efforts already approved by the board,” Taylor said. “This decision was made because the pace of activity was accelerating beyond what was responsibly manageable and outpacing thorough vetting and discussion.”

Taylor said the board shares some of the goals and visions discussed by Friends of WEVL, but the board decided “it needed to take a direct role, rather than a supervisory one.”

Friends of WEVL said the station’s lineup of local programmers has shrunk from 80 to 40 and that more than 25 percent of WEVL’s shows are syndicated programs or are replays of old shows.

Of those 40 programmers, only Joyce Cobb is African American, the group says, and she’s the station board’s only person of color. So, Friends of WEVL suggests the station diversify both its board and line-up of programmers.

The group wants WEVL to broadcast 24 hours per day, wants an easier process for new programmers to get a show, and for the station to pursue new funding opportunities like donations from charitable foundations, event sponsorships, and underwriting.

Also, Friends of WEVL suggests either renovating its current space or finding new space, perhaps in Crosstown Concourse. They say WEVL’s South Main headquarters hasn’t been updated in almost 30 years and is in “serious need of refurbishment and modernization.”

As of Monday morning, the list of Friends of WEVL included 16 anonymous WEVL programmers.

“On August 20th the management of WEVL informed the programmers that allowing their name to be listed on this website will subject them to disciplinary action, which could include loss of their radio program,” reads the Friends website.

Categories
Book Features Books

Claire Fullerton’s Mourning Dove

One could put together a mighty fine shelf of novels set in Memphis. To name just a few: September, September by Shelby Foote. Good Benito by Alan Lightman. Another Good Lovin’ Blues by Arthur Flowers. The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern. Molly Flanagan & the Holy Ghost by Margaret Skinner. A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor. The Springs by Anne Goodwin Winslow.

And now we must add to that august shelf this powerful, polished gem, Mourning Dove, by ex-Memphian Claire Fullerton. Fullerton lived here through the ’60s and ’70s, when most of this novel takes place. Her memory is clear and her prose crystalline. This is Memphis rendered nimbly and passionately, a city that encompasses both the landed gentry and the restless younger generation, which sees through — and travels through — the thin veil of gentility that still sits on the sprawling city like a doily on a magnolia stump.

Claire Fullerton lives in California now. But this is a chronicle penned by a shrewd novelist haunted by her hometown, a city of ghosts and lush memories. At times this family novel reminded me of the grandest family novel, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. Fullerton’s delineation of her memorable characters is masterful.

The story is predominantly about a brother and sister, Finley and Millie Crossan, and is told first-person through the soft-filter eyes of Millie. She adulates Finley, who, we are told on the first page, has died early. So, this is not just an examination of the peccadillos and mores of the Southern upper crust. It is also a mystery. What happened to the golden boy, a genius in school, an athlete and musician, and a protean soul if ever there was one?

The Crossans relocate from Minnesota to Memphis, escaping from the children’s father, a well-meaning drunk. “The Memphis Finley and I landed in was my mother’s Memphis. It was magnolia-lined and manicured, black-tailed and bow-tied. It glittered in illusory gold and tinkled in sing-song voices.”

Millie grows up during the course of the novel, searching for her true self, one which has to struggle out from under her veneration of Finley and from under her mother’s genteel velvet glove. “At sixteen,” she says, “I was beginning to wrestle with the gnawing impression of what I interpreted as my mother’s superficial world, and it left me conflicted, for I had yet to arrive at the stable ground of my own identity.”

This is the Memphis of the Memphis Country Club, but it’s also the Memphis of the Well and the burgeoning punk music crowd, which draws Finley into its sphere. The children learn to assimilate in both cultures, though Millie says, “People from the neat grid of Memphis society I’d been raised in didn’t test its perimeters.”

