Author: Bianca Phillips

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News News Blog

Memphis Shelby Crime Commission Hires Harold Collins

Harold Collins

Former Memphis City Councilman (and 2015 mayoral candidate) Harold Collins has taken a position as vice president for community engagement at the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, announced the commission’s president Bill Gibbons on Thursday afternoon.

Collins had previously worked with the commission under a consulting contract. Now he will lead and direct the day-to-day implementation of efforts to increase citizen involvement in Crime Commission activities. He’ll also be recruiting community partners to help promote and implement the commission’s Operation: Safe Community crime-fighting initiative, which was just revamped to include new strategies.

“Harold’s experience in the community, his former work with the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office, and his service on the Memphis City Council bring a wealth of knowledge to the Crime Commission,” Gibbons said.

“It’s an honor to serve my community in this new role. I look forward to the challenge and sharing the Operation: Safe Community goals with our citizens and having them join our work,” Collins stated.

Collins served on the council from 2008 to 2015. He ran an unsuccessful bid for Memphis mayor against incumbent A C Wharton and current mayor Jim Strickland last year. He also served as a special assistant to Shelby County district attorney Amy Weirich for a number of years.

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News The Fly-By

Q&A with Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem was a young journalist working for New York Magazine in 1968, a few years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1975 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. She’d been sent to cover a meeting in a New York church, where women were sharing their personal experiences with abortion.

“For the first time in my life, I saw women standing up and telling the truth about something that was not supposed to be spoken of in public. The stories were moving, and I realized that one in three American women — then and now — needs an abortion at some time in her life. So why was it illegal and unsafe?” Steinem said. “I had an abortion when I was newly graduated from college and never told anyone. [This meeting] was a great moment of revelation.”

Steinem soon became a trailblazer for women’s equality and reproductive rights, eventually founding the feminist-themed Ms. magazine. Steinem has traveled the globe organizing and lecturing on women’s equality, and she recently published a book — My Life on the Road — on those travels and the impact they’ve had on her life.

She’ll be traveling to Memphis this month to speak at Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis Region’s (PPGMR) annual James Award ceremony at the Hilton Memphis on September 15th. That event will also serve as the local health services provider’s 75th anniversary event.

Steinem took a few minutes to speak about the future of reproductive rights in the U.S., sexism in American politics, and her thoughts on gender identity in the feminist movement. — Bianca Phillips

Gloria Steinem

Flyer: Abortion rights are being challenged in states across the country. Do you worry that Roe v. Wade could be overturned?

Gloria Steinem: We’ve been worrying about that ever since the decision. It would only take a couple of right-wing presidents appointing anti-choice Supreme Court justices to make that happen. There’s a lot of resistance, even though the majority of Americans clearly believe that reproductive freedom is a fundamental human right.

Tennessee’s Planned Parenthood organizations jointly launched the Tennessee Stories Project this year to give women a safe space to share their abortion stories online. That sounds like a virtual version of that meeting you attended in 1968.

There’s nothing like the truth to help us realize that we are not alone, and it is crucial for women to be able to decide when and whether to have children. Whether or not we can make that decision is the biggest factor in whether we are educated or not, healthy or not, able to work outside the home or not, and determines how long we live. It’s a human right.

Sexism seems to have dominated this presidential election. Are we moving backward?

[The equality movement] has been winning quite a lot, so there are waves of backlash. It’s probably peaking in part because, in short order, this country will no longer be a majority European-American or white country. For people who were born into a system that told them that men were superior, white people were superior, and Christians were superior, it’s very upsetting to understand that they are no longer in the majority, and they’re fighting back.

Do you think America is ready for its first female president?

It’s going to be very difficult, but it’s been very difficult for President Obama, too. The right wing has been so hostile to him. If the right wing had cancer and he had the cure, they wouldn’t accept it. They’re just dead set against him. Similarly, the idea that a female human being should be the head of arguably the most powerful nation on Earth is offensive to people who believe in the hierarchy. I did not think in 2008 that this country could elect a woman. I do think we can and must now, but it’s going to be hell.

What young women inspire you?

