Arkansas Times - June 9, 2016

NEWS + POLITICS + ENTERTAINMENT + FOOD / JUNE 9, 2016 / ARKTIMES.COM

Cost of incarceration

When moms jailed, kids sentenced to foster care

BY KATHRYN JOYCE

CHILDREN IN CRISIS: an Arkansas Times special investigation

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COMMENT

Mansion ownership For many years, I volunteered at the Governor’s Mansion as a docent and in other roles. Docents are part tour guide and part historian. The Mansion is full of our state’s history, and our tours were absolutely nonpartisan. As tours began, we would make a point to say: “The governor and first lady want you to know that this is your house, and they have the privilege of living here.”

But, that was during the Beebe years when the governor and first lady took pride in making sure everyone felt welcome.

Mansion tours started at the portrait of the late Gov. Sid McMath — the Mansion’s first resident — and included every room except the first family’s private quarters and the governor’s office. Docents took pride in former Gov. [Winthrop] Rockefeller’s generosity when pointing out the living and dining room rugs. Each item in the Mansion had a story that we were proud to tell visitors, both Democrats and Republicans alike.

I am saddened by the Hutchinsons’ declaration of ownership. It appears they believe the Mansion

belongs to them. The portrait of Gov. McMath — removed. Volumes of books that belonged to former President (and Arkansas Gov.) Bill Clinton — removed. The bipartisan authority of the Governor’s Mansion Commission — removed. A million-dollar grant requested to make over the Mansion with no oversight or regard for historic preservation — approved.

The Governor’s Mansion is the people’s house. Treating it as anything different is arrogant and self-serving.

I wonder if future docents will talk about all of the artifacts of Arkansas history we lost during the Hutchinson administration.

Sheila Castin Little Rock

Planned Parenthood necessary What a wonderful, well-rounded, positive article about Planned Parenthood clinics [“Planned Parenthood: More than abortion,” May 26]. The people who told about their personal experiences with the clinic were awesome. Thank you for stepping up and challenging the misinformation that has been spread by political special

interest groups.

The detailed research, accurate information and comments by the staff are things the public needs to know. The services offered at Planned Parenthood clinics are necessary and important if people want to promote a more educated, healthier society. Men, women and teenagers need health clinics that will give them accurate, nonjudgmental medical information and options so they can make better choices about their health care needs. I appreciate the article’s open-mindedness and I appreciate that Planned Parenthood clinics treat whoever walks in their doors with dignity. Not everyone has a high-paying, everythingis-covered insurance plan, but that doesn’t mean they should not have access to good health care clinics. I can’t come up with a good reason why anyone would want their state overrun with diseased, sexually ignorant, pregnant teenagers, especially when Planned Parenthood clinics offer prac-

tical, common-sense heath care education that could prevent it. I can’t come up with a good reason why anyone would force a rape victim to carry to term, when she would rather terminate the pregnancy. I support Planned Parenthood’s valuable medical services and the good work they do. To me personally, it is about our basic human right to choose what is done or not done to our bodies, without interference from the state government. The state government should not endanger my health by invading the privacy between me and my doctor or by restricting my doctor’s ability to do what is best for my health. I expect equal health care laws. I have the same right to good medical care that men have. I have the same right as a man does to choose what is done or not done to my body. Period. End of discussion. No ifs, ands or buts.

Shirl Standridge Little Rock

From the web In response to Gene Lyons’ June 2 column about Bernie Sanders: I liked what Bernie had to say and voted for him in my state’s primary.

It was the self-aggrandizing sanctimony of his supporters that put me in the tank for Hillary. Bernie and his fans have a choice. They can have influence in the Democratic Party and be a queenmaker or they can get absolutely nothing or, worst case, get hunted down by Trump’s mobs after the election. From what I can tell, they prefer the latter.

Mack Paul I suppose it was inevitable. With Bernie’s delegate count getting dangerously close to the anointed’s (don’t count the game-rigging superdelegates), and the grand prize of California just around the corner, it was time for Gene Lyons to unleash another scattershot smear on Bernie.

When the best opposition research you can dig up on Bernie is a 40-yearold essay he wrote for an alternative rag (just like this one, ironically), you must be awfully desperate. One awkward line, taken completely out of context, and it’s perfectly acceptable to lynch a good and decent man for the high crime of misogyny? Did you bother to even read the essay?

Of course not. Hatchet jobs and yellow journalism don’t require that

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JUNE 9, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

sort of responsible reporting. Have you noticed how the television bobbleheads have quit referring to Bernie as a “Democratic socialist” and just call him a “socialist” now? That’s if they even bother to mention him at all. And apparently the mainstream media is planning to announce that Hillary has clinched the nomination (by including those damnable superdelegates), before the California primary even starts.

All in an effort to discourage Berners from even going to the polls next week. So I guess Gene (Gene, the dancing machine) is just doing his part as a loyal Clinton apparatchik. Pretty sad and pathetic. He’s a decent writer when he’s not doing his establishment masters’ bidding.

Vive la revolution! The time for patching’s past (from a poem by Edward Arnold Brenholtz, in the November 1902 edition of The International Socialist Review).

John Ragland In response to Ernest Dumas’ column June 2 column “Beyond contempt,” in which he noted that a “Senate juror who was brother of the deputy prosecutor” was one of several “tormentors” of then-President Clinton who were later revealed to be adulterers: Ernie, I have a question.

Why do we insist on dancing around certain subjects and not naming names?

It was Sen. Tim Hutchinson who was cheating on his wife with a staffer.

His brother, then-Rep. Asa Hutchin-

son, now our governor, was the prosecutor. If memory serves, they lived together in Washington at the time.

Wonder what Asa knew about Tim at the time he was excoriating Clinton?

Rick Fahr In response to an Arkansas Blog item about the Razorback Foundation’s $3.5 million payout to former UA athletic director Frank Broyles for “speaking fees”: The greatest irony of many with the Razorback Foundation is that as a nonprofit it exists to profit handsomely a small number of elites who are public employees and who use the 501(c)(3) foundation essentially as a means of circumventing state compensation laws.

But every Division 1 school does it! Sadly the IRS rarely challenges 501(c)(3) groups’ status under their own rules.

Black Panthers for Open Carry

marching up and down that damn field in the hot sun.

In the late ’90s when some of the football players got into trouble, Frank or the UA sports program for reasons unknown hired Fort Smith lawyer Eddie Christian to advise them. So one day Frank is parked on Garrison Avenue and after a visit to Eddie’s office he strides down the sidewalk, jumps in his new Cadillac and puts it into reverse without looking behind him and backs right on out into traffic. A car heading east took the back end off Frank’s Cadillac as slick

as a whistle. Before the cars had stopped shaking, Frank jumped out, handed his card to the woman who had hit him and hollered, “Get an estimate and I’ll pay for the damages,” and then got back in his damaged Caddy and off he went lickety-split.

I’d rather see that kind of money go to save the battered and sinking Little Rock public school system, but no one ever asks my opinion. How much speaking money is the U of A paying Noland Richardson these days? Oh … I thought not.

Deathbyinches

Fall in love with our TENTH SEASON

Well, good for Frank of the Ozarks.

The Razorback marching band used to practice on a crappy field next to the football practice field back in the early ’70s. God, was it hot, and each practice seemed to last forever. I was a sousaphone player and we were always backed up to the fence separating our field from the football boys. I swear, during down moments Frank would stare at me ... maybe wondering what kind of fool would be a sousaphone player.

I never waved, he never smiled, which is OK with me; I didn’t feel like smiling

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WEEK THAT WAS

Quote of the Week:

—Sarah Huckabee Sanders, daughter of Mike Huckabee, responding to questions on CNN about the presumptive GOP nominee’s recent railings against a federal judge’s “Mexican heritage.” Sanders is a senior adviser on the Trump campaign.

Trump has said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing a lawsuit brought against Trump University by former attendees of the for-profit school, is biased against him because of Trump’s plans to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.

BRIAN CHILSON

“I think that a lot of the Latinos will eventually come on board and support Donald Trump, because at the end of the day, I think there are a lot of things they care about. And that’s the economy and that’s national security. And those are things that Americans trust Donald Trump on infinitely more than they trust Hillary Clinton.”

FIERY FINALE: The crowd at Riverfest 2016 watched Sunday’s closing fireworks show from the First Security Amphitheater in Riverfront Park. Riverfest officials said 140,000 people attended the festival over its two days of concerts.

eager to take congressional politics to new extremes of partisan dysfunction.

Meanness for meanness’ sake U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton keeps topping himself when it comes to vindictiveness.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote this week of Cassandra Butts, who was nominated by President Obama in 2014 to become the U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas; Butts died recently of acute leukemia while still waiting to be confirmed, more than two years after the Senate held a hearing on her nomination. Sen. Cotton evidently held up the nomination specifically because — in addition to possessing impeccable credentials that included decades of public service and a degree from Harvard Law School — Butts was a longtime personal friend of the president’s.

It’s not unusual for a lawmaker to place a hold on an executive branch nomination to exert specific political leverage. But to maintain that blockade indefinitely — the diplomatic post to the Bahamas had gone unfilled for 1,647 days when Butts died on May 25 — is another matter.

As with so many things, Cotton seems 6

JUNE 9, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

ISIS takes on Arkansas librarians With ambitions of waging cyberjihad against the West, hackers associated with the Islamic State have been attempting to target military and governmental personnel in the U.S. Last week, the group turned its sights on none other than the Arkansas Library Association, publishing the personal information of around 800 library workers from around the state. Why? Simply because of lax server security, it seems; ISIS has a pattern of hacking low-profile databases seemingly at random. As far as scare tactics go, it’s fairly pathetic: Both the FBI and the Arkansas State Police have indicated there’s no real threat posed by the breach.

Legislator heads to DHS

Trashing curbside recycling

State Rep. Kelly Linck (R-Flippin) resigned from the legislature Friday to become chief of legislative and governmental affairs for the Arkansas Department of Human Services. He’ll be paid $108,243 in the newly created position (a substantial raise from a legislator’s $40,000 salary), which will entail working with the legislature on DHS issues.

In other words, Linck will act as a lobbyist, although that’s not how the agency characterizes the position: “We do not lobby the legislature… . We provide them information about programs, services and legislation, and answer questions,” DHS spokesperson Amy Webb said.

Normally, a legislator is barred from becoming a lobbyist for two years after leaving the legislature, but that does not apply to state jobs. Linck’s hire is part of a broader reorganization of DHS, details of which have yet to be released.

The local authority responsible for residential recycling programs in Little Rock and other parts of Pulaski County announced last week it would begin “auditing” recycling carts for contamination, meaning material that cannot be recycled and must be sent to the landfill.

The presence of non-recyclable materials “has reached an unsustainable level,” according to the director of the Regional Recycling and Waste Reduction District, “which negates the positive efforts of the citizens who recycle properly.”

The district is implementing a threestrikes policy. Beginning June 6, carts will be tagged if they’re found to contain non-recyclables. If a customer is tagged thrice, “further steps, such as citations or removal of the cart from the address, may be taken to reduce contamination in the recycling stream.”

Things that are not recyclable

OPINION

All politics is local

T

he old cliche about focusing on local concerns in politics generally guides my weekly outlook.

The web is brimming with comments on the Middle East, global warming and presidential politics. But what do they know about the Pulaski County Quorum Court or the Little Rock City Board of Directors?

National politics are important locally, however, even if Arkansas’s few electoral votes rarely are pivotal in presidential outcomes.

Still, we do have a former Arkansas first lady just about to become the first woman nominated by a major party for president.

If my trip to Arkansas Boys State last week is any indication, history won’t count for much at the Arkansas ballot box. I asked for a show of support from the 600 delegates to Boys State last Tuesday among three still-standing major candidates: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton

and Bernie Sanders.

The roar for Trump was overwhelming.

There was a solid but much smaller claque for SandMAX ers. A paltry and BRANTLEY quiet three or four maxbrantley@arktimes.com youths expressed a preference for Clinton. Several Sanders supporters told me later that they’d be in Clinton’s corner should she be the nominee, if not enthusiastically.

Boys State delegates trend conservative, but so does the state generally, absent an outlier of a political figure like Dale Bumpers or Bill Clinton. A Hillary Clinton victory in Arkansas — or in most of Dixie — seems unlikely. Sanders might even do better in some places, were he to be on the ballot. It is a year for emotion, not detail work. Hillary Clinton does her homework. But she lacks ease as a candidate and is longer on policy than

Private Hillary

H

er supporters wonder why so many people do not like Hillary Clinton, and reporters and columnists keep trying pointlessly to answer. David Brooks, the New York Times resident conservative brain, explained that she had always been too dead-level serious and that maybe she had needed a hobby to balance or humanize her wonkiness.

Who needs likability if people who wouldn’t relish an evening of canasta with you trust you to run the country while they wrestle with the demons of their own lives?

Rather, the better question is, why has she made so many mistakes of a political nature over 40 years that dog her to this day, when she has become the first woman nominee for president of a major party but faces a tough race against a man with an even lower likability quotient? It happens that I can answer that question.

Since she is a lawyer and I am prepared to admit from personal experience that she is an authority on the subject, the simple answer is her obsession with privacy, which she would point out the courts have said is a fundamental right guaranteed by the U.S. and Arkansas con-

stitutions. It is actually broader than that. Pathologically private people do not get into politics, ERNEST at least successDUMAS fully, but leave it to people who love the public nature of it, thrive on controversy, battle and compromise, and get away with a little dissembling, like her husband, or in the case of Donald Trump, plain lying.

Hillary Clinton’s insistence on privacy for practically everything, even when it was wholly in the public sphere, produced her lifelong hatred of and battles with the media. It led to the failures and epic controversies of the Clinton presidency — health care reform, Travelgate, the billing records, Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater investigation and the impeachment.

Her refusal to let anyone, especially reporters at the Washington Post, see her old billing records with little Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan at Little Rock because they were client records and no one’s business, led to the appointment of a special prosecutor. When they were finally turned over years later, it was mostly

passion. She also remains a victim of sexism. Male candidates shout to be heard at noisy rallies and men think nothing of it.

Hillary shouts and she’s viewed as shrill.

Women have not achieved equality in the U.S. — even if they’ve advanced farther than blacks, Latinos and sexual minorities. The local newspaper did yet another one of those corporate surveys the other day that showed the tiny percentage of women in top jobs at major Arkansas businesses. It is the same throughout executive ranks and on corporate boards. I asked the delegates at Boys State to consider whether this was a sign of discrimination or a sign that white men were inherently superior. One young man responded — seriously — by quoting the Bible verse that says women should not be placed in authority over men. A woman preacher later schooled me on the relevant context of that verse should I encounter it again. I could only think to say at the time, “You better be glad my wife the judge isn’t here.”

All this is a roundabout way to say that Hillary Clinton had a good week last week. It was a propitious time, just before

the California primary. She spoke for more than 30 minutes on foreign policy.

But it was really a speech about Trump’s abysmal record. She didn’t shout. She didn’t call him names. Time after time, she merely quoted Donald Trump.

Clearly discombobulated, Trump tried to say later that Clinton had not told the truth. She provided cites for every quote.

Republican leadership is again nervous this week about the candidate their primary voters have chosen. He exhibited flaws beyond foreign policy. There was also his racist attack on a federal judge hearing the lawsuit over corrupt practices of Trump University (an attack Arkansas Republican politicians have been slow to repudiate). And there was his calling out at a California speech to a black man in the audience as “my African-American.” It was too reminiscent of the scene in “Animal House,” when frat boys encounter a familiar R&B band at a black roadhouse and one calls out, “Otis, my man!” The look on singer Otis Day’s face doesn’t reflect a shared feeling of kinship.

If only this was a movie and not Election 2016. Then it might be funny.

routine title opinions for the little thrift. I had seen them years earlier.

Of course, the whole overblown email controversy arose from her obsession with privacy. You could be surprised that Secretary of State and former National Security Adviser Colin Powell insisted on a private email server, but it is hard to imagine Hillary Clinton doing anything else.

My first encounter with Hillary followed an article I had written in 1977 for the Arkansas Gazette about a prominent businessman who had been taped asking an ex-convict to steal diamonds, an air compressor and a load of truck tires for him. He and others were indicted by a federal grand jury, but the Justice Department got the federal district court to dismiss the charges. I had obtained and transcribed hours of recordings from a mike taped to the thug’s chest and my story was mainly a recitation of the recordings, including the businessman’s derogatory references to members of his family.

