If you don’t know him already, meet Reuben Skahill, the new “sauce boss”/managing partner at the upcoming Elwood’s Shack Park, which is slated to open in March, at 4040 Park Avenue.
Skahill, 30, co-founder of the Memphis Sandwich Clique and the old Clique HQ, will help cook at Elwood’s if need be, but he insists he’s not a chef.
“I just love food,” Skahill says. “I’m just so passionate. I feel like it’s a testament. If you really like something, if you just go for it 110 percent, you don’t have to be an expert.”
A native of Beverly, Massachusetts, Skahill says, “I lived in a Kosher household, so I had traditional Jewish food. Like chicken cutlets and matzo ball soup.
“I was a ‘competitive eater.’ I have two younger twin siblings. There was always food.”
And there was a strategy involved when sitting down at the table: “You get the biggest piece and you finish first, you get more.”
Skahill’s family moved to Memphis in 2004 after his dad, an air traffic controller, was reassigned. The move was “an incredible culture shock. In the best of ways.”
As a 12-year-old, Skahill had “never experienced the flavors” of the South.
He ate pig for the first time at a sleepover. “His mom made breakfast in the morning and we didn’t tell her we were keeping Kosher.”
And? “I don’t want to disrespect my religion, but it was amazing.”
He continued to experiment. “I felt like I had to make up for lost time. I did enjoy the freedom of these new options: fried chicken, spices, in general.”
Skahill, who prefers brisket over pork barbecue, still keeps a Kosher diet with some items.
He got his first food-related job at 16. “I opened up the Holy Cow at the Memphis Jewish Community Center. It was just like a poolside grill.”
He and a friend served Kosher items, including chicken shawarma and Kosher hot dogs. “I was the register for the most part and he was the griller. And sometimes we would switch.”
Skahill moved to other restaurant jobs, including Amerigo Italian Restaurant, where he worked as a bartender. He ate “everything on the menu” at least once at Amerigo.
In 2019, Skahill “started getting into the nuances of sandwiches.” He co-founded Memphis Sandwich Clique, a Facebook group. “We would just encourage anyone to post sandwiches they like. Tasty things someone could get from a local place that doesn’t advertise.”
Skahill, who no longer is with the group, says, “We found an overwhelmingly zealous audience for sandwiches of all types.”
As for how many sandwiches they posted during the two years he was with the group, Skahill says, “I’m not exaggerating. Over 500,000 posts of sandwiches.”
That led to co-founding Clique HQ, a “sandwich speakeasy” in East Memphis. “That was our online pick up-only sandwich deli restaurant.”
He was working for Memphis Capital when Elwood’s Shack owner Tim Bednarski asked him to come to work for him at the restaurant’s second location. “Tim has been a huge supporter of me and things I have done over the last four or five years. I’ve been a huge Elwood’s fan forever. It changed my life. I had never had a smoked anything.”
Skahill fell in love with Elwood’s Caribbean jerk wings. “Everything on this menu is gold.”
In his new job, Skahill says, “I’ll be in charge of operations for the front and the back of the house.”
He’ll help with cooking, but, he says, “Food wise, I’m helping create our high-end coffee bar menu.”
Skahill is excited about the new place. “Being close to the University of Memphis and being close to the new developments that are going on such as the renovation of the Audubon golf course and Leftwich Tennis Center. And just being a part of the revitalization of the whole neighborhood.
“Anybody I’ve ever met in Memphis has either lived in or partied in or had some crazy experiences in the neighborhood.”
Now, Skahill says he wants to “try and get everybody back in the neighborhood and get some good food.”
Songwriter Burt Bacharach died last week at 94. His songs were mostly old-school paeans to romance — “Walk on By,” “The Look of Love,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “This Guy’s in Love With You,” “Alfie,” to name just a few. Still, they popped up on the Top 40 charts for four decades, alongside the latest from the Stones, Donna Summer, Bruce Springsteen, the Temptations, the Cure, Elvis Costello, you name it. Bacharach left a musical legacy that made millions of people happy, even if only for three minutes at a time. You could do worse in this life.
I mention all this because I’ve been reading a lot about happiness lately, and the fact that we humans are essentially hard-wired for toxic or tonic thinking — stress or respite. It’s well-established now that how we process stress can either help our body heal or cause it to close itself off with anxiety.
I’m dealing with some health issues, so I’ve spent a lot of time recently consulting with Dr. Google. And even though my prognosis is pretty good, I still take heart from reading the vast trove of anecdotal “power of positive thinking” stories. These are genuine NIH medical histories, not hippie fantasies or Mexican-miracle-cures. For example, countless serious studies using placebos have demonstrated that if someone believes a medicine is helping, it will, even if it’s not medicine. Similarly, what were once considered “quack” remedies, including meditation and holistic practices, and even certain mushrooms long used in Chinese medicine, are now being tested with promising results. So that reishi mushroom tincture I take every morning couldn’t hurt, right?
Once, virtually every system of healing around the globe, from primitive jungle tribes to the kingdoms of Renaissance Europe, treated the mind and body as a whole. Then, 300 years ago or so, Western medicine started to see them as two distinct entities: The body came to be perceived more as a machine with replaceable, repairable, independent parts, with little medical connection to the mind’s influence. This led to great advances in surgery, trauma care, and pharmaceuticals, but it ignored the vital connections between mind and body, the recognition that the mind and body are not separate, but one. Our healthcare system is still primarily geared to medicate and operate, but thankfully the recognition of holistic strategies has also re-emerged.