There are so many more feminists today than there were in my generation or the one that came afterwards. Think about the three young women who started Black Lives Matter [Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi] or Lena Dunham or America Ferrera. Sometimes I think I just had to wait for some of my friends to be born.

Where do trans women and non-binary women fit into the struggle for women’s rights?

It seems to me to be all the same struggle. We invented the idea of gender. It doesn’t exist. The old languages — Cherokee, Bengali, the oldest African languages — do not have he or she. They don’t even have gendered pronouns. We’re all trying to achieve a world where you are a unique individual and a human being.

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News News Blog

Shelby County Commission Wants to Study New Rules for Drilling Wells into Aquifer

TVA is replacing the Allen coal plant (above) with a new gas plant, and they’re looking at drilling wells into the Memphis Sand aquifer to cool that new plant.

The Shelby County Health Department has already issued three permits to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to drill wells into the Memphis Sand aquifer to access cooling water for its new gas-powered Allen Combined Cycle plant.

Two more permits for wells are being considered, but at a Shelby County Commission committee meeting on Wednesday morning, Commissioner Steve Basar asked the Health Department not to issue those permits without coming to the commission first. Basar and Commissioner Heidi Shafer also recommended the formation of a committee that would look at updating the codes for drilling wells into the aquifer — the source of the region’s drinking water.

“What was acceptable 10 to 20 years ago may not be acceptable now. We need to evolve and move on and change the way we’re doing things,” Basar said.

At that meeting, Bob Rogers, manager of the Health Department’s pollution control program, told the commission that current codes say that if a company or resident wants to drill a well and has the proper design and installation plan, the department generally issues a permit. He said there are some restrictions, including a restriction on water use for non-circulating systems, meaning the water is used and discarded.

At issue are the permits TVA has requested to drill into the Memphis Sand aquifer for up to 3.5 million gallons of water per day to cool the new, under-construction gas plant. In 2014, when the TVA approved plans for the Allen Combined Cycle gas plant that will replace the Allen Fossil coal plant in 2018, they said they’d be using wastewater from the nearby Maxson Wastewater Treatment Plant for its cooling water system.

But those plans have turned out to be too expensive, according to a report from TVA, since using wastewater would first require treatment due to pollutants in that water. The TVA looked a few alternatives  — either drilling five wells into the aquifer and pulling water directly from the ground, purchasing potable water from Memphis Light, Gas, & Water (MLGW), or some combination of the two. If potable water is purchased from MLGW, that water would come from both the Memphis Sands and the Fort Pillow aquifers, but the TVA environmental assessment report says MLGW cannot sell the TVA enough water to meet peak demand.

The TVA published a supplemental report on those proposals in April, but the entity did not seek public comment. That’s not required by law, but TVA did seek comments for its original report detailing the options for switching from a coal plant to a gas plant.

Scott Banbury, conservation program coordinator for the Tennessee Sierra Club, spoke at the county commission meeting, and he said those new codes should include public notice for drilling permits. 

At a Sierra Club-hosted panel discussion on the issue in August, MLGW President Jerry Collins told the crowd that if TVA had to take water from the aquifer, he’d prefer the entity buy potable water from MLGW rather than pump directly. Either way, it comes out of the aquifer, but Collins said a purchase from MLGW would allow for more oversight.

“That would keep your rates low, and we could monitor how much they’re using. Also, we take out the iron and add phosphate, which makes it much less corrosive,” Collins said at that panel meeting. 

At the Shelby County Commission committee on Wednesday, Tyler Zerwekh, administrator of environmental health services for the Health Department, revealed that the department has issued 25 well permits in the past 12 months, and that includes wells for residential and industrial use. In total, there are 841 quasi-public wells (meaning at least some of the water is for public use) in 641 locations. That does not include wells for residential use.

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Memphis Gaydar News

OUTMemphis Closes on Property for Youth Housing Project

This map shows where the OUTMemphis youth homeless shelter will be located.

OUTMemphis (formerly the Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center) has closed on a piece of Shelby County Land Bank property at 2059 Southern for its project to house homeless LGBTQ young adults ages 18 to 25.