My publisher sent the story down the street to the Rose Law Firm, the Gazette’s counsel since the 19th century. I met with Vince Foster, a Rose partner, who concluded there was no libel since the story was all based on the businessman’s own words. But a long legal opinion arrived the next day from Hillary Rodham, who had

recently joined the firm. While she concurred that there was no libel, she recommended that the Gazette not publish the story because parts of it invaded the privacy of the businessman’s family who were not public figures and who had done nothing illegal. While the family members probably would have no recourse against the paper, she thought it had a moral responsibility to respect their privacy and the Constitution. The paper didn’t publish the story, over my objections.

None of my other encounters with her had a pleasant outcome for me, although I should say in the interest of full disclosure that I think she will make a pretty solid president if she can restrain her hawkish impulses.

No woman and few men have had their private and public lives dissected and analyzed more than Hillary Clinton, and no one ever hated it more. The books fill a library shelf.

The best single piece remains Connie Bruck’s 32,420-word profile in the May 30, 1994, The New Yorker, as her great health care reform initiative was crashing. Bruck got members of Congress, the White House staff, news people back in Little Rock, old classmates and seemingly every friend Hillary ever had to talk about her — g ushing usually but sometimes too revealing. The first CONTINUED ON PAGE 31 www.arktimes.com

JUNE 9, 2016

7

Democratic endgame

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JUNE 9, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

K, so the fix is in. In one sense, it’s too bad the Associated Press and the TV networks called the Democratic race for Hillary Clinton before New Jersey, California and four smaller states voted on June 7, as this week’s paper went to press. Judging by my Facebook feed, this has inflamed the Bernie cult’s belief that they’ve been cheated by the “establishment.”

Whatever the results, they’ve been rendered illegitimate in the eyes of some by the news media’s supposedly premature call. Never mind that news organizations feel a professional duty to report the facts as quickly as they are ascertained. Not much imagination is required to grasp the mischief that could result from their doing it any other way.

Never mind, too, that anybody who can do the electoral arithmetic knows that Hillary Clinton has been the inevitable Democratic nominee since April, when she prevailed in New York and Pennsylvania by 16 and 13 points respectively. There simply weren’t enough populous states left for Bernie Sanders to catch up — unless he could win California by an impossible 60 points.

Nevertheless, Bernie soldiered on.

First came the argument that Clinton’s wins in “red state” Southern primaries shouldn’t count, because the South is the most conservative region of the country.

These strictures did not apply, of course, to Sanders’ victories among downtrodden white Democrats in the Cow States — Kansas, Oklahoma, Utah and Idaho, which are actually more one-sidedly Republican than many Southern states.

Not to mention thinly-populated.

Notwithstanding the likelihood that several Southern states could be in play come November (while Kansas and Idaho almost certainly won’t be), the insult to African-American voters could hardly have been more ill-advised. If it was Sanders’ intention to turn himself into the white-bread college kids’ candidate, he couldn’t have done better.

It must be thrilling to be the 74-yearold Pied Piper of the campus set, because Bernie was hard at it during a recent California stadium rally. He interrupted his ritual chant about billionaires and Wall Street to favor the crowd with some oldtimey Marxist cant.

“Any objective analyst of the current campaign understands that the energy and the grass-roots activism of this campaign is with us,” Sanders said. “Not Hill-

ary Clinton.” You see, “objective” has always been radical-speak for “in my opinion.”

Back in his SocialGENE ist Workers Party LYONS days, I’m sure Bernie won a lot of arguments browbeating people that way.

My own scientific view is that twentysomethings go to rallies; older people vote. As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait put it, “energy and activism are definitely part of the election process.

But the way you determine the winner is by holding elections.”

Meanwhile, instead of complaining about the complexity of election rules, Sanders would have been wise to explain them to his supporters. No, you can’t vote in a New York Democratic primary unless you’re a registered Democrat. Too bad, but there it is, and it’s been that way for a generation.

Instead, Sanders and his minions went around kvetching that ineligible voters would have put them over the top. They seized upon every election glitch nationwide to complain that they were being cheated.

For example, 132,000 mostly black voters in Brooklyn somehow got left off the rolls. Bernie supporters all, they’d have you believe, although Sanders lost the African-American vote in New York by a wide margin. Probably the errors hurt Clinton, but there’s no real way to know.

Chait acidly sums up the rest of the Sanders camp’s extended whine by pointing out that in Electoral College terms, Sanders is nowhere.

“Clinton has a large lead in pledged delegates, and an even larger lead in superdelegates,” he wrote. “You could rely entirely on one or the other, or change the weights between them in any fashion, and Clinton would still win. Sanders simply refuses to accept the combination of the two, instead changing subjects from one to the other.

Ask him about the pledged delegates, and he brings up the superdelegates. Ask about the superdelegates, and he changes to the pledged delegates. It’s an infinite loop of bullshit.”

First Bernie denounced superdelegates as an impediment to democracy; now he’s counting upon them to begin the revolution by overturning the will of Democratic voters. Fat chance.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

Lawmakers punish the poor

S

ince December 2015, about 3,000 dents. Nationally, Arkansans receiving benefits over a quarter of through the federal Temporary white, collegegoing males are Assistance for Needy Families program have been subject to drug screenings, illicit drug users, thanks to a bill sponsored by Sen. Blake according to the ELEANOR Johnson (R-Corning) in the name of 2013 National WHEELER Survey on Drug “accountability.”There is no comparable requirement for any other governUse and Health performed by HHS. ment subsidy or service. Homeowners Surely, thousands of drug-consumaren’t asked to pee in a cup before being college students in Arkansas are ing handed a homestead tax credit or enjoying subsidized tuition rates, student loans or scholarships paid for by mortgage interest deduction. Retirees are sent Social Security checks withthe hard work of the rest of us taxout invasions of their payers, but I have privacy. We don’t check The fact is that yet to hear of plans on the drug use habits to subject the residrug use in the dents of the state’s of people who benefit from subsidized stu- U.S. crosses all fraternity houses to dent loans or CEOs who intrusive and humildemographic receive economic deiating drug testing velopment incentives. lines. schemes or restricIf you can get behind tions on their ATM the morality (and quesuse. If the goal is to tionable constitutionality) of insulting increase accountability from people low-income people with drug screenwho benefit from government handings, why not screen everyone else, too? outs, surely it makes more sense to start This year, legislators again shook with Frat Row than the poor house. their fingers at Arkansans who receive And yet, Arkansas lawmakers continue TANF by tacking on restrictions on how to demand “accountability” from the they may spend their benefits. A spepoor and no one else. Of course, no cial language amendment attached to one is going to seriously propose drugthe budget bill that includes TANF says screening all college aid recipients or benefits must be spent on food, clothing, putting their spending habits under housing, utilities, child care and “incia government microscope. But what dentals.” The new rules limit cash withdoes it say about us that we would find drawals, which runs contrary to specific it absurd to drug test a college stuinstructions from the U.S. Department dent before giving them a scholarship, of Health and Human Services (HHS) but not a mother trying to feed her meant to ensure spending flexibility. kids? Laws that exclusively target lowWithout access to cash, TANF recipients income families highlight the deeply ingrained and unfounded mistrust of won’t be able to use their benefits for the poor at the Capitol. common cash-only expenses like field trips, lunch money, home repair and There is no doubt some of Arkanbabysitters. The inconvenience might sas’s poor do have drug problems, but they are not alone. HHS estimates that not upend people’s lives, but it sends a broader message that low-income fami70,000 Arkansans have substance abuse lies aren’t valued or trusted as members problems and most of them receive no of society. treatment at all. The fact is that drug use Setting aside questions about in the U.S. crosses all demographic lines. whether recreational drug use should Rather than penalizing the poor with be criminalized in the first place, lawTANF restrictions, perhaps Arkansas makers should consider who is actulawmakers should think about funding ally ingesting illegal substances. If it’s effective treatment programs for the the purchase of drugs that legislators state’s low-income citizens. are worried about, they should target a demographic far more likely to use Eleanor Wheeler is a senior policy analyst for Arkansas Advocates for Chilillegal drugs than people needing TANF dren and Families. aid: white, male, full-time college stu-

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THE OBSERVER NOTES ON THE PASSING SCENE

Can you spare a Harriet?

T

he Observer heard recently that the U.S. Mint is planning to boot President Andrew Jackson to the back of the $20 bill in favor of the great Underground Railroad conductor and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, which immediately made Yours Truly ask: What the hell took ’em so long?

Don’t get us wrong. While we can’t quite say we’ve got nothing against ol’ Andy Jackson — he was, after all, the guy who really kicked off America’s wholesale genocide against Native Americans, including marching the Cherokee west on the infamous Trail of Tears — we do think he was deserving of the spot on the double sawbuck, if only for the fact that he owned a parrot named Poll who so disturbed Jackson’s funeral with her nonstop cursing that Rev. William Menefee Norment, who officiated over Jackson’s trip downstairs, saw fit to write about it in his memoirs. Norment wrote that Poll was so excited by the crush of emotion at the funeral that she “let loose perfect gusts of cuss words,” to the effect that funeralgoers were “horrified and awed at the bird’s lack of reverence.” In Poll’s defense, The Observer has known a few parrots in our day, and we can attest to the fact that reverence is not their strong suit. Another fact: Jackson owned a 1,400-pound wheel of cheddar cheese — a.k.a. “The Cheshire Mammoth Cheese” — which he kept in the entryway of the White House so visitors and the unwashed masses could pop in and whittle off a hunk for a snack whenever they wished.

We didn’t make up that stuff about the parrot or the giant cheese, by the way. You can Google it.

But back to Tubman getting her spot on the $20: Though The Observer soon moved on to idolize old dead folks like Jefferson, Hemingway, Susan B. Anthony, Jonas Salk and Nikola Tesla, in elementary school we were solidly Team Harriet, who we learned about as a voracious reader in the kids’ section of the library.

She was, hands down, our favorite historical figure until age 15. Selfless heroism has always been the thing that gets under our rhino hide, and Harriet had it in spades.

Born a slave in 1822 on a Maryland plantation, she escaped to Philadelphia when she was 27. Then, instead of getting as far away from the slaveholding South as she could without falling into salt water or crossing the Arctic Circle, Harriet turned around within a year and became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, risking her own life and freedom to creep back into the slave states under cover of night and steal away dozens of slaves and guide them to safety, including her own family. After the Fugitive Slave Act was passed and even non-slaveholding states became a danger zone for escapees, she smuggled former slaves as far north as the Canadian border. When the Civil War broke out, she volunteered as a nurse, scout and spy. In June 1863, she helped lead a raid on Combahee Ferry in South Carolina that freed 750 slaves. After the war, she retired to upstate New York, where she was active in the effort to secure women the vote.

She died there in 1913.

So no flash in the pan was Harriet, no politically correct pick for the $20 bill, either, though there’s been much grumbling from the loony Right that she is. If anybody deserves to be there, it’s hard to imagine one more deserving than her, who was upholding the constitutional promise of birthright freedom for all Americans long before the white folks got around to recognizing it. How the hell is this woman not the subject of a stirring, Oscar-bait movie yet?

The Observer, for one, will be proud to spend our Harriets. As for anybody who disagrees with the face swap on the $20 to the point of righteous indignation, you’re welcome to express your displeasure by mailing the offending bills right on over to The Observer. They’ll spend just fine for us.

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11

Arkansas Reporter

THE

Dyslexia dysfunction Arkansas schools are progressing with interventions, but major gaps remain.

BY BENJAMIN HARDY

“We know there are huge numbers of people who are in prison who are dyslexic,” Elliott said. “Connect that dot and think about what that means for kids.” Elliott said the Orton-Gillingham methodology also helps non-dyslexic children who are struggling with language skills. “The reading intervention for dyslexia can work for any kind of reading issue, in most cases. It’s just a good response.”

Among the most vocal advocates for

12

JUNE 9, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

BRIAN CHILSON

B

etween 5 and 17 percent of school-age children in the general population are dyslexic, but only about 1.1 percent of Arkansas public school students (including those in charter schools) currently receive dyslexia services.

That’s the conclusion of a survey of school districts and charters recently completed by legislative staff at the request of state Sen. Joyce Elliott (D-Little Rock). In 2013, Elliott, a former teacher, crafted a new law requiring schools to screen children for “markers of dyslexia” by second grade and provide appropriate reading interventions.

Some districts have been slow to comply, she told the joint Education Committee of the legislature in March.

In the 2015-16 school year, about 5,400 students out of a statewide student population of around 476,000 received services, according to the survey (answered by all 237 districts and 22 open-enrollment charters in the state). If 11 percent of Arkansas students have dyslexia — the middle of the predicted range for prevalence — then over 50,000 kids should be receiving services.

“I hear from many people even right now that things are not happening, or they’re not happening like they should,” Elliott said when she presented the report. “This is not optional, and there are still people out there acting like it is optional. On the other hand, there are some districts out there that are knocking it out of the park and doing a fantastic job.”

Dyslexia is a common learning disability that results from a specific neurological breakdown in the way the brain processes language. Dyslexic individuals have difficulty “decoding” the written word into phonemes — the sounds that comprise speech — and therefore

OVERCOMING DYSLEXIA: Dallas Guynes Green (left) and Melissa Hannah say many schools are still neglecting struggling readers.

require interventions geared toward intensive, methodical phonics-based instruction. The new law doesn’t mandate any particular intervention program, but the Arkansas Department of Education requires schools to use a program based on what’s called the OrtonGillingham approach, a methodology that emphasizes the basic mechanics of language. About half the schools in Arkansas use an Orton-Gillingham curriculum called the Barton Reading and Spelling System, with the rest being split between other proprietary OrtonGillingham programs.

Such details matter, dyslexia advocates say, because schools have too often let struggling readers fall through the cracks by implementing ineffective interventions or by implementing good programs poorly. Because reading instruction in the early grades is the gateway skill to all future learning, the bad consequences of failing to teach large numbers of students basic literacy are staggering.

the new dyslexia law are parents such as Dallas Guynes Green of Bryant. Her son Lucas, now 19, was diagnosed with dyslexia 10 years ago; now graduated from high school, he still struggles with basic reading skills. Upon researching the disorder, Green soon realized that she herself was likely dyslexic (the disorder appears to run in certain families; dyslexia appears to have a genetic basis).

“Basically, I was functionally illiterate when I graduated from high school,” she said. “I tried to go to college and it was a nightmare. Everyone in my family chalked it up to me being lazy. ... If you’re not a strong reader, it affects everything. Reading is so second nature to people who know how. You don’t even think about it; it’s like breathing.”

Like many dyslexic individuals, Green gradually and painfully learned how to compensate for her reading difficulties and is now a licensed practical nurse. She now belongs to a group of activists pressing schools to imple-

ment better reading interventions at an early age. Dyslexic students can learn to read, Green emphasizes, if they are just taught using effective methods.

“If people are taught [in] the way [that] their brains work, then they can learn to read. … It’s such an easy fix if you know what to do and get it done.

We should spend more money and put more resources to make sure people get started out right in life. ... As a society, we do not look at that at all.”

Melissa Hannah, a speech-language pathologist in North Little Rock who specializes in dyslexia interventions, said Arkansas school districts need to pick up the pace on making sure teachers know what dyslexia is and how to respond to it effectively.

“It’s not the teachers’ fault; teachers are desperate for more training.

They’re stuck not knowing how to teach kids.” She faults change-averse and budget-conscious school administrators (the law included no new funding for implementation) along with the state Education Department: Some districts “are eager for guidance” about how to better meet the new requirements but are unsure how to do so, Hannah said.

Sen. Elliott agrees the state needs to do more. “I was disappointed in the Arkansas Education Department’s lack of proactiveness,” she said. “The ADE said they really have no ability to enforce [the law].” (The department has no problem enforcing state takeovers of local school districts in academic or fiscal distress, she added.)

But Vicki King, the Education Department’s dyslexia specialist, said the department does not have the necessary regulatory enforcement authority to force districts to implement better dyslexia intervention programs. “The department’s role in this is working with the dyslexia specialists at the co-ops,” she said, referring to the Education Service Cooperatives.

The department disseminates information to administrators and teachers in professional development through the state’s 15 regional education cooperatives. “We can go to a school and offer assistance … but it’s not like we’re coming in to catch them,” King said.