One of Fullerton’s strengths — and there are many — is her Fitzgeraldian gift of observation. She gets all the details right. Here is Millie’s description of an adult party and her exclusion from it. “The Austrian crystal chandelier in the card room twinkled like a spotlight on their haute couture, and their voices carried all the way upstairs, to where Finley and I kept out of the way.” This concision, and its nuanced rendering of emotion, is found throughout this remarkable novel.

Mourning Dove is mainly concerned with Finley and how Millie’s view of him fluctuates, though her love never flags. As she gets older, her exalted brother’s diamond-bright personality begins to reflect sides she was unprepared for. As a friend tells her, “Careful of this guy, he leads a double life.” Though the heart sees what it wants to see, Millie begins to cast a gimlet eye on Finley, as he drifts away from her.

I don’t want to diminish how really fine this novel is by characterizing it only as a Memphis novel, though Memphians would be right to want to claim it and hold it dear. As I read it, page after page, I kept thinking, “Jesus, this is truly extraordinary.” Claire Fullerton is the real deal, and my admiration for this book is comparable to my admiration for Eudora Welty — I think Mourning Dove is that good.

Claire Fullerton signs Mourning Dove at Novel on September 11th.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

In MPD We Trust? Surveilling Citizen Activists is Wrong

I spent the better half of last week reporting on the federal trial between the city of Memphis and the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee. The question at hand: Did the Memphis Police Department (MPD) violate a 1978 agreement to not conduct political surveillance on non-criminals?

I’m no legal expert, but if political surveillance means keeping close tabs on political activists and their movements, it would appear the city has violated that agreement.

On the stand, MPD brass said over and over that the purpose of the monitoring of activists was to protect public safety and not to discourage them from exercising their First Amendment rights.

The police department might have had good intentions for doing what it did, but they didn’t go about it in the most transparent and constitutional way. The monitoring was done in a covert fashion, such that made those on the other end of the surveillance feel targeted and in some cases, criminalized.

Keedran Franklin, a well-known Memphis activist and one of the original plaintiffs in the case, said in court last week that police officers had been following him for a while. He’d notice them sitting outside of his house and showing up at events he coordinated. It’s isolating, Franklin said, as people have been reluctant to associate with him because of the police’s focus on him. He said he doesn’t even visit his mom much anymore because he doesn’t want her to be involved.

If the police were in fact following Franklin to this degree, then they were infringing upon his First Amendment rights, even if that wasn’t the intention. More than that, it’s a violation of the basic right to privacy. Everyone should have the right to move about without fear of constant police scrutiny.

Many of the events Franklin organized revolved around empowering and uplifting youth, but even these types of gatherings were apparently viewed by MPD as potential threats to public safety.

On other occasions, MPD showed up at vigils, memorial services, book drives, and other seemingly non-threatening events. A waste of resources? Probably. Stereotyping? Maybe.

Evidence presented in court showed that there was also heavy monitoring of events related to the death of 19-year-old Darrius Stewart, who was killed at the hands of an MPD officer in 2015. Adding insult to injury, MPD saw even the community’s attempts to grieve and memorialize Stewart as potential threats to public safety.

And why use a fake Facebook account and a make-believe profile to find out what’s going on in the community? That’s not community policing. That’s policing the community. Someone in the department should have known that, at the end of the day, that would only further alienate the members of the groups they were infiltrating.

After basically being outed as deceiving the public by conducting surveillance on civilians, police department morale has to be lessened. That’s because policing is about trust. The community has to be able to trust that law enforcement has their best interests in mind. Ultimately, people just want to be able to know that the police have their back, no matter what political causes the citizens might believe in.

Michael Rallings, MPD director, said in court that the department never discriminates against a cause and only wants to assist activists in exercising their First Amendment rights by allowing them to carry out protests peacefully.

However, the undercover and, in some cases, sketchy MPD behavior revealed in court undermines that statement in the eyes of many.

Instead of spending the energy and resources used to create and monitor a fake Facebook account, the department could have made a better effort to personally get to know the activists they were surveilling.