The sale closed on Wednesday. According to a letter from OUTMemphis to the Shelby County Board of Adjustments (BOA), the proposed project will span three parcels on Southern near the Cooper-Young neighborhood. OUTMemphis is requesting a zoning variance from the BOA to use shipping containers to create “comfortable and unique living spaces for our youth.”

They’re also requesting a variance to increase the number of parking spaces allowed on the site to five spaces. Each parcel will have a maximum of four residents, so the parking will allow for one guest spot.

“We have modeled the project after other, similar facilities in cities such as New York and Ohio and have taken into account things that have proven to be successful. We plan to have 24-hour surveillance cameras around the facility for protection of our young adults as well as for neighborhood security. The site will have 24-hour staff supervision of all young adults present on the property to ensure order and respect of the neighborhood,” reads the letter to the BOA.

The project serves a need currently unmet in Memphis, according to the letter.

“Currently there are no secure options in Memphis for this population. Emergency shelters currently in place have proven themselves unsafe for our LGBT young adults. LGBT people make up 7 to 10 percent of the general population but homeless LGBT youth make up between 20 to 40 percent of the homeless youth population. The numbers are overwhelming and have given us a reason to come up with a solution to help our youth here in Memphis. Our project will be a safe haven for young adults who are trying to improve their lives and move forward to a more stable place of their own,” according to the letter.

The variance request will be heard at the BOA meeting on Wednesday, September 28th.

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News The Fly-By

President Jimmy Carter Talks Habitat, Politics, and Memphis

CREDIT: Habitat for Humanity of Greater Memphis

Last August, former President Jimmy Carter announced that he had stage IV metastatic melanoma — a type of skin cancer — that had spread to his liver and brain. In November, despite his poor health, Carter traveled to Memphis to announce that he’d be back this summer for Habitat for Humanity’s 33rd annual Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project.

“I told the news reporters I’d be back next year. I didn’t know if I was going to come back or not,” said Carter last week from the Memphis worksite. He’s cancer-free now, thanks to a new cancer drug called Keytruda.

Carter, his wife Rosalynn, and country stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood spent all of last week in Memphis helping more than 1,500 volunteers for Habitat for Humanity of Greater Memphis build 19 new homes in Bearwater Park, just north of Uptown. They also worked on 10 neighborhood beautification projects in Uptown and six “aging in place” projects.

Last Thursday, after wrapping up a day’s work in the Memphis heat, Carter took a few minutes to talk with the Flyer about cancer, his work with Habitat, his Sunday school classes, and the current presidential election season. — Bianca Phillips

Habitat for Humanity of Greater Memphis

Jimmy Carter

Flyer: What’s it like getting back to good health after such a scare?

Jimmy Carter: I feel like I have a second chance at life. A year ago in August, I thought I had two or three weeks to live. It’d already moved to part of my liver, and I’ve had four different cancers in my brain. I was prescribed some new medicine, and it worked on me, thank goodness. But I’m still checking my cancer status pretty regularly. So far, I’ve been very lucky.

You’ve been doing these annual Habitat projects since 1984. How did you get started with Habitat?

We had worked on Habitat projects in our local town for a couple of years. Then, [Habitat] had a very serious problem in New York City, and we thought we’d get maybe six people to go with us. But we got 42 people to go up with us, and it’s grown from there. We went back to New York the second year and Chicago the third year. Then we started going overseas every other year, so we’ve been to 14 foreign countries, some of them several times. The largest we had was 14,000 volunteers at one time, and we built 293 houses in five days. That was in the Philippines.

Are there any Habitat homeowners whose stories have stuck with you?

I met one [future Bearwater Park Habitat homeowner] here Monday morning, and he told me that seven years ago, he was living under a bridge. He was addicted to drugs, and he decided to turn his life around. He got a job at a fast food place, and now he’s in charge of Chick-fil-A’s kitchen. He told me about all the different sandwiches that Chick-fil-A makes.

What construction skills are you best at?

The detail work. I’m a furniture maker. I make beds and chairs. So I like the detail work at the end of a project. Today, I’ve been putting on siding, and the first day, I got make the walls. I can do the whole thing.

You teach Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. Are you there most Sundays?