Despite the gaps, responses to Elliot’s survey nonetheless indicate

THE

BIG PICTURE

I

Arkansas Times Recommends:

edge makes me dig it even more. Here’s the beautiful thing about “Retreat from the Sun”: If you listen to this track and don’t like it, stop. You won’t like the rest of the album. I promise. Save perhaps the dominatrix routine in “Gagged and Tied,” there aren’t really any surprises, just 13 tracks of synth and sunshine.

— Stephanie Smittle

SUMMER FUN EDITION

MIGHT BE THE Dog’s “Retreat from the Sun” could LAST AMERICAN be construed as pretty antithetical to male who will admit “summer fun,” but I’d dare anyone to that he doesn’t like stick to that literal interpretation after beer. Yep, even your favordigging the surfy, ultra-pop vibes on ite beer. Even the craftithis album. Producer Brad Wood put est craft beer, made by such a thick coat of polish on these monks in an abbey high tracks that you barely notice the lyrical despair in the title track’s rearview mirin the mountains. I suspect I’m what’s known ror: “You may run like a bitch in heat, but as a “supertaster,” it’s fun to sometimes try to retreat from which means that all the sun, cause it’s awful lonely where flavors are particularly I’m coming from.” No less giggly than 1995’s “Totally Crushed Out!” but defiintense to me. The best nitely less driven by Petra Haden’s artsy wine you can imagine tastes to me like grapeviolin line, “Retreat from the Sun” is flavored turpentine. an absolute pop confection. It’s sonic Meanwhile, all beer summer candy, stuffed with “oohs” and tastes like goat piss “la-la-las,” crunchy guitars, and tales of crushes that begin with mutual T-shirt — or what I’d imagine admiration. It even explores the oftengoat piss would taste like, ignored subject of platonic love. From if I’d ever tasted it.

All that said, I’ve finally found a 1997 until today, I’ve been rocking out porch-sittin’ booze for me, in the form to the track “I’m Gonna See You,” thinkof Coney Island Hard Root Beer. Yes, I ing it was a sweet song about grown-up know hard soda concoctions have the love, about falling out of Total Infatuareputation of being the Playskool My tion Phase with a lover and still being First Hangover Kit. But I like it. Though thrilled about what’s left, and about some hard root beers I’ve tried predict- learning to adore the feeling of havably dance across the tongue like Billy ing a mundane routine with another Dee Williams’ mustache sweat, Coney human being: “I’m gonna see you in the Island Root Beer tastes like, well, root morning, I’m gonna see you when you’re beer. I suspect they may be buying their uptight, I’m gonna see you when you’re concentrate off Barq’s, because it tastes boring.” Apparently, though, it’s singerEXACTLY like that, only with a bit of a songwriter Anna Waronker’s “love letter beery twang that goes away after the to the band” (with whom she was inifirst few swallows. Believe me: Given tially unsure she wanted to create my delicate palate, if I can drink it by this album), the pail with no problems, it should and that bit taste like heaven to your average of knowlperson, especially if you don’t mind your drunk coming in a sweet wrapper. If you like unleaded root beer, give it a try.

—David Koon AS THE TITLE SUGGESTS, That

progress: In the previous school year, 2014-15, only about 2,300 students received such services, as opposed to 5,400 in 2015-16. Over half of the districts and charters in the state did not even respond to a question asking how many students received services in 2014-15. More schools are beginning to ensure their reading interventionists — a staff position that already existed in schools before the law went into effect

— are properly trained in the phonicsbased instructional approaches that work with both dyslexic students and also non-dyslexic students who struggle with reading.

Elliott said she couldn’t publicly distribute data showing each district’s numbers because the survey questions were part of a larger legislative research effort that guaranteed schools’ anonymity, but that she’d gladly provide the

PAN BAGNAT MEANS “bathed bread” in French, and I have no idea what its original Provencal form is like, but the following Americanized adaptation is a perfect summer picnic food: salty, fresh, portable and satisfying. Procure a baguette or some similar substantial, crusty loaf.

Slice it open, leaving one edge intact.

Then, pile on thinly sliced vegetables: Tomato, cucumber and purple onions are necessary, while black olives, artichoke hearts, razor-thin peppers and most anything else are optional. You can stop there if your tastes run vegan; otherwise add thin slices of provolone or another mild cheese, hard-boiled egg and/or a smattering of meat. Drizzle with olive oil and top with freshly ground black pepper, course salt and a single minced clove of garlic. Your goal is to bind these ingredients tightly together in the heart of the bread, wherein their comingled juices will inform the whole. Lay out a yard or so of plastic wrap on the counter and place the sandwich on top; wrap the entire thing up, including both ends, and wind the plastic around a time or two as if you’re bandaging an injured arm. Now, compress and be patient: Place the sandwich beneath something heavy and flat (bricks, dictionaries, etc.) for at least a couple of hours of marinating. Unwrap, slice and serve with a Busch Light and 95 percent humidity.

— Benji Hardy

information to any legislator interested in his or her home district. (Also, while the legislature can’t provide the public with that district-level information, parents and other education advocates can request it directly from school districts and charters themselves.)

“There are some places where [the number of students receiving services] is very, very high and other places where it’s very low,” she said.

FIND TWO HOURS TO YOURSELF. Make a pitcher of iced tea, preferably with fresh mint and a little sugar. Fill the baby pool with water, and pull a chair up to it. Then take the 721 New Yorker magazines that have been filling up the space under your bed, in the basket, on top of the chair and on the coffee table and stack them by the chair. Fill glass with iced tea. Put feet in pool to stay cool.

Drink tea and catch up on all those stories you never got to. Don’t worry if you skip one or two. In fact, skip the fiction.

— Leslie Newell Peacock IF YOU HAVE A DRIVER’S LICENSE, a piece of property that needs to be improved and $300 (or $200 and a trailer), you should immediately rent a mini excavator. Operating heavy equipment, it turns out, is not unlike playing a video game. You quickly become adept — or at least competent enough — at maneuvering the joysticks and levers. Then: digging and destruction! Expending the amount of energy it takes to dip a spoon into ice cream, you’ll be able to dig up three or four feet of rocky, thick-rooted soil in one scoop. If you have things you need to knock down — old fencing, smallish trees, neighbors’ mailboxes — you can swing the bucket into them like a slap with devastating effect. It’s the kind of contagious power that makes you want to dig massive holes just for kicks.

Who needs a goldfish pond?

—Lindsey Millar

Elliott said she also has concerns that some schools may not be implementing early reading interventions “with fidelity” — perhaps complying with the letter of the mandate, that is, but not investing the time, energy and funding necessary to ensure a truly effective program. Using the right intervention in the right way is crucial, she said. “If you have a headache, I hope I don’t give you something for your toe.” www.arktimes.com

JUNE 9, 2016

13

BRIAN CHILSON

A mother and child disunion In an era of mass incarceration, more women are going to prison and for longer. An often overlooked consequence: More children are ending up in foster care.

T

en days after her youngest son was born in April 2014, Lisa Rushing, a 27-year-old from Paragould, went to jail.

She’d been in trouble for a while: After receiving felony probation for credit card fraud, she’d failed to meet with her probation officer for at least two years, resulting in a warrant for absconding. During the same time, she’d also become addicted to meth, and had signed over guardianship of her two older children, a boy and a girl, to her mother to prevent them from being taken into foster care. There were circumstances behind Rushing’s problems: Her father had been murdered in 2010, and she’d begun drinking heavily and eventually using drugs to cope; the father of her own children was in and out of prison, and it seemed that every time she became pregnant he was locked up again.

BY KATHRYN JOYCE

CHILDREN IN CRISIS:

an Arkansas Times special investigation 14

JUNE 9, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

Both the child welfare and the criminal justice systems caught up with Rushing when her infant was born with methamphetamine in his system.

Rushing was to meet with a lawyer soon after delivering so she could formalize her mother’s status as guardian of this child as well. But, while she was waiting to leave the hospital three days after the birth, Greene County sheriff’s deputies came to her room accompanied by employees of the Division of Children and Family Services, the branch of the Arkansas Department of Human Services responsible for child welfare and foster care. DCFS took the infant into state custody and Rushing’s mother was told that if she wanted to care for the baby, she’d have to apply to become a foster parent.

Rushing began the first steps of the process toward “reunification,” the term for returning a child removed from his or her home by authorities and the stated goal of most child welfare cases.

She went to the local DHS office and watched “The Clock Is Ticking,” a short

BRIAN CHILSON

video laying out what she should expect from the case plan and court process, and what steps she’d have to fulfill if she wanted to regain custody from DCFS. The video emphasized how quickly the child could be offered for adoption if she didn’t satisfy the requirements of her case plan — in most cases, 15 months after the child comes into custody. She went to her first family court hearing, where her son was officially placed in foster care and Rushing said she was advised that if she met her case plan, beginning with addressing her addiction and criminal history, she could get him back.

But the same day, her bondsman called to say that her bond, issued around 2012 for the initial fraud charge, was being revoked. Hoping that complying meant she could get her son back, Rushing willingly turned herself in.

Just over a year later, in May 2015, Rushing was living at Southeast Arkansas Community Correction Center, a therapeutic women’s prison in Pine Bluff specializing in substance abuse recovery. She’d been transferred there from Greene County Jail, and, most of the way through the prison’s recovery program, she anticipated that she’d be approved for an early release that August. She’d been sober for a year, and had been working on the parts of her DCFS case plan that she could address from prison: She went to counseling seven days a week, had taken parenting classes, GED exams and spirituality classes, and worked in the prison “chow hall” and later as a porter in the center’s administrative office.

She hadn’t been able to attend any of the court hearings for her DCFS case in person. It was a three-and-a-half-hour drive back to Paragould, and paying to transport prisoners to hearings requires a court order. She tried to participate remotely, as the prison director and administrators set her and her counselor up with phone conferencing to listen in on her hearings. That worked twice, Rushing said, but on several other occasions she sat with her counselor almost the whole day, waiting for the court to call until realizing they wouldn’t.

Rushing hadn’t been able to visit with any of her children since she’d been transferred to Pine Bluff. Her mother, who had her two oldest, didn’t have a driver’s license (which Rushing believes prevented her from being approved as a relative foster parent).

And DCFS, she said, never agreed to bring the baby to Pine Bluff, although the prison sent documents approving the visitation.

Alisa Rawlings, the adminstrative assistant to the prison director and Rushing’s supervisor in her job as a porter, recalled a number of confusing setbacks they couldn’t get to the bottom of: court dates, postponed or canceled without notice; DCFS caseworkers who didn’t return calls; the agency’s failure to follow the prison’s straightforward protocol in requesting visitation for Rushing’s son; and, their

year, during a quick visit at the Greene County Jail before she’d been transferred to Pine Bluff. A thin white woman with long brown hair in a bun and a face that quickly reddens when she cries, Rushing remembered how they’d sat on the floor of a conference room at the county lockup and played. The boy was crawling and teething, and he smelled like lavender, like another family’s soap.

The other women in class piped in with advice, some of it wrong. “From what I understand, they can’t take your rights away while you’re incarcerated,” one woman said. “They have to give you that chance.”

“Oh, yes they can,” someone else replied.

incorrect later assertion that visits had taken place.

“There was always some excuse,” Rawlings said.

As her probable release date neared, Rushing wrote her parent counsel — the court-assigned attorney who represented her — to ask that she request more time for Rushing to meet her case plan. As it was, Rushing would be released from prison only weeks after the 15-month cut-off point, and would just miss the opportunity to meet her remaining requirements, namely that she find a job and housing.

Her lawyer responded brusquely.

“Your request will not be granted because that’s not the law,” she wrote in a letter to Rushing. “The law and the court do not care that you cannot obtain home and employment while incarcerated. The law and the court care that your child has had to wait over a year for permanency and if you were given more time the child would have to wait even longer.” The court, the lawyer predicted, would likely decide to change the goal of the case plan from reunification to adoption, terminating Rushing’s parental rights. Rushing’s only option, she said, was to choose to relinquish her rights herself.

Sitting in a yellow jumpsuit at a classroom desk at the SACC detention center in May 2015, Rushing said she’d only seen her youngest son once in all that

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he United States incarcerates people at a higher rate than any other country, and children reap the consequences. In our era of mass incarceration, over 5.1 million children nationwide have had a parent imprisoned at some point in their lives, according to a report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation released this April.

Those numbers include 61,000 kids in Arkansas, or 9 percent of the state’s children, compared to 7 percent nationwide.

Many of those children live with their other parent or an extended relative. But a large number will end up in foster care.

Nationally, about 15-20 percent of children in foster care have an incarcerated parent. Arkansas is on the high end of that spectrum: Former DCFS Director Cecile Blucker estimated that 20 percent of Arkansas’s foster children are in care because a parent went to prison or jail. It’s the third-most common reason that children are taken into state custody, and has been for years, she said.

(Blucker stepped down as head of the division at the end of March.)

That’s likely due in large part to the changing gender demographics in prisons in the U.S. over the last several decades. Since 1980, the number of incarcerated women across the country has increased 700 percent, growth that has continued at a faster pace than the incarceration rate for men. Arkansas stands out here as well. As of 2014,

the state was among the top 10 states with the highest female incarceration rates. Nationally, most of those women — around 60 percent, according to statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics — are mothers of minor-age children.

When fathers go to prison, children often remain with their mothers, but when mothers go to prison, the children are much more likely to live with aunts or grandmothers, or, barring that, to land in foster care. While 2 percent of children with incarcerated fathers are in foster care nationwide, the figure is 11 percent for children with incarcerated mothers, according to Rutgers University’s National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated. Between the mid-1980s and 2000, the number of children in foster care more than doubled, and a 2006 study published in the journal “Demography” argued that this “foster care crisis” could be traced to the growth in the imprisonment of women, particularly the higher incarceration rates and longer sentences that resulted from the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. The study’s authors concluded that the steep increase in foster care rates was also fueled by cuts to welfare benefits and food stamp allowances during this same period. (Researchers have long recognized that poverty correlates strongly with child maltreatment rates, whether because poor families come under more stress or because poor families become more visible to authorities and thus are more likely to be reported to child welfare agencies.)

Conventional wisdom might be that parents who wind up incarcerated are de facto unfit, and that their children will be better off. But extensive research has shown that in most cases, children and families suffer when a family member goes to prison. Aside from emotional fallout, a large portion of family income is usually lost, adding significant stress to the family, and potentially compounding neglect as the family falls under greater strain.

Sara Wakefield, a professor at Rutgers University and co-author with Christopher Wildeman of “Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality,” conducted a series of studies on the children of incarcerated fathers. There, the two found, in almost all cases children are worse off when their fathers are incarcerated (with the exception of a

On the Cover: Lisa Rushing and two of her children, Aubree, age 4, and Alvin, age 7. www.arktimes.com

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Act, which is where the 15-month “ticking clock” comes from. The law stipulates that, with a few exceptions, if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months (unless they’re being fostered by a relative), child welfare agencies must stop working toward the reunification of the family and should instead move to terminate parental rights and make the child available for adoption.

The law was intended to protect children from lingering for years in foster care. But it came into effect during the era when mothers began going to prison more often and in greater numbers, leading to the unintended effect that many more women were put at risk of losing their parental rights. A principle that might make sense if a mother is incarcerated for a number of years seems to make less sense when it’s applied to mothers who may only miss their window for regaining custody by a matter of months.

The playground was proposed by Arkansas Voices for the Children Left Behind, an advocacy group founded by Dee Ann Newell. For 25 years, Newell has been visiting prisons to teach her class, “Parenting Inside.” She started years ago, in a previous women’s unit in Pine Bluff that at the time had only a chicken coop for a classroom. She continued on to 13 other prisons and jails across the state, for both men and women; this June, Newell will join 11 other organizations for a Listening Summit for Children of Incarcerated Parents at the White House, where a member of the youth groups she works with will make recommendations to the federal agencies tasked with dealing with prisoners and their families.

In February, Newell arrived at SACC for the first day of a parenting course with a new set of 15 students. The women were mostly already seated, though two wouldn’t make it that day — they were

BRIAN CHILSON

small subset of violent fathers who had abused the children’s mothers).