Historically, there is deep mistrust between law enforcement and certain groups in the community. Monitoring the community from undercover is just a means of bandaging wounds that, in reality, need stitches.

Undercover officers and fake Facebook accounts seem like near-sighted shortcuts and an avoidance of the necessary hard work, like going into the community, hearing the concerns of the people, and finding a way to work together.

That being said, obviously, it makes sense for law enforcement to use modern technology to assist in doing the job of protecting and serving Memphis. But the use of that technology shouldn’t be abused to overstep boundaries and impede on citizens’ rights.

Technology can’t and shouldn’t ever take the place of building relationships and conducting true community policing.

Maya Smith is a Flyer staff writer.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Plunge to Expunge at Memphis Made

The concept is fairly straightforward. You put a bunch of well-known Memphians on a hot-ass day in a place serving cold-ass beer and hire a badass comedian like Katrina Coleman to harass everybody. Then you give your event a catchy, preferably rhyming name like Plunge to Expunge and watch the money roll in!

The Plunge to Expunge at Memphis Made Brewing is a money-raising project for Just City’s Clean Slate Fund. Clean Slate does exactly what it says, creating meaningful second chances by facilitating an expungement of criminal records for low-level offenders with no more than two convictions.

Josh Spickler

“We’ve successfully reduced the costs of expungement,” Spickler says. “When [Just City] started, expungement cost $450. Now it costs $280. What that means is, when we have fund-raisers like this, we can help more people. Not quite double.”

With modest expansion, Just City has recently added capacity making it possible to complete 30 expungements in August alone. “And we have big goals for the next calendar year,” says Spickler, who thinks 200 to 250 expungements are possible.

“For a donation, you get a chance to dunk somebody, and for a big enough donation, we guarantee you get to dunk somebody,” Spickler says, describing a dunking setup where economic advantage tends to yield better access and more favorable results. “It’s much like the criminal justice system, actually,” he quips.

If enough money is raised, Holly “I Love Memphis” Whitfield, Reggie “Street Ministries” Davis, and sports radio journalist Gary Parrish will climb in the dunk tank — for justice.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Solitary Man: Reflections on John McCain

CREDIT: Traceywood | Dreamstime.com

I first encountered John McCain in 1983 when I was a newish grunt on the Washington scene, then serving as an aide to a Democratic congressman, Bill Alexander of Arkansas. McCain himself was in his first year as a member of the House, not yet the iconic presence that the world would get to know so well.

My only awareness of McCain was gained from seeing the occasional appearances on the House floor of the then relatively unknown Arizonan, from my perch in the office of the Chief Deputy Majority Whip (that was Alexander) in the Capitol. One of the major issues confronting the House that year was President Ronald Reagan‘s decision to infuse American military forces as “peacekeepers” into the cauldron of Lebanon, at the time the focus of an ongoing civil war involving guerilla-level combat between factions and near anarchy.

Like most Democrats — in particular the party leadership, which he represented — my boss viewed the situation with alarm. Republicans, on the other hand, tended to fall in line behind the president. The debate on the floor followed that all-too-predictable binary course, until McCain, a freshman GOP member, took the floor and stated his unequivocal opposition to what he viewed as an unnecessary and dangerous course.

Traceywood | Dreamstime.com

Senator John McCain

McCain was no peacenik. He had been a military careerist until leaving the Navy in the wake of an active career as a pilot who, as we all would subsequently learn, had been downed in a mission over North Vietnam and confined and tortured for years as a P.O.W. His opposition to the Lebanese involvement was a matter of Realpolitik, earned via experience. It turned out to be prescient when hundreds of Marines were killed in their barracks by a truck-driving suicide bomber. Shortly thereafter, Reagan withdrew the remainder of the American military contingent.

All that was in the future on the day of McCain’s speech in the House. Later that day, I was walking from one point to another on the grounds of Capitol Hill when I saw McCain treading the same pathway, more or less, and coming in my direction.