We try to be in Plains on most Sundays. When I’m not there on Sunday, the town kind of dries up. Nobody’s going to the local restaurants. But when I’m there, we have anywhere from 200 to 850 visitors coming to Plains. We only have 650 residents to start with, so we double the size of the town when I teach Sunday school.

What do you make of this presidential campaign season?

It’s been an unprecedented campaign season. The standards of campaigning and criticizing your opponents have never been this bad. There’s been a massive infusion of money into campaigns from very wealthy people, so the [wealthy] have a lot more influence now. Once the campaign is over and the candidate goes into office, no matter which party they represent, they’ll have very rich people who helped them get into office, and now they’ll have access to them and their lobbyists. The average family doesn’t have lobbyists to take care of them. That’s been the cause of a growing disparity in income between the richest people and the poorest people.

Who are you voting for?

Well, I’m a Democrat, and I’ve always been a Democrat.

Have you had any time to explore Memphis?

We’ve been to Beale Street. We went to Central BBQ. We had a visit to the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid, and we went up to the top. It’s one of the most remarkable stores in the world, and it’s right here in Memphis. It’s a wonderful tourist attraction y’all have. I’m an outdoorsman — a hunter and a fisherman. [We’re staying] on the 18th floor of a hotel, and when we got to the top of the Pyramid, we could look down on our hotel room. And it’s a wonderful view of the Mississippi River.

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News News Blog

Pets of the Week

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.


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Memphis Gaydar News

OUTMemphis is New Name for MGLCC

The Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center (MGLCC) has changed its name to OUTMemphis in an effort to be more inclusive of the entire gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer community.

OUTMemphis was established as the MGLCC more than 27 years ago, and although the center has served the entire community through its programs, the original name didn’t include a mention of the bi, trans, and queer communities that may not identify as gay or lesbian. The center began considering a name change eight years ago as it began adding paid staff and expanding its services.

“Changing our name reflects our efforts to be more responsive to and inclusive of all LGBTQ people in Memphis and the surrounding areas,” says Will Batts, OUTMemphis Executive Director, in a press release. “Our new name mirrors the change this organization began eight years ago. It honors the diversity of our board, our staff, our volunteers, our visitors, and our services.”

OUTMemphis’ programs range from support networks, social activities (like potlucks), HIV testing, and workshops to educate the wider public about LGBTQ issues. OUTMemphis is also working to launch a project that will house homeless LGBTQ teens.

Here’s a statement from OUTMemphis’ press release on the name change:

We have known for a while that our name did not reflect our full identity — as individuals, as an agency, or as a community. So we set about to change it. No combination of letters describing our individual identities could do full justice to our diversity; no acronym would encompass every way in which we define and describe ourselves. So rather than focus primarily on our individual identities, we chose a name that would express our vision, our mission, our hopes, and our dreams of a living in a world that respects all LGBTQ people. Thus we have become OUTMemphis: The LGBTQ Center for the Mid-South.

Regardless of how we identify as individuals, we all seek a world where we can live openly, honestly and authentically. We desire a community that celebrates and respects us fully as parts of the whole. A community that respects US, and not a caricature or incomplete identity we put on simply to live in peace. We each deserve to live as openly as WE choose to be. We expect the freedom to be open about who we are and about whom we love. We deserve to be OUT, as OUT as we choose to be. Working to make that vision a reality is what we do every day at — in dozens of ways, in hundreds of settings, and for thousands of clients and allies each year.

Just as our new name highlights our vision of a better world, our new image reflects our mission. The rainbow illustrates the diversity, passion, and POWER of our people, interlocked and CONNECTED through a central hub, working to EDUCATE ourselves and others about the LGBTQ experience, and turning that knowledge into ADVOCACY that demands equality and safety for all of us wherever we are. We do not imagine ourselves the only place where this happens. However, as the only center like us for several hundred miles in every direction, we have a special responsibility to serve as many people as we can, as best as we can, and in as many ways as we can.

Our movement — the LGBTQ struggle for full equality and inclusion — has made too many advances to accept retreat. We understand that not every person can be out and fully honest. We know that right now we live in a world where the costs of being out can be too high to bear for some people. As an agency and as a movement, even with that understanding, we can no longer accept being silent, being hidden, or being in the closet. Someday in the future, there may be no need for coming out, because there is no “in.” Until that day, we will continue to fight, to educate, to support, and to stand proud. Open, authentic, and OUT.