So, back to the mind: If there are two options, what mental habits are tonic? And which are toxic? Meditation is probably the purest form of tonic thinking — just focusing on breathing and clearing one’s mind. Listening to music is tonic, as is any activity that gets your mind and body into a cohesive flow. As for toxic thinking? It’s dealing with stress. It’s worry. It’s tossing and turning at night over unpaid bills or that fight with your spouse or the pain in your chest that won’t subside. Learning to recognize stress and how to counter it is as medically necessary as remembering to take that evening cholesterol tablet.
In my, er, research, I rediscovered a book by Norman Cousins called Anatomy of an Illness. This book was a big deal in the 1960s, mainly because it was one of the first accounts of someone who ignored the medical establishment and succeeded in curing himself — and because Cousins was a well-known writer and the editor of the then-popular national magazine, Saturday Review. (I should add here that I was briefly managing editor at SR in the 1980s and had occasion to work with Cousins for a few months.)
At any rate, in 1964, Cousins was told he had ankylosing spondylitis — a crippling and irreversible disease — and should get his affairs in order. Faced with spending the short remainder of his life wasting away in a hospital room, Cousins checked into a hotel, and with the help of a sympathetic doctor, took massive amounts of vitamin C and spent hours every day watching comedies by the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields and reading humorous books, his thesis being that laughter would free his brain from worry and negativity. It was a good call. His illness disappeared and his book became a huge bestseller, and he beat the raindrops falling on his head. You could do worse in this life, Alfie.
Basira Mohammed (Photo: Courtesy Mid-South Black Film Festival)
When Black Panther hit the big screen in 2018, it broke records and became the highest grossing film directed by a Black filmmaker. Before then, local filmmaker and director William Edwards says, “The running thing in Hollywood was that you couldn’t have a Black film with a Black director, with a Black cast, and a Black story line and it make money. And with Black Panther, it shattered that myth.”
Coincidentally, that same year, Edwards founded the Global Black Film Consortium, with headquarters in Memphis. Of the organization, Edwards says, “After I wrote a couple of films, I was doing some research on global film, and what I found interesting was that people all over in the global film industry did not feel that the whole continent [of Africa] or the Caribbean or the Black community within the United States were viable film markets. And so what I wanted to do was to figure out a way of creating a platform that would give Black filmmakers on a global level the opportunity to express themselves and get that support.”
From that mission, in early 2020, the Global Black Film Consortium founded the Mid-South Black Film Festival showcasing feature films, short films, documentaries, and other video media submitted by Black filmmakers from around the world. This weekend, the group is gearing up to celebrate its 2022 festival winners with a ceremony on Sunday, featuring a special presentation by internationally award-winning filmmaker Basira Mohammed from Ghana.
“The other component of what I do is I try to get people from all walks of life to just see each other as people as human,” Edwards says. “And I see film as a medium that is very powerful and helps shape society.”
At this moment, especially after the case of Tyre Nichols, Edwards says, “Memphis as a whole is at a very serious crossroads, and how the city leaders and citizens and the police officers handle things, it could either splinter the city further or cause it to come together as one.”
For his part, Edwards hopes to bring people together, so in addition to the awards ceremony this weekend, the group is also hosting a Global Black Taste of Memphis & Youth Expo, where local and global vendors will serve up the cuisines of the African continent, the Caribbean, and the United States. The event is sponsored by Lit Restaurant Supply.
The day will also feature live music, free activities for youth, and food competitions. And, Edwards adds, “We’re gonna send out an appeal to the police department, to the fire department, to the sheriff department, to educators, to clergy, to youth, to Black Greek organizations, and we’re going to have a eating contest with representatives from the various groups. And so that’s just something that we wanted to do, kind of fun, to get the city more connected.”
Muscle Shoals, Alabama, experienced a thunderstorm on Dec. 10 that brought more than lightning and heavy rain, WHNT-TV reported. The city’s utility board manager, James Vance, said lightning struck controls at a sewer pump station, which allowed almost 2,000 gallons of sewage to flow into the streets of the Camden Cove subdivision. The sludge eventually flowed into a stormwater retention pond, and utility crews were able to clean up the mess. [WHNT, 12/13/2022]
New World Order
People. Can’t we all agree that fast food isn’t worth a human life? On Dec. 12 at a KFC restaurant in St. Louis, Fox2-TV reported, a man in the drive-thru asked for corn with his meal. When the employee told him they were out of corn, he made threatening remarks, then drove up to the window displaying a handgun. A 25-year-old employee went outside to speak with the suspect, who allegedly shot him. The victim was hospitalized with his injuries. The suspect took off after the shooting; police are still looking for him. [Fox2, 12/13/2022]
Irony
Early on Jan. 14, in Monterrey, Mexico, Carlos Alonso, 32, allegedly broke a glass door at Christ the King Parish and entered, intending to rob the church, Catholic News Agency reported. But as he tried to flee with a statue of St. Michael the Archangel in hand, he tripped and fell on the angel’s sword, seriously wounding his neck. Passersby saw the injured Alonso and called for help; he is expected to be charged after he recovers from the fall. The statue was unharmed. [CNA, 1/17/2023]
Recent Alarming Headline