As we crossed paths, I spoke to him, identified myself, and told him how impressed I had been by his speech. McCain gave me that grateful, vaguely mischievous, and somewhat self-satisfied smile that would later become so familiar on national television, and thanked me. There were many times later on when I would reflect on the fact of my getting so early a glimpse of the great contrarian — and on the occasion of his first official maverick act, no less.

Subsequently, of course, McCain moved on to the Senate, became a truly national figure, and made an upstart race for president in 2000 aboard his famously media-friendly “Straight Talk Express” presidential-campaign tour bus, winning the New Hampshire primary but later falling short to the well-endowed establishment campaign of George W. Bush.

McCain was well aware of the corrupting power of big money, having suffered from it in that first presidential race. Working in harness with Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat, McCain sponsored the McCain-Feingold Act, which imposed reasonable curbs on campaign fund-raising, until a conservative Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision in 2010 in effect nullified it. 

Meanwhile, McCain warmed up for another presidential run in 2008 and, as part of that mission, came to Memphis in April 2007 to address the Economics Club. Before a turnaway crowd at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn, he unveiled an economics program that was hardcore conservative Republican — all laissez-faire and belt-tightening measures. 

Not very exciting, but the kind of thing, he might have hoped, that would soften the GOP establishment’s  memory of him as the reform-minded party-line-crossing outlier who had almost stolen the party’s presidential nomination away from Bush in 2000.

The fact was, McCain’s second presidential campaign was slumping badly, and at a press conference after his economics speech, encouraged by his courtly manner as he insisted on shaking hands in advance with each member of the attendant media, I made bold to ask him to account for his relatively dismal fund-raising thus far (he was in third place in Republican ranks, behind both Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani).  

The senator said flatly, “Because I didn’t do a better job.” Asked why that was, McCain answered, “Because I’m not competent enough, I guess.” It’s hard to imagine another candidate being quite that self-effacing — or candid.

Competent fund-raiser or not, McCain had the staying power, or the stature, or the what-have-you to endure in that race, even when most of his money ran out and his staff evaporated. Not quite a year later, he had won the New Hampshire primary again, would go on to win the Republican nomination and ran an honorable race for the presidency against Barack Obama.

Along with his defiant independent streak and his compulsive truth-telling, McCain was also blessed, it is reliably said, with a short fuse and an explosive, near-volcanic temper. Hearing about this, I made it a point to ask each of Tennessee’s two U.S. Senators if they had ever been on the receiving end of it. 

Said Lamar Alexander: “Yes, I have,” adding after a pause, “There are very few of us [senators] who haven’t.”  Said Bob Corker: “Yes. Very early on, I was a party to that. It’s not an urban myth. It’s just a fact.”

Corker added: “But at the same time, John has been a true American hero, and he feels very strongly about the positions he holds, and when he disagrees with you, he lets you know.” 

It is well known, surely,  that McCain had serious disagreements with Donald Trump, and equally well known that he let the president know — most recently after Trump’s Helsinki summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, when, bravely waiting out his inevitable death from incurable brain cancer in Arizona, McCain issued a statement lamenting that, in “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president,” Trump had “abased himself … abjectly before a tyrant.”

John McCain never abased himself, not in captivity in Hanoi and not in his distinguished public life thereafter. We should salute this solitary, honorable man, even if Trump won’t.  

• With several of its newly elected eight members-to-be looking on, the 13-member Shelby County Commission that was elected in 2014 held its last public meeting on Monday. They voted to override the veto of outgoing county Mayor Mark Luttrell of a commission ordinance prohibiting the mayor’s office from hiring special counsel to sue the commission — one last shot in a two-year battle between the legislative and executive powers. 

And, with time running out, the commission shelved a resolution calling for change in the functioning of EDGE, the city/county board charged with spurring economic growth. As one of her last acts, outgoing Commission chair Heidi Shafer has appointed a blue-ribbon task force of returning commissioners and community leaders to begin meeting with an eye toward making recommendations for further action.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

The Pie Folks introduce a pie mix.