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News News Blog

MATA Security Guard Placed on Diversion in Passenger Death

Adicus Mitchell

A private security guard responsible for pushing a Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) passenger, which resulted in that passenger’s death, has been placed on diversion for three years. 

On May 6th of last year, a bus driver at the North Main terminal alerted security guard Adicus Mitchell that he had an unruly passenger on board, and Mitchell responded by forcefully pushing the passenger off the bus. The passenger, 69-year-old Robert Gray, landed face-first and lay motionless on the concrete. Mitchell wasn’t a MATA employee but was hired to as a security guard at the terminal.

Gray was hospitalized in critical condition and later transferred to a long-term care facility. He died there from complications from his fall on August 3rd, 2014. Gray had been allegedly been making obscene remarks to a female passenger when the driver alerted Mitchell.

Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Lee Coffee granted Mitchell’s request for diversion, a type of probation that will erase the conviction from his record after three years of good behavior.

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News News Blog

President Jimmy Carter Discusses His Work with Habitat

CREDIT: Habitat for Humanity of Greater Memphis

Habitat for Humanity of Greater Memphis

Jimmy Carter

A year ago this month, former President Jimmy Carter announced that he had a form of skin cancer that had spread to his brain. Just a year later, 91-year-old Carter and his wife Rosalynn are out in the Memphis heat building houses for the 33rd Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project for Habitat for Humanity.

“A year ago in August, I thought I had two or three weeks to live. It’d already moved to part of my liver, and I’ve had four different cancers in my brain,” said Carter in an exclusive interview with the Flyer during a break from installing siding on a Habitat house near Uptown. “I was prescribed some new medicine, and it worked on me, thank goodness.”

The Carters announced that they’d be working on this project to build 19 new homes in Bearwater Park, just north of Uptown, last November. Their planned 32nd Habitat project in Nepal last year was canceled due to civil unrest in that country, so the presidential pair came to Memphis instead. They built one home then and made the announcement that the 33rd project would come to Memphis in 2016. But he had cancer then, and he said he wasn’t sure he’d make it back. 

“I told the news reporters I’d be back [this] year. But I didn’t know if I was going to come back or not,” Carter said.

Now cancer-free, Carter is back to work — working from about 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily this week alongside his wife (she’s 89) and country stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, who are also in Memphis helping with the Habitat project. The four are working on a house together, one of 18 new homes along a residential street called Unity Lane. The Carters started their annual Habitat project in 1984, and each year, they travel to a different location around the world. 

“We’ve been to 14 foreign countries, some of them several times. The largest we had was 14,000 volunteers, and we built 293 houses in five days. That was in the Philippines,” Carter said.

In Memphis, 1,500 volunteers are working on the project, and they’ve traveled from all over. The recipients for the 19 homes have already been selected by Habitat for Humanity of Greater Memphis, and most have been out working on their own homes on the site.

Damonic Davis has been working on her home all week. She and her two young kids have been living with her mom and sharing one room since Davis divorced a couple years ago. She and the others must put in 350 to 500 hours of sweat equity to qualify for the program.

“I’ve been divorced for about two years, and Habitat is helping me and my family get our very first house. It’s giving me the ability to provide stability, financially and shelter-wise, for my children,” Davis said.

Carter said, earlier in the week, he met another Memphis Habitat house recipient who had been homeless and addicted to drugs just a few years back.

“He told me that seven years ago, he was living under a bridge. He was addicted to drugs, and he decided to turn his life around,” Carter said. “He got a job at a fast food place, and now he’s in charge of Chick-fil-A’s kitchen. He told me about all the different sandwiches Chick-fil-A makes.”

The Carter project is helping Memphis Habitat complete their five-year commitment to build 50 homes and do 100 critical repairs in Uptown.

“We’ve already done 32, so this will put us over 50,” said Habitat for Humanity of Greater Memphis President and CEO Dwayne Spencer.