Their studies didn’t look at foster children specifically, but Wakefield said she wouldn’t be surprised to find that that cohort — children of incarcerated fathers who were then placed in foster care — were doing the worst of all, since foster children fare worse, as a group, on various measures of instability. A 2005 study of foster care alumni undertaken

by Casey Family Programs found that a third of former foster children were living in poverty as adults, more than half had experienced clinical levels of mental illness, and that as a group they exhibited post-traumatic stress symptoms at twice the rate of U.S. war veterans. On the other side of the equation, staggering proportions of former foster youth themselves end up incarcerated within a few years after aging out of state custody — around 33 percent of young women and 64 percent of young men, according to an ongoing study by the Chapin Hall research center at the University of Chicago — in what is sometimes called the foster-care-to-prison pipeline. Somewhat counterintuitively, early research suggests that the effects of having a mother incarcerated aren’t as uniformly negative as having a father in prison. Wakefield, who is now studying the children of mothers in prison, said this is because mothers have a more central role in childrearing: When a father is unstable, mothers can offer a buffer to offset a child’s exposure, but when mothers are unstable — most often because they’re mentally ill or addicted — children can be more directly harmed.

“Incarcerated mothers are a heterogeneous group,” Wakefield said, representing both “large groups of women who are good parents but who are struggling with mental illness, substance abuse or poverty, and then also a group of women who arguably are not safe with their children.” It follows, she said, that while having a mother incarcerated is likely to be inherently more destabilizing for a child, whether it’s better or worse for the child to then be placed outside the home depends on the situation.

“You have a portion of kids who are really harmed and then a portion of kids who are not harmed, or who are benefited [by being removed]. If you add them together, it’s a zero, but that doesn’t mean it’s neutral. It means it’s different for different kids,” she said. “The way I’d characterize it is that one-size-fitsall laws about foster care do not map well onto the population of incarcerated mothers and their children.”

One such one-size prescription is the 1997 federal Adoption and Safe Families

ADVOCATE: Dee Ann Newell has been teaching parenting classes in Arkansas prisons for 25 years.

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ocated on the grounds of a former boys’ academy, Southeast Arkansas Community Correction Center still has some of the feel of a school campus, with one-story cottages connected by a network of sidewalks.

Outside the prison gates, inmates in yellow jumpsuits work in a large garden growing greens and tomatoes, and wave when visitors approach or leave. SACC is a therapeutic community that is not supposed to hold any violent offenders, and you’d almost forget where you were if not for the squads of women marching and chanting adapted boot camp cadences with their hands clasped behind their backs. On one of the patches of grassy lawn inside the fence there’s a children’s playground, but it largely goes unused.

pregnant and getting medical checkups for babies they’d likely deliver in prison.

They sat at tables in a horseshoe arrangement and passed Newell’s handouts as she began to tell them about herself: how when she’d first started volunteering in Pine Bluff in 1991, nearly all of the 200 female inmates approached her to ask if she’d check on their children and the relatives who were caring for them. With support from the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, Newell and local university social work students interviewed 180 of those families and found they were struggling. Consequently, beginning in 1994, Arkansas Voices began to provide services for the families of prisoners as well, through visitation facilitation, reentry support and peer groups for inmates’

children.

But most of her time is spent painstakingly dealing with individual parents and kids. She told the class that what they did in parenting class was hard and painful work — “because we’re dealing with mothers who aren’t with their children” — but that it was also important work that could help them avoid recidivism. Out of 1,025 former mothers who’d taken her class from 2001 to 2010, Newell told them, she’d only had one woman return to prison after release.

Before she’d gotten halfway through her introduction, one woman couldn’t hold back from interjecting with a question that seemed to be on many minds.

Her daughter had been taken into foster care when she was arrested; would she be able to get her back?

The other women in class piped in with advice, some of it wrong. “From what I understand, they can’t take your rights away while you’re incarcerated,” one woman said. “They have to give you that chance.”

“Oh, yes they can,” someone else replied.

“What are you being told?” Newell asked gently. The woman said she hadn’t heard anything from DCFS since she’d been incarcerated in August, six months earlier. She wasn’t sure if DCFS even knew where she was.

“Nobody has talked to you?” Newell asked. She said she’d need details of the case, and in fact, would need details on all of the women’s situations if they wanted help.

“It is important for you to know your rights and your responsibilities,” she started again. “I think there’s a general consensus here that there has not been a lot of responsibility on your part and you’re trying to amend that.” But they also had rights that were often overlooked. One of the most pressing problems for incarcerated parents, Newell said, was that if they weren’t hearing from DCFS, their parental rights could be terminated without warning. (Often, this occurs because DCFS doesn’t know how to reach an incarcerated parent, Newell said: Family members may not tell the truth to caseworkers, or mothers simply may not know who to contact.) She told them to get access to their hometown newspapers, in case DCFS had placed pre-adoption classified ads about their child — something the agency will do if it can’t locate a parent.

She mentioned the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and how it came into being during the wave of tougher crime bills and prison sentencing. Unlike some states, such as California, New York and Washington, which have extended the

15-month time frame for incarcerated parents, Arkansas has not. “The one way we can stop the clock is if the child is with a relative,” she said. But, she added, Arkansas also fails to place enough children with relatives. “So we’re losing it both ways.” She reminded the women whose children were living with family members — about half the class — that they should know how lucky they were, and that she hoped the women with DCFS cases wouldn’t be jealous. She said that she would bring in stationery and stamps so they could write thank-you letters to the grandmothers or aunts “who stepped up when you couldn’t.”

As the women went around the room, sharing their stories, describing distinct situations with common elements of drugs, poverty and often abuse at the hands of partners or parents, Newell listened and said, “Bless you,” and occasionally grimaced at the mention of a county she knew to be particularly hostile to incarcerated parents. One woman — only one — noted that she got to see her two children regularly, since they were both living with relatives. Newell clapped her hands.

“I’m going to jump up and down!

That’s good news,” she said.

Getting to see your children in prison in Arkansas, Newell said, can seem impossible. When DCFS is involved, she said, visits sometimes simply don’t happen, even though caseworkers are generally charged with supervising prison visits so they can report back to the judge.

“But it doesn’t happen in Arkansas. I can count on two hands how many times it’s happened.” Sometimes this might be due to the prison refusing to approve visits, but that didn’t seem to be the case at SACC, where a number of the women said the prison director and administrators had sometimes gone to great lengths to try to arrange visitations. The facility’s assistant supervisor, Rose Washington, said that part of their mission is ensuring “that family contact is maintained to the very extent we can make it happen.”

SACC’s staff varied in their estimates of how often mothers with DCFS cases get to see their children. Treatment supervisor Syrne Bowers recalled instances where caseworkers sometimes made multiple trips to bring down a large family of children to visit their mother — three one week and two the next, to accommodate car seats — but Alisa Rawlings, who processes the prison’s visitation paperwork, said that overall “there’s not a huge amount of mothers that get to see their children while they’re here.”

Sometimes, said former DCFS Director Cecile Blucker, a lack of visitation is the result of a judge opposed to children

visiting parents in prison on principle, fearing “generational issues”: that taking children to prison will so normalize the experience that they won’t see prison as bad, and may be more likely to end up there themselves.

A number of states have more generous family visitation policies for prisoners, and some have piloted programs to let infants stay with their incarcerated mothers for the first year of their lives to allow bonding. Research has consistently shown that encouraging contact between children and incarcerated parents not only benefits kids — a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services notes that maintaining regular contact is one of the most important factors in helping children adjust — but also helps parents, since those who receive regular visitation with their families are significantly less likely to return to prison.

But many such visitation programs have been cut back, casualties of the era of mass incarceration and shrinking budgets. As a December story in The Nation explored, Mississippi until recently was home to a remarkably progressive visitation model that allowed parents to spend extended time with their children, playing, cooking and talking. In 2012, however, it was shut down.

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isa Rushing was one of those who never received visitation while she was incarcerated, although she said the staff at SACC had “done everything they could” to help make it happen, including the prison director and her administrative assistant personally contacting DCFS. To her dismay, she learned last fall that that failure to obtain visits had permanent consequences.

In early August, as she’d hoped, Rushing passed her “vote” — the assessment by her prison counselors and other treatment and administrative staff that she’d successfully completed the program and could leave on parole. Her official release date was Sept. 1, less than a week after the court date at which DCFS said it planned to terminate her parental rights. The family that had been fostering Rushing’s son since she went to jail wanted to adopt him.

The court date was postponed — thanks, Rushing believes, to the intervention of SACC administrators — and she returned to Paragould. Her daughter, now in preschool, and her oldest son, in first grade, clung to her side for weeks after she got back. She joined a Narcotics Anonymous group, told her old friends she couldn’t be around them anymore, and signed up for GED classes to finish the last subject she hadn’t passed in prison.

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For more information: e-mail casa@arcourts.gov W W W. A R K A N S A S C A S A . N E T www.arktimes.com

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that she hadn’t made her visits, nor sent financial support for her son’s foster care, nor passed more drug screenings while she had been in prison.

Rushing didn’t fail any drug tests in prison but wasn’t ever picked for random testing at SACC, and, because DCFS didn’t bring her son to visit while she was in Pine Bluff, the agency never tested her there, either.

“They acted like I hadn’t done anything I was supposed to do,” she said. “Like I had a choice of where I was at.”

In the end, the judge let her voluntary termination stand.

DCFS is forbidden by law from speaking on specific cases, but presented with the outline of the situation as Rushing told it, former Director Blucker said that DCFS tends to support visitation between children and incarcerated parents. She said it’s normal DCFS protocol for caseworkers to visit with parents in prison, to make recommendations about children visiting their incarcerated parents, and to have either a caseworker or program assistant drive children down for regular visits. The long distances involved in many cases though —three-and-ahalf hours between Paragould and Pine Bluff, in Rushing’s case — come on top of already-heavy DCFS caseloads, and could be a reason visits aren’t always made. Blucker added that the practice of some courts to hold cattle call-style “DCFS days,” when caseworkers and their charges are compelled to wait in court until their case is called — sometimes all day — could impact the ability of DCFS and courts to ensure that incarcerated parents are allowed to at least attend hearings by phone.

“It could be that we just messed up,” Blucker said, speaking hypothetically about the lack of visitation in a case like Rushing’s. But the responsibility for making sure that visits — or court appearances, or drug testing — happen, Blucker said, rests with parent counsel, not DCFS. Today, Rushing is engaged, attending NA meetings and in the process of buying a house; she hasn’t yet passed her final GED exam, but her adult education teacher said that Rushing has been a respectful and dedicated student and that she expects she’ll return to try again this fall. When she and her oldest two children drive past DHS offices in Paragould, Rushing said, the kids point at the agency building, where they’d gone BRIAN CHILSON

Although confidentiality laws prevented counselors at SACC from commenting on the specifics of Rushing’s treatment history, two of the treatment staff described her generally as one of the center’s success stories. Dealing with a DCFS case while incarcerated, as well as dealing with addiction, is unequivocally challenging, they said. But those who make good use of the time can also reach a pivotal point in their recovery.

“Lisa took this as an opportunity,” said Karen Matcin, Rushing’s last primary counselor at SACC. “I think she’s an example of an individual who, if you are faced with adversity and challenges, if you apply the right tools, they become a testament to the program.”

Alisa Rawlings, who’d gotten to know Rushing when she worked as a porter, remembered her as a shy and concientious worker who liked to share pictures of her children. Rawlings said she’d been rooting for Rushing when she was released.

“One thing I know about her is she loved her children,” Rawlings said. “I was praying that it would turn in her favor.”

Within a week of being home, Rushing applied with DCFS to visit her son, now almost 18 months old, passed the agency’s mandatory drug test and was approved. She asked her new caseworker — she said she’d had six — what her son’s current clothing sizes were so that she could buy him new clothes.

Her court date was postponed to late September, and then to late November.

Rushing became hopeful that DCFS would give her more time, “considering I’m doing good and trying to get things right.” But when she asked DCFS workers questions, she said they told her to ask her lawyer. And when she called her lawyer — the same parent counsel who had written her so curtly in May — she said she left five messages and had to visit the office in person before she got a response.

Still, she got to see her son, for two hours once a week in a tiny room at DHS offices. After not seeing his mother for 10 months — since just before she’d been moved from Greene County Jail to SACC — the boy was restless and wary.

But after that first awkward visit, she felt him begin to warm up, playing with her and posing for pictures.

Then, in mid-November, as they neared Rushing’s court date, she was

informed that her upcoming hearing would be her last before her parental rights were terminated.

“They said I was locked up too long and that the foster family was willing to adopt him and was the only family he knew. That it was in the child’s best interests to terminate because we have no bond,” she said. “But that’s because they never brought him to see me.”

Her parent counsel called her to her office to have a phone conference with the judge who would preside over their case. There, they told her that she faced a choice: Either voluntarily relinquish her parental rights, or have them involuntarily terminated. Rushing provided the Arkansas Times with a letter from the attorney advising her against fighting the termination: “Remember, if and when the Court involuntarily terminates your parental rights, that termination can be used against you to terminate your rights to any children born to you after [your son] that are taken into DCFS custody… Additionally it is my opinion that you cannot win this case considering your past and the lack of progress you have made to this point as a result of your very lengthy incarceration.” (The attorney’s office told the Times that it would not discuss details of a past client’s case.)

It took more than a week for Rushing to decide what to do. In the end, to protect her “children and future children,” she said, she signed. At the court hearing, Rushing said, DCFS presented a case for involuntary termination anyway, testifying that she hadn’t fulfilled her case plan:

with their grandmother on visitation, and say that that’s where their brother is. Her son keeps asking when he’ll see his brother, and Rushing’s mother keeps buying presents, Christmas ornaments and clothes for her grandson, which then get put in storage, in case the boy gets in touch when he turns 18.

Rushing said she’s careful to explain to her other children that she bears the blame for the loss of their baby brother.

“The kids understand that I did something bad when I was pregnant, so they don’t think, ‘These bad people took baby.’

No, it’s that I was bad and so someone came and took baby,” she said.

When she’s not teaching them, though, she sounds less clear. “I know I was in the wrong. I understand why they took him. But when you go through a program to get better, and you come out and they still pull everything out from beneath you? It’s like they don’t want to help.”

“I

think the broader policy discussion to have around incarcerated parents is that incarceration isn’t working,” Sarah Wakefield said.

Crime rates have fallen dramatically in recent decades, but that’s not thanks to mass incarceration. A recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that the huge increase in incarceration rates in the ’80s and ’90s had a negligible effect on reducing crime when compared to other social and economic factors. And policymakers are taking note: At the federal level, a bipartisan coalition in Congress is currently backing legislation that would reduce mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent crimes and drug offenses, and in Arkansas, a legislative task force is considering state-level reforms.

In addition to the immense financial and human costs of locking up millions of people for nonviolent offenses, mass incarceration further destabilizes disadvantaged families and adds to the tally of children in foster care.

“Why would we pursue a path that isn’t making us safer and is transmitting this disadvantage across generations?” Wakefield asked. “We tend to think of this as ‘incarceration happens first and then children end up in the child welfare system,’ but if you look at the histories of women in prison, many of them come from the child welfare system. It’s a cycle.”

The next question that raises is what we should be doing instead. While the incarceration of parents is bad for their children, it’s also bad for children to live in environments of poverty and instability, where their parents can’t afford

housing, food or medical care, or suffer from untreated mental health or substance abuse problems.

A glimpse of what a better solution might be came this April in a new study published in the “American Sociological Review.” Frank Edwards, a sociology Ph.D. at the University of Washington, reviewed 10 years of federal data about every state’s foster care system and compared those findings to how punitive a state’s criminal justice system is, and how generous its system of welfare benefits. What he found was a clear correlation between three factors: how harshly a state deals with crime (as measured by incarceration, death sentence rates and the ratio of police per capita), how it deals with the economically vulnerable (according to how difficult it is for families to access welfare benefits), and how many children will end up in foster care.

“The simplest terms I could put it in,” Edwards said, “is that the number of children entering foster care every year in a state is pretty well predicted by the punitive-ness of the state’s criminal justice system and the generosity of its welfare system.” Edwards’ research suggests a cultural link between these disparate pieces of a state’s approach to its citizens, or what he calls its “policy regime.” A

state more disposed to punish criminals harshly also tends to “punish” parents more harshly in child welfare cases.

“It’s a culture or style in governments and agencies that trickles down to how caseworkers and judges make decisions,” he said. In the data that Edwards looked at, Arkansas had a higher-than-average incarceration rate (6.4 people incarcerated per thousand, compared to a national average of 5.04) and low enrollment rates for benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, as well as “especially ungenerous” TANF payments ($260 per month maximum, as compared to $477 nationally).