On Jan. 16, a drive-thru customer at a coffee shop in Auburn, Washington, wanted more than an extra shot, KCRA-TV reported. As the barista handed Matthew Darnell, 38, his change through the window, a surveillance camera caught him grabbing her arm and pulling her toward him as he fumbled with a zip tie. The barista was able to pull away from him and close the windows as his dollar bills went flying. He drove off, but a distinctive “Chevrolet” tattoo on his arm was captured on video, along with his side profile. Police later reported that Darnell had been arrested at his home in Auburn and was held on $500,000 bail. [KCRA, 1/19/2023]
Molehill, Meet Mountain
After getting into a dispute with staff at Jinling Purple Mountain Hotel in Shanghai on Jan. 10 over a misplaced laptop, a 28-year-old man named Chen decided to escalate, CBS News reported. He crashed his car through the glass lobby doors and careened around the space, knocking over fixtures and terrifying other guests, who tried to get the driver out of the car. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Are you crazy? Are you?” onlookers screamed at him. As he attempted to exit the lobby, he hit a door frame and came to a stop, and police took him into custody. It turns out the laptop had been stolen and was found outside the hotel; no one was injured. [CBS News, 1/11/2023]
Fail
When Minnechaug Regional High School in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, was built in 2012, the district installed a high-tech lighting system that was intended to save on energy costs, NBC News reported. But the software that controls the lights failed on Aug. 24, 2021, and every light in the school has been on since then. Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent for the district, says the glitch is costing taxpayers “in the thousands of dollars per month on average, but not in the tens of thousands.” Teachers have removed bulbs where possible, and staff have shut off breakers to darken some of the exterior lighting. But help is on the way! Parts from China have arrived to fix the problem, which is expected to be completed in February. [NBC News, 1/19/2023]
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries director Francis Ford Coppola was asked to name the year’s worst movie. The question didn’t interest him, he said. He listed his favorite films, then declared, “Movies are hard to make, so I’d say, all the other ones were fine!” Coppola’s comments remind me of author Dave Eggers’: “Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.” In accordance with astrological omens, Aries, your assignment is to explore and embody these perspectives. Refrain from judging efforts about which you have no personal knowledge. Be as open-minded and generous as you can. Doing so will give you fuller access to half-dormant aspects of your own potentials.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Artist Andy Warhol said, only half in jest, “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art.” More than any other sign, Tauruses embody this attitude with flare. When you are at your best, you’re not a greedy materialist who places a higher value on money than everything else. Instead, you approach the gathering of necessary resources, including money, as a fun art project that you perform with love and creativity. I invite you to ascend to an even higher octave of this talent.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): You are gliding into the Season of Maximum Volition, Autonomy, and Liberty. Now is a favorable time to explore and expand the pleasures of personal sovereignty. You will be at the peak of your power to declare your independence from influences that hinder and limit you. To prepare, try two experiments. 1. Act as if free will is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing. Then visualize what your destiny would be like. 2. Act as if free will is real. Imagine that in the coming months you can have more of it at your disposal than ever before. What will your destiny be like?
CANCER (June 21-July 22): The ethereal, dreamy side of your nature must continually find ways to express itself beautifully and playfully. And I do mean “continually.” If you’re not always allowing your imagination to roam and romp around in Wonderland, your imagination may lapse into spinning out crabby delusions. Luckily, I don’t think you will have any problems attending to this necessary luxury in the coming weeks. From what I can tell, you will be highly motivated to generate fluidic fun by rambling through fantasy realms. Bonus! I suspect this will generate practical benefits.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Don’t treat your allies or yourself with neglect and insensitivity. For the sake of your mental and physical health, you need to do the exact opposite. I’m not exaggerating! To enhance your well-being, be almost ridiculously positive. Be vigorously nice and rigorously kind. Bestow blessings and dole out compliments, both to others and yourself. See the best and expect the best in both others and yourself.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Is there a bug in the sanctuary of love? A parasite or saboteur? If so, banish it. Is there a cranky monster grumbling in the basement or attic or closet? Feed that creature chunks of raw cookie dough imbued with a crushed-up valium pill. Do you have a stuffed animal or holy statue to whom you can spill your deep, dark, delicious secrets? If not, get one. Have you been spending quality time rumbling around in your fantasy world in quest of spectacular healings? If not, get busy. Those healings are ready for you to pluck them.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): There’s a weird magic operating in your vicinity these days — a curious, uncanny kind of luck. So while my counsel here might sound counterintuitive, I think it’s true. Here are four affirmations to chant regularly: 1. “I will attract and acquire what I want by acting as if I don’t care if I get what I want.” 2. “I will become grounded and relaxed with the help of beautiful messes and rowdy fun.” 3. “My worries and fears will subside as I make fun of them and joke about them.” 4. “I will activate my deeper ambition by giving myself permission to be lazy.”
