Tag: Love Letter

Here’s what I packed in my car on a recent Saturday morning: 17 cans of paint, 8 propane canisters, 2 old iPads, a Medusa tangle of electrical cords, and a bag stuffed so full with bags it had to sit buckled into the passenger’s seat. “Can you take this too?” my wife asked, thrusting some kind of enormous Geiger counter into my arms, another technological casualty of her rainy field season in Costa Rica. I took it, and so did CHaRM.

No one listens to classical gamelan music for the first time and thinks, “I’ve heard something like this before.” There’s nothing like it.

In August 2016, my oldest daughter, Vivien, started kindergarten at Parkside Elementary School in Grant Park, just a few blocks down the street from Zoo Atlanta. The school—which opened in 2001, shortly after the arrival of the zoo’s first giant pandas, Lun Lun and Yang Yang, in 1999—adopted the iconic creature as a mascot. Since then, seven pandas have been born at the zoo, with the youngest, a pair of twins, born just a month after Vivien started school.

True dive bars have become harder to find in our ever-gentrifying city, where $16 cocktails are being served at every cafe and movie theater. Fortunately, the original location of the Righteous Room has been a reliable dive for more than 25 years.

I’m strolling through Centennial Olympic Park on a warm spring day, rocking a crop top for the first time—at age 42. It’s black with the word MANIAC scrawled in thin, neon pink font. As I soak up the sun, I pass many others in the same shirt. The K-pop group Stray Kids is in town for their “Maniac” world tour, and Atlanta is overrun by STAYs—the official name for Stray Kids fans like me.

About seven years ago, Yvonne Hou learned the previous bookstore in the same spot was about to close. Rather than let that happen, she decided to take it over and make it her own. But what to call her new business? She posed this question to one of her (many) cats, who replied, “Mi-o!” And so it was settled. Hou named the shop Maomi, the Mandarin equivalent of kitty. With an origin story like that, of course this place would draw me in.

I have been waiting at St. Cecilia for over an hour. It’s pouring outside, but that’s not the reason for Stanford Lightfoot’s tardiness—he forgot about our interview. But, hey, when you’re one of the busiest concert host–comedian–do-it-all entertainers in the city, it’s easy to get off schedule.

The first time that I was lured to the Flora-Bama Lounge, I had been casting for speckled trout on a guided fishing trip off the coast of Orange Beach, Alabama. This was a fall evening in the ’90s. Gulls spread rumors overhead. The sun was going to orange. From a distant point came music, pounding yet lighthearted, like a cross between Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Buffett. It sounded like dirty dancing. It sounded like a good time.

Tickets often have to be secured months before. I’ve likened performances to family reunions. I don’t know everyone’s names, but there is surely a connection: the love of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. From a dancer’s outstretched body, a tip of a hat, and the twirl of an umbrella, to how fabrics flow with every bend and bow, each act is its own happening and affirmation—as if to say, Everything’s going to be all right.

With its recognizable logo in St. Patrick’s Day font, those simple but wonderful green awnings, and that chatty, sweet staff, Green’s operates stores across South Carolina and has two in Atlanta. But the original, and my favorite, dates back to 1937 on Ponce de Leon Avenue.