“The links are undeniable,” he said.

“There’s abundant evidence that the criminal justice system is having negative impacts on families, and there’s abundant evidence that having an expansive criminal justice system will … increase the number of kids going into foster care.” In clearer terms than research has shown to date, the study indicates that a state faced with a foster care crisis can reduce its foster population by making two policy changes that may seem, on their surface, unrelated to child welfare: creating a more forgiving criminal justice system and a kinder, more expansive social safety net.

www.arktimes.com

JUNE 9, 2016

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Arts Entertainment AND

A ‘WINDFALL’ FOR THEATERGOERS Jason Alexander directs play premiere at The Rep.

BY JAMES SZENHER

A

lottery ticket almost never gives much of a chance to win big, but a ticket to the Arkansas Repertory Theatre this month seems like a sure shot to deliver laughs, surprising twists and an action-packed final act.

For its final production of the season, The Rep is staging the world premiere of “Windfall,” written by Scooter Pietsch and directed by Jason Alexander, best known for playing George Costanza in “Seinfeld.”

A reductive description of the play might be “Office Space” meets “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” with a somewhat darker edge. The gist of it is that four data entry employees, bonded in their dissatisfaction with their jobs and loathing of their boss, become convinced of a surefire way to win a $400 million lottery: They agree to invest all their savings and split the winnings. Soon, though, suspicions begin brewing and shifting alliances pit them against each other as they go to extreme lengths to make sure no one gets away with the money single-handedly.

The setting is a nondescript office interior. Set designer Mike Nichols and his crew have captured the essence of the type of soul-sucking beige prison that many will relate to having worked in, all the way down to the logo. Alexander praised the design as being on par with anything that a New York playhouse could pull off.

Depending on whom you talk with, Glenn Brannon, the owner, is either a wise and practical foil to his employees’ spiraling descent into comedic chaos, or a manipulative sociopath who delights in exploiting his employees’ weaknesses. Ray Wills, who plays 20

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Glenn, explained that his character stays firm in his belief that effort, not scheming, is what ultimately pays off in the end. “They think that money will solve their problems and make them happy,” he said of the employees, noting that they are more deeply flawed than they realize.

Scooter Pietsch, who wrote the play, more or less agreed: “Even though the boss is a mean guy, he’s right in the end: You get what you can through hard work, and you are the one who creates happiness in your own life.”

Alvin Keith, who plays Galvin, one of the employees, wasn’t buying it, though: “We still hate [the boss] in the end. He sees that we are beaten down and he preys on that. He continues to beat us down, which drives us to more desperation.”

Galvin, described as the “most deserving” of the employees, acts as a sort of catalyst, inspiring the other employees to take on their shared commitment to the dream of winning millions. Hannah, played by Nikki Coble, is the reliable office veteran, and one to whom audience members are more likely to relate. Chris, played by Cyrus Alexander, is the charming slacker who never grew up. Kate, played by Lisa Ann Goldsmith, is the older, alcoholic office manager. Apart from these four is Jacqueline, played by Kayla Nicole Wilkes, a newbie brought in

by Glenn to make the other employees fear for their jobs.

Jason Alexander says the play boils down to the question: “What happens when someone cheats you out of a winning lottery ticket? If you were in these people’s situation, how far would you go?”

The second act of the play was

SOCIOPATH OR FOIL? The boss (played by Glenn Foil) says effort, not scheming, is the way to happiness.

described as “like an action movie.”

Pietsch hinted at some of the details: “The paper cutter and document shredder play prominent parts.” Jason Alexander teased, “Have you ever laughed at something but said to yourself, ‘Oh my God?’ That’s Act 2.”

What could drive these people who have spent their lives in a low-risk, low-reward job to put everything on the line for the ultimate payoff? “We come across the story we want to hear,” Coble said. “We’ve been provided with

proof, the undeniable truth that we will win, and we invest completely because we think it’s our only way out.”

“Windfall” opens Friday, June 10, and plays through Sunday, June 26.

Special events include a panel discussion at the Clinton School of Public Service at noon Thursday, June 9; “Pay Your Age Night” on Sunday, June 12; and Sign Interpreter Night Wednesday, June 22. More info is available at therep.org/attend/productions/ windfall.

Check out the Times’ A&E blog arktimes.com

A&E NEWS LITTLE ROCK NATIVE ROBERT Palmer was chief pop music critic for the New York Times during the 1980s, and the late writer’s imprint is all over a blossoming project by his daughter, Augusta Palmer, to be titled “The Blues Society: A Documentary Film.” In what Memphis artist Randall Lyon called “poetic furor,” a group of blues musicians and enthusiasts launched the first Memphis Country Blues Festival at the Overton Park Shell (now The Levitt Shell) in 1966, challenging the paradigm of racial segregation in America during the 1960s; bathrooms at the Overton were still segregated then, and the KKK had held a rally there only a week prior. The first festival featured the likes of Booker T. and the M.G.s, Canned Heat, Bukka White, Albert King and Furry Lewis, and “was assembled with almost no money,” says the Memphis Flyer. “According to legend, it was kick-started with $50 from Jim Dickinson’s paycheck and a chunk of hashish that ranges from baseball to softball size, depending on who’s telling the story.”

Fundraising has become a little more transparent since 1966; Augusta Palmer is seeking funds to complete the film with interviews from the festival’s organizers, attendees and crew. It’s already studded with commentary from Peter Guralnick and Robert Gordon.

JUSTIN NICKELS, DIRECTOR of the upcoming Little Rock Picture Show film festival, got to attend a film course by legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog, an abbreviated version of which is making the rounds on social media. Nickels’ film “The Dealer’s Tale” landed him in the pool of around 60 applicants chosen during a blind selection process to attend the German New Wave director’s Rogue Film School in Munich. Nickels says the course was “like a version of graduate school,” a sort of open dialogue with Herzog (“Fitzkarraldo,” “Nosferatu,” “Grizzly Man”) in which Nickels “got a personal understanding of [Herzog’s] notion of ecstatic truth.”

Noting the filmmaker’s fascination with guerilla film devices like the GoPro, Nickels quoted his new mentor, saying “‘Facts inform, but truth illuminates – you document what reality is, but there are moments that are contrived in order to get at the truth.’ ” Inspired by Herzog’s advice to create prolifically, Nickels has released two volumes of a series he’s calling “Little Rock Stories,” documenting the voices of local creators like painter Sarah Higgins and musician/ photographer Joshua Asante.

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The cast of Windfall. Photo by John David Pittman.

ROCK CANDY

Arkansas Repertory Theatre Presents the World Premiere of

A madcap new comedy

by Scooter Pietsch and directed by Jason Alexander

June 8 - 26

TheRep.org | (501) 378-0405

Sponsored by

Presented by

Catherine and Ron Hughes Janna and David Knight www.arktimes.com

JUNE 9, 2016

21

THE TO-DO

LIST

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

FRIDAY 6/10-SATURDAY 6/11

ARKANSAS STATEHOOD 1836: THE PEOPLE RULE Old State House Museum.

5 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. Saturday. Free.

RIDE WITH PRIDE: Rainbow scarves float above passengers aboard a decked-out streetcar for last year’s Central Arkansas Pride’s “Ride with Pride” Trolley Party.

FRIDAY 6/10

RIDE WITH PRIDE TROLLEY

North Little Rock Trolley Barn. 8 p.m. $25-$40.

On May 31, President Obama declared June as LGBT Pride Month, saying, “I call upon the people of the United States to eliminate prejudice everywhere it exists, and to celebrate the great diversity of the American people.” The members of Central Arkansas’s LGBT community have done a lot of hard, often thankless work in the name of dignity and equality over the last year,

so it’s high time for some play. Those of legal drinking age may join Central Arkansas Pride on a trolley “decked out with pride” and stocked with an open bar for a celebratory ride on Little Rock’s River Rail. The ride begins at the trolley barn at the corner of Sixth and Main streets in Argenta, so you need not brave the parking lots further downtown. See centralarkansaspride. com for tickets, details and a reminder to drink responsibly.

FRIDAY 6/10

LATE ROMANTICS, RODNEY BLOCK, RAH HOWARD 9:30 p.m. White Water Tavern. $7.

The moment you’ve mastered a recipe, it’s probably time to fiddle with it. When I heard John Willis & Late Romantics at South on Main in 2014 (and then dragged some friends from out of town to see them at The Afterthought a few weeks later), I heard sounds that were joyful without a hint of irony, even when the lyrics themselves were wry, self-aware. Willis’ songs stand on their own without the fanfare of a full band, but it’s sure hard to argue with the glori22

JUNE 9, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

ous harmonies that open up when Sarah Stricklin, Jack Lloyd and Sydney Hunsicker chime in halfway through the first verse of “Sensitive Man.” Since the release of the band’s EP “Bad Boyfriend” a year ago, it’s ventured off into more democratic territory, changed its name, the musicians “kinda holed up and stumbling our way through writing new material,” said Lloyd, “seemingly moving in a far more R&B, funk, soul direction.” Jeremy Brasher’s joined Mike Motley in the rhythm section; the new lineup debuts Friday evening, preceded by Little Rock’s beloved trumpeter Rodney Block and emcee/harmonica player Rah hoWard.

If you are still tenaciously sporting your submission to Little Rock’s Beard Growing Contest, if you own a pair of suspenders, or if you know what LARP stands for, you’re already properly outfitted for the Old State House Museum’s live-action roleplaying event recreating life during 1836, the year during which Arkansas attained statehood. Upon arriving at “The People Rule,” you’ll be given information about who you are, what you do to earn your living, a handful of “money” to spend and vouchers for services you’d presumably need in the

1830s — say, from the local cobbler or blacksmith. The living history interpreters at the museum will be on hand to guide you through activities like a puppet show, speeches and toasts from the would-be political candidates of the day, gambling and era-specific games and dances. Or, stop by the night before for 2nd Friday Art Night: Cindy Woolf and The Creek Rocks perform music that sounds as if it flowed directly from the mouth of an Ozark Mountain spring. Southern Gourmasian, Loblolly Creamery and Stone’s Throw Brewing will have food and drink for purchase, and the museum’s displaying “Different Spokes: Bicycling in Arkansas” and “First Families: Mingling of Politics and Culture.”

FRIDAY 6/10-SUNDAY 6/12

FREE FISHING WEEKEND

Statewide. Noon Fridaymidnight Sunday. Free.

Did you know that you can check out a fishing pole from the Central Arkansas Library System? That there’s one weekend out of the year during which you don’t need a fishing license to fish? Yes, even if you don’t have a fishing license or a trout permit, you can cast a line from noon Friday to midnight Sunday anywhere in the state’s “9,700 miles of fishable streams and rivers” and “600,000 acres of lakes,” by the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism’s measure. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission provides fishing poles to local libraries if

you don’t own one, and suggests nearby places where you can use them: Pinnacle Mountain State Park, Fourche Creek, Burns Park, Lake Maumelle, the Saline River, Palarm Creek or Lake Pickthorne in the Holland Bottoms. Bream and redear sunfish are abundant here in June for those who want to wade in with a pole, or if you’re outfitted with a boat, go for a white bass or walleye. On Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., the AGFC’s five hatcheries will be stocked with fish for the AGFC’s Kid’s Fishing Day. Be a good steward of our waterways and check out the rules at agfc.com before you head out; you’ll find out about general fishing etiquette and about the size and quantity of fish you can legally catch for supper.

IN BRIEF

THURSDAY 6/9 Last Chance Records hosts Ray Wylie Hubbard’s first performance at the White Water Tavern, with Nashville’s Aaron Lee Tasjan opening, 9 p.m., $25. The Ron Robinson Theater screens National Lampoon’s “Vacation,” 7 p.m., $5. “Her Royal Dopeness,” soul singer Bijoux, performs at The Joint as part of the Block Party series, 7:30 p.m., $10.

SATURDAY 6/11

ERYKAH BADU

Verizon Arena. 8 p.m. $70$100.

FRIDAY 6/10 The Tony-nominated musical “Grey Gardens,” which tells the story of the downfall of Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale, opens at the Weekend Theater, 7:30 p.m. Thu.-Sat., 2:30 p.m. Sun., $16-$20.

The third Solar Flux: A Flux Family Music and Arts Festival begins at Cadron Creek Outfitters in Greenbrier, 4 p.m., $50-$65. Amelia White sings of tales of life on the road with her all-star band at South on Main, with an opening set from Mark Currey, 9 p.m., $10. Surf rockers Repeat Repeat join The Dizzeaze, Vintage Pistol and “girl band power pop” group Daughters of Triton for a show at Maxine’s, Hot Springs, 9 p.m., $7.

BENJAMIN MISTAK

“Baduizm” came out in 1997, which seems completely impossible. There’s an air of antiquity surrounding so many other chart-topping names of that year (Smash Mouth, Third Eye Blind, Marcy Playground), but “Baduizm” feels like something that could have been released five years ago, not 20.

The precision and intention behind the lilting vocal lines of tracks like “Next Lifetime” seem no closer chronologically to Roberta Flack’s or Billie Holiday’s vocalizing than, say, “Out My Mind, Just in Time” (2010) or “Me” (2008).

The latter, a track from her album “New Amerykah Part One (4th World War),” is a prime example of how Badu since the beginning has managed to focus on what’s intensely personal while remaining aware of how her identity — as a woman, an American and later on, a mother — is situated within a political moment. Videos of Badu singing Sinatra’s “High Hopes” with her children in the car and lines like “This year I turned 36, damn, it seems it came so quick, my ass and legs have gotten thick, yea, it’s all me” seem completely at one with the last verse of “Me:” “So I salute you, Farrakhan, yes, cuz you are me.”

The tune’s bass groove and hand-claps drop out abruptly, leaving us with a candid and completely endearing outtake in which Badu sings her mother’s life story in unison with a trumpet. Whether you dug into “Baduizm” in 1997 within the confines of your earphones or you’re doing so for the first time at Verizon Arena, her catalogue is a deep one, full of complexity and completely worth your attention.

VISION CONTROL: John Pugh, a veteran of Little Rock’s Towncraft-era scene, returns with a “punk science” solo project and a collaboration with trash-punk rockers The Crisco Kids, plus psych-wave band The Casual Pleasures and live-action poetry duo Half Sestina 811.

TUESDAY 6/14

VISION CONTROL

White Water Tavern. 9 p.m. $5.

A veteran of the Towncraft-era Little Rock scene, John Pugh moved on to New York to play drums for !!!, a band that helped usher in the dance-punk revival of the 2000s, before founding Free Blood, another outfit that made compelling dance music. These days Pugh is performing and recording as a solo “punk science” project called Vision Control. His drumless experiments reside somewhere in the territory between Philip Glass and Tom Waits: He does a series of “vibrational drum tests,” in which objects like playing cards and broken drumsticks are propelled into motion by the vibrations of modified speakers, and pieces like “Lateral Traveling,” a spooky four-minute groove about a “wet night” spent dodging a whispering, unseen creature. (Given the chance, I’d gladly trade that four minutes for any time I spent

watching episodes of “Lost.”) Tuesday’s show celebrates the release of Pugh’s collaboration with The Crisco Kids — which Pugh calls “one of the best secret bands in Little Rock” — on two tracks, “Crisco Kids Meet The Zomby” and “Halloween Xmas.”

The tracks made their way to me with a warning alongside: “Protect your ears. It’s easily the trashiest thing to come out of Arkansas since 1847.” Joining Pugh and The Crisco Kids are psych-wave band The Casual Pleasures with the soft release of its 7-inch “Heaven,” and Half Sestina 811, a “live-action poetry duo” in which interpreter Jerry Colburn “bends his body to create images that dynamically describe” the words of writer Jordan Galaxy. If, like me, you’ve got a soft spot for artists that make you double-check the volume knob before you cue up a song because you aren’t sure what’s about to come seeping out from the headphones, go to this show.

SATURDAY 6/11 Florence, Italy, indie rockers Nothing for Breakfast come to South on Main, 9 p.m., $10. Creator of the 1994 film “The Crow,” James O’Barr, takes questions after a screening of the film as part of the Little Rock Picture Show, 7 p.m., Ron Robinson, $10.