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): How many people would fight for their country? Below I list the countries where my horoscopes are published and the percentage of their populations ready and willing to take up arms against their nations’ enemies: 11 percent in Japan; Netherlands, 15 percent; Italy, 20 percent; France, 29 percent; Canada, 30 percent; U.S., 44 percent. So I surmise that Japanese readers are most likely to welcome my advice here, which is threefold: 1. The coming months will be a good time to cultivate your love for your country’s land, people, and culture, but not for your country’s government and armed forces. 2. Minimize your aggressiveness unless you invoke it to improve your personal life — in which case, pump it up and harness them. 3. Don’t get riled up about vague abstractions and fear-based fantasies. But do wield your constructive militancy on behalf of intimate, practical improvements.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): By the time she was 33, Sagittarian actor Jane Fonda was famous and popular. She had already won many awards, including an Oscar. Then she became an outspoken opponent of America’s war in Vietnam. Some of her less liberal fans were outraged. For a few years, her success in films waned. Offers didn’t come easily to her. She later explained that while the industry had not completely “blacklisted” her, she had been “greylisted.” Despite the setback, she kept working — and never diluted her political activism. By the time she was in her forties, her career and reputation had fully recovered. Today, at age 84, she is busy with creative projects. In accordance with astrological rhythms, I propose we make her your role model in the coming months. May she inspire you to be true to your principles even if some people disapprove. Be loyal to what you know is right.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Charles V (1500–1558) had more than 20 titles, including Holy Roman Emperor, King of Spain, Archduke of Austria, and Lord of the Netherlands. He was also a patron of the arts and architecture. Once, while visiting the renowned Italian painter Titian to have his portrait done, he did something no monarch had ever done. When Titian dropped his paintbrush on the floor, Charles humbly picked it up and gave it to him. I foresee a different but equally interesting switcheroo in your vicinity during the coming weeks. Maybe you will be aided by a big shot or get a blessing from someone you consider out of your league. Perhaps you will earn a status boost or will benefit from a shift in a hierarchy.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Some people I respect regard the Bible as a great work of literature. I don’t share that view. Like psychologist Valerie Tarico, I believe the so-called good book is filled with “repetition, awkward constructions, inconsistent voice, weak character development, boring tangents, and passages where nobody can tell what the writer meant to convey.” I bring this to your attention, Aquarius, because I believe now is a good time to rebel against conventional wisdom, escape from experts’ opinions, and formulate your own unique perspectives about pretty much everything. Be like Valerie Tarico and me.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): I suspect that arrivederci and au revoir and sayōnara will overlap with birth cries and welcomes and initiations in the coming days. Are you beginning or ending? Leaving or arriving? Letting go or hanging on? Here’s what I think: You will be beginning and ending; leaving and arriving; letting go and hanging on. That could be confusing, but it could also be fun. The mix of emotions will be rich and soulful.
Antonio Banderas reprises his role in the Shrek franchise as the feline hero Puss in Boots.
DreamWorks has long been a force to be reckoned with in animation, with financially successful properties like Kung Fu Panda and Trolls. Shrek is DreamWorks’ most beloved franchise, and the company has been able to flawlessly continue the ogre’s legacy by creating spin-offs centered around his sidekick, Puss in Boots. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish has proven to be a sleeper hit, with $555 million in box office earnings and an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film.
This story follows Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas), who has lived many lives as a fearless hero and, being that he is a cat, has had a few lives to spare. Inevitably, he takes a stunt too far and finds himself left with only one remaining life. With death always on his tail, he can no longer be the fearless cat he once was. Instead, he must live the life he has always feared: that of a domestic cat.
Exchanging boots for kitty mittens and unlimited toilet privileges for a shared litter box, Puss prepares for a quiet retirement. Then he hears about the Wishing Star, a magical object hidden somewhere in the Forbidden Forest that will make dreams real. It is not long before Puss straps on his cape and rapier and quests for the star. During his journey, though, he encounters other iconic fairy-tale characters, such as Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) with her Three Bears (Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone, and Samson Kayo), Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), and Jack Horner (John Mulaney), who are all out for the same prize. Diving back into his dangerous lifestyle, Puss has to team up and trust those around him to have any chance at another life. Jack simmers as the main antagonist, who is angry at the world for his lack of fame. Driven by this anger, he wants the Wishing Star to make him the most powerful and recognized creature in the world.
Even though Jack is evil, director Joel Crawford tunes the humor to make sure he’s not too scary. Many jokes throughout the film are geared toward adults, usually coming from Perrito (Harvey Guillén), whose dialogue is sometimes bleeped out for comedic effect.
Aside from the feelings this movie elicits, the screenplay is as entertaining and interesting as the characters themselves. The animation style has a hand-painted look, similar to some scenes from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The noticeable brush strokes and swirling color make the film feel like watching a painting in progress. The landscapes are especially pleasing to the eye.
While I have praised Puss In Boots: The Last Wish heavily, I do have one worry. The film ends with an overt suggestion that the future may yield another Shrek movie. DreamWorks, so far, has done a phenomenal job at upholding the Shrek legacy, but with so many sequels and remakes saturating the film industry, I would hate to see another classic franchise driven into the ground. If Shrek 5 is your plan, DreamWorks, maybe slow your roll just a tad.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish Now playing Multiple locations
When Tina Turner, retired in Switzerland after many decades as one of the most powerful voices in American pop, soul, and R&B, first heard the idea of rendering her life story as a musical, she knew exactly how she felt about it. “No, I’m not interested. No. No. No.” As she wrote of the experience in Rolling Stone in 2019, “I didn’t feel like talking about that stuff from the past because it gave me bad dreams. I was just settling into retirement, a newlywed, content to be Mrs. Erwin Bach, and the last thing on my mind was working anywhere but in my garden.”
But after meeting with the producers proposing the show, her position softened. She thought about “all the people who tell me that my story gives them hope and is my legacy” and ultimately gave the project her blessing. “Then,” she wrote, “I sat back to watch director Phyllida Lloyd and writer Katori Hall do what they do best.”
Those two names alone must have reassured her. U.K.-based Lloyd already had a stellar track record as director of the stage and cinematic versions of Mamma Mia!, which, in using the songs of ABBA, reaffirmed just how successful the “jukebox musical” genre could be. She’d also proven her skills with more serious material like The Threepenny Opera, La Bohème, an operatic version of The Handmaid’sTale, and the Tony Award-nominated Mary Stuart.
