History

Fans will get a two-night crash course in the history of the Athens music scene this weekend, thanks to two icon-studded bills as part of Art Rocks Athens: The Music. Tonight at the 40 Watt in Athens, the music of The B-52’s, Pylon, The Side Effects, R.E.M., Is/Ought Gap, Club Gaga, The Fans, and Kevin Dunn will be celebrated. On Saturday night at the Georgia Theatre, music vets and newbies on the Athens set will pay tribute to Method Actors, Squalls, Kilkenny Cats, Dreams So Real, Oh-OK, Bar-B-Q Killers, and others.

“Child, what are you up to?” Instantly recognizing the voice behind me, I froze midway into shoving the crumpled dollar bill into the brown interoffice memo envelope. It was the morning of October 3, 1995. In Los Angeles, the verdict was about to be read in the O.J. Simpson trial. And on the eighth floor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Features Department, I was collecting up the office pool. As the department’s unofficial class clown/kid brother and a writer for the paper’s Peach Buzz column (the copy desk lovingly referred to me as Buzz Boy), this was in my job description. The voice behind me belonged to Celestine Sibley, a newspapering icon and state treasure. Red-faced, I explained to “ma’am” what in the hell I was doing (I never, ever called her Celestine. I had grown up reading her, after all). She toddled off and I assumed she was on her way upstairs to demand that the publisher fire me and then tie me to printing presses in the basement and use my blood to pump out the afternoon’s Extra edition. A minute later, Celestine handed me a dollar and said, “Put me down for a guilty.”

For its “Dream Cars” exhibition, which runs May 21 through September 7, the High Museum of Art becomes a showroom for seventeen concept cars built by Ferrari, GM, and Porsche. The fleet represents auto design ambition from the 1930s through the twenty-first century.

For decades, as the lights dimmed before every Fashionata runway show, Rich’s fashion director Sol Kent would position himself in the wings backstage and whisper to each of his anxious models, “Be Divine!” Kent’s words ended up inspiring “Be Divine: A Tribute to Fashionata,” Thursday night’s sold-out tribute to the city’s long-running Rich’s-hosted style extravaganza at The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Midtown. The evening served as a benefit for the Breman.

Of his legendary style sense, Rich’s fashion director Sol Kent once wryly observed to Atlanta Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley, “There’s nothing so unchic as a woman who looks too new.” Kent’s genius at merging the new with the traditional and his eye for discovering future classics will be on dazzling display at tonight’s tribute to his career, “Be Divine: A Tribute to Fashionata” at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Midtown. The evening benefiting the Breman also serves as a social set finale for the museum’s six month-long “Return to Rich’s: The Story Behind the Store” retrospective set to close on May 27.

As The Seed & Feed Marching Abominable, Atlanta’s iconic kooky community marching band struts into its 40th anniversary today at the Inman Park Festival parade, the act has a souvenir for fans. To celebrate four decades of silliness, the band’s fundraising arm, the Seed & Feed Marching Abominable Endowment, Inc., a 501c3 nonprofit, is selling the act’s brand new 2015 "Naughty Bits" calendar.

The first time Atlanta writer Dana Hazels Seith attempted to interview Blondie for the new Clermont Lounge coffee table book, No Cameras, the legendary dancer threw her out of her Ponce de Leon Avenue dressing room. For good measure, Blondie also tossed Seith on her second and third attempts to talk to her.

The Negro Building was the first designated space, since Emancipation, for the showcase of African-American achievement in a white-dominated setting. Without it, the Exposition committee could have not received federal backing, and those funds appropriated from Congress, are what helped make the fair an international success.

Last Tuesday night, huddled behind the steering wheel in an overcoat, gloves and a hat, Buckhead Coalition president Sam Massell was gridlocked on Atlanta’s main artery, stuck in the slush with the rest of us. As his usual 16-minute Buckhead commute down Peachtree Road slid into an hour, Massell, 86, had time to reflect on half a century of metro Atlanta's mass transit maladies.

Nestled amid apartment complexes on Seventeenth Street, the seven-story, 100-foot Millennium Gate is hard to miss but easy to whiz by. Many Atlantans assume the Roman-inspired arch, erected in 2008, is just another decorative element of Atlantic Station, the mini-city built on the site of an old steel mill. But the monumental structure houses a 12,000-square-foot museum that pays tribute to Georgia history and Atlanta’s founding families.