Maxine’s hosts an utterly danceable trio of bands: Ghost Bones, Pagiins and Don’t Cry Paula, 9 p.m., $5. Brent Hinds of Mastodon brings his project Fiend Without a Face to Vino’s, with a set from Death Before Breakfast, 9 p.m., $7. The 1920 John Barrymore classic “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” gets a live musical score from progressive instrumental quartet Becoming Elephants, Ron Robinson, 9:45 p.m., $10 (included with admission to River City Comic Expo). DeFrance takes the stage at the Rev Room, 8:30 p.m., $10$20. Ginsu Wives, Sassy Goose and The Uh Huhs tear it up at the White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m.

TUESDAY 6/14 Meet the artists behind the paintings adorning the storm drains around town to remind people not to litter at the Drain Smart Unveiling Party, 6 p.m., 614 President Clinton Ave., donations. Self-described “farm-to-table psychedelic rock band” Chris Robinson Brotherhood comes to the Rev Room, 9 p.m., $20.

www.arktimes.com

JUNE 9, 2016

23

AFTER DARK All events are in the Greater Little Rock area unless otherwise noted. To place an event in the Arkansas Times calendar, please email the listing and all pertinent information, including date, time, location, price and contact information, to calendar@arktimes.com.

THURSDAY, JUNE 9

MUSIC

Bijoux. Part of The Block Party series. The Joint, 7:30 p.m., $10. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501372-0210. thejointinlittlerock.com.

“Inferno.” DJs play pop, electro, house and more, plus drink specials and $1 cover before 11 p.m.

Sway, 9 p.m. 412 Louisiana.

Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-324-2999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Open Jam. Thirst n’ Howl, 8 p.m. 14710 Cantrell Road. 501-379-8189. www.thirst-n-howl.com.

Open jam with The Port Arthur Band. Parrot Beach Cafe, 9 p.m. 9611 MacArthur Drive, NLR. 771-2994.

Ray Wylie Hubbard. With Aaron Lee Tasjan.

White Water Tavern, 8:30 p.m., $25. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. whitewatertavern.com.

Reed Turchi and The Caterwauls. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 8:30 p.m., $5. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. stickyz.com.

RockUsaurus. Casa Mexicana, 7:30 p.m. 7111 JFK Blvd., NLR. 501-835-7876.

Sirona, Call It Home. Vino’s, 8 p.m., $6. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. vinosbrewpub.com.

Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 8 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com/.

EVENTS

#ArkiePubTrivia. Stone’s Throw Brewing, 6:30 p.m. 402 E. 9th St. 501-244-9154.

KIDS

Garden Club. A project of the Faulkner County urban Farm Project. Ages 7+ or with supervision. Faulkner County Library, through Aug. 31: 3:30 p.m., free. 1900 Tyler St., Conway. 501-3277482. www.fcl.org.

COMEDY

J.R. Brow. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m.,$8. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. www. loonybincomedy.com.

FRIDAY, JUNE 10

MUSIC

All In Fridays. Envy. 7200 Colonel Glenn Road.

501-562-3317.

Amelia White, Mark Currey. South on Main, 9 p.m., $10. 1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. southonmain.com.

Big Dam Horns. Silk’s Bar and Grill, 10 p.m. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 5016234411. oaklawn.com.

Brian Nahlen. Flying Saucer, 9 p.m., free. 323 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-8032. beerknurd.com.

The Good Time Ramblers. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 9 p.m., $5. 107 River Market Ave. 24

JUNE 9, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

EVERYDAY SUNSHINE: Fishbone, South Central’s ska-rock innovators, come to the Rev Room on Sunday, 8 p.m., $12-$15.

501-372-7707. stickyz.com.

Jocko. Pop’s Lounge, June 10-11, 5 p.m. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-623-4411. oaklawn.com.

Late Romantics. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m.

2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. whitewatertavern.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

North Little Rock Community Band: Concerts in the Park. NLR Community Band performs a concert with 25 members of the 106th U.S. Army Ceremonial Band. Lakewood Village Amphitheatre, 7:30 p.m., free. Lakewood Village, NLR. 501-758-2576. nlrcommunityband.com.

Repeat Repeat. With the Dizzeaze, Vintage Pistol, and Daughters of Triton. Maxine’s, 9 p.m., $7.

700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. maxineslive.com.

Salsa Dancing. Clear Channel Metroplex, 9 p.m., $5-$10. 10800 Col. Glenn Road. 501-217-5113. www.littlerocksalsa.com.

Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 8 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com/.

Upscale Friday. IV Corners, 7 p.m. 824 W. Capitol Ave.

COMEDY

J.R. Brow. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., $12. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-2285555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

“Rednecks in Spandex.” An original production

by The Main Thing. The Joint, 8 p.m., $22. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

DANCE

Ballroom dancing. Free lessons begin at 7 p.m.

Bess Chisum Stephens Community Center, 8-11 p.m., $7-$13. 12th and Cleveland streets. 501-

The perfect place to shop for DAD!

221-7568. www.blsdance.org.

Contra Dance. Park Hill Presbyterian Church, 7:30 p.m., $5. 3520 JFK Blvd., NLR. arkansascountrydance.org.

EVENTS

Fantastic Friday. Literary and music event, refreshments included. For reservations, call 479-968-2452 or email artscenter@centurytel. net. River Valley Arts Center, Every third Friday, 7 p.m., $10 suggested donation. 1001 E. B St., Russellville. 479-968-2452. www.arvartscenter.org.

LGBTQ/SGL weekly meeting. Diverse Youth for Social Change is a group for LGBTQ/SGL and straight ally youth and young adults age 14 to 23. For more information, call 501-244-9690 or search “DYSC” on Facebook. First Presbyterian Church, 6:30 p.m. 800 Scott St. Solar Flux Festival. Festival includes live music, camping, fire dancers, visual art. Cadron Creek Outfitters, June 10-12, $45-$60. 54 Cargile Lane, Greenbrier. 501-581-0300. fluxfamily.com.

SATURDAY, JUNE 11

MUSIC

Big Dam Horns. Silk’s Bar and Grill, 10 p.m. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 5016234411. oaklawn.com.

DeFrance. With Vintage Pistol. Revolution, 8:30 p.m., $10-$20. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501823-0090. revroom.com.

Erykah Badu. Hosted by comedian Rickey Smiley.

Verizon Arena, 8 p.m., $69.50-$99.50. 1 Alltel Arena Way, NLR. 800-745-3000. ticketmaster. com.

Fiend Without a Face. Vino’s, 9 p.m., $7. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. vinosbrewpub.com.

Ghost Bones, Pagiins, Don’t Cry Paula. Maxine’s, 9 p.m., $5. 700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. maxineslive.com.

Ginsu Wives, Sassy Goose, The Uh Huhs. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-3758400. www.whitewatertavern.com.

Hinder. Magic Springs’ Timberwood Amphitheater, 8 p.m., $8-$10. 1701 E. Grand Ave., Hot Springs. magicsprings.com.

Jocko. Pop’s Lounge, 5 p.m. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-623-4411. oaklawn.com.

K.I.S.S. Saturdays. Featuring DJ Silky Slim. Dress code enforced. Sway, 10 p.m. 412 Louisiana.

501-492-9802.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Nothing for Breakfast. South on Main, 9 p.m., $10. 1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. southonmain. com.

Pickin’ Porch. Bring your instrument. All ages welcome. Faulkner County Library, 9:30 a.m. 1900 Tyler St., Conway. 501-327-7482. www.fcl.org.

Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 8 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com/.

Tragikly White. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 9:30 p.m., $10. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. stickyz.com.

COMEDY

J.R. Brow. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., $12. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-2285555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

“Rednecks in Spandex.” An original production

by The Main Thing. The Joint, 8 p.m., $22. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

EVENTS

Falun Gong meditation. Allsopp Park, 9 a.m., free. Cantrell and Cedar Hill Roads.

Hillcrest Farmers Market. Pulaski Heights Baptist Church, 7 a.m.-2 p.m. 2200 Kavanaugh Blvd.

Historic Neighborhoods Tour. Bike tour of historic neighborhoods includes bike, guide, helmets and maps. Bobby’s Bike Hike, 9 a.m., $8-$28. 400 President Clinton Ave. 501-613-7001.

Little Rock Farmers’ Market. River Market pavilions, 7 a.m. 400 President Clinton Ave. 375-2552. www.rivermarket.info.

The People Rule: A Statehood Celebration.

A live-action role-playing game recreating life during the 1830s. Old State House Museum, 10 a.m., free. 300 W. Markham St. 501-324-8642. oldstatehouse.com.

Pork & Bourbon Tour. Bike tour includes bicycle, guide, helmets and maps. Bobby’s Bike Hike, 11:30 a.m., $35-$45. 400 President Clinton Ave. 501-613-7001.

River City Comic Expo. Statehouse Convention Center, June 11-12, 10 a.m., $10-$15. 7 Statehouse Plaza. rivercitycomicexpo.com.

Solar Flux Festival. Festival includes live music, camping, fire dancers, visual art. Cadron Creek Outfitters, through June 12, $45-$60. 54 Cargile Lane, Greenbrier. 501-581-0300. fluxfamily.com.

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. NWA Naturals. Texas League baseball. Dickey-Stephens Park, 5:30 p.m., $7-$13. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-6641555. milb.com.

2516 Cantrell Road Riverdale Shopping Center

366-4406

KIDS

Super Summer Saturday. Sporting and Olympicthemed programming for kids. 10 a.m. Saturdays through June 25. William J. Clinton Presidential

Library, free. 1200 Clinton Avenue. 501-374-4242. clintonfoundation.org.

SUNDAY, JUNE 12

MUSIC

Bodysnatcher, MisManage, Izuna, Ares. Vino’s, 7 p.m., $10. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. vinosbrewpub.com.

Brit Floyd: Space &Time Continuum. A multimedia tribute to Pink Floyd. Verizon Arena, 7:30 p.m., $43-$68. 1 Alltel Arena Way, NLR. 501-9759001. verizonarena.com.

Fishbone. Revolution, 8 p.m., $12-$15. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. revroom. com.

Irish Traditional Music Session. Hibernia Irish Tavern, 2:30 p.m. 9700 N. Rodney Parham Road.

501-246-4340. www.hiberniairishtavern.com.

Little Rock Wind Symphony: A Stars and Stripes Celebration. MacArthur Park, 7 p.m., free. 503 E. Ninth St. lrwindsymphony.org.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

EVENTS

Artists for Recovery. A secular recovery group for people with addictions, open to the public, located in the church’s parlor. Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church, 10 a.m. 1601 S. Louisiana.

Bernice Garden Farmer’s Market. Bernice Garden, 10 a.m. 1401 S. Main St. www.thebernicegarden.org.

River City Comic Expo. Statehouse Convention Center, 10 a.m., $10-$15. 7 Statehouse Plaza. rivercitycomicexpo.com.

Solar Flux Festival. Festival includes live music, camping, fire dancers, visual art. Cadron Creek Outfitters, $45-$60. 54 Cargile Lane, Greenbrier.

501-581-0300. fluxfamily.com.

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. NWA Naturals. Texas League baseball. Dickey-Stephens Park, 2:10 p.m., $7-$13. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-6641555. milb.com.

MONDAY, JUNE 13

MUSIC

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Open Mic. The Lobby Bar. Studio Theatre, 8 p.m. 320 W. 7th St. Richie Johnson. Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf. com.

SPORTS

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. NWA Naturals. Texas League baseball. Dickey-Stephens Park, 7:10 p.m., $7-$13. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-6641555. milb.com.

CLASSES

Arkansas Travelers vs. NWA Naturals. Texas League baseball. Dickey-Stephens Park, 7:10 p.m., $7-$13. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-6641555. milb.com.

Garden Sketch Hour. Faulkner County Library, Continues through Aug. 31, free. 1900 Tyler St., Conway. 501-327-7482. fcurbanfarmproject.org.

CLASSES

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15

Finding Family Facts. Rhonda Stewart’s genealogy research class for beginners. Arkansas Studies Institute, second Monday of every month, 3:30 p.m. 401 President Clinton Ave. 501-320-5700 ‎. www.butlercenter.org.

TUESDAY, JUNE 14

MUSIC

An Evening with Chris Robinson Brotherhood.

Revolution, 9 p.m., $20. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. revroom.com.

Jeff Ling. Khalil’s Pub, 6 p.m. 110 S. Shackleford Road. 501-224-0224. www.khalilspub.com.

Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-324-2999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Vision Control, Crisco Kids, The Casual Pleasures. White Water Tavern, 9 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. whitewatertavern.com.

COMEDY

Stand-Up Tuesday. Hosted by Brett Ihler. The Joint, 8 p.m., $5. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

EVENTS

Little Rock Farmers’ Market. River Market pavilions, 7 a.m. 400 President Clinton Ave. 375-2552. www.rivermarket.info.

Little Rock Green Drinks. Informal networking session for people who work in the environmental field. Ciao Baci, 5:30-7 p.m. 605 N. Beechwood St. 501-603-0238. www.greendrinks. org.

Trivia Bowl. Flying Saucer, 8:30 p.m. 323 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-8032. www.beerknurd. com/stores/littlerock.

MUSIC

At All Cost. With Insvrgence and Becoming Elephants. Revolution, 8 p.m., $5. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. revroom.com.

Brian and Nick. Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf. com.

Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-324-2999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Open Mic Nite with Deuce. Thirst n’ Howl, 7:30 p.m., free. 14710 Cantrell Road. 501-379-8189. www.thirst-n-howl.com.

RockUsaurus. Senor Tequila, 7 p.m. 10300 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-224-5505.

COMEDY

The Joint Venture. Improv comedy group. The Joint, 8 p.m., $8. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

DANCE

Little Rock Bop Club. Beginning dance lessons for ages 10 and older. Singles welcome. Bess Chisum Stephens Community Center, 7 p.m., $4 for members, $7 for guests. 12th and Cleveland streets. 501-350-4712. www.littlerockbopclub.

FILM

Movies at MacArthur: “The Real M.A.S.H..”

MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History, 6:30 p.m., free. 503 E. 9th St. 501-376-4602. www. arkmilitaryheritage.com.

POETRY

Wednesday Night Poetry. 21-and-older show.

Kollective Coffee & Tea, 7 p.m., free. 110 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-321-0909. maxineslive.

North Little Rock 501-945-8010 Russellville 479-890-2550 Little Rock 501-455-8500 Conway 501-329-5010

laspalmasarkansas.com www.facebook.com/laspalmasarkansas

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AFTER DARK, CONT. com/shows.html.

ARTS

THEATER

Comic Expo back, bigger Little Rock Picture Show added to scene.

BY DAVID KOON

S

ince 2011, the year River City Comic Expo founder Brent Douglass put on the first Expo in Sherwood for about 300 attendees, people have been telling him that a comic book convention would never work in Central Arkansas. Too isolated. Not a big enough fan base. Not enough disposable income to keep a niche event like that afloat. This weekend, as thousands of comic book fanatics and cosplayers converge on downtown Little Rock’s Statehouse Convention Center for the 2016 installment of the Expo on June 11-12, some of those naysayers will be eating fanboy crow.

Last year, the event drew over 6,500 ticket holders for fun and fandom, a record this year’s two-day event seems sure to smash. As of last week, Douglass said they had already presold over 220 tickets for the event, which far exceeds ticket presales in the past.

Tickets for this year’s event, available at rivercitycomicexpo.com, are $10 for a day pass, $15 for a weekend pass, or $75 for an all-access VIP pass. Children under 12 get in free.

The other big news for the Expo this year will be the addition of the Little Rock Picture Show, the sci-fi, horror and fantasy film fest that’s the sole surviving member of the family of film festivals that once resided under the umbrella of the still-mourned Little Rock Film 26

JUNE 9, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

Festival. Douglass, a comic book fan since childhood who has a collection of somewhere between 22,000 and 24,000 comic books, said he started the River City Comic Expo after becoming frustrated with having to drive to Dallas, St. Louis or New Orleans to attend large gatherings of comic book fans.

“I thought, these cities are a little bit larger than Little Rock, but we’re comparable,” he said. “Why don’t we have anything like that?”

Starting out small at Woody’s Sherwood Forest, the event quickly outgrew first that space, then the Clear Channel Metroplex, before landing at the Statehouse Convention Center last year.

Cramped for space again in 2015, this year Douglass booked the entire downstairs of the Convention Center, almost 100,000 square feet. Even so, the vendor booths quickly sold out.

