October 6th to 8th - Memphis redux and Arkansas

Arriving back in Memphis, Martha picked me up at the airport and Allison met us for lunch at La Baguette, magical French bakery I remember from childhood.  Armed with a box of almond croissants and two coffee mugs, I drove around Memphis and visited Stax Records for the first time.

Stax is magnificent.  It's history, and what it is as a museum.  An uncanny number of musicians recorded there, including Isaac Hayes, Sam and Dave, and Jean Knight.  It is also the last place Otis Redding recorded before he died in a plane crash.

The most interesting trivia I learned: Sam and Dave's song "Hold On, I'm Coming" originated thus: one of them was working on chords and the other was in the bathroom.  The one doing chords found a great melody and yelled for the other to join.  He replied, "hold on, I'm coming!" hoisting pants back on, running down the hallway.  The comedy was not lost on them and made its way into the lyrics.

The wackiest thing I saw: Isaac Hayes' Cadillac.  It is peacock blue, with white fur trim under the gas and brake pedals, and most everywhere else.  It has a television and mini fridge, and gold trim (by which I do not mean gold-colored trim).  It lives on what is essentially a car-size turntable and rotates with the doors open, mesmerizingly.

The biggest reminder of the creative process: The song Green Onions is not one you'd know by name but definitely by tune.  It started out as a b-side of a different record, then took on a life of its own.  It is featured in a shocking number of advertisements and films.  Why Green Onions?  Because the blues was sometimes called onions -- because it was so stinky.  They went fresh and stinky. . .


Stax is surprisingly near where I grew up.  I did a tour of the neighborhood.  This may be the most personal part of the blog yet, but here is our house, minus some trees that were cut down on the front yard.  Our block was in the film Walk the Line, when Johnny Cash is being a traveling salesman.  He stands on the front porch. . . 

From here I drove over the Mississippi River and into the flood plains, to visit family in northwestern Arkansas.  This is one of my favorite drives on earth.  My dad could drive it blindfolded (and in fog felt like he did).  If there is a comfort food of landscapes, this is mine -- utterly flat ground, big sky, butter yellow crops and gray clouds, improbable, Impressionist color palette.  You drive across the impossibly wide, force of nature Mississippi, away from the Memphis skyline, and immediately hit verdant, flat-flat green, and swamplands that then give way to fields.

I've painted this landscape before, had one in my attic room in London in art school, in lieu of an additional window.

I drove straight over to Jonesboro to visit with my cousins Dewey and Teresa.  I had come all the way from New York very early and was a bit comatose by the end of the day.  Dewey and Teresa couldn't have been nicer about my incoherence and took me out for catfish dinner.

The next day, we stopped by to visit the vibrant Laura Collier in the retirement home -- she alternated Sundays with my grandmother as a church organist. 

I drove over to Harrisburg, Arkansas, the town of about 2,000 where my dad and aunt grew up, and stopped in to see the new performing arts center at the high school.

The facility was really quite amazing:

I got into a conversation with a woman who was doing some housekeeping.  I mentioned my dad had grown up there.  She knew him, and my grandmother, who had taught music to a couple of generations of students at the grade school.  (We used to joke that my grandmother would never get a speeding ticket because she had played in everyone's wedding.)  The woman who was cleaning was like, "Oh, Berniece!  Of course."  And then proceeded to offer me directions to my grandmothers house.  (My grandmother died in 1993.)  For the record, I did know how to get there, though it's three blocks away.

Harrisburg is the county seat of Poinsett County:

Also of institutional longevity is The Modern News, an independent newspaper founded in 1888.

It's a wonderful paper.  My aunt has a New Yorker friend who subscribes.

Some other parts of the downtown square are colorful but shut down, other parts, still, full of offices.

I went to check on the farm, and started to uncover my artistic "style" of diagonal "taken while driving" photos.  

I did stop to take this one, which is exactly the same shot I have in black and white from 15 years ago.

The farm is where all of us learned to drive (er, yes, Amy, you are in a ditch, but that's why it's a four-wheel-drive car. . . ).  My grandfather was a farmer and, as my aunt says, loved what he did so much she's pretty sure he would have paid someone to let him do it.

I don't mean to seem like a tourist in a place where I am from, but here is some local color.  A study in font size at the Food Giant:

 And these are inside the grocery store:

(Those are huge industrial bags of something like deer feed in front of the pharmacy.)

I started the drive westward toward Dallas, over rural roads that drop phone calls in an instant, resurfacing on the interstate.  

That setting sun.  Listening to music from Stax (which would hit its real renaissance accompanying Sunday morning in New Mexico). . . .