CREDIT: Michael Donahue

If you like Audrey Anderson‘s banana cream pie from The Pie Folks, get in the kitchen and make one of your own — using her instant banana cream pie mix, of course.

Anderson, owner/chef at The Pie Folks & Bistro in Cordova, now has her Ape Wild Banana Cream Pie Filling mix in Kroger stores in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

This began about a year ago. One of her customers who works at Kroger, said, “Your pies are so good, I’m going to have somebody from Kroger reach out to you,” Anderson says.

Michael Donahue

Going bananas in the bakery — The Pie Folks’ Audrey Anderson shows off her instant banana cream pie.

Someone from the regional corporate office then came by and said, “I don’t eat that much sweets.” He took an “itty bitty bite” and said, “Your pies are really good.”

Anderson then met with other people from the regional corporate office, who told her they wanted to go with the banana cream pie.

“I had to get a chemist to formulate the flavor. They formed my recipe into a dry mix. I don’t know how they did it, but they did it. You give them your recipe, and they do their magic on it.”

It took a few times for the chemists to come up with the exact taste, Anderson says. They would send the mix to her overnight by FedEx in Ziploc bags. “It took probably 10 times to get it like mine. Sometimes it was too sweet. Sometimes not sweet enough. They needed to bring up the banana flavor in it sometimes. Things like that. We got the perfect one.”

The pie “had to taste exactly like the one I was making,” she says.

To make the pie, one banana, one eight-ounce tub of whipped topping, a half cup of water, and one graham cracker crust also are needed. The banana is sliced on top of the graham cracker crust. The filling mixture then is spread over the bananas.

You don’t bake it, Anderson says. “It has to set up. When you make it, it’s not going to be totally liquid, but kind of soft. It’s got a six-hour set-up time so it will be firm enough for you to be able to slice it.”

Anderson didn’t think the banana cream would be the first of her pies to be made into a mix. “I thought the chocolate pie would be my golden child. I really thought that would be the one. You never know how things will happen.”

Born in Tunica, Anderson only made “sweets” — cookies and candy — at home. “My mother had 12 kids. None of the kids ever cooked. My mom did all the cooking. Whenever she had a baby, my daddy did the cooking.”

Anderson made her first pie after she was married; she made her mother’s pumpkin pie from memory. “My mother never wrote out a recipe,” she says.

Anderson opened her first bakery, The Poconut Pie Factory, in 1997 in the Eastgate Shopping Center. It was named after the coconut sweet potato pie, which was the bakery’s signature pie. Anderson’s Slap Yo Mama Chocolate Pie later became her signature pie. The bakery moved to Olive Branch, where it was re-named The Pie Folks, then to Germantown and, finally, to Cordova.

Anderson serves 19 of her 27 flavors of pies each day at The Pie Folks & Bistro. The pies are available by slice, half, and whole. She also bakes cupcakes and serves lunch.

She is planning more pie mixes. “The next one is going to be my apple and my peach pie. I’m going to make it to where you can use apple pie filling from the can. And put a recipe on there if you want to do fresh apples.”

Anderson currently uses her pie mix to make her banana cream pies at the bakery. “It’s my mix. It saves me time. It takes me 30 minutes to make a pie, to do everything. Now I can make it in five minutes.”

The Pie Folks, 1028 North Germantown Parkway, 752-5454

The Pie Folks introduce a pie mix.

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Best Bets: Lazy Woman’s Bread Pudding

CREDIT: Michael Donahue

Michael Donahue

Michael Donahue

Lazy Woman’s Bread Pudding

I tried Peggy Brown’s no-cook banana pudding, which is super delicious. So, when she told me also makes her own bread pudding, I had to try that, too.

What made it more enticing was the name: “Lazy Woman’s Bread Pudding.”