At the time, native Memphian Katori Hall was less of a known quantity but had made waves with a play she’d begun while studying at The Juilliard School, The Mountaintop, which reimagined Martin Luther King Jr. on the night before his assassination. After opening in London and winning an Olivier Award in 2010, it went on to a successful Broadway run starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett. But for Tina Turner, perhaps Hall’s greatest qualification was that she was “a Tennessee girl, just like me.”
Zurin Villanueva performing “I Want to Take You Higher” as Tina Turner with the cast of the North American touring production of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical (Photo: Van Zimmerman | MurphyMade)
Taking over from early drafts by Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins, Hall crafted a compelling book for the show, titled Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, which opened in London in the spring of 2018 before moving to Broadway the next year. When that production was nominated for a dozen Tony Awards in 2020 and Adrienne Warren won in the category of best leading actress in a musical, Tina Turner’s instincts were vindicated. And when Hall won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for drama for a later play, The Hot Wing King, it reinforced the impression that, despite the reputation of jukebox musicals for superficiality, Tina was cut from a different cloth.
Now the show has hit the road, making its Memphis debut on Valentine’s Day at the Orpheum Theatre and slated to run there through February 19th. While there’s no denying the importance of the show’s success in London and New York, the current production in Memphis may be its most significant staging yet, in terms of its historical and cultural impact — because for both Hall and Turner, bringing the show to Memphis means bringing it all back home.
Tina Turner (Photo: Craig Sugden)
Nutbush City Limits
As anyone who’s seen the 1993 Oscar-nominated film, What’s Love Got to Do with It, knows, Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock in West Tennessee. Following Jackson Avenue some 50 miles to the northeast will bring you to the town of Nutbush, where a young Anna Mae grew up singing in the Spring Hill Baptist Church. Indeed, that may have been the most accurate thing about the film, which goes on to play fast and loose with the facts as it spins a fanciful version of Turner’s life. As Turner told Oprah Winfrey in 2018, “I watched a little bit of it, but I didn’t finish it because that was not how things went. Oprah, I didn’t realize they would change the details so much.”
As the musical was being created, Turner was determined to make it more true to life, and a crucial part of that was working with Hall. Even then, as Turner tells the Memphis Flyer via email, one shouldn’t assume that Memphis figured in her early life simply by virtue of its proximity.
“Memphis seemed another world away when I was growing up in Nutbush,” she writes. “Our town was so small and the access to the records coming out of Memphis was just from the radio. My life in Nutbush was very focused on my family and the church, and I suppose that was the music that I remember and how I started to sing. It wasn’t until I moved to St. Louis that I started to be more aware of the Memphis music through the local R&B scene.”
Nonetheless, Hall’s Memphis upbringing convinced Turner that she was working with someone who really understood her roots. “From the minute I met Katori I felt she was the right person to tell this story,” Turner says. “We talked so much about growing up in Tennessee and our families’ experiences. Katori understood immediately what it took for me to get to where I did, given where I started. The odds I had to overcome time and again.”
Hall feels the same way about their shared experience. “I grew up listening to Tina’s music because my mom was such an avid fan,” she says. “My eldest sister is named after her! So Tina’s influence and impact on my life has been ever-present. I do think, being a Southern gal myself, born of the Tennessee soil, really helped me step into her shoes a bit, in terms of thinking about everything she had gone through. Though we grew up through completely different times and different eras, the seeds of racism, planted so long ago, unfortunately bloom over and over again in that Tennessee soil. So both her lived experiences and mine inspired me to create this character of Tina that is in the show.”
ZurinVillanueva as Tina Turner and Ann Nesby as Gran Georgeanna (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman | MurphyMade)
We Don’t Need Another Hero
Hall is careful to point out that she took great pains to represent Turner’s character with as much nuance as possible. “The beautiful thing about Tina the person, or Anna Mae Bullock, is that she very much is still Anna Mae,” says Hall. “She has lived her life so bravely, and there’s a fierce transparency to her. I feel as though the character I’ve created based on her and her life is very much closely aligned with the actual Tina. And it’s because we had this icon who was so honest about everything she went through, whether it was her highs or her lows. We have really gone on this journey with her just because of how open she’s been about sharing her story with the world.”
In spite of Turner’s public openness, Hall felt she needed to engage with the star more directly, telling writer Julie Vadnal in 2019 that, in preparing to write the book, she did “several interviews over a few years. I’ve been working on [the musical] for almost five years. And of course, there’s her autobiography — I, Tina — and a movie out there. But for me, it was very important to talk to her again about all the things she had already told the world. Now she had some distance from it and was able to retell it and actually revise parts of our story that had gotten out of her hands.”
Part of that, Hall says, was decentering Turner’s abuse by ex-husband Ike. “Her story characterizes her as a survivor,” says Hall, “like this ultimate survivor, particularly of domestic abuse. And I don’t think people realize that she’s a survivor in other ways. She’s a survivor in terms of her family. She didn’t have the greatest relationship with her mother — in fact, there was quite a toxic relationship there. She was a survivor in terms of the entertainment industry. I think all these dragons combined created an opportunity to really show, yes, there’s a great amount of resilience there when it comes to domestic abuse, but there are other things she had to slay. Whole systems.”
Yet even that broader view of the obstacles Turner faced wasn’t enough, according to Hall. “Oftentimes we don’t allow people who are that powerful and that strong their vulnerability. For me, that was one of the greatest joys of this creative process. I was really allowed inside these complicated feelings she had toward her mother, toward Ike. I’m really grateful she allowed me that opportunity to weave that into her story and into the musical. I think a lot of people are going to be really touched by how cracked-open we get to see Tina be in the musical.”