A side note:

October 3rd to 6th - Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD

In the middle of the Southern leg, I flew north for a booksellers convention in Baltimore, a party in D.C., and a couple of things in New York (work, an engagement party, etc.).  

Arriving in D.C. on a Sunday morning, Scott -- whom I've known for several years through a very old Memphis friend -- met me from the train and we headed to the grocery store while her husband was out with their boys.  

Scott is one of the funniest people I know, archetypal of the "Northern wits, Southern charm" mode.  If you ever see that she has written a book, as the saying goes, 'buy two, give one to a friend.' 

Scott and Porter graciously offered to host a party for Museum Legs that Sunday afternoon.  As became immediately clear, as we trundled through the store, Scott subscribes to the same school of party hosting I do: cook for eighty if you've invited twenty, when in doubt have too much alcohol.  As an inspired addition, Scott also advertised that there would be a babysitter.

With our cart full of wine, we also worked on the fact that it was Scott's week to bring snacks to Mac's school.  The previous year, she had gotten a note from the teacher afterwards saying "Good snack."  As Scott explained (and you have to hear this in Scott's dry wit and perfect delivery), taking care of kids doesn't provide a lot of concrete positive reinforcement so she was hoping for another "good snack" this year.  

The party left the "good snack" hurdle in the dust as Scott kept producing things like homemade pimento cheese and magic nutty bars and the ability to give a cream cheese toping on a cucumber slice a scalloped edge.  

After lounging and snacking, and making absurdly last-minute invitations to a few people (including my brother's mother-in-law Bilha who made a hugely strong showing by turning up on an hour's notice), we got ready to receive guests.  Here we are with Canon, who, it was pointed out, occasionally looks European.

Here's Mac preparing for the theatre piece he had planned for babysitter time:

Guests included, Wade of business school, back from London, with Connor:

And whole other crews, including my very old friend Charlotte, and her friend David, 

the lovely Anabeth, 

and lots of new and interesting people, including a somewhat professional level athlete who laughed awfully hard at my story about playing for a team that once got shut out in a *basketball* game.  

Scott asked me to give some remarks, and then we had Q&A, and sold books in a Tupperware Party format, thanks to Scott's lovely display.  She even had a plate stand:

Baltimore. . . 

The next day was the North Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association meeting, one of those real and fascinating lenses onto the nuts and bolts of how books are sold.  It is a conference for owners of independent bookstores.  

Publishers and distributors of books set up booths.  I was slated to sign a huge stack of books and chat with people (that same energy of retail, the delicate dance of providing enough but not too much information).

Scott and Canon came along as my PR and assistant PR. (Scott, in fact, used to be a literary publicist.)  Canon helped us meet people, like a nice guy named Charlie from Simon and Schuster, at lunch, as Canon explored every heating grate and unstable surface of the sandwich shop. 

I got to know some of Hol's sales reps, who were super interesting, and toured around a few tables, particularly striking up a long conversation with a lovely woman named Trudy at the Penguin table.  I met a lot of interesting bookstore owners.

I also met an art teacher who has written a series of books called We the Peepers -- these were interesting -- and got stopped by another author signing books.  His was a magnificent study in marketing, to say nothing of its apparent literary merit.  The book had subplots related to history, geography, a secret society, and golf.  I was hard pressed to say it didn't appeal to my brother or father or someone else I needed to get a book for.  The whole time we were talking, I marveled and thought I would try to learn from the magnetic pull of his unapologetically long summary (it takes time to cover six subplot, after all).  He had the cadence and pull (and lingering handshake) of a low-key, small-congregation Southern preacher.  I finally suggested that it was best to keep the plot a surprise and left with a book.

Back in D.C. . . .

The real literary "in" happened when we were back in D.C. and Scott, Mac, and Canon accompanied me to Politics and Prose -- iconic, much-loved independent bookstore that is near Scott's neighborhood.  Although many friends had suggested trying to speak there, Politics and Prose schedules events far enough out that by the time I approached them, they were booked.  And by the time they were free, they said my book would no longer be new.

Politics and Prose, being a D.C. institution with agreeable values, was hosting the book fair for Mac's school, and Scott was co-chairing the committee.  While Scott set up a tab in the cafe, I chatted up a nice South African clerk who not only took up my invitation to sign copies of Museum Legs, but led me to them, on the top of this display table at the front of the shop:

Again, I am hugely complimented to see Museum Legs surrounded by real other books. . . 

Back in New York. . . 

I visited the wonderful Op-Ed Project workshop to give away a copy of Museum Legs at the end of the program.  Every once in a while, in a planes-trains-and-automobiles phase, I forget something important -- in this case thinking the workshop ended at 9 instead of 8pm.  Having even had to kill a lot of time on a wander over from work, luckily the workshop ran long, and I got to see this inspiring group of participants:

The founder, Katie Orenstein, is in the orange dress near the middle.  

