Historic Mobile - First Pass!
- story and photographs by Ellis Anderson
Historic Mobile - First Pass!
Our new column explores fun destinations within a two-hour drive of Bay-Waveland. This month, the Shoofly visits downtown Mobile and comes up with a fun - and delicious - one-day itinerary!
- story and photographs by Ellis Anderson October Second Saturday: 10/8
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Over the past 20 years, the monthly Artwalk has become one of the most popular events in the region. Old Town stays lively all day, with many merchants and restaurants offering specials. The pace picks up from 4–8 p.m., when gallery openings and live music keep the streets humming with activity.
Each month, one or two Old Town businesses take the spotlight as “Hot Spots." Veteran Second Saturday patrons know these will be among the liveliest places to be during the event. Hot Spots in September are Bay-tique Boutique (125 Main) and Mockingbird Café (110 S. Second Street). |
the Second Saturday column
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Bay St. Louis's favorite mad potter is back at it again.
After a summer of soaking up some artistic inspiration from the muse of his Maine haven, and after a long dusty week of unique performances at Burning Man in the Nevada desert, area artist Steve Barney is back in the Bay, and his new project here might be his most ambitious yet. Barney has purchased the iconic 7500 square foot complex of ironworks buildings at the corner of Washington Street and Central Avenue in Bay St. Louis and plans to transform it into a new Bay St. Louis community arts center. Barney, who will serve as executive director, says that the center will be called the Bay St. Louis Center for Creative Arts, or “BSLCCA” for short. |
Arts Alive
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In the spring of 1980 I was involved running an electrical supply business with my Grandfather Stevenson at 126 Main Street. I also was working with my band a good bit on weekends. When we weren't working with the band on weekends, my wife Candy and I were hanging out in Baton Rouge a good bit with Duke and Jackie Bardwell.
On one of these weekend trips, Duke's band was playing for an outdoor festival on the grounds of the old State Capitol building in Baton Rouge and we went along with them while they played. There were three or four local Baton Rouge bands playing along with a lot of arts and craft and native food booths. The name of the event was Fest for All, and there were several thousand people down in the old downtown area of Baton Rouge. |
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It’s the name of her shop, but it’s also the reason Janice Guido moved to town: Bay Life.
After retiring from a career in the hospitality industry and relocating full time to Bay St. Louis, Janice has discovered – for the first time in her life – that travel’s not really appealing. “I love being here in my shop and love my house on State Street,” she says. “I don’t want to go anywhere. I traveled so much for so long. It gives me a huge appreciation for this small town and its people. It’s home.” |
Sponsor Spotlight
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If you enjoy the beauty of the monarch butterflies on their migration to Mexico this time of year, imagine helping to capture, measure and tag the delicate Monarchs to gain information about their incredible journey.
Volunteers in the international network of citizen scientists are keeping an eye on the butterflies to gather information on how many successfully make the trip to Mexico. Gathering information on the Monarch migration is just one of many hands-on ways that volunteer “citizen scientists” can assist researchers as they observe and record our changing natural environment. |
Beach to Bayou
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You’ve heard the rule about not going to the grocery store when we’re hungry.
Forget it. When you’re feeling hungry, that’s when you should go straight to Claiborne Hill Supermarket on U.S. 90 in Waveland, where the deli staff starts work early, cracking eggs and cooking bacon and biscuits for breakfast. Early morning regulars, including police and fire department personnel, line up around 6:30 or 7 to get a breakfast plate (two scrambled eggs, grits, a biscuit and either bacon or homemade sausage) before heading to work. If you’re on a leisurely schedule, you can grab breakfast until around 11 a.m., and even later on weekends. |
Coast Cuisine
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If you live in the American South, you have probably walked through a neighborhood cemetery. Some cemeteries lie under nature’s ceiling of oak trees and moss, while others border waterways, railroads, or highways. Some are tucked away behind homes and churches, in the town square, or in a forgotten place. Whether you were lured to visit by the architecture of gravestones, history of the interred, or the circumstances of their demise, cemeteries are an important part of understanding Southern life.
I walked through St. Mary Cemetery last October. A soft, cool breeze flowed across the gravesites. St. Rosa de Lima Church posed a gentle shape to the north, and the sounds of young men in sports practice echoed from the south. Tall and short, vertical and horizontal monuments and headstones mark the burial sites within the cemetery. |
Shared History
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Do you love gardening but don’t have the yard to do it? Have I got the perfect project for you! Keep reading to learn how to build your own above ground garden. This project is simple and shouldn’t take more than 2-3 hours to complete.