Naomi Rodgers as Tina Turner (Photo: Matthew Murphy | MurphyMade)
Blow Your Horn, Raymond!
One especially egregious omission in the Hollywood version of Tina Turner’s life was her relationship with a member of Ike Turner’s band long before Ike claimed her hand in marriage. As profiled in the Flyer in 2021, saxophonist Raymond Hill first appears in the history of recorded music when the singer in Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, Jackie Brenston, shouts, “Blow your horn, Raymond! Blow!” on the breakthrough R&B hit, “Rocket 88.” Hill was with Ike’s band in St. Louis when young Anna Mae Bullock joined the group, and Hill and Bullock were involved long before Ike had any romantic inclinations toward his singer.
In the musical, Hill’s role in Tina Turner’s young life is at last being recognized; and that, Turner says, is deeply meaningful to her. “My relationship with Raymond was a very significant relationship in my life, especially because of our son, Craig. Raymond and I met when I was very young, and I had just started working with Ike when our romance began. Raymond had so many years of experience and I feel calling him an unsung hero of Black music is very true. I was very happy that the relationship has found its moment in the musical.”
For Hall, including Turner’s romance with Hill was crucial to the story. “When we talked,” Hall says of her interviews with Turner, “there was still this kind of girlish giddiness about Ray! So many years later! It became super apparent that I would need to not only include him, but also make him part of the narrative structure and drive of the show. Just because of how much he meant to her. As we all know, rock-and-roll is messy. Yet she was able to find love and have a child that she adored. She adored Craig, and it was so heartbreaking when he died in the past few years. So she’s just a woman who, even today, continues to experience so much tragedy.”
Garrett Turner as Ike Turner (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman | MurphyMade)
A Second-Hand Emotion
If What’s Love Got to Do with It cuts quickly to Tina Turner’s relationship and troubled marriage to Ike Turner, skipping Raymond Hill altogether, it also arguably oversimplifies Ike’s character. That was also something Hall was determined to correct as part of getting the Tina Turner story right.
“I knew that was going to be a huge task,” says Hall of complexifying what’s perhaps the most famous abusive marriage in history. “Ike’s pretty much the villain in her story. That’s just the truth. However, as we all know, people are people. People make mistakes. People are a balance of bad and good. I did not ever want to excuse Ike’s behavior, but I wanted people to understand. So I felt that giving the psychological, the social context of where he grew up and what made him who he was so important. That to me allowed for the nuance. There’s a scene where they try to get into a hotel and can’t because of the color of their skin. They have to sleep by the side of the road, and so you have this man who created rock-and-roll, and is an icon himself, still feeling like he’s invisible. I felt it was important to show that psychological complication so people could understand why any human being would displace their anger and try to control another person, especially when that other person is flying higher than you are, when you are just as deserving of recognition and credit. That’s something I really felt proud about. Because I don’t think we’ve gotten that in any story, whether it’s journalistic articles or previous tellings of her story. It felt like a necessity, especially knowing that this may be one of the last retellings of Tina’s life, particularly from a musical perspective.”
The actors who portray Tina Turner on alternate nights of the touring show, Zurin Villanueva and Naomi Rodgers, appreciate this nuance as well. “We have to respect every single character in this show,” notes Rodgers. “Katori did such an amazing job of giving Ike a moment of vulnerability in the show. Even though things didn’t change afterwards, there were still moments of vulnerability where you could remind yourself, ‘Wait, maybe this was the moment Tina forgave him for a quick second.’”
Villanueva agrees. “In scene work, you have to find the love. You can’t just hate someone. It’s not where the interest is. Because you stayed with someone for a reason. If there was no love, you’d walk out the door and that would be the end of the story. So it’s always about the duality, the love and the hate.”
“It Breaks You, Then It Builds You Up”
Such a duality shapes the entire musical, especially as it’s appearing on a Memphis stage. As Hall notes, part of relating to Tina’s roots in the Tennessee soil was recognizing the seeds of racism. The show opens here just as Memphis dominates international headlines for the trauma of police-sponsored terrorism, the latest instance in a long history of such trauma. The idea is not lost on the musical’s two lead actors.
“You can never forget watching your people, your community, in pain, especially a wound that’s been reopened multiple times,” says Villanueva. “It’s really difficult, but we are here to uplift and inspire and give strength as we continue to try and get results, and change our policies so this stuff doesn’t happen. We’re just there to give strength.”
Or, as Rodgers puts it, “It breaks you, then it builds you up, and it comforts you, and then it reminds you of who you are. Because that’s what we went through. And it hits! It shows the most important parts of [Tina Turner’s] life; it includes the hard parts and how you get through it. This is a story for such a time as this, especially for Memphis.”
Ultimately, for Hall, that’s both the irony and the power of having one’s own writing debut on the Memphis stage. “It’s a dream come true, as a hometown girl, to have your work grace a Memphis stage. I definitely feel like I’ve checked something off my bucket list. And I’m overjoyed that in this moment of Tina’s life, after she’s struggled for so much, we’re able to be in the room with her in this figurative way. I just hope that Memphians love and enjoy it just as much as we, as a creative team, have loved and enjoyed bringing her story to the world.”