The backstory on the organization is that sometime around when Larry Summers may or may not have said anything about women in science and math, a group of women journalists started talking about why women were under-represented on op-ed pages and, by extension, in public debate.  The statistic was that 88% of op-eds were written by men.  BUT, the other statistic was that 9 out of 10 submissions were also coming from men.  (So, women were technically batting above average but not submitting enough.)

Katie's own story is that shortly after college she had a fellowship to study folklore in Haiti.  She was there when the coup broke out.  Because she spoke dialects, she could have conversations with people others couldn't.  She started writing about the coup, and her work was picked up on a number of op-ed pages.  She said that, in those first few assignments, she was taught a lot on the job about how to construct an opinion piece -- largely that it is not an "opinion" piece but an evidence-based argument.  She thought these were learnable skills and set out to teach more women to do it.  

All of the workshop's materials are open source.  They encourage you to share them, just to let them know if you xerox handouts for more than ten or so people so they can keep track of their outreach.  I've even recommended their materials to men -- e.g., a highly gifted technology guy in a senior management role -- because I think there are a lot of voices not included in public debate.  (This is a topic covered in more depth in the San Francisco post -- private knowledge within companies vs. public knowledge in newspapers, and how this split is a justification for the importance of blogs.)

The program has amazing statistics for having workshop participants place op-eds.  (I am still in the unsuccessful yet undeterred camp, but am applying myself to this more soon.)  

Anyway, I can't say enough good things about the Op-Ed Project -- and people like Katie Couric do too.  You can check it out at www.theopedproject.org.

Nearly missing the meeting was a good reminder to me to take a break, which I happily did watching some Tivo with my sister's husband, and flying back to Memphis the next day.  

side note / postscript: I have this idea that it is important to talk to people you disagree with about politics because otherwise your views are essentially formed by the media you watch / read / listen to.  D.C. is also fun because my host was a super smart ideological conservative and it's not that often someone of liberal view (even if my own personal "bleeding heart libertarian" version) is asked to re-articulate to herself why we have public schools.  One of the key points of the Op-Ed workshop is that you have to remember that people who disagree with you are rational and moral and intelligent, working from a different set of values.  

September 29 - October 3 - Nashville and Memphis, TN

Nashville. . . 

After Birmingham, my next speaking gig was in Memphis, but I cut through Nashville to visit one of my oldest friends, Bedford, and her family.  Bedford's daughter Sarah Scott was studying a math lesson on counting and gave me an uncanny interrogation about the book: what was the print run? how many had I sold? [easier to answer] how many states had I visited?

The next morning, I hung out in a coffee shop in downtown Franklin, Tennessee, catching my breath and going through email.  I have to say, if anyone ever wonders where many of the ruggedly handsome men on earth are, they kept, inexplicably, walking through the door of the Franklin Starbucks.  Either that is one of the enduring mysteries of the world, or they were all country singers I didn't recognize. (I mentioned this phenomenon to Bedford later and she said I wasn't the first to report it.)

I paged through another book from the Louise Cecil Lending Library (Birmingham), Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit and her chapter called "An A+ in Failure."  Sort of a perfectionist's view of failure but an embrace of it nonetheless. . .  Aptly, I was just about to start blogging, belatedly (a mere two months ago, as I write now).

As I was leaving Franklin, someone barely grazed my bag passing buy, stopped dead in his tracks, "Oh, excuse me. I am so sorry."  It's never too much.  I eat it up.  

Memphis. . .
Memphis is where I was born.  I lived there until I was almost eleven.  I am still close to my childhood friends, Allison and Martha.  We lived on the same street, stone-throwing distance, listened to Duran Duran, watched unconscionable amounts of the Price is Right, dealt with a three-foot-tall bottle of Jeannate After Bath Splash Martha once won from the local drugs store, and generally hung out all the time and went to grade school together.  

We have some museum history together too as they came to visit London when I worked at the Tate and we went traveling in Spain and France.  At one classic point, there was a low blood sugar warning (in the irritability not medical sense) in the Prado so we bolted to the nearest cafe we could find, only to be handed menus and realize we were at Planet Hollywood.  Just as we were swearing we would never tell anyone, Allison glanced at the next table: George and Ashley Hamilton. . .


Memphis is a place steeped in memory and attachment, and I will acknowledge that right away by showing this photo:

This is the roof of the gymnasium where we used to roller skate after church fellowship dinner.  They had old-school, proper, brown lace-up skates.  And a trampoline.  And, I now realize in my older age, a Christian tile motif in the ceiling.  

