tumbleweave – Memphis Flyer

Clean Sweep

Traffic slowed to a near halt on Union this weekend when a Midtown woman decided to sweep the stairs of Idlewild Presbyterian Church. It wasn’t the broom that caught motorists’ attention. It was the woman’s choice of attire, which, in this case, was no attire at all. According to reports, Memphis police took the woman to the Regional Medical Center before taking her to jail. Nobody has satisfactorily explained what she was doing with the milk crate or the bag of Kingsford Charcoal pictured below.

Neverending Elvis

Did the ghost of Elvis Presley briefly possess Madonna just at the moment of his passing? According to Joe Henry, Madonna’s songwriting brother-in-law, the King of Rock-and-Roll may have reached out from beyond the grave to give the Material Girl a birthday surprise. Madonna was born on August 16th, and, according to an Elvis Week story published on music-news.com, “when Elvis Presley died on this date in 1977, [Madonna] professed in real-time that she felt his spirit had passed out of his body and through her own in exodus.”

Hair Loss

Fly on the Wall has asked readers to aid us in documenting the lost hairpieces littering the streets of Memphis. Some discoveries are just too important not to share in print. Take, for example, this extremely rare shot of a “scandal weave,” which was discovered in a sack of shredded documents.

Verbatim

“They hijacked the civil rights movement and say it’s the same thing, but it’s not the same thing.” — Memphis pastor Bill Owens, founding president of the Coalition of African-American Pastors, explaining why he opposes same-sex marriage. Owens is encouraging religious leaders to engage in civil disobedience to protest the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. “When we sat at the counters at restaurants, we knew we were going to be arrested. You do things to get arrested, to call attention to it,” Owens said.

In related news, Charles Lee was released on probation after sending a slur-filled bomb threat to the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center and decorating his delightful missive with a German swastika. Authorities had hoped to charged Lee with a hate crime, but charges were reduced because Tennessee’s anti-intimidation laws cover race and religion but don’t include sexual orientation.

Hair Loss

We’ve all seen them. The flipped wig. The tumbling tumbleweave. Memphis is a city of feral hairpieces separated from their owners and left to rot in the street like roadkill. Fly on the Wall is reaching out to readers and asking them not to ignore all this senseless hair loss. If you see a lost wig or some lonely extensions, take a picture and email it to the Fly on the Wall blog. We’ll post it in the hopes that we can reunite some good people with their good hair. Send your photos to davis@memphisflyer.com.

Also, if you know whom this hair belongs to, contact Fly on the Wall. We’ll tell you where it was last seen but can’t guarantee a successful reunion, because we’re not touching that.