Tag: Wanda Wilson

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We Recommend We Recommend

Wanda Wilson Memorial

CREDIT: Brandon Dill

Craig Brewer is trying to figure out the best way to honor the life and legacy of Wanda Wilson, the Midtown muse, and former P&H Cafe proprietress, who was interred in her hometown of Parsons, Tennessee. The Poor & Hungry filmmaker, who went on to success in Hollywood with movies like Hustle & Flow and Footloose, doesn’t know if it’s something that can be accomplished in a single event.

“I feel like the arts community needs to check in with each other again,” he says, wondering if there’s anything in Memphis quite like the P&H was when Wanda held court at a little round table at the end of the bar.

Brandon Dill

Wanda Wilson

“You know, if Wanda didn’t exist, if I had just created her for a movie, somebody would say, ‘Craig, you can’t just will somebody like this into existence because you think it would be cool,'” he says, remembering how the earthy, feather-draped beertender had given him such good advice when he was just starting out as a filmmaker.

“She was so instrumental in my career and in my life,” Brewer says. “What I’m left with is this feeling that there isn’t anybody else like her. There’s nobody who’s this fulcrum of all these different people and artists.”

The local arts community and all other denizens of the P&H Cafe can “check in” to pay their respects at “Wanda: A Celebration of the Life of Wanda Wilson” at Playhouse on the Square on Saturday, February 14th.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Everything That’s True

CREDIT: Photo by Fontaine Pearson

Photo by Fontaine Pearson

Darling, we are the light reflected 

Darling, we are the love we made 

Darling, nothing precious is protected 

We’re all trembling like a blossom 

With winter on the way. — Rob Jungklas 

Maybe it’s last week’s passing of Wanda Wilson, the singular and much-loved proprietess of the P&H Cafe, a woman who created and curated a beer joint that once made Midtown feel like a village of like-minded souls. It was a harbor, a place of sanity (and insanity), conversation, friendship, and laughter for those of us of a certain age.

Maybe it’s the rain and the long cold spell and the winter hanging on, but there’s an inevitable sadness that comes when you ponder the passing of people and things. Sometimes you just have to let it in.

Or maybe it was my discovery of Rob Jungklas’ “Everything That’s True,” a perfect and gorgeous song celebrating the temporal, inevitable human condition. Memphis singer Susan Marshall posted Jungklas’ song on her Facebook page and dedicated it to all the “beloved Memphians who have recently passed: Jimi Jamison, Jack Holder, John Hampton, John Fry, Sid Selvidge, Jim Dickinson, Di Anne Price, Mabon ‘Teenie’ Hodges, James Govan, and Wanda Wilson.”

Seeing that list in black and white was stunning. So many Memphis music and cultural icons gone in such a short time, so much light no longer reflected.

I found myself wanting to disconnect from the hive-mind of email and chatrooms and Twitter and Facebook for a while. I dug out some old books and hunkered down by the fireplace on Sunday, reading from Be Here Now, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and a battered Alan Watts tome — books that offer words and thoughts that lead one back to the center, to this moment.

Here. Now. All that we have.

And after thinking for a while, it came to me that the hive itself, the incessant connections we make with each other these days, is itself a gift — a way of learning more about the joys and pains of the human condition. The village is larger now; the beer joints are still there, but there are other paths to empathy, to sharing sorrows, celebrations, and memories, to being connected to those we don’t see often enough.

The deepest valley of the human heart knows winter is always on the way, even as spring approaches. It’s as certain as the throw of stars overhead on a February night. There’s a sadness there, but it’s a good sadness. And that too is a gift.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

‘Night, Darlin’

The first person I met at the P&H Cafe wasn’t the beer joint’s famous proprietress, Wanda Wilson. It was Martha Sue Campbell from Florence, Alabama, a longtime beer-and-hash slinger who passed away last April. Sue frowned at me and squinted, which I later discovered was her way of smiling, and gave me the once-over twice. I was new in town, only 18 years old, and sure she was going to ask for an I.D. that I didn’t have. Instead, she took my order and asked if I’d like to hear a joke.