“To me, it’s just a shortcut from cooking it the way my grandma did,” says Brown, chef/owner of Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking. “I didn’t want to do a whole lot of work, so I just decided to do it that way.”


The ingredients in Brown’s unconventional bread pudding include instant vanilla pudding. She uses day-old bread, but she also uses day-old cinnamon rolls and honey buns.

“My grandma, she beat all the eggs and she did it step by step. I just use the vanilla pudding. I don’t use the cornstarch. I don’t use the eggs. I don’t use a lot of the stuff they use.

“My grandma made bread pudding all the time. Back in the day, people didn’t throw anything away. We had biscuits every day. My grandma would keep all the old biscuits. When she had enough, she’d crumble them all up and make a bread pudding.”

Brown began making her Lazy Woman’s Bread Pudding eight or nine years ago. “It tastes about like the ones she made.”

When Brown poured that custard over the bread, I knew it was going to taste fabulous.

If you’re lucky, you’ll hit a day when she serves her bread pudding at her restaurant. “Every once in a while we serve bread pudding. We don’t serve it a whole lot, but we serve it.”

Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking is at 326 South Cleveland; (901)-474-4938.

Best Bets: Lazy Woman’s Bread Pudding

Categories
News News Blog

Memphis Pets of the Week (Aug. 30-Sept. 5)

Each week, the Flyer will feature adoptable dogs and cats from Memphis Animal Services. All photos are credited to Memphis Pets Alive. More pictures can be found on the Memphis Pets Alive Facebook page.

[slideshow-1]

Categories
News News Blog

Tennessee Tourism Breaks Record (Again)

CREDIT: Joe Boone

Beale Street

Tourism broke records in Tennessee last year and spending in Memphis topped totals from the previous two years.

Tourism spending in the Volunteer State reached a record high of $20.7 billion in 2017. That figure grew 6.3 percent from 2016, according to state tourism officials and the U.S. Travel Association.

Tourism spending in Memphis and Shelby County last year grew 5 percent from 2016. The 11.7 million people who visited here last year spent more than $3.5 billion, according to Memphis Tourism. The group says the data suggests that people are staying longer and spending more money on their trips here.

Memphis Tourism, formerly the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau, markets Memphis to visitors across the U.S. and the world. Their pitch is focused on ”a dynamic culinary scene rooted in BBQ, along with the sounds of a rich music legacy and a new Memphis beat,” according to a news release.

Increased spending in tourism here meant more jobs. Tourism payroll in Memphis and Shelby County last year was $742 million, up $41 million from 2016, according to Memphis Tourism.

“Tourism is economic development, plain and simple,” said Kevin Kane, president and CEO of Memphis Tourism. “Our industry creates and sustains jobs. While the 5 percent year-over-year growth in visitor spending is a very positive sign, we are equally encouraged by the increase in employment numbers along with the growing local payroll for our industry.”

Across Tennessee, tourism created 184,300 jobs last year, according to state data; the growth in job numbers this year was 3.1 percent higher than in 2016.

Last year was the 12th consecutive year that tourism drew more than $1 billion into the coffers of state and local governments.

State tourism officials said they sell Tennessee to visitors on its authenticity, Southern hospitality, food, history, and outdoor vistas and experiences.

AIRBNB

In a related note, Airbnb announced this week that in its first year of a tax agreement with the city, Memphis hosts have remitted $647,000 in home-sharing tax revenue to city coffers.

Airbnb hosts pay a 3.5 percent short-term room occupancy tax and a $2-per-night assessment for the Tourism Improvement District.

Memphis’ agreement with Airbnb was the first of its kind in Tennessee, according to the company. That agreement started a trend, which spread to similar agreements for Knoxville, Chattanooga, and a deal for tax collection through the Tennessee Department of Revenue.

From May 2016 to May 2017, 87,000 have stayed in Memphis Airbnbs. That’s 67 percent more than in 2016.