I had arrived in time for church fellowship dinner which starts around 5:15pm and is priced at a maximum of $20 per family.  I tagged along to an after-dinner program, and can now report that I am a person who got up in the middle of an ADHD seminar. . . to go make a phone call, as I thought to do one thing in the middle of doing another.

Children's Story Hour. . .
Program number one in Memphis was children's story hour at Davis Kidd, a great independent bookstore.  Miss Marjorie, the regular host of the program, has that incredible, magnetic authority with children and had captivated everyone with the sing-along warm-up.  

(Barry and Martha and the girls to the left) 
We went through a few songs before she turned to me, "So, Miss Amy, do yo have any favorite songs you want us to sing?"  I couldn't think of anything age-appropriate (well, Miss Marjorie, how about some Aerosmith?).  I fumbled enthusiastically and she led us onward through Wheels on the Bus and the Hokey Pokey.  Song time is designed to tire them out slightly before reading.

(during the Hokey Pokey. Note the adorable girl in head-to-toe purple in front of me)
Martha and Allison were wonderful about coming along.  Martha and her husband Barry brought their girls.  Allison (and her mother) brought Allison's niece Ellie.  

(Allison with one of Martha and Barry's daughters)
The first thing that happened after I sat in Miss Marjorie's tiny chair and opened Harold and the Purple Crayon to brace myself for reading upside down, Ellie came and gave me a hug and climbed into my lap.  

I gently put her down.  You can notice in all the other photos of the event, many of the children are looking at me listening.  Ellie is looking the opposite direction busy with train tracks.

After the second book, Art, we did a craft project -- our own moons and suns -- (the moon is what anchors Harold back to his bedroom) and then "curated" the drawings by propping them up on the pink carpeted risers that form the children's story hour area.

There was a touch and go moment at the end when a couple of the kids approached Miss Marjorie and realized that the craft project was a substitute for, not complement to, the traditional lollipop.  And then we adjourned for lunch.

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. . . 

The second program of the day was a reading at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, a beautiful white marble building in the middle of Overton Park.  I remember having a birthday in the grounds once back when I was four and wore full-length dresses everyday and my mother made elaborate birthday cakes -- that year's looked like a butterfly.

Now I was being hosted by Karlene Gardiner, a very interesting and elegant member of the Education staff, who graciously scheduled us in the board room.  

The Brooks is particularly noteworthy in two regards: It is the setting for the second chapter of Museum Legs -- First Friday.  It is also the first place I had a two-event attendee.  Michel Allen, who runs a gallery in New York and is from Memphis, was at both the book party in New York and the reading in Memphis, where she kindly brought along her mother.

Below is the video obelisk from the story. I also read about whether the First Wednesday event was a pick-up scene, in front of Martha's mother who, in the story, nods genteely, perfectly coiffed hair going up and down. . . 

The Pink Palace / The Living Arts. . .

The next day, Martha's mother watched her daughters and Allison took the day off of work and we went to the Pink Palace craft fair.  The Pink Palace was the mansion home of the founder of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store.  I had last been to one of the fairs back when I had a plastic wallet I tried to find thirty-five cents in to buy a hand-sized piece of fur that rolled up when you petted it, or similar.  

You have to appreciate the cheerful food booths (Pronto Pups!):

Allison collects what I would call folk-art images of churches.  This one came from a small display of art by a booth owner's eight year old daughter and daughter's friend.

You can't dispute the curatorial eye.


This photo is really for my brother, because we used to be these kids

except that we were made to wear navy blazers and pale yellow dresses and were named the Toscaninis.


I spent the afternoon visiting with Winston Eggleston, son of the photographer William, who is a gentle, interesting, lovely guy.  We ended up paging through some photo books by William / Bill Christenberry.


That evening, Martha, Allison, and I hit the town.  If you are in Memphis soon, I heartily recommend Molly Fontaine's.  

It has a special magic energy -- a converted, steep-proportioned Victorian with an atmosphere that feels like fairy dust has been sprinkled on everything, but just enough incongruous, or even naughty, art to keep your eyes moving around and the vibe just that tiny, enjoyable bit unpredictable. 

Note the eyelashes behind us.

This is Hugh, my brother's best friend, and his girlfriend (since the photo, fiancee), Lisa, who joined us.


As a bonus reel, here are Martha's daughters enjoying chocolate cupcakes, part of the kindly babysitting by Martha's mom that enabled the adventure:

The woman at the top of this post, sitting in the lemon, is from the Pink Palace craft fair.  Sometimes, art is for the beholding in everyday life, more than in the museum setting, per se.