Pardon me if you have already read about this, but I have taken a break from writing this column every week for some 16 years and am now writing just every other week and sometimes I have some catching up to do. And to my friend who is trying to get me to go back and find the information I wrote some years ago about a carload of Pentecostals being arrested for driving through Arkansas buck naked in their car, I implore you to be patient and let this little tidbit suffice for the time being. I’ll get around to the naked Pentecostals soon. In the meantime, it seems that just a few weeks ago, jury selection began in a trial here in Memphis involving a woman accused of hitting her brother’s girlfriend in the face with a brick at a trailer park. This is not a joke. It happened. According to reports, right after jury selection began, one man got up and left, announcing, “I’m on morphine and I’m higher than a kite.” Goodness. I would have been his buddy from the get-go. Then, when the prosecutor asked if anyone had been convicted of a crime, a prospective juror said that he had been arrested and taken to a mental hospital after he almost shot his nephew. He said he was provoked because his nephew “just would not come out from under the bed.” Probably on morphine the nephew, that is, and probably with good reason. Another would-be juror said he had had alcohol problems and was arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover officer. “I should have known something was up,” the prospective juror proclaimed. “She had all her teeth!” In the end, the woman accused of hitting the other woman in the face with the brick was found not guilty. Whew. And you thought John Ford was embarrassing. You thought it was embarrassing that the city has decided to lay off 2,100 people and stop providing food to hungry senior citizens in order to cut the fat out of the budget, just a couple of months after a certain city government body ran up a $4,000 tab at a holiday dinner that included 28 bottles of wine. And if you didn’t catch this little bit of news, it bears repeating that the Bush administration just got caught again planting yet another public relations person posing as a reporter at a White House press conference. They’ve been doing a lot of this lately, with the ersatz reporters helping push the Republican agenda. Only thing is, this guy not only got exposed, it came out (no pun intended) that one of the companies he owns is the registered owner of some Web sites that don’t exactly push that same agenda namely, Hotmilitarystud.com. Hee-hee. But don’t worry. Unless it’s just my old computer being crabby, the site is already down. Imagine that. But on to bigger and better things: what’s going on around town this week, and there’s a lot. Tonight, Confirmation featuring Kenneth Whalum III and Gerald Barnes is at CafÇ Soul. Twin Soul is at the Flying Saucer. And Higher Ground, six vignettes that explore humanity and the American world, opens at Rhodes College’s McCoy Theatre. — Tim Sampson
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