Douglass said there will be 265 vendor booths at this year’s River City Comic Expo — everything from collectibles to board games to costumes — and another 26 booths featuring celebrities like Nichelle Nichols, who played communications officer Lt. Uhura on the original “Star Trek,” and Arkansas native Gil Gerard, who starred as Buck Rogers on the 1979-1981 TV series “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.” In addition, there will be several well-known comic book artists on hand to sign auto-

graphs, including James O’Barr, creator of the comic book series “The Crow,” and Neal Adams, who helped define the modern look of several DC superheroes, including Superman, Batman and Green Arrow. Douglass said another sure draw on the floor of this year’s Expo will be a meticulous recreation of the black 1967 Chevrolet Impala from the fantasy TV show “Supernatural,” which will be available for photos.

Douglass said he thought the Little Rock Picture Show “would be a good fit, so we worked out the details. … It’ll fit right in with the science and sci-fi crowd that we’ll have there already.”

Highlights of this year’s Picture Show including a screening of 1994 cult classic “The Crow” with creator O’Barr for a Q&A, a screening of the 1920 silent classic “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” with live musical accompaniment from instrumental quartet Becoming Elephants, the world premiere of the time travel feature “Diverge” with director and Little Rock native James Morrison, and a large slate of sci-fi and horror short films.

Douglass said the River City Comic Expo gets a little bigger every year, and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing.

Already looking toward next year, Douglass said they’ll likely have to rent even more space at the Statehouse Convention Center in 2017 to accommodate the demand for booth rentals.

“Each year the attendance grows and each year the number of people coming out in cosplay grows,” Douglass said.

“It’s fun to see the people in costume, it’s fun to see the people who put meticulous detail into their costumes, and it’s fun to see the little kids who dress up as their favorite heroes as well. You can see their imaginations just running wild.”

For more information or to buy tickets, visit the River City Comic Expo website at rivercitycomicexpo.com.

“Camelot.” A Lerner and Loewe musical based on the legend of King Arthur. Royal Theatre, June 9-12; June 16-19, $5-$12. 111 S. Market St., Benton. 501-315-5483. theroyalplayers.com.

“Grey Gardens: The Musical.” Thu.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun. 2:30 p.m. The Weekend Theater, June 10-12; June 17-19; June 23-26, $16-$20. 1001 W. 7th St. 501-374-3761. weekendtheater.org.

“The Last Potluck Supper.” 6 p.m. Tues.-Sat.; 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. Sun. Murry’s Dinner Playhouse, through June 18: Tue.-Sun.., $23-$36. 6323 Col. Glenn Road. 501-562-3131. murrysdinnerplayhouse.com.

“Windfall.” Written by Scooter Pietsch, directed

by Jason Alexander, Wed.-Thu., 7 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m. Arkansas Repertory Theatre, through June 12; through May 19; through June 26, $20-$40. 601 Main St. 501-378-0405. www.therep.org.

NEW IN THE GALLERIES ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, MacArthur Park: 58th annual “Delta Exhibition,” June 10-Aug. 28, lecture “Relationship” by juror Elizabeth K. Garvey 6 p.m. June 9 ($15 nonmembers), member and artist reception to follow; Renoir’s “Madame Henriot,” loan from the Columbus Museum of Art, through Sept.

11; “55th Young Artists Exhibition,” work by Arkansas students K-12, through July 24. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun. 372-4000.

ARKANSAS CAPITAL CORP., 200 River Market Ave., Suite 400: “Naturals,” work by Virmarie DePoyster, Heidi Hogden, Logan Hunter and Anna Sheals. Reception 5-8 p.m. June 10, 2nd Friday Art Night. www. arcapital.com.

BOSWELL MOUROT FINE ART, 5815 Kavanaugh Blvd.: New works by Louis Watt, reception 6-9 p.m. June 11. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Sat. 664-0030.

BUTLER CENTER GALLERIES, Arkansas Studies Institute, 401 President Clinton Ave.: “School’s Out: An Exhibition of Student Work,” organized by Arkansas Art Educators, June 10-Aug. 27, reception 5-8 p.m. June 10, 2nd Friday Art Night, music by Das Loop; “Culture Shock: Shine Your Rubies, Hide Your Diamonds,” work by women’s artist collective, including Melissa Cowper-Smith, Melissa Gill, Tammy Harrington, Dawn Holder, Jessie Hornbrook, Holly Laws, Sandra Luckett, Morgan Page and Rachel Trusty, through Aug. 27, Concordia Hall; “Jeanfo: We Belong to Nature,” sculpture, through June 25. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 320-5790.

HEARNE FINE ART, 1001 Wright Ave.: “AfriCOBRA NOW,” works on paper by Akili Ron Anderson, Kevin Cole, Adger Cowans, Michael D. Harris, Napoleon JonesHenderson, Moyo Okediji, James Phillips, Frank Smith and Nelson Stevens, through Sept. 3; “Power of Art: Generational Wealth II, Exploring the Secondary Market,” works by Romare Bearden, Charles Sebree, Beauford Delany and others, through June 8. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat. 372-6822.

HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM GALLERIES, 200 E. 3rd St.: Illustrations by Sally Nixon, reception 5-8 p.m. June 10, 2nd Friday Art Night, with music by Randall Shreve and beer by Rebel Kettle Brewing Co.; “Fucoid Arrangements” by Robert Lem-

ming and abstract drawings by Louis Watts, through Aug. 7; “Hugo and Gayne Preller’s House of Light,” historic photographs, through October. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9351.

OLD STATE HOUSE MUSEUM, 300 W. Markham St.: “Arkansas Statehood Celebration,” living history demonstrations, music by The Creek Rocks with Cindy Woolf, with food and drink for purchase from Southern Gourmasian, Loblolly Creamery and Stone’s Throw Brewing, 5-8 p.m. June 10, 2nd Friday Art Night; “The People Rule,” 1830s living history role-playing game complete with period “money,” as well as dancing, political speeches and toasts, other activities 10 a.m.-4 p.m. June 11; “Different Spokes: Bicycling in Arkansas,” through July; “First Families: Mingling of Politics and Culture” permanent exhibit including first ladies’ gowns. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9685.

BENTONVILLE CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, One Museum Way: “Distinguished Speaker Series: Ruth Reichl,” food critic, 7-8:30 p.m. June 10; American masterworks spanning four centuries in the permanent collection. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon., Thu.; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Wed., Fri.; 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Sat.-Sun., closed Tue. 479-418-5700.

PINE BLUFF ARTS AND SCIENCE CENTER FOR SOUTHEAST ARKANSAS, 701 S. Main St.: “Here.

African American Art from the Permanent Collection,” through Oct. 15; “Pine Bluff High School Annual Exhibition,” through July 3. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 1-4 p.m. Sat. 870-536-3375.

HELENA DELTA CULTURAL CENTER, 141 Cherry St.: “Faces of the Delta,” drawings, silverpoint and lithographs by Aj Smith, through July 4, talk by the artist 5:30 p.m. June 9. 870338-4350.

NEW IN THE MUSEUMS MOSAIC TEMPLARS CULTURAL CENTER, 9th and Broadway: “Foot Soldiers for Freedom: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Arkansas,” through July 13; “African American Treasures from the Kinsey Collection,” through July 2; permanent exhibits on African-American entrepreneurship in Arkansas.

683-3610.

ONGOING GALLERY EXHIBITS ARGENTA GALLERY, 413 Main St., NLR: Paintings by Cindy J. Holmes. 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 258-8991.

CANTRELL GALLERY, 8206 Cantrell Road: “Black Box,” paintings by Kae Barron, through July 2. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 224-1335.

CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, 509 Scott St.: “Interconnections,” paintings and drawings

by Maria and Jorge Villegas, through June 30. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Thu., 9 a.m.-noon Fri. and Sun. 375-2342.

DRAWL SOUTHERN CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY, 5208 Kavanaugh Blvd.: “The Gun Show.” 680-1871.

GALLERY 221, 221 W. 2nd St.: Chuck Blouin, paintings, through June 28. 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

Mon.-Fri., 1 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 801-0211.

GALLERY 26, 2601 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Paintings by Michael Lierly, ceramics by Donna Uptigrove.10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 664-8996.

GREG THOMPSON FINE ART, 429 Main St., NLR: “Magical Realism.” 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 664-2787.

LAMAN LIBRARY, 2801 Orange St., NLR: “Inked Arkansas,” exhibition of work by Arkansas printmakers Melissa Gill, Catherine Kim, DebiLynn Fendley, Kristin DeGeorge, Warren Criswell, Daniel Adams, David Warren, Nancy Dunaway, Neal Harrington and Tammy Harrington, through July 1. 771-1995.

LAMAN LIBRARY ARGENTA BRANCH, 420 Main St., NLR: “Family Portrait,” paintings

by Kesha Stovall, through June 10. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Sat. 687-1061.

L&L BECK ART GALLERY, 5705 Kavanaugh Blvd.: “Go West, Young Man,” paintings

by Louis Beck, month of June, free giclee drawing 7 p.m. June 16. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.Sat. 660-4006.

M2 GALLERY, 11525 Cantrell Road: “Unwrapped,” paintings by Robin Trevor Tucker; “Dressed,” new works by Lisa Krannichfeld; also new works by Bryan Frazier, John Sadowski and Charles James. 225-6721.

MATT MCLEOD FINE ART GALLERY, 108 W. 6th St.: “Art • Craft • Art,” jewelry, tapestries, felt, ceramic, glass, paper, metal and mixed media sculpture by James Hayes, David Clemons, Sage Holland, Tom Holland, Lucas Strack, Beau Anderson, Louise Halsey, Barbara Cade, McLees Baldwin, David Scott Smith, Susan Campbell, Leandra Spangler and Carrie Crocker. 725-8508.

MUGS CAFE, 515 Main St., NLR: “Renee Williams, New Works.” 7 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.Sat. 379-9101.

THEA FOUNDATION, 401 Main St., NLR: CONTINUED ON PAGE 30

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27

Dining

Information in our restaurant capsules reflects the opinions of the newspaper staff and its reviewers. The newspaper accepts no advertising or other considerations in exchange for reviews, which are conducted anonymously. We invite the opinions of readers who think we are in error.

B Breakfast L Lunch D Dinner $ Inexpensive (under $8/person) $$ Moderate ($8-$20/person) $$$ Expensive (over $20/person) CC Accepts credit cards

WHAT’S COOKIN’ THE PIZZERIA AT TERRY’S Finer Foods is changing its location and its name, but with construction just beginning, no timeline has been announced. Jacquelyn and Jeremy Pittman’s gastropub is moving to 4910 Kavanaugh Blvd., near the intersection of Cantrell Road and Kavanaugh. The storefront was previously a gym; now gourmands will get a workout choosing from a menu that includes oven-fired Camembert on flat bread and arugula salad and a kale onion potato pizza and a chorizo pizza and a tuna alfredo pizza and so forth.

With a larger prep area, the menu could grow, bar manager Dillon Garcia said. The kitchen will, of course, feature the Mario Acunto hand-built, thick-brick oven from Naples that reaches 1,000 degrees. The Pizzeria is both neighborhood watering hole and eatery: The 20-foot back bar will feature at the new restaurant as well, Garcia said. The Pizzeria in its current location is 700 square feet; the new location will have 3,700 square feet, but only 1,000 square feet of that will be for dining, to keep the cozy feel. There will also be dining on the patio out front, Garcia said, and a private dining room in back.

The rest of the space will be used for much-needed storage and an office.

The Pittmans, who met at the New York Culinary Institute and formerly operated the catering service Palette, got into the pizza business bite by bite, starting with a mobile pizza oven. The Pittmans should know soon when they can expect to open; they’re still working on the new name.

COMING SOON: THE GREEN Leaf Grill on the ground floor of the Arkansas Blue Cross Building at 601 Gaines St. is planning on opening an express version of the healthy-eating cafeteria at 320 W. Capitol Ave. The restaurant is mum on its plans for now; it may announce something soon. Tropical Smoothie has taken out a permit to open in Riverdale at 1510 Rebsamen Park Road. A Nothing Bundt Cakes franchise will open soon at 12312 Chenal Parkway, as will a Freddy’s Frozen Custard, at 4305 McCain Blvd.

28

JUNE 9, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

SERVED UP THICK: The pancakes and Petit Jean Meats sausage take up plenty of plate space at the dependable Andina Cafe.

Breakfast, bologna, beer Andina thrives on Third.

A

ndina Cafe is a survivor — forcibly moved from one end of the River Market building to the other before heading south a couple

of blocks for bigger space at Third Street and River Market Avenue in 2011. Owners Nita and Curtis Westbrook have expanded the cafe’s offer-

ings and might qualify as the hardest working couple in the restaurant business. Andina is open 97.5 hours a week, and it seems like one or both Westbrooks usually are there.

Andina first established itself as a good choice for gourmet, houseroasted-and-ground coffee, and that still brings in a loyal crowd in the early morning — often with laptop, tablet or newspaper in tow. At 9 a.m. one recent weekday morning there still was a bustling crowd, most opting for breakfast to accompany their

BELLY UP

Check out the Times’ food blog, Eat Arkansas arktimes.com

coffee. Our vanilla latte ($2.79 for a small) was tasty, and although there was nothing terribly distinctive about the blend, the java hit the spot. Hot chocolate (we got the tall for $3.25) is not crazy rich, but it — and the latte — did come with a big dollop of whipped cream, which helps almost everything.

We ordered two pancakes ($4.25) with a side of Petit Jean sausage ($2.79) and were taken aback — in a good way — when our plate arrived and we saw that each of the cakes was at least twice as thick as a nor-

mal pancake and that our sausage patty was burger size. Andina features Petit Jean Meats products, and they’re consistently the best we’ve ever had. The sausage is flavorful with just the right amount of herbs. We would have preferred to have thinner pancakes, though, because while fluffy they couldn’t help being a little doughy inside, and they didn’t soak up butter and syrup as well as thinner ones would have.

The Razorback omelet ($8.49) is a three-egg monster with finely chopped bacon, ham and sausage and plenty of cheddar. It is a fluffy plate-filler with the ingredients dispersed throughout the egg mixture vs. “pocket” style. We had leftovers.

The accompanying toast was mundane.

We were back a couple of days later for lunch and again there was a decent crowd. Ordering is done at the counter, and we had to wait a bit, but no big deal. Daily plate lunch specials change weekly, we’re told, and we plotted a Thursday trip because chicken and dressing ($7.25) sounded good. And was it ever! Plenty of tender chicken lurked in the moist, not overly herbed dressing (just the way we like it), covered with a thinnish, light brown gravy that was just salty enough. Very warm mashed sweet potatoes were a welcome side item. We didn’t get around to the melange of squash, cauliflower, broccoli and carrots that also were on the plate.

Our dining mates enjoyed their sandwiches. The fried bologna ($6.25) featured a thick slab of Petit Jean bologna nicely griddled up to almost blackened. It came with American cheese on Texas toast, and she chose spicy mustard. It was declared a hit, but we decided it would be even better if it was a fried bologna grilled cheese with the bread buttered and griddled vs. toasted. Choosing potato salad vs. chips added $1.25, but the combo mustard-mayo potato salad featured chunky potatoes and sweet relish. It’s good stuff.

The “Down Towner” ($8.99) is a mammoth meat-rich combo of ham, turkey and roast beef, with cheddar. There was more ham than tur-

key and more turkey than roast beef.

“Bring your bigger mouth,” one friend suggested, while the other called it a “three-napkins sandwich.” (That’s praise if you couldn’t tell.) We finished with two huge $1.69 cookies, one chocolate chip and one macadamia. They did the trick but weren’t mind-blowingly good.

So breakfast and lunch consumed, the next trip was a late-afternoon stop at the Tuf-Nut Tap Room on the west end of the space. The taproom features a collection of Diamond Bear selections as well as an impressive menu of bar food. We adore the Trojan Tripel (brewed in honor of the hometown college athletic program), and we will remember to come back on Thursday, when those TTs are offered for $2. And we’ll get to the bar food next trip as well.

Andina is a pleasant place to hang out, whether that’s morning, noon or night. The Westbrooks are friendly, there’s a nice blend of classic rock/ pop/soul playing (it was a Pandora mix, we learned) and it’s kind of cool to see/smell the coffee roasting process as the roaster is in the Tap Room.