“Do you know which two toes a woman’s most ticklish between?” Sue asked, frowning even harder, which meant she was about to bust a gut. Before I could reply she blurted out, “The big ‘uns,” and we both frowned and frowned and laughed and laughed. I was a country kid, on my own for the first time in a city I didn’t know. But watching my funny new acquaintance waddle through a swirling curtain of cigarette smoke to fetch my cheeseburger and gazing for the first time at all those strange, nicotine-browned murals of famous (and infamous) locals like banker, politician, and mega-fraud Jake Butcher, and Dana Kirk, Memphis State’s ticket-scalping basketball coach, I knew I had somehow landed in safe harbor, right where I belonged.

Like so many other “poor and hungry” artists, musicians, actors, authors, journalists, roustabouts, and straight-up weirdos, I was immediately intrigued by Wanda Wilson. She always wore a big, curly, blonde wig, a feather boa, and a hat that she might have won from Mae West in a poker game. She chain-smoked cigarettes from a long, jeweled cigarette holder and called everybody “darlin'” in a husky Parsons, Tennessee, drawl that reminded me of home.

Wanda reminded many people of home, no matter where they came from.

Last Friday, Wanda Wilson shuffled off this mortal coil, leaving Memphis a poorer and hungrier place. She was Midtown’s muse, and many artists painted her portrait, though few captured her timelessness like Paul Penczner, whose impressionist works once hung in the bar. She was the patron saint of the local theater community, and a real life honky-tonk angel, famous for her generosity and a love of lost souls. Chances are, if  you were ever a regular at her beer joint and found yourself down on your luck, she’d offer to start a tab before you asked, buy your first round, offer a job if she could, and a place to stay until you were back on your feet.

One particularly busy night, Wanda told me to “jump behind the bar” and get my own beer. “Act like you belong here,” she scolded, unconcerned with any potential ABC violations.

“Act like you belong here” was something I’d hear her say to many other customers. It wasn’t just permission to self-serve; it was the golden rule, and the one thing you really had to do to become a part of the P&H family. Like she once told an old friend whom she’d thrown out for bad behavior (and invited back with open arms): “This isn’t a bar sweetie. It’s an orphanage for the misunderstood.”

Wanda was mugged one summer night in 1999 while leaving the bar with the evening’s bank deposit. The girls of Memphis Confidential Burlesque — more P&H orphans — concocted a plan to stage a pudding-wrestling event to recover the losses, and Jerry Lawler agreed to referee. Somehow I found myself in the middle of it all, in a kiddie pool filled with chocolate pudding, wearing a grass skirt and coconut boobs, wrestling three women, and feeling like I’d stumbled into some lost chapter of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Hundreds of people paid cash money and lined up 20-deep to take in the gender-bending, fire-breathing, bodice-ripping show.

“I love you for thinking of this, but I don’t need the money,” Wanda told the event organizers. “Let’s give it to Hands on Memphis.”

That’s who she was.

Wanda traveled to Hollywood when Craig Brewer’s P&H-inspired film, The Poor & Hungry, had its big moment at the Hollywood Film Festival. I will never forget the moment when she arrived on the Paramount lot, wearing a stunning black gown covered with tiny gold coins. When someone asked about her outfit, she proudly announced, “A drag queen gimme this dress, darlin’.” Even in a city accustomed to seeing stars, this Memphis glamor girl could turn heads.

Losing Sue last year was hard, but I’m still having trouble imagining a world without Wanda Wilson. When I had no family in Memphis, Wanda and the P&H regulars stepped up. Now we’re orphans all over again.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (February 5, 2015)

CREDIT: Brandon Dill

I know I’m no economics or business expert, but am I the only person in Memphis who could care less about a Cheesecake Factory restaurant or IKEA furniture store coming to Memphis? I know that means jobs and all, but is that really what Memphis needs — another chain restaurant and a generic furniture store?

I’m probably wrong in my way of thinking, but I think the thing about Memphis that makes it so special is something people in the tourism industry refer to as “authentic assets.” I call it “cool shit you can find only in Memphis,” but that’s just me. One of the things that got me started thinking about all this was running across a story about the New York City-based Shake Shack restaurant business going public last Friday with an IPO. Shake Shack used to be a charming little one-of-a-kind food cart that caught on so well, because of its great hot dogs and burgers, that people in New York started standing in long lines to get lunch. Cool as can be. But now I read this from some financial publication:

“Shake Shack was founded by Danny Myer, a restaurateur from St. Louis who made his name with high-end establishments like New York’s Union Square Café. Shake Shack started as a hot-dog cart in Madison Square Park in 2001 and became a brick-and-mortar fixture of New York City by 2004. Mr. Meyer’s 21-percent stake in the company was worth more than $340 million as of Friday afternoon. Shake Shack’s revenue grew 41 percent from a year earlier to $83.8 million in the 39 weeks through September 24th, while net income fell by a fifth to $3.5 million, as it opened 20 new restaurants in the period.”

I suppose it’s the American dream to want to get rich selling burgers, but it’s kind of depressing to me to think that a cool hot dog cart has turned into something being traded on the stock market. It would be like Earnestine & Hazel’s expanding all over the globe and selling their Soul Burgers to the masses and becoming something people could invest in. Gone would be the old griddle in the former brothel, where Steve cooks up those piles of sweated onions with Worcestershire sauce and flat burger patties and turns them into the most gooey, delicious cheeseburgers in the world. And it is the only place in the world you can get them. It’s an authentic asset. It’s cool shit you can find only in Memphis. And you certainly aren’t going to get them at a Cheesecake Factory.

To be perfectly fair, I have never been to a Cheesecake Factory restaurant, because I don’t like chain restaurants. Nothing personal against O’Charley’s, Denny’s, Chili’s, Applebee’s, or any of the other big chain restaurants (and forget about fast food, altogether, except, of course, for Krystal, which is exempt from all comparisons because it is food of the Gods, no matter what). Why would I want to go to a place like that when I could just as easily eat at a restaurant that is unique and owned by a local person and is interesting? There’s nothing interesting about those chain restaurants that I can see or feel or taste. So why all the fuss about a Cheesecake Factory coming to town? It’s kind of a hick-like response to me: “Aw, Memphis has finally made it. We got us a dang Cheesecake Factory. Now, ain’t we cool.”

People, Memphis is already cool. You just have to know where to go. Would you rather have tamales at Chili’s or would you rather go to Hattie’s Tamale House on Willie Mitchell Boulevard in South Memphis just across the street from Royal Studios, where Al Green recorded all his smash Hi Records hits and Bruno Mars just recorded some of the tracks to the new monster hit “Uptown Funk?” Would you rather have shrimp at a Captain D’s or would you rather go to Chef Gary Williams’ Déjà Vu on Florida Street, where exactly seven tables occupy a tiny brick building that formerly housed a storefront church and where the food is as good as any New Orleans’ restaurant?

Brandon Dill

Wanda Wilson

And while we are on the topic of authentic Memphis and what sets us apart from cities like Dallas and Atlanta, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge one woman and that one woman’s “beer joint of your dreams.” I’m talking about the recent passing of the legendary Wanda Wilson, founder of the famed P&H Café. This is another massive loss for Memphis, and one that comes on the heels of many other recent losses. Wanda was a true and genuine character, with her wigs and hats and outlandish outfits, but as many of us know, she was also a mother, sister, confidante, inspiration, and just plain wonderful friend to thousands of people in this city. There’s no other place on earth like the P&H Café, and there will never be another Wanda Wilson. Wanda, you helped make Memphis one of the coolest cities in the world, and we will miss you terribly.

I just hope Memphis can learn a lesson from you about being an original.