Turner underscores how deeply having the show debut in Memphis has affected her. “So many forms of music have their roots in Memphis, and my life and career have circled the city so many times,” she writes. “To bring my show to Memphis has huge meaning to me. If you had told me all those years ago as a small child picking cotton in Nutbush that this would happen, I definitely wouldn’t have believed you, and thought you were telling me a fairy tale! It does feel almost like a full circle, to be returning home and to be able to tell my story in such an amazing way.”
Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Sometimes it causes them to fester. This week will mark 12 years since my friend, Jessica Nicole Lewis, was murdered in South Memphis. Twelve years of unanswered questions. Twelve years knowing the man who took her life was able to continue living his, freely and without consequence.
On February 20, 2011, Jessica’s body was found in Mt. Carmel Cemetery, an unkempt graveyard at Elvis Presley and Elliston, about three miles north of Graceland and as many miles south of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. There was evidence of a struggle; she’d been dragged through the grounds and shot in the head, the only clothing left on her battered body was underwear and a single sock.
We’d been close friends throughout high school and college, working two separate jobs together. We dated bandmates and arrived arm in arm to many concerts and parties during those years. She was the fiery, beautiful blonde who took no shit, and I was more or less her sidekick. It’d be impossible to share in this short space how much she meant to me or, after her death, how deep the need for justice would embed itself in me. As weeks and months and years went by with no movement in her case, I’d spend countless hours researching, poking through arrest records and crime reports, going down Facebook rabbit holes, and talking to people who knew her in her final days to try to find a single thread that might lead to her killer.
The following words are never easy to say: Jessica was a prostitute. In her last years, she was a drug addict, with arrests for possession of a crack pipe and solicitation. The last time I saw her, about two and half years before her death, she’d just gotten out of rehab, so I knew she had been struggling. But I had no idea how far she’d fallen. She had a pimp. She practically lived in shady hotels. She walked the streets. She walked the streets. I’ve yet to accept that this was her life and not a Lifetime movie.
Jessica, who was 28 at the time, wasn’t the only victim. On January 27, 2011, a “known prostitute,” according to reports, 31-year-old Tamakia McKinney, was found dead in the middle of Hemlock Street, about a mile from Mt. Carmel. Four days after Jessica’s death, another prostitute, 44-year-old Rhonda Wells, was found in the same cemetery. Two days after the discovery of Wells’ body, a fourth victim was shot in the face and left for dead on nearby Ledger Street. She survived.
A composite image of the suspect | Courtesy Memphis Police Department
Investigators believed the cases were connected. They retrieved shell casings linking two of the victims, as well as DNA samples from each crime scene. The survivor was able to give a description of the shooter: a Black male, around 24 years old, hair in cornrows. He drove a dark-colored Dodge Charger or Chrysler 300. Even with evidence, even with DNA, no one was ever charged. How do you not find a man who killed three women in a month’s time? I’ve formulated a few theories that I won’t get into here. And I’ve covered this case in news articles (within these pages) and a feature-length story (“A Voice for Jessica,” Memphis magazine, July 2016). I have met and interviewed the survivor. I worked closely with the cold case investigator, W.D. Merritt (who was almost as tenacious as I was about solving this case), before he passed from Covid in 2020. With so many murders in this city, I don’t expect much time to be spent investigating a 12-year-old case involving “prostitutes.” But had it been me? Had it been a school teacher, the daughter of a politician, a bank teller, or any other upstanding-citizen label you’d like to apply, these women would have had justice.
Jessica is never far from my mind, but as the anniversary of her murder approaches, I can’t help but paint a picture of her last days, the final horrifying moments before she was killed execution-style in a cemetery. I’ll never forget how the media sensationalized these killings, dehumanized the victims. Does time heal all wounds? Ask their mothers. Ask their children. Ask their friends. You’ll hear a resounding no.
The fight over Tennessee’s strict abortion law is set to start this week in a House subcommittee slated to hear legislation removing the “affirmative defense” for physicians who perform an abortion to save the life of a mother.
State Rep. Esther Helton-Haynes, R-East Ridge, is sponsoring House Bill 883, which will be designed to clear up confusion and enable doctors to make decisions without the threat of prosecution. Doctors can be charged with a felony for performing an abortion under the “trigger” law that took effect last August after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and sent abortion decisions back to states.
“Right now it’s affirmative defense, and there needs to be an exception for the life of the mother,” Helton-Haynes told the Tennessee Lookout. “I believe moms matter. Oftentimes they have babies at home, other children at home that need them, and that’s why I’m carrying the bill.”
The measure could pit Helton-Haynes against Tennessee Right to Life, which was waiting Monday morning to see the legislation’s language. The group opposes a “subjective” decision by physicians to perform an abortion to save a woman’s life but could agree to language that makes those decisions “objective.”
Helton-Haynes, however, said, “I think that’s difficult if a mother’s hemorrhaging, to be objective.” Right to Life wants more diagnostic testing, but sometimes the doctor needs to know what to do and “take care of it,” she said.
The Attorney General’s Office is helping her craft the language in House Bill 883 to make sure it’s constitutionally sound. Republican Sen. Richard Briggs of Knoxville is sponsoring the Senate version.
The Tennessee Medical Association is making HB883 its first initiative for the legislation session. The measure clarifies exceptions to criminal abortion when the life or health of the mother are in danger, including for common procedures such as ectopic pregnancies as well as ending a pregnancy in which a “non-survivable fetal anomaly is diagnosed,” in addition to providing immunity for pharmacists who dispense drugs for inducing abortions, according to a memo from the association.