There are many reasons people build above ground gardens. Some do it because they don’t have the ground to cultivate for gardening. Some do it because they prefer to eat herbs and vegetables that have not been saturated in chemicals from pesticides and hormones. My husband Leo and I love to eat healthy. But let’s face it; organic groceries are very expensive, so we thought we’d try our hand at building our own little garden. |
Beautiful Things
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Just as aesthetics applies to art or design, it applies to fashion. In its original Greek, aesthetics refers to any sort of sensory perception, to “making oneself sensitive” to the world.
It’s in this true spirit of the word that we can apply aesthetics to fashion. It’s really about taking your own personal expression and using it to define your style. When I work with clients in interior design, I collaborate with them to come up with a theme that describes the overall feeling for a space, i.e. industrial farmhouse or French Provincial. |
Window Shopping
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Late afternoon, I am aimlessly walking along the north edge of the beach near Buccaneer noting plant life along the marsh edge. It’s still very warm (late summer and all that) but a light southeast breeze prevails so it’s not uncomfortable. The partly cloudy sky is white-white and blue-blue. Clouds are way high, fluffy, in lines providing a feeling of great distance between me and the dome of the sky. From here it would seem that no rain now falls anywhere on earth.
I hear waves crashing against the sea wall behind me so I turn south. Scanning east a snowy egret stands in calm shallow water adjacent to a beach jutting out beyond the sea wall. She looks down in stillness. I watch her for a while. |
On the Shoofly
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It's hard to believe that fall is upon us. My Pacific Northwestern soul tells me that soon, a lasting chill will be back in the air, wet leaves will carpet the ground and candles will be lit in windows to ward off the encroaching darkness.
Literally all of Mississippi: "HA!" While the edge may be taken off the heat now that we are officially out of summer, we still have a long way to go before we can look for anything that near resembles the Octobers of my youth. |
Grape Minds
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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. James Baldwin James Baldwin is one of the most quoted writers of the 20th century. I admire his ability to express powerful ideas with an economy of words. Recently, while reading the Baldwin book “The Fire Next Time,” I found myself highlighting dozens of passages and scribbling in margins. This book was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963 and an anthem for the emerging civil rights movement. It takes the form of two letters written near the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. In the letter written to his namesake nephew, then a teenager, Baldwin writes: | Bay Reads |
For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men
have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America
what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from
sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and
built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved
an unassailable and monumental dignity.
The essays in “The Fire Next Time” are as timely today as they were in the ’60s. Recent national events prompted Pass Christian native, Jesmyn Ward, to return to Baldwin for solace in “his frank and elegant prose.” She reached out to young African American writers for their perspective on race in 21st century America. The result is a collection of essays, poems, and memoirs that make up “The Fire This Time.” In the introduction Ward states, “all these essays give me hope. I believe there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives through words. That sharing our stories confirms our humanity. That it creates community, both within our own community and beyond it.” |
How y'all are? Fall is finally in the air and the crisp, cool 85 degree weather is ushering in memories of warm and loving holidays with family. I found myself reminiscing about favorite holidays through the years with my neighbors at Starfish Café and it got me to thinking about all the wonderful meals I've shared with family and friends.
Inspired by the sentiment, I began to ponder the roots of all the culinary bliss that besieges our tables at this particular time and linked it to what I now believe is the very soul of cooking - our cookbooks. In this day and age, recipes linger in the internet atmosphere, but I guarantee you won't find my mother’s sweet potato casserole through any search engine, for it resides within the smudged pages of the well-loved Lester Memorial United Methodist Church: Sharing Our Best cookbook. Cookbooks like this are a prize find. |
Vintage VIgnette
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“It all began with someone vandalizing the cemetery with spray paint, and I decided to sit in the cemetery and stand guard,” says Charles Gray. Charles is the Lifetime Executive Director of the Hancock County Historical Society (HCHS). He says that a few other HCHS members joined him as sentinels that first night, and they sat around playing cards. “It wound up ‘Well, we’re going to be there; let’s do something,’” Gray says. The next year, the tour was born. “Someone suggested that we to pretend to be the ghosts of the people,” Gray says, “and it started out as a ghost thing. But of course when we actually got around to doing it, it’s not a Halloween ghoul thing; it’s a formal presentation of history and genealogy.” | Shared History |
BP Town Hall MeetingLt. Governor Tate Reeves will be in Diamondhead at 11 a.m. Thursday, October 20 for a Town Hall meeting at the Diamondhead City Hall, 5000 Diamondhead Circle. This meeting is intended to give Gulf Coast citizens an opportunity to give input on how $750 million of the Deepwater Horizon settlement fund should be spent. Lt. Governor Reeves has gone on the record stating that he would like to see the majority of the funds spent in south Mississippi. Obviously, the rest of Mississippi would like to see the money spent in their communities. | What's Up, Waveland |
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