In addition to building 19 new homes, the Carter project is also working on 10 neighborhood beautification projects, like planting shrubs and grass and doing touch-up painting.

“We did a windshield survey of the community and identified houses that we thought needed some love and care. We knocked on doors and asked if they’d be receiving of it,” Spencer said.

They’re also doing six “aging in place” projects, which means building ramps for seniors. That work is funded through the Plough Foundation.

When asked why they chose Memphis this year, Carter took a moment to praise the Memphis Habitat organization.

“They offer a wide range of services that other Habitats don’t provide. For example, if you’re over 75 years old, and you have a broken window or a door that won’t shut, [they’ll fix it]. For instance, last year [when we were in Memphis], we worked on a house where one side of the living room was six inches lower than the other side because the foundation had rotted out.”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Bardog celebrates eight years with 5K and street fest.

CREDIT: Bardog

In 2010, as local restaurateur Aldo Dean was planning for Bardog’s second anniversary alley party, one of his former employees tossed out another idea.

“She wanted to hold a 5K for our Salty Dogs running club, and she wanted to do it for charity. One of our bar patrons, Kevin Washburn, had a son who was being treated for leukemia at St. Jude, so I said, why don’t we donate the money to [Kevin’s] family? But Kevin said St. Jude pays for everything, so why don’t we donate the proceeds to St. Jude?” says Dean, who also owns Slider Inn and Aldo’s Pizza Pies.

That former employee, Jen Barker, also worked at Breakaway Running, so the locally owned running store got involved in organizing the event.

“I don’t know anything about running a race, so that’s why we got Breakaway involved,” Dean says.

Thus, the Breakaway Bardog 5K was born. The 3.1-mile race has coincided with Bardog’s outdoor anniversary party ever since. The race and party — now dubbed the Monroe Avenue Street Festival — is scheduled for Sunday, August 28th.

That first year, the race attracted a little more than 200 runners, many of whom were associated with Bardog’s Monday night running club, the Salty Dogs. But last year, Dean said the race involved 1,500 runners and raised $32,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Bardog

The Breakaway Bardog 5K draws an impressive crowd.

Runners form fund-raising teams, and the team that raises the most for St. Jude will win a $2,000 bar tab at Bardog. The group with the second highest fund-raising total will get 10 pairs of running shoes from Breakaway.

The race starts at 9 a.m. at Bardog and makes a loop around downtown. Beer bottle-opener medals featuring the Bardog logo will be awarded to the fastest runners in each age group. Afterward, there’s a post-race party, and runners get access to free beer and food until 11:30 a.m.

“The race and the post-race party kicks into the Monroe Avenue Street Festival, so most of the runners stick around and party all day,” says Bryan Roberson, owner and manager of Breakaway. Roberson and his girlfriend, Jessica Grammer, codirect the Breakaway Bardog 5K.

At 11:30 a.m., the Monroe Avenue Street Festival opens to the public. Although it’s the seventh year for the 5K, the festival is in its eighth year. Dean held the first Bardog anniversary alley party in 2009, and the event has now grown so large that he’s had to move the party from the next-door alley to an entire downtown block. Monroe Avenue from Front to Main will be closed to traffic, and the party takes place in the street.

“It’s a fun event, just a big community party. And it’s one of the few local street festivals put on by a business,” Dean says.

The party is free, but some vendors will be accepting donations for St. Jude. Food will include dishes from Dean’s restaurants — Bardog, Slider Inn, and Aldo’s Pizza Pies — as well as food from Felicia Suzanne’s, McEwen’s on Monroe, and other downtown restaurants. MemPops will be on-site with their popsicle food truck. There’s a VIP beer tent with more than 25 craft beers.

“If you’re going to drink more than two beers, it’s worth paying for the beer tent,” Roberson says.

At 4:30 p.m., the eighth annual I Busted Grandma’s Balls contest will pit amateur competitive eaters against one another in a meatball-eating tournament. There’s a dunk tank and a prize raffle benefiting St. Jude.

Bands will play all day, and a few featured include Dead Soldiers, Michael Brothers, the Mighty Souls Brass Band, and the Sheiks.

The event is family-friendly and will include face-painting and cotton candy for the kids.