Right now it’s affirmative defense, and there needs to be an exception for the life of the mother. . . I think that’s difficult if a mother’s hemorrhaging, to be objective.
– Rep. Esther Helton-Haynes, R-East Ridge
The Tennessee Medical Association is encouraging its members to show support for the bill by wearing their white coats and attending Tuesday’s meeting to “convey a “powerful message” to the Legislature.
Briggs, a physician, has been saying for months that the law needs to be clarified so doctors will be able to follow their professional oath and save the life of a pregnant woman without worrying about prosecution. He has acknowledged he didn’t understand the legislation when it passed four years ago and didn’t think the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade.
While it has HB883 on its radar, Tennessee Right to Life is going after lawmakers trying to change the state’s abortion law to provide exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the mother in dangerous pregnancies.
Will Brewer, executive director of Tennessee Right to Life, confirmed that the group opposes a “subjective” decision by a physician to perform an abortion when a mother is going through a dangerous pregnancy, though it could support an “objective” decision.
A group of doctors attempt to get Gov. Bill Lee’s attention after an October 2021 press conference. The Tennessee Medical Association is urging physicians to attend hearings to support legislation to change the state’s abortion laws.(Photo:John Partipilo)
The anti-abortion group is sending emails to constituents encouraging them to challenge legislation that dials back restrictions that took effect in August 2022.
“The Human Life Protection Act is one of the strongest laws in the nation to protect unborn children and is working as legislators intended when they passed it in 2019,” the Tennessee Right to Life email says. Yet the law is “now under attack,” the missive continues.
Co-sponsors added their names to legislation last week allowing for abortions in cases of rape and incest and to remove “affirmative defense” from cases involving the life of the mother in which doctors could face felony charges for performing an abortion for saving a woman’s life.
While talks are under way on some legislation, Brewer said Tennessee Right to Life will not support Senate Bill 857 by Sen. Ferrell Haile and House Bill 1440 by Rep. Iris Rudder, which exempts cases of rape and incest from the offense of criminal abortion.
Despite the addition of sponsors, Brewer said, “I don’t think they have enough momentum to change it, so I don’t think it’s a done deal.”
The group also objects to weakening the affirmative defense portion of the law, though it has been working with lawmakers to come up with a “clarifying” measure, according to Brewer, and that remains the “preferred path.”
Helton-Haynes also is sponsoring HB778, which would limit criminal abortions to “elective” procedures and define those as not medically necessary to prevent the death or serious injury to a pregnant woman. It is sponsored in the Senate by Senate Republican Caucus Chairman Ken Yager of Kingston.
Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and Twitter.
The Young Actors Guild will celebrate 32 years of theatricality and the arts with a grand re-opening of the Harriet Performing Arts Center on Sunday, February 19th. The theme of the re-opening is “The Journey Continues.”
YAG was founded by Memphian Chrysti Chandler in 1991, after feeling that children did not have many outlets to occupy their time after school.
“I saw that children were just idle, not doing anything after school,” said Chandler. “Then I came to find out that the reason a lot of students are not doing anything is because they can’t afford it.”
Chandler recalls that when she was in school, she wasn’t required to pay for extracurricular activities. Sabrina Norwood, executive director for YAG, also said that with arts being taken out of the schools, this provided an opportunity for community organizations to step up.
With these sentiments, Chandler set out to start an organization that allowed children to have affordable performing arts experiences within their community.
YAG initially started with 15 students who would meet in a small theater at LeMoyne-Owen College on Saturday mornings. Years later, more than 30,000 students have been impacted by the lessons taught by Chandler and her team.
The accolades of YAG are not only seen on a local scale, but on a national one as well. Not only does the company celebrate a 98 percent graduation rate from college, but they have performed for the Tom Joyner Morning Show, The Voice, American Idol, former President Bill Clinton, and Oprah Winfrey.
One may wonder what YAG’s formula for success consists of, and according to Sabrina Norwood, the executive director for YAG, the key is accessibility. She said this provides a path for young people to grow and develop. Not only does YAG offer training in the arts, but they also provide ACT and college readiness workshops.
“We believe that any profession that you’re in, artists will certainly excel at all of those,” said Norwood. “That’s why it’s so important for us to be in the community, to be where the young people are, to be where the beat of the community is, because the heart of the community will be developed through programs like ours.”
With a number of accolades and a concrete mission and understanding, it may seem like YAG has been equipped for success; however, until recently, there’s been a key component missing: a permanent home.
While they have been operating for more than 30 years, they haven’t been able to find a space that was “just theirs.”
“We’ve been renting, leasing spaces, and we’ve kind of been from this church to that church and all over the city,” said Norwood. “We were talking, and greatly the mayor’s thinking, as well as some other community people, was that we would have an opportunity to find a space, and we did.”
The Harriet Performing Arts Center, which will be located at 2788 Lamar Avenue, was originally an old firehouse that YAG purchased for only $1.
“From there we started fundraising,” said Norwood. “We chose some nontraditional routes of fundraising, which we chose to sell popcorn, hamburgers, and hot dogs, a little bit of everything in order to fundraise for the interior.”
Norwood said that for the exterior portion, they reached out to local art agencies like ArtsMemphis and Memphis Music Initiative, combined their fundraising efforts with donations, and were able to renovate the exterior.
YAG’s grand re-opening will take place on Sunday, February 19th, at 3 p.m., at 2788 Lamar Ave. There will be a Greater Memphis Chamber official ribbon cutting, live performances, expressions from government officials, and so much more. The event is free and open to the public.