With the Third Street dining/ drinking scene continuing to grow, and nearby hotels continuing to open, it looks like Andina is in a good spot to thrive — and not just survive.

Andina Cafe and Coffee Roastery 433 E. Third St. 501-376-2326 www.andina-cafe.com QUICK BITE Keep an eye on the $7.25 daily lunch specials, displayed on a board affixed to the front door. And hope they’re all as tasty as the chicken and dressing we tried. Also know if there are extras they are sold after lunch and even packaged to take home.

HOURS 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Sunday.

www.arktimes.com

JUNE 9, 2016

29

AFTER DARK, CONT. “Delta des Refuses,” artworks rejected from the Arkansas Arts Center’s “Delta Exhibition,” through June 22, opening reception 5-8 p.m. June 17.

HISTORY, SCIENCE MUSEUM EXHIBITS CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL MUSEUM VISITOR CENTER, Bates and Park: Exhibits on the 1957 desegregation of Central and the civil rights movement. 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. daily.

374-1957.

ESSE PURSE MUSEUM & STORE, 1510 S. Main St.: “Changing Tides: 100 Years of Iconic Swimwear,” 20th century swimwear

from the collection of the Fashion History Museum in Cambridge, Ontario, through Aug. 7; “What’s Inside: A Century of Women and Handbags,” permanent exhibit. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sun. $10, $8 for students, seniors and military.

916-9022.

HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM, 200 E. 3rd St.: Refurbished 19th century structures from original city and galleries, guided tours Monday and Tuesday on the hour, self-guided Wednesday through Sunday, $2.50 adults, $1 under 18, free to 65 and over. 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9351.

MacARTHUR MUSEUM OF ARKANSAS MILITARY HISTORY, 503 E. 9th St. (MacArthur Park): “Waging Modern Warfare”;

MOVIE REVIEW

‘POPSTAR’: Andy Samberg as “Connor4Real,” who finds himself in a downward spiral of his own egomaniacal making.

Idiocy done brilliantly ‘Popstar’ audacious satire.

BY SAM EIFLING

“P

JUNE 7 –JULY 12

AT THE BAUM GALLERY, UCA, CONWAY 30

JUNE 9, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

opstar: Never Stop Not Stopping” flopped last weekend, earning about a tenth of what a quartet of Ninja Turtles hauled in, and that fact is enough to have you weeping for America. Its clunky trailers be damned, “Popstar” is, minute-for-minute, maybe the funniest movie of the year so far. The mock-rockumentary from the Lonely Island trio of “Saturday Night Live” infamy — Jorma Taccone, Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer, who also directs — runs like a feature-length version of the “I’m On a Boat” music video. Is The Lonely Island a spoof group, in business to satirize the vapidity and vulgarity of party hip-hop?

Or is it a highly skilled pop trio whose work skews ludicrous as they bang out catchy hooks? Non-English speakers would bop their heads along with, to pick but one example, “I Just Had Sex” (252 million YouTube views and counting) even as you do spit-takes at the filthy, ridiculous lyrics.

“Popstar” builds around a fictional trio, the Style Boyz, who are in effect a bizzaro Lonely Island imagined as the “world’s biggest pop group.” Imagine a mashup between NSYNC and the Beastie Boys lighting up charts in a dimension where “I’m So Humble” or “Hot New Pop Song” are embraced as unironic.

The story picks up after infighting has split the group: Samberg’s oblivious egotist Connor has splintered off to a huge solo career as “Connor4Real” without realizing how much he relied on the beats by his DJ bandmate Owen (Taccone) and lyrics by Lawrence (Schaffer), who’s so disgusted he leaves, fizzles in his own solo career (“Things In My Jeep” featuring Linkin Park didn’t chart so well) and retires to Colorado to farm, bitterly.

Connor charges ahead with what’s supposed to be his monster new album,

but his glaring idiocy cripples it. For instance, he releases a tentpole single around advocacy for same-sex marriage punctuated with insistences that he’s not himself gay, and inks an ill-fated distribution deal with an appliance manufacturer that pipes his songs out of microwaves and refrigerators nationwide. His publicist (Sarah Silverman) and manager (Tim Meadows) are helpless to intervene, and failure doesn’t sit well with Connor. He’s a sort of dunce hybrid of Justins Bieber and Timberlake, with a spritzing of Usher (all of whom appear in “Popstar”), and what follows through his tantrums and crashes is a tale of friendship, hubris, self-realization and, in a strange twist of earnestness, collaborative creativity.

But no one really cares about the character arcs. You’re here for the jokes.

And, boy, are there jokes. “Popstar” is embroidered as finely as you’d expect from a crew of comedians used to writing songs and music videos. Practically every shot includes a gag of some kind, every cameo (and there must be dozens) chosen for maximum effect. The songs, too, almost all land as absurdist riffs on the past decade or so of pop. It’s easy to hear the influence of, say, Macklemore or Nicki Minaj strewn around, and in the climactic number, maybe a nod to Insane Clown Posse, even as Michael Bolton is singing along. It’s that kind of jamboroo.

Obviously something went awry in the marketing of this flick, and understandably so. There’s a fine line between so-stupid-it’s-smart and so-stupid-it’sback-around-to-really-stupid. The genius of “Popstar” lies in its audacious weaponization of idiocy. It’s not a shock that this movie was made, but clearly no one expected it to be made this well. See it while you can, while it’s not even the flavor of the month.

DUMAS, CONT. lady was too busy to talk to Bruck even by phone, but the president of the United States spent two hours gabbing to her about his wife. The article recounted how senators and congressmen were blown away by her grasp and articulation of difficult issues but it also picked at her dissembling and dodging about matters she thought were private, like her futures trading and White River land deal in 1977 and 1978, her legal billings and her husband’s womanizing. Most subjects would have been thrilled with the overall story but she was furious.

Bruck’s story had some remarks from me about how Hillary had earned her husband eight years of peace by schmoozing the managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat, a once fierce critic of Bill. Her press aide, Lisa Caputo, called and said she was sure I had been misquoted since everyone else she had called disputed the remarks credited to them. I said it looked pretty accurate.

She hung up. Never again would her friends talk to the press or to prying scholars and authors.

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LOCAL

Little Rock Schools - Summer Food Service Program The Little Rock School District Child Nutrition Department is participating in the Summer Food Service Program. Meals will be provided to all children (18 and under) without charge and are the same for all children regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability and there will be no discrimination in the course of the meal service. Meals will be provided at the sites and times as follows.

Little Rock Schools - Summer Food Service Program

Days of the

Program

Program

BREAKFAST Beginning

LUNCH Beginning

The Little Rock School District Child Nutrition Department is participating Food Service Program. Ending Meals will be provided SCHOOL LOCATION ADDRESS Week in the Summer Beginning Ending Endingto all children nd all children regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability and there will be no (18Bale and under) without charge and are the same Mon-Fri Elementary 6201 W. 32forSt. 06/13/16 06/30/16 8:15 9:15 11:00 12:00 discrimination in the course of the meal service.

Meals at the sites and times as follows.

Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Baseline Academy 3623 Baseline Rd. will be provided 07/28/16 7:30 9:00 11:00 12:30

Mon-Fri 06/13/16 Carver Elementary 2100 Eat 6th St. 07/29/16 7:30 9:30 11:30LUNCH 1:00 BREAKFAST Mon-Fri 06/13/16 Cloverdale Middle 6300 Hinkson Rd. 06/30/16 9:30 12:30 1:30 Days of the Program Program 8:30 Beginning Beginning Mon-Fri 06/06/16 David SCHOOL O Dodd Elementary LOCATION ADDRESS Week Beginning Ending 6423 Stagecoach Rd. 07/28/16 7:30Ending 9:00 11:00Ending 12:30 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Mon-Fri Hall High Bale Elementary 6700 "H" Street 06/24/16 8:30 9:30 6201 W. 32nd St. 06/13/16 06/30/16 8:15 9:15 12:30 11:00 1:30 12:00 Mon-Fri 06/13/16 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Hamilton Learning Academy Baseline Academy 3301 South Bryant 07/29/16 9:00 9:30 3623 Baseline Rd. 07/28/16 7:30 9:00 12:00 11:00 12:30 12:30 th Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Mon-Fri 06/13/16 Henderson Middle Carver Elementary 401 John Barrow 07/28/16 7:30 9:10 2100 Eat 6 St.Rd. 07/29/16 7:30 9:30 11:00 11:30 12:45 1:00 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Mon-Fri 06/13/16 JA Fair High Middle School Cloverdale 13420 O Dodd 06/21/16 7:30 9:15 6300David Hinkson Rd. 06/30/16 8:30 9:30 12:00 12:30 1:15 1:30 Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 M.L. King David O Elementary Dodd Elementary 905 M.L.K. Dr. 07/08/16 7:30 8:30 6423 Stagecoach Rd. 07/28/16 7:30 9:00 11:15 11:00 12:30 12:30 Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Mabelvale Hall HighElementary 9401 Mabelvale Cutoff 06/24/16 9:00 9:30 6700 "H" Street 06/24/16 8:30 9:30 11:00 12:30 11:30 1:30 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Mon-Fri 06/13/16 Mabelvale School HamiltonMiddle Learning Academy 10811 West 07/13/16 8:00 9:30 3301Mabelvale South Bryant 07/29/16 9:00 9:30 11:00 12:00 12:30 12:30 Mon-Fri 06/14/16 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 McClellan High School Henderson Middle 9417 SpringsRd. 07/19/16 7:30 8:00 401Geyer John Barrow 07/28/16 7:30 9:10 12:00 11:00 12:30 12:45 Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 McDermott Elementary J A Fair High School 1200 Reservoir Rd. 07/08/16 7:30 8:30 13420 David O Dodd 06/21/16 7:30 9:15 11:00 12:00 12:30 1:15 Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Otter M.L.Creek King Elementary 16000 Otter Creek Pkwy.

07/08/16 7:30 8:30 905 M.L.K. Dr. 07/08/16 7:30 8:30 11:00 11:15 12:30 12:30 Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Parkview High School Mabelvale Elementary 2501 John Barrow Cutoff Rd. 07/19/16 7:30 9:00 9401 Mabelvale 06/24/16 9:00 9:30 10:15 11:00 12:15 11:30 th Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Rockefeller MabelvaleElementary Middle School 700 East Mabelvale 17 St. 08/05/16 7:30 9:00 10811 West 07/13/16 8:00 9:30 11:00 11:00 12:30 12:30 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Mon-Fri 06/14/16 Romine Elementary McClellan High School 3400 Romine 07/29/16 7:30 8:45 9417 Geyer Rd. Springs 07/19/16 7:30 8:00 11:00 12:00 12:30 12:30 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Stephens Elementary McDermott Elementary 3700 West 18th St. 07/29/16 7:30 9:00 1200 Reservoir Rd. 07/08/16 7:30 8:30 11:00 11:00 12:45 12:30 Mon-Fri 06/13/16 Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Otter Creek Elementary Wakefield Elementary Otter Creek 07/08/16 7:30 8:30 11:00 11:00 12:15 12:30 7516000 Westminister Dr. Pkwy.

07/29/16 8:00 9:00 Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Washington Elementary Parkview High School 2700 S.John MainBarrow St. 07/08/16 7:30 9:10 2501 Rd. 07/19/16 7:30 9:00 11:15 10:15 12:45 12:15 th Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Western Hills Elementary Rockefeller 4901 07/01/16 7:30 8:30 700Western East 17 Hills St. 08/05/16 7:30 9:00 11:15 11:00 12:15 12:30 Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Williams Elementary RomineMagnet Elementary 7301 Evergreen 07/01/16 7:30 8:30 3400 Romine Rd. 07/29/16 7:30 8:45 11:15 11:00 12:15 12:30 Mon-Fri 06/13/16 Mon-Fri 06/06/16 Wilson Elementary Stephens Elementary 4015 Stannus Road 07/29/16 9:00 9:30 3700 West 18th St. 07/29/16 7:30 9:00 12:00 11:00 12:30 12:45 Mon-Fri 06/13/16 Wakefield Elementary 75 Westminister Dr. 07/29/16 8:00 9:00 11:00 12:15 The U.S.Washington Department of Elementary Agriculture (USDA) prohibits discrimination employees, and applicants for07/08/16 employment on7:30 the bases 9:10 of race,11:15 color, national Mon-Fri 06/08/16 2700 S. Main St. against its customers, 12:45origin, age, disability,Western sex, gender identity, religion, reprisal and, where applicable, political beliefs, marital status, familial or parental status, sexual orientation, or if a ll or part of the individuals Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Hills Elementary 4901 Western Hills 07/01/16 7:30 8:30 11:15 12:15 income is derived from any public assistance program, or protected genetic information in employment or in any program or activity conducted or funded by the Department. (Not all prohibited bases Mon-Fri 06/08/16 Williams Magnet Elementary 7301 Evergreen 07/01/16 7:30 8:30 11:15 12:15 will apply to all programs and/or employment activities.)

Mon-Fri 06/13/16 Elementary 4015 Stannus Road 07/29/16 9:00 Complaint 9:30 12:00 12:30 online at If you Wilson wish to file a Civil Rights program complaint of discrimination, complete the USDA Program Discrimination Form, found

http://www.ascr.usda.gov/complaint_filing-cust.html, or at any USDA office, or call (866) 632-9992 to request the form. You may also write a letter containing all of the information requested in Department the form. Send your completed complaint form or letter to usagainst by mail U.S. Department of Agriculture, Director, Office of Adjudication, Independence Avenue, S.W., The U.S. of Agriculture (USDA) prohibits discrimination itsatcustomers, employees, and applicants for employment on the bases1400 of race, color, national origin, age, Washington, D.C.gender 20250-9410, byreligion, fax (202) 690-7442 email at program.intake@usda.gov.

Individuals who are deaf, hard of hearing, or have speech wish to file either an is disability, sex, identity, reprisal and, or where applicable, political beliefs, marital status, familial or parental status, sexual orientation, or ifdisabilities a ll or part and of the individuals income EEO or program complaint please contact USDA thegenetic Federalinformation Relay Service at (800) 877-8339 or (800) 845-6136 (in Spanish). derived from any public assistance program, orthrough protected in employment or in any program or activity conducted or funded by the Department. (Not all prohibited bases will apply all programs and/or activities.)

Persons withtodisabilities, who wishemployment to file a program complaint, please see information above on how to contact us by mail directly or by email. If you require alternative means of communication for program Braille, large print, audiotape, please contact USDA’S Center at (2 02) 720-2600 (voice andComplaint TDD).

If you wish to file information a Civil (e.g., Rights program complaint of etc.) discrimination, completeTARGET the USDA Program Discrimination Form, found online at http://www.ascr.usda.gov/complaint_filing-cust.html, or at any USDA office, or call (866) 632-9992 to request the form. You may also write a letter containing all of the information USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer. requested in the form. Send your completed complaint form or letter to us by mail at U.S. Department of Agriculture, Director, Office of Adjudication, 1400 Independence Avenue, S.W., Washington, D.C. 20250-9410, by fax (202) 690-7442 or email at program.intake@usda.gov. Individuals who are deaf, hard of hearing, or have speech disabilities and wish to file either an EEO or program complaint please contact USDA through the Federal Relay Service at (800) 877-8339 or (800) 845-6136 (in Spanish). www.arktimes.com

JUNE 9, 2016

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Persons with disabilities, who wish to file a program complaint, please see information above on how to contact us by mail directly or by email. If you require alternative means of communication for program information (e.g., Braille, large print, audiotape, etc.) please contact USDA’S TARGET Center at (2 02) 720-2600 (voice and TDD).

USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer.

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BURGER WEEK ROCK(S) JUNE 6 - 12

RESTAURANTS AROUND TOWN ARE PARTICIPATING! HERE’S WHO:

@ the Corner Arkansas Burger Co Big Orange, Midtown Big Orange, West Big Whiskey’s Boulevard Bistro The Box Doe’s Eat Place

Four Quarter Bar Rebel Kettle Brewing Company Homer’s West Revolution Taco & Lazy Pete’s Tequila Lounge The Main Cheese Skinny J’s Mason’s Deli & Grill Stickyz Rock ‘N’ Roll Chicken Shack Midtown Billiards Old Chicago NLR The Tavern Sports Gril Town Pump

SPONSORED BY:

ARKTIMES.COM/BURGER

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JUNE 9, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES