Boom Jackson v4n1 - Young Influentials 2011

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Of Doctors and Nurses, starts p 22 // Ramsey’s Tabouli Tour 2011, p. 57 A Mentor and A Rapper, p. 74 // A Furrows Journey, p. 78

FREE // summer 2011 Vol. 4, No. 1

Local Menu Guide, starts p 41

SHINE Young Influentials 2011 pp 63-72

AMAZING MEDICINE

Innovations You Won’t Believe pp 28-37

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Summer 2011

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Buy Online at www.CarterDiamonds.com Exclusively at

Downtown Jackson Corner of High & State Phone: 601-354-3549 4

Summer 2011

New Location in Vicksburg 3412 Pemberton Boulevard Phone: 601-631-0700

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Summer 2011

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“I love how easy it is to get plugged in here. There are so many opportunities to volunteer and use your time/talents for the greater good. It’s the fastest, best way for newcomers to get to know Jackson and her people.” — Andi Agnew (more, p. 17)

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Clinic for the People

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What’s in Your Briefcase?

We were brazen enough to ask Mr. Lee.

Medical students help city’s needy...for free.

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Fly Away Home

The Ladybug Club empowers Midtown girls.

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Home, Sweet, Home

3-D views of, yes, your mouth.

Meet a home-health, and local, giant..

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Around the block with Furrows.

A daughter of privilege escapes the nest.

Plus: New museums on the way?

Dr. Sethi doctors, and mothers, with style.

JXN: X-RAY VISION What’s in the Water?

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Condo with a View

Developers could build around Lake Hico.

Plus: Hands on with Thomas Price

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Lovin’ Jackson

You gave 60 reasons to stay, or move here.

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Squeaky Wheels

Fondren folks build their own dang park.

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Bogey, Rez-Style

Don’t call it Frisbee if you want to live.

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Bloom Where You’re Planted

Neighbors clean up, promote the zoo area.

Plus: BOOM or BUST

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Solar, Retro

Progress reports from all over the metro.

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BIZ: FIRST, A PLAN

An optometrist learns to do business.

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Yoga Studios Unite

The business of namaste isn’t too cutthroat.

Best Doc

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AMAZING MEDICINE

The eco-devo of health care simply rocks.

In the section: Innovations by UMMC, Baptist, St. D and lots of docs; fighting obesity; Jackson Heart Study; the nitty-gritty of local health-care economics.

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MENU GUIDE

(Paid advertising section.)

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RESIDENT TOURIST

Ramsey seeks world peace on tabouli turf.

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Art of Sushi

Fatsumo’s chef gives credit where it’s due.

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Little Nigeria

Chitoes offers exotic fare and, yes, fufu.

Plus: Olga mans her restaurant.

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YOUNG INFLUENTIALS

Salute these placemakers in our midst.

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DO-GOODERS

This man mentors, and raps, to help kids.

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Timbuktu’s Legacy

Muslim museum overturns “history.”

MELODIES: ROCK THIS

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Glam Blues

Sparkling with blueswoman Jackie Bell.

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Crowd Pleaser

Scott Albert Johnson is a harmonica master.

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ARTS: OUR FRONT YARD Planting motifs in a new garden.

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Miss Welty’s Neighborhood

Artists take advantage of downtown venue.

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Japan in Jackson

Orient Expressed looks eastward.

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EVENTS: JUNE, JULY, AUGUST

Plan those hot summer memories now.

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HER LOCAL LIST A yogini’s transcendental 10.

Breathe and enjoy her city.

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

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Assistant Editor Valerie Wells Art Director Kristin Brenemen Editorial Writers

Quita Black // Charlotte Blom Marika Cackett // Andrew Dunaway // Garrad Lee Lance Lomax // Adam Lynch // Lacey McLaughlin Anita Modak-Truran // Langston Moore Ronni Mott // Rose Pendleton // Tom Ramsey Tim Roberson // Ward Schaefer // Julie Skipper

Listings Editor // Latasha Willis Interns

Jordan Lashley // Amelia Senter

Photography Cover // Tate K. Nations Photographers

William Patrick Butler // Tate K. Nations Rose Pendleton // Aaron Phillips // Amile Wilson

Ad Design Andrea Thomas // Holly Harlan Sales Advertising Director // Kimberly Griffin Account Executives

Ashley Jackson // Adam Perry

Distribution Manager // Matt Heindl

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But what the readers of BOOM and the ride. I’ve been thinking a lot about that five-letter word in recent months. Jackson Free Press know is that a new generaPride in your work. Pride in your ac- tion is staying and coming back—or just movcomplishments. Pride in your friends ing here because they want to be a part of a city on the rise. This is the creand family. Pride in your comative class that will ensure a munity. Pride in your city.

Pride in each other. bright city for our future, and it is growing by the year.

Since we started our For years now, our comnewspaper, the Jackson Free pany has celebrated what we Press, almost a decade ago, call “Young Influentials”— we have watched a city seek Jackson-area residents unout and find its inner pride. der 40 who have decided not

It’s been heartwarming to wait around for someone to see metro residents start else to make Jackson, and to love and work to improve Mississippi, an amazing our capital city—and to reach place to live. First in the Jackacross what used to be huge son Free Press, and now in divides to get ’er done.

Donna Ladd BOOM every summer in

Driving this pride moveEditor in Chief, glorious glossy color and ment in Jackson are our BOOM Jackson wearing fashions provided young professionals and creby our inimitable local bouatives: a new generation of Mississippians (native or newcomer) who aren’t tiques, these Young Influentials epitomize what fleeing to what they think are more exciting pas- is possible if we each just make the effort.

You will meet entrepreneurs, children’s adtures; they are embracing the thrill of building alliances to make our community stronger than vocates, a craft beer lobbyist (change the archaits ever been. They know that our glory is not in ic laws already!), an urban architect, a hipster some distant, less than proud past. plumber, the city’s most prolific karaoke deejay,

It is now, and it is ahead of us. a gay community builder, a banker and more.

We’ve also heard a lot of talk about re- You won’t know all these faces when you see branding in recent months ever since the 2000 them, but these are just 13 of the young JackCensus figures showed that Jackson is slightly sonians to watch. Their faces and works are the smaller in population than it was 10 years be- best rebranding the city could hope for. If they don’t make you proud of Jackson, nothing will. fore, even as suburban flight has slowed.

Tate K. Nations

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Editor in Chief Donna Ladd

In the Name of Love

Marketing // Shannon Barbour Bookkeeper // Montroe Headd

feedback

Publisher Todd Stauffer CONTACT US Letters to the Editor: editor@boomjackson.com Queries: valerie@boomjackson.com Ad Sales: ads@boomjackson.com BOOM Jackson P.O. Box 5067, Jackson, MS 39296 p 601.362.6121 f 601.510.9019

Would you like copies of BOOM Jackson for recruiting, welcome packets or other corporate, institutional or educational uses? Call 601.362.6121 x17.

BOOM Jackson is a publication of Jackson Free Press, Inc. BOOM Jackson focuses on the urban experience in Jackson, Miss., emphasizing entrepreneurship, economic growth and city life.

Dear Editor,

I just finished reading your new magazine, BOOM Jackson. It just has a great presence, and the articles and advertising are so interesting!

Thanks for your effort to put Jackson on the map. This new edition shows Jackson as a wonderful place to live and do business. I hope those who are in charge of making the capital of Mississippi a better place work as hard and with such pride as you do.

Congratulations to you, to (publisher) Todd Stauffer, and to all who work at BOOM Jackson magazine to display Jackson as a jewel in the new south.

Jackson’s Downtown Neighborhood Association: It’s awesome to see a downtown office on the cover of the new BOOM Jackson in the “coolest offices” issue! Our neighborhood is full of cool spaces!

Solar Tint USA : Its great to have a magazine like BOOM in Jackson!

Dimitri Fevrier Love the cover. Keep up the good work.

© 2011 Jackson Free Press Inc.

Cover photo of Faith Jackson by Tate K. Nations For fashion information, see page 71 10

Summer 2011

Blessings, Elsa Baughman Jackson

Send your letters to editor@boomjackson.com or leave comments on the BOOM Jackson Facebook page. Follow @BoomJackson on Twitter. boomjackson.com

contributors

Tate K. Nations is an interactive developer, photographer and videographer from Ridgeland who enjoys skateboarding.

He shot the Young Influentials.

ShaWanda Jacome, assistant to editor Donna Ladd, coordinated the Young Influentials shoot and wrote several pieces.

Ward Schaefer came to Mississippi to teach middle school, and is now a journalist. He wrote about amazing medicine.

WEAR A HELMET

Lacey McLaughlin is the news editor of the Jackson Free Press. She enjoys riding her bike around Jackson. She wrote several BOOM features.

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

IT’S A NO BRAINER! For more information on brain injury and links to support groups please visit www.msbia.org or call 601-981-1021.

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Summer 2011

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WILLIAM PATRICK BUTLER

Hico’s Horizon p 16 // Rez ‘Golf’ p 19 // ZAPPing the Zoo p 20 // Progress p 21 Medical Biz starts p 22

Cutting Edge // by Quita Bride

The PreXion 3D isn’t a science-fiction thingamabob.

It’s a scanner that creates high-definition digital 3D images of teeth.

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hree-dimensional X-rays help Dr. Alex S. Abernathy find those hidden issues at the root of pain. This cutting-edge technology is saving teeth throughout the metro. Using an imaging system called Cone Beam Computed Tomography, Abernathy and his staff at Lakeland Dental Care can create a virtual image of a patient’s teeth and view the mouth easily from all directions with high-definition digital imaging.

CBCT scanners have been available in the U.S. market since 2001. Abernathy says the technology helps him evaluate complex cases involving dental implants, TMJ disorders, jawbone pathology, periodontal disease and other serious problems. Unlike regular X-rays, CBCT scans can discriminate between different tissue types such as bone, teeth, nerves and soft tisWork. Live. Play. Prosper.

sue. The 3D visual allows Abernathy to diagnose conditions he can’t see externally. It also helps him to better assess risks.

The device has aided Abernathy in root canals, fillings, implant surgery and restoring teeth, he says. His patients face up to 10 times less radiation than a conventional scan. With more accurate information, exploratory surgery can possibly be eliminated. The CBCT can also identify the effects of conditions such as infection and tumors and allow for effective treatment.

The scanning process is much quicker and noninvasive.

Abernathy purchased the CBCT scanner, the PreXion 3D, in 2008. He has been practicing dentistry in the Jackson area since 1978, the same year he graduated from University of Tennessee College of Dentistry.

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JXN // secret canton // by Marika Cackett

Jimmy smith

Allison’s Wells

University Press of Mississippi

gone wrong,” Watkins writes in her book.

This realization forged a rift between Watkins and her father, a member of the racist Citizens Council and a defender of Jim Crow laws.

This sense that segregation was wrong also ended her first marriage. She escaped Mississippi with a civil-rights lawyer, disgracing her family.

The busy season at Allison’s Wells began on Memorial Day and extended through the fall, but bathing was not the only way to improve health.

Drinking the cold, frothy water was also encouraged. A sign described ailments the water was supposed to cure, from asthma to worms.

Allison’s Wells spring water contained minerals, including iron, and people drank it to treat irondeficiency-related illnesses. In addition to the mineral water on the property, a second well contained sulphur. Sulphur water has long been used to treat eczema, diaper rash and dry scalp, and can aid in relieving arthritis pain. Watkins’ grandfather saw a business opportunity in 1904 to ship five-gallon jugs of well water across the country just as hotels with spas were becoming popular.

In 1948, the Mississippi Art Colony was founded at Allison’s Wells. The colony flourished for more than 15 years until Jan. 15, 1963. A fire destroyed the old resort.

Now owned by the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi, the former Allison’s Wells is home to the Duncan M. Gray Episcopal Camp and Conference Center. But it is perhaps most known today as the site of Camp Bratton-Green, where some young Episcopalians spend part of their summers.

Guests came to the Allison’s Wells health retreat and spa for mineral springs.

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raveling to a hot spring for medicinal benefits has enticed humans since prehistoric times. Archaeological digs near hot springs in France and the Czech Republic reveal Bronze Age weapons and offerings.

The famous English town of Bath credits ancient legends of early Celtic kings with the discovery of its famous hot springs. The term “balneotherapy” is the treatment of disease with bathing, usually practiced at spas and mineral springs.

In the town of Way, near Canton, was Allison’s Wells, a turn-of-the-century health spa and mineral spring that attracted travelers from all over the United States to dip into its healing waters.

In her new book, “The Last Resort” (University Press of Mississippi, $28, 2011), Norma Wat-

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n the 2011 Legislature, Mississippi lawmakers authorized construction of two museums that were stuck in the planning stage for more than three years: one devoted to Mississippi history and one to chronicle the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.

The bill provides $18 million for the history museum and $20 million for the civil rights museum.

The Mississippi Department of Archives and History plans the con14

Summer 2011

Anthony DiFatta

Teaching History

kins chronicles her childhood living at Allison’s Wells. Her aunt and uncle, Hosford and John Fontaine, owned the resort.

“In the late 1800s, Mama’s grandfather, Sam Wherry, bought the property, along with a well famous for its medicinal water, from Mrs. Allison, a New Orleans widow. Mrs. Allison started the hotel for people who showed up wanting to try the water,” she writes.

Segregation was prevalent at Allison’s Wells.

Watkins makes passing references to maids and butlers, handymen and child keepers. She remembers kind, loving black women who helped raise her. She recalls white, privileged guests who came to the hotel. Segregation bothered her as a young woman. “Even at 18, I saw where we’d

// by Dylan Watson struction of the Museum of Mississippi History near the William F. Winter Archives and History Building on North Street.

For decades, MDAH displayed artifacts in the Old Capitol Museum, but moisture problems and lack of space were problems.

The history museum will feature 21,000 square feet of permanent exhibits and will have an estimated impact of $19 million yearly. The construction

of the two museums coincides with recent changes to the statewide history curriculum to make sure that all Mississippi school children learn about civil rights and human rights.

In 2008, a Gov. Haley Barbourappointed commission chose Tougaloo College, north of Jackson, as the location for a civil rights museum, but construction never began due to a lack of funds for construction and a lack of progress in fundraising. Bar-

Jacksonian Medgar Evers was gunned down in 1963. bour has said he’d like the museums to be open in time for the state’s bicentennial in 2017.

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JXN // potential

Hico, Hico One Day? cious that development hasn’t happened, yet, because developers are unable to remove the local (black) population from the area.”

Lumumba says he doesn’t see any other reason why no one has built nice, affordable housing in an upscale part of the city that happens to be majority black. “There are people of substantial means living over there,” he adds.

The Interstate 220 corridor connects the neighborhood to other booming spots, including Hawkins Field Industrial Park, Echelon Business Park and Northwest Industrial Park. Besides its connection to the Interstate 220 corridor, the area also features a short link to U.S. Highway 49, which can get a driver as far north as Piggott, Ark., or as far south as Gulfport.

Its highway ties make the area an equally desirable industrial port, providing city leaders approve.

Lumumba prefers the idea of new residential communities, however, and says there is plenty of vacant land around the lake, particularly around Livingston Road.

The lake, despite its semi-pris-

Hands On Courtesy Thomas Price

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Summer 2011

The promise of developing property near Lake Hico in northwest Jackson beckons county and city leaders. tine appearance, remains undeveloped mostly due to the possibility of a high bacteria count thanks to a portion of the lake being unnaturally heated by Entergy Mississippi’s nearby Rex Brown natural gas and oil-burning power plant.

Entergy Mississippi spokeswoman Mara Hartmann says that the EPA determined in 1972 that an “industrial cooling pond” like Lake Hico doesn’t serve good recreational use.

But the threat of bacteria in the water doesn’t appear to affect the fish population. Lumumba says fishermen regularly poach at the lake. Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks officials say they have had to remove alligators from the water in the last 10 years. Someone should also tell the bacteria story to the beavers that temporarily flooded neighboring Northside Drive last year when they

// by Thomas Price

worked in Jackson lived in Jackson, specifically on the other side of Gallatin—you know, in that forgotten area in our economy, south Jackson.

I imagine a man like myself leaving this building after a hard day of work and being greeted by his family, all within five to 10 minutes away from his punch card.

I believe in “return flight.” I see it starting around the train depot downtown, but it would be nice to spread some good fortune north of there.

Call it “progressive sprawl.”

Today, the building is ideally positioned to be a mixed-use building. The paper company is across the street, two blocks from the new train depot.

The building could have a restaurant, a bookstore, and perhaps some office or retail space. Let’s try it, and see if they come back.

Thomas Price is an intern architect at Cooke Douglass Farr Lemons and a Mississippi State grad.

Courtesy Thomas Price

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f I could get my hands on the abandoned building at 510 N. Gallatin St. (a couple of blocks south of West Monument Street), I would use it to re-join both sides of Gallatin: downtown and southwest Jackson. The building’s intrigue for me is not so much its structure as its location.

The building was the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. from 1958 to 1972. It was then vacant until 1978, when South Central Bell used it as a warehouse. The telephone company used the space until 1987. The building has been vacant ever since.

Nostalgically, I like the building and its location.

I can envision downtown Jackson in the 1960s and how business was flourishing then. The people who

AMILE WILSON

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ard 2 Councilman Chokwe Lumumba has big plans for the area directly around Jackson’s Lake Hico in northwest Jackson. One side snuggles up against West Northside Drive.

The opposite side borders the middle-income Pines neighborhood and undeveloped woodlands on the appropriately named Forest Avenue. The woods are on 16th Section land that is set aside to earn money to maintain schools.

Most of the 16th Section land the Lake Hico area occupies, however, is covered with fields and varmints. The area around it is largely underdeveloped, even though a years-long battle rages along the Pearl River to create valuable lakeside property. Lumumba says Hico represents remarkable potential, and hungrily wants to increase both the population and the tax revenue around the lake.

“We could take development in that area in any number of directions,” Lumumba says. “I’m surprised this area hasn’t exploded already. I’m actually a little suspi-

// by Adam Lynch

This building at 510 N. Gallatin St. could rejoin downtown and southwest Jackson as a mixed-use space.

boomjackson.com

60 Reasons to Love Jackson

Recently, we asked readers at www.jfp.ms why they choose to live in Jackson. Here’s what they said:

blocked a run-off drain from the lake.

A working group consisting of Jackson Public Schools, the Jackson Redevelopment Authority, the city of Jackson, the Hinds County Economic Development District, and Entergy contracted JBHM Architects to conduct a land survey of the area between the lake and Interstate 220. JBHM delivered its survey to the group earlier this year.

The Northwest Business Corridor Study estimates the marketing growth of the area surrounding the 16th Section land, which offers plenty of potential, thanks to the natural business corridor on Interstate 220 and other amenities.

The land at the focus of the study includes a collection of multi-family residential units to small offices, abandoned warehouses and undeveloped wooded lots. Even though 17 separate property owners own land on the proposed site, five of the owners, including Tri-State Brick and Tile Company, United Methodist Children’s Home and Entergy Mississippi, hold 94 percent of the land.

JBHM reports that development of the property for professional office, light industrial and eventual mixed use could cost between $2.75 million and $3 million, but deliver a net benefit to the city, county and school district of up to $11 million in the first 10 years. The study area currently generates $62,600 in annual taxes for the county.

Milestone developments for the property would include traffic ramps at Methodist Farm Road for access to I-220, rezoning for Technical Industrial Park use, storm-water improvements, and street and utility upgrades.

Some developers are already eyeing the area, but Lumumba says he is aiming higher than some of the current proposals circulating for the neighborhood. The councilman is working to discourage construction of a new planned neighborhood offering homes with a 15-year lease, similar to the lease agreement for the Timber Falls subdivision in south Jackson.

Lumumba says the extended lease-time frees home owners from long-term commitment to their property and encourages a transient population. The councilman prefers permanent residents willing to maintain their property for decades.

“It’s a beautiful place. It deserves good development,” Lumumba says. ¢ Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

1. Jacksonians, as a rule, care so much about their city.

17. You can be a big fish in a small pond.

39. The many opportunities to celebrate who we are!

2. Our history has helped create a place where it is easy to make a difference in other people’s lives.

18. Young people are often afforded the opportunity to attain higher levels of jobs than they might have in bigger cities.

40. The miniature horse living in Fondren.

3. Jackson has so many of the advantages of a larger city, as well as a smaller town.

4. Incredible diversity; it’s nice not to live in a place dominated by the kinds of people who ran the state when I was growing up.

5. It’s close to family, but still has big-city advantages.

6. I don’t have to commute anywhere. Much of my daily life revolves about a couple square miles.

7. I live among people who don’t agree on everything, but who tend to be progressive minded regardless of party.

8. Most people I meet in Jackson are compassionate progressives of faith.

9. There are more things to do in Jackson in a weekend than in almost a year’s worth of events in surrounding cities.

10. The restaurant offerings in Jackson allow us to taste a different country’s culinary cuisine almost daily.

19. Opportunities to be connected with a strong “community.”

20. Networking opportunities aplenty.

21. Personal contacts with the local media can be easily attained.

22. Anything we do is progress.

23. Cost of living. You can make the wages of a pauper and live like a king.

24. Feel much safer, considering the high safety risks of commuting.

25. Fondren.

26. Jackson is an introduction to a better life ... especially for people from the country and the Delta.

27. It’s home.

28. I love to see what the young people of this city are doing, what it means to them for Jackson to be successful.

29. The women!

11. The support for all the local establishments.

30. Authentic local music scene.

12. Jackson has history and a story to tell, unlike the suburban developments that were farms or timberland 25 years ago.

31. Livable neighborhoods with pretty houses.

13. Many more job opportunities than in other areas of the state.

14. A strong cultural tradition with the symphony, opera, museums and more.

15. The opportunities for individuals to make sustainable change is endless.

16. Our community offers an amazing amount of support for individuals to start bands, nonprofits, businesses, zines and art.

41. Musicians here will offer to collaborate with you, invite you to do shows, and treat you like a brother or sister.

42. I can always find a parking spot when I need to get a loaf of bread.

43. Southerners have a certain sense of humor that I really love.

44. Because my family had slaves long ago, and I want to be part of the healing.

45. The mix of urban amenities and low-density population appeals to me.

46. I could afford to buy a home here.

47. All my friends are here, and my family isn’t far away.

48. I love how easy it is to get plugged in here.

There are so many opportunities to volunteer and use your time and talents for the greater good.

49. Two words: Downtown Renaissance.

50. The creative pulse of Jackson and the Fondren community helped me become an artist.

51. Jackson is honest.

52. Peace and quiet.

32. Casual bars like Fenian’s made me feel like a regular the first time I came in.

53. I found a creative community that urged me to write.

33. Good independent boutique shopping.

55. Rainbow Whole Foods.

34. It’s where I live and make my living. It’s where God put me!

36. I go to the most diverse (and friendly) events I’ve ever attended anywhere.

37. The locally owned restaurant scene is amazing!

38. If you don’t have family in Jackson, you’ll find one.

54. Arts, Eats & Beats (in Fondren every spring).

56. Friday Forum at Koinonia.

57. Progressive, passionate people who really love and embrace their city.

58 The neighborhoods … oak-lined streets with historic charm.

59. Cannoli at Campbell’s Bakery.

60. I’m supposed to be here.

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JXN // parks and rec

// by Lacey McLaughlin

Aaron Philips

By the People

Fondren residents drummed up support for a neighborhood park.

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est Fondren residents Jenny Nelson and Wes Harp stand at the outer edge of Fondren Park on Northview Drive on a sunny April afternoon, admiring a bunch of lush green plants surrounding an oak tree.

A few days earlier, the plants had mysteriously gotten trampled, but the residents, who spent the last four years planning the park, weren’t upset. As soon as one neighbor came out to pick up the injured plants, several more were on their way with replacements from their own gardens.

“At first some people were like, ‘See, you can’t plant anything because it’s just going to get torn up,’” Harp says. “But now we have twice as much.”

The neighbors’ attentiveness to the park, which celebrated its grand opening April 9, is understandable. Since 2007, a group of community members and the Fondren Renaissance Foundation stuck through the long and often tedious process of building a park from start to finish. Fondren Park is the result of a diverse neighborhood’s perseverance and dedication.

For several years, community members reg18

Summer 2011

ularly met at the remaining steps of a demolished home on a grassy vacant lot. It served as a green space where kids played pickup softball games, and members of a local church regularly hosted Bible studies.

In September 2010, neighborhood leaders broke ground on the park. The Fondren Renaissance Foundation received a grant totaling $588,900 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The park now includes a playground, a pavilion for performances and walking trails.

Several people played a specific role in the park’s formation over the years. In the 1980s, Ward 7 Councilwoman Margaret BarrettSimon worked with U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson to preserve the green space and pushed for the city to donate it to the foundation.

Harp, an architect at Burris Wagnon Architects, led a committee of residents that had a direct role in determining how the park could best serve the neighborhood. John Weaver of Weaver Architects took the committee’s suggestions and drew plans, which was necessary for the foundation to submit a grant proposal that Fondren resident Charles Richardson helped write.

Community advocate Leslee Foukal, a

barista at Sneaky Beans, describes herself as the “squeaky wheel.” She continued to drum up support and excitement for the park through the entire four-year process. Harrell Contracting Group constructed the park, but it was the residents who essentially built it.

On a cold December morning last year, Nelson and Harp went door-to-door asking residents to build the playground.

“We mixed our own concrete with representatives who showed us how to mix it and pour it, and we worked together to get the playground installed,” Nelson recalls.

The playground’s installation turned into celebration when neighbors brought food and donated bulbs for children to plant.

On April 9, the community gathered for the park’s grand opening with live music, food and the support of various community organizations.

Crossroads Film Society is planning to host outdoor movie screenings in the summer, and neighbors will soon host a community gardening day.

“It’s definitely bringing people together, and that’s the goal,” Harp says.

“We hope to have people take care of the playground, get involved with events and take care of the garden.” boomjackson.com

Bogey at the Rez

// by Langston Moore

A Windsurf17

t first glance, a disc-golf basket looks like an abstract work of art or a leftover piece of fencing.

“My family and I started coming out to the reservoir over the winter. We saw the targets but didn’t know what they were,” Robbie Landry says. “This is only my second game and, man, I am hooked.”

The targets are roughly 5 feet high and centered with a metal pole that could be used for chain-link fencing. Surrounded by layers of woven chain to soften the putts, a metal basket is about halfway down to catch what one hopes is a birdie (one shot below par).

Disc golf targets are 5 feet high.

Since 1963, the Ross Barnett Reservoir, or “the Rez,” has offered a plethora of activity.

Families enjoy boating, fishing, skiing and picnicking along more than 100 miles of shoreline.

And now, some add disc golf to the amenities.

In 2004, the Jackson Union of Disc Golf Enthusiasts completed the 18-hole disc-golf course at the reservoir. Although it’s different from traditional golf, some elements remain. Disc golf has the etiquette of play, but without the formal attire. It has the same theory as golf, to get the ball in the hole in the minimum amount of shots as possible. The terminology—birdie, bogey and par—is used in disc golf.

Although some out of the loop call it Frisbee golf, players don’t like that name.

“That term is dated and can upset some of the more serious disc golfers,” Ricky Clark of Brandon says.

Clark was enjoying a round of disc golf on a beautiful, sun-filled Sunday at the Pelahatchie Shore course with his wife, Alison. Clark, a former avid player of traditional golf, took up disc golf a couple of years ago and describes the Rez

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

course as “the best course in the state.”

“I enjoyed traditional golf, but I seem to not get as frustrated playing disc golf and don’t have the urge to break (clubs). My decision to take up disc golf was also a budget-conscious one as well,” Clark says.

The reservoir course weaves in and out of the shaded and cool woods of Pelahatchie Shore Park, offering disc golfers tight fairways carved out of the gigantic pines. But it also has straightforward holes that don’t require the disc golfer to be as precise with their shots.

Just as in traditional golf, players have different skill levels. To become successful in disc golf, however, one doesn’t have to hire the expensive swing coach. Just a knack for throwing a disc is all one needs to enjoy this game.

“I don’t really know much about the game.

I just enjoy throwing the discs and being outside. It is a great form of exercise,” Landry, a technician at Puckett Power Systems, says.

“We were looking for something for the entire family to do that was economical, took up some time and was enjoyable, and I believe we have found it. I even have my 4- and 7- year-olds out here playing,” he says.

One can get equipped to play disc golf for less than $30, whereas even not-so-expensive clubs for traditional golf start in the $200 range.

This investment doesn’t include balls, protective gloves, tees, green or cart fees, shoes, proper clothing and so on.

Different discs share the same names and uses as traditional clubs for golf. A player uses a disc driver for “teeing” off on long holes, and mid-range discs for second shots like an iron in golf. Players use the putter discs at close range for what is hopefully a golfer’s last shot at the basket or target.

Most sporting goods stores and some of the courses around the state sell discs.

Disc golf is becoming more popular in the state, in part because it’s affordable. If you would like to become competitive in the sport, email info@jacksondiscgolf.org.

If you just want to play disc golf casually, head out to your favorite sporting goods store and for less than a traditional round of golf would cost, you will be ready to go.

Other courses around the state include LeFleur’s Bluff State Park in Jackson, Moccasin Bend in Morton, Chautauqua Park in Crystal Springs and Flying Eagle in Raymond.

19

JXN // in bloom

ZAPPing Perceptions Amile Wilson

ZAPPer Marcia Reed plants flowers along Capitol Street near the zoo.

T

The small neighborhood coalition formed in 1995 to help revitalize the zoo and its surrounding blocks, and to curb the “negative perception” of their community.

The city also relies on the group to report houses or lots in bad shape that need to be renovated or demolished. “What we see affects how we think about things. And so if we can clean up the area and it looks better, then people will have a different perception about the people that live there,” Marcia Reed, ZAPP board president, says.

About three years after its inception, Reed, 61 and a resident of the neighborhood for more than 30 years, jumped into the mix. The group coalesced, she says, in response to an effort to bring in two-story “fourplexes” that would introduce overcrowding and mismatched housing styles. In a neighborhood traditionally comprised of single-family homes, ZAPP fought to keep the apartment clusters away. And won.

The group works in partnership with the zoo and local non-profit organizations that bring financial support and muscle to make things happen. The City of Jackson, Keep Jackson Beautiful, Voice of Calvary Ministries and Jackson Metro Housing Partnership have all assisted ZAPP. (Reed has worked for the latter two groups in the past, and her husband, Phil Reed, is now president of Voice of Calvary.)

In December 2010, ZAPP assembled a board and applied for nonprofit status. Thanks to her coordination efforts for the group over the last few years, Reed, who is a CreditPlus sales manager at BankPlus, was elected as ZAPP’s board president. Reed says she and her grandchild hit the zoo every few weeks or so, favoring the new tiger exhibit and watching the otters swim.

ZAPP meets at the zoo for lunch the second Tuesday of every month, with about 10 to 12 people in regular attendance, including Sheba Moses, a zoo employee and ZAPP board member, and Beth Poff, the zoo’s executive director.

“One of the hardest things the zoo has to encounter is the negative perception of west Jackson,” Poff says.

Aside from barring the four-plexes, ZAPP’s biggest feat may be writing the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks grant that created the 16-acre Claiborne Park, near Provine High School. Voice of Calvary Ministries also put in a walking trail, bridges over the park’s creek, benches, lighting and a parking lot. With additional funding, ZAPP plans to build pavilions and picnic grounds.

Reed cites increasing home ownership, active neighborhood organizations and some new businesses as evidence of the area’s proactive improvement in recent years.

“I’ve lived in the neighborhood a long time. There are a lot of good people, a lot of hard-working families that live in the area, and there are a lot of positive things going on,” Reed says.

To get involved with ZAPP, call 601-260-2632.

BU Gu S tD T e

BO OM

CE cis O ion B s De onu er se s c Bu Je am ps ru sin sa es sA Bo lem na m ba Café l N av ytic W yB hi yS s te istr EA W Rus o Di LS eb sia s k 2 ns Ur .0 Pe Gol ba tra f Sk n in ny Tres Café Bi Ren rk Gi A en ew rl mig M Th sto al ar os an cks Vi gar krtu ita Co You s al nt iza ac Twe P l t t a i e Fit s ce on ts ne m ak ss in Fa Bo T g st h o an -Fo t C TO k -Y M W od am ou S ar p C on ha s La Not Os Dr ins se es am ug rV s isi a Bo bi Cr on lo n L o s ad Fo ss F en Tr od it ac W ki ar Tru on ck HC ng G Ba Ob s D ra es Ye iet ck ity Ol Ob d am Bu Sc sin alp B a Br ow es el a ti Se s A Ea in S es n. s U c t s P in u g ienc Us aul al -v. Ry Re- Ro Hea e en bo -T a l gin tic thie Ne hem n r ee S tb u red o rg e P.R ok Wo r rkp y . l a M M ces ys e pa M dica ce et ro re Pl an Chr Uni tin om ty g Fa ebo ke ok St or ies Vi ny l

he corner garden at West Capitol and Parkside streets needs a little color. The folks who planted it, volunteers with the Zoo Area Progressive Partnership, have decided to add some annual flowers to the mix of day lilies and monkey grass that already mingle with perennial blooming bushes.

Among the clashing blend of kept-up and dilapidated houses along the West Capitol Street corridor, from Interstate 220 to the Jackson Zoo, the residents and business owners of the group known simply as ZAPP are committed to sprucing up their community. This might mean anything from planting a few flowers to blocking development they believe will hurt the neighborhood.

// by Charlotte Blom

20

Summer 2011

boomjackson.com

JXN // progress

Back to the Future

// by Adam Lynch

Adam Lynch

ate more communal yard space, and every unit has a carport with a solar-paneled roof.

The solar panels, with net-metering technology provided in a special arrangement with Entergy Mississippi, will help reduce residents’ electricity bills by up to 28 percent.

Overall, the project will create 16 new residential units, which are only one part of a master plan for the Midtown neighborhood developed

by Duvall Decker for the North Midtown Community Development Corp. and JHA.

Commercial space included as part of the plan will likely host a health clinic, barber shop and community meeting space, along with offices for housing counselors.

Bennie G. Thompson Research Center

Construction workers are assembling a series of solar-powered and energy-efficient duplexes as part of a new Midtown development this year.

P

rogress in all sections of the city continues to push forward despite some delays:

Holly Hills

Workers are banging away on a $7.75 million affordable housing project near Northside Drive. Holly Hills is using low-income housing tax credits to install 60 rental units, some of which should be open this summer.

The property at 4555 Holly Drive, near Banner Hall, is the former home of Stratford Manor Apartments, which were vacant and desperately in need of renovation. New Horizon Development is the project developer.

Construction will include demolition of two buildings and raising two- and three-bedroom units with new roofs, electrical work, heating, air conditioning and appliances, said Phil Eide, senior vice president of Hope Enterprise Corp.

Developers target the project for moderate to lowincome renters. People with incomes 60 percent of the area median income or below are eligible to apply. Developers reserve a portion of the apartments for prospective clients with incomes of 50 percent of the area median income or below.

Capitol Green Project

Full Spectrum Inc. completed its construcWork. Live. Play. Prosper.

tion analysis for a $27 million robot-assisted parking garage. The company plans to build the garage and adjoining $4 million multiple-building air-conditioner as a component of the first phase of the Old Capitol Green Project in downtown.

The company is moving forward with development on the garage this year using Jackson Redevelopment Authority bonds and New Market Tax Credits. It’s also working on beginning construction on a neighboring commercial building connected to the Old Capitol Green project now that the company has been approved for $45 million in industrial revenue bonds, through the Mississippi Business Finance Corp.

The garage will feature industry-specific electrical hook-ups for charging electric cars—including that picky connection for the Nissan Leaf.

Midtown Solar Homes

Developers are moving ahead on construction on the first phase of a $3.49 million energyefficient residential development in Jackson’s midtown neighborhood at Livingston and Lamar streets. The Jackson Housing Authority partially financed the project through stimulus funds.

The duplexes represent the city’s first solar-powered, sustainable, green, energy-efficient affordable housing development, according to Sheila Jackson, JHA executive director. Duvall Decker Architects designed the buildings to cre-

Duvall Decker also designed Tougaloo College’s Bennie G. Thompson Academic and Civil Rights Research Center, which had its ribbon-cutting in May. The research center’s 27,000 square feet of space features a 120-seat lecture hall, seminar rooms, and modern classrooms with the latest technological trappings.

The $8.5 million building has a gallery for Tougaloo’s impressive art collection containing many renditions of the Civil Rights Movement.

Roy Decker, principal architect of Duvall Decker Architects, said that the building honors Tougaloo’s role in the Civil Rights Movement, and creates a place where civic discussion can continue as well as displaying important works of art.

Retro Metro

The city of Jackson’s under-used Metrocenter mall will get a boost this year as the city moves several municipal agencies into a space formerly occupied by Belk department store.

Jackson Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr. signed on to the plan last year to move city departments—including water and sewer, human and cultural services, and parks and recreation—from their current offices at the Jackson Medical Mall and the Atmos building on West Capitol Street into the mall’s 60,000 square feet of property.

Retro Metro LLC, a project of Watkins Partners, leased the space to the city and plans to invest $2.5 million to build out and renovate the space.

Johnson anticipates an economic boost to the area, courtesy of 200 to 300 new city employees. He said he expected the city to complete the move in October, following renovation.

Get breaking development news at jfpdaily.com. Send Progress reports to editor @boomjackson.com.

21

BIZ // optimism

by Natalie A. Collier

Seeing Clearly

22

Summer 2011

Charles A. Smith

S

tepping onto the front porch of the EnVision Eyecare Clinic at 1316 N. State St., you might think you were walking into an eyeglass frame boutique, not an optometrist’s office. Affordable frames to highend, name-brand sunglasses rest on large pieces of dark, cherry-stained furniture, and you see mirrors in every part of the room when you look through the large picture window.

Though the lobby isn’t quite as boutique-y, it isn’t any less chic. Dressed in black with gold accessories, Dr. Tonyatta Hairston, a mocha brown woman with a gleaming white, genuine smile, says cheerily, “Good morning!”

Hairston, a 35-year-old alumna of Callaway High School and Tougaloo College, graduated from the Southern College of Optometry in Memphis, Tenn., in 2001, and immediately moved back to Jackson to use her new skills.

First, she worked with another doctor (whom she declines to name) for two years.

“That was good experience. I learned what I didn’t want to do, and I also learned what I had to do, which was start my own practice,” Hairston says.

After the short stint taking another optometrist’s lead, Hairston was ready to open her own practice. She established a clinic at the Wal-Mart in Magee, where she still maintains her practice of eight years, working two days a week.

“Some people look negatively at optometry at Wal-Mart. But I always (go) into every exam as ‘It’s not where I am; it’s what I’m here to do,’” the doctor says. While she loves serving people in Magee, Hairston couldn’t shake the desire to set up shop in her hometown.

“Even today, the fight continues about commercial versus private. It’s just a political thing amongst us doctors. But no matter where I am—in a field in Iraq—you’re going to get the same care, no matter what,” Hairston says.

Building from the foundation up in Jackson offered the doctor-turned-entrepreneur even more obstacles.

“I knew how to be an optometrist; I didn’t know how to be a business owner,” she says.

“I had a notebook, I had an accountant, and I had a lawyer, and, of course, my parents and my brother were very supportive,” the doctor adds.

Dr. Tonyatta Hairston discovered after graduating from optometry school that practicing medicine might be pretty easy for her, but owning her own clinic presented challenges.

“The first obstacle was probably the financial aspect, going from school with $150,000 worth of debt—between student loans and consumer debt.

So the first obstacle was I didn’t have any money. … Trying to get a bank to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll loan you $100,000, even though you don’t have but $5.’ My parents were super supportive in helping to make those things happen,” she says.

Then there was the fact that she’d have to actually run the business.

“I didn’t know how to manage people.

I wasn’t great with managing time. Where in school it took me an hour to do an eye exam, now I’m going to have to do it in 20 minutes. … Sometimes I look back, and I don’t know how I did it,” she says of her 28-year-old self.

The one thing Hairston did know was where she wanted the clinic. “I grew up in north Jackson; I wanted to be in north Jackson.” She found a spot in Fondren. (She has since moved her practice closer to downtown.)

Her family and cheerleaders were opposed to the first location, but she had a vision.

“The lawyer and accountant handled the legal parts,” Hairston says.

“At night, I would sit with my notebook

and plan out how this was going to manifest.

From how much equipment was going to cost to how many frames I need in the office to how am I going to pay some employees. So a big part of it was planning and asking a lot of questions,” she says.

A plan, she says, makes all the difference.

And that’s what she tells optometry students and people looking to start their own business.

“Younger colleagues will ask me ‘How did you do it? Can you help me?’, and I say, ‘Sure.

Plan. Let’s talk about what do you want to do, and then let’s talk about how do you get there.’”

Hairston says she is the only black female optometrist who owns her own practice in the area and at last check, the state. (She thanks Linda Johnson, the oldest living black optometrist who works at Hinds Comprehensive Health, for supporting her career.) She feels no pressure to perform or be a standard bearer.

Rather, she feels optimism.

“I’m trying to help the profession of optometry and help black women realize they can do this. It’s a great profession. I’m not on call all the time. There’s not a whole lot of blood and guts— every now and then there’s a little,” she says. boomjackson.com

D

r. C.J. Chen may be chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, but he is also an accomplished ballroom dancer.

It all started in 1998 when Chen, as a member of the Mississippi Symphony board, took a free dance lesson from In Step Studio to prepare for that year’s Symphony Ball. Although now closed, In Step Studio allowed Chen and his wife, Dr. Lin Chen, to discover a new joy in ballroom dancing.

After the Symphony Ball came and went, the couple continued their lessons. They quickly discovered the sexy tango was their favorite dance.

Now 65, Chen has been dancing for more than 12 years.

“When you go to a class, you never stop moving. By the end, you are sweating all over,” Chen says.

Last summer, Mississippi Opera held a Dance with the Stars

Dr. C.J. Chen and his instructor, Lisa Day, won the Opera’s Dance with the Stars fundraiser. event. Each Mississippi “star” partnered with a professional dancer to raise money for the opera.

Chen was invited to dance, but there was one problem.

“I’d never danced with anyone but my wife,” Chen says.

This left him nervous about a partner. Mike Day, the instructor at

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

Shine, Baby, Shine

// by Tim Roberson

Mississippi Opera

First Tango

Chen’s regular dance studio, Dance Connection in Pearl, stepped in to help, suggesting that Chen dance with his wife, Lisa Day.

Chen and Lisa Day trained at least 12 sessions in order to perfect their routine for the benefit. Mike Day choreographed the American tango routine, picked “Jealousy Tango” by Placido Domingo as their music and coached both dancers.

Chen was unsure what his UMMC colleagues would think.

Several of them found out, and not only donated but also were present at the event to support Chen.

Not only did Chen and Lisa Day win first place with the American tango, Chen also raised the most money of all the contestants.

Chen says he won’t dance this year. He has a scheduling conflict and is speaking at a medical conference. Besides, “I want everyone to participate, so it’s not just limited to me,” the dancing doc says.

E

mployees matter. Great companies find ways to make workers shine, writes Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, in his new book, “Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011, $26.95).

The latest in a series of fascinating business books based on emerging neuroscience (basically proving that the brain keeps growing if you feed it right), Hallowell urges managers to follow his “Cycle of Excellence” model to managing: (1) Put people in the right job; (2) Connect them with each other and the company mission; (3) Encourage imaginative play to feed brain growth; (4) Create conditions to make them want to work harder; and (5) Shine: Recognize them for a tough job well done to prod them to be even more excellent.

When they shine, you shine.

— Donna Ladd

23

BIZ //spirit

by Garrad Lee

The Business Within Tate Nations

Scotta Brady, right, operates her Fondren business, Butterfly Yoga, with the view that money is energy.

S

cotta Brady, owner of Butterfly Yoga Studio, exudes the calm demeanor of a worldly yogini as she sits in the lobby of her studio in Fondren talking about her business (3025 N. State St., 601.594.2313), housed in a repurposed gas station.

Brady speaks easily about such philosophical abstractions as “the divine consciousness” and “the spirituality of daily life.”

In the next breath, she talks about the ins and outs of running a successful business, which, at first glance, might seem counter intuitive to her metaphysical concept of reality.

“With yoga and business, it’s all about the exchange of energy,” Brady says. “Money is just another form of energy.”

The businesswoman also barters, exchanging her yoga energy for everything from cleaning services and massage therapy to music lessons for her son. At Butterfly, Brady teaches the tantric-based Anusara style of yoga founded by John Friend in 1997.

Brady, who has been teaching yoga since 2000, is always on a mission to introduce as many people as possible to yoga, and as it has gained in popularity over the years, she has witnessed an increase in the number of people practicing yoga in the city.

“I am excited about the number of dedicated yoga studios in Jackson,” Brady says.

“Still, there are a lot of people in this town, which means there are a lot of people not doing yoga, yet.”

24

Summer 2011

The owners of the Jackson area’s other studios agree. Debi Lewis, owner of Joyflow Yoga (7048 Old Canton Road, Trace Harbour Village, Ridgeland; 601.613.4317), has noticed that yoga’s growing popularity has led to a plethora of options for people ready to try out yoga. Gyms, health clubs and even hospitals offer yoga classes to a public excited to try a new way to get healthy and fight stress.

For Lewis, this is a positive thing. She uses an “eclectic mix of teachers” to foster an “eclectic style” of yoga.

“I’m a creative person,” Lewis says. “I have never taught the same class twice. I like to see what the needs are of the students and create classes around that.”

Nichole Baker, owner of Fondren’s StudiOm (665 Duling Ave., 601.209.6325) agrees. “People who want to grow further as yoga students come to the studios,” she says.

Baker, who has taught for 19 years, practices and teaches a style of yoga called Iyengar, known for its use of props, such as blocks, blankets and ropes that hang from the walls of StudiOm that help students maximize and maintain poses.

Georgette Turner opened Matworks Yoga and Pilates Club in 2004 (408 Monroe St., Clinton, 601.624.6356). She says her classes acknowledge the value of yoga in everyday life, incorporating breath and focus into the present, maintaining discipline and strength.

Turner teaches “yoga off the mat,” helping

others find spiritual and physical balance.

Yoga originated in India more than 5,000 years ago, although its history is somewhat obscured by a lack of written records from that era and the secretiveness and mystery surrounding early yoga teachings.

The earliest portrayals of yoga are images from the Indus River Valley that depict people sitting in traditional yoga meditation poses.

The word yoga comes from Sanskrit “yuj,” meaning to yoke, join or unite. Yoga is not just about exercise, but also about the union of “mind, body, spirit and art,” Lewis says. It is this multi-pronged holistic approach to physical and spiritual fitness that keeps people coming to yoga studios.

Competition is not an issue, studio owners say. “I love the idea of the cross-pollination of all the different styles. … I encourage my students to try different styles. Hopefully, they come back to me, but ultimately I want people to find what feeds their spirit. It magnetizes more interest in yoga as a community,” Brady says.

It is that sense of community, which is “very large, but splintered,” that Brady sees as the biggest challenge to the future of yoga in the city. A non-dual philosophy that embodies an ideal of completeness grounds the Anusara style that Brady teaches at Butterfly and serves as a model of unity for the community.

“Yoga is bigger than any individual studio,” Brady says. “I’m just really glad people are doing yoga. More people means more buzz.”

Yogis v. Abuse

Y

oga enthusiasts will converge Aug. 6 at the Arts Center of Mississippi in Jackson for the second Yoga for Nonviolence to benefit the Center for Violence Prevention, a 24-hour crisis and referral service for domestic-abuse victims. Massage therapist and yogi Magnus Eklund, who first envisioned the event, says the benefit consists of 108 sun salutes, a tradition performed at every equinox in some yoga lineages.

“It is in a way a yoga marathon, but we encourage participants to be non-violent to their own bodies, and do as many as they safely can,” Eklund says. Last year’s event had 60-plus participants and raised more than $2,500.

Area studios will hold free classes to teach sun salutes leading up to the event. For information, call 601-500-0337 or 601-932-4198. Visit the Yoga for Non-Violence Facebook page. boomjackson.com

Local businessman Jonathan Lee, what’s in your briefcase?

1 Flat Kaylyn, a traveling school project his young cousin sent 2 His late father’s Bible 3 Pen and pencil set from his late father 4 Stationery; you never know when you need to write a note 5 Camera 6 Product catalog for his company, Mississippi Products Inc. 7 Parking ticket 8 Jump drive

Ronni Mott

Peekaboo

9 Phone 10 A journal 11 The book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” by Jane Jacobs 12 CD of JSU radio music 13 Baby toy for daughter Morgan Elizabeth 14 Candy 15 Germicide Can we peek into your bag, desk, nightstand? Email editor@boomjackson. com to volunteer.

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

25

BIZ // home care amile wilson

Off the Cliff

// by Donna Ladd aberrant billing practices, and they’re using that as a trigger to investigate. That’s a good thing.

They’re going after criminals who decided this is a safer crime because penalties aren’t as big as for other crimes. The likelihood of getting caught is a lot less. They are literally like mafia people.

Sta-Home serves 6,163 patients in 50 Mississippi counties, 1,227 in the Jackson metro. Still, CEO Vincent Caracci runs the $85 million Jackson-based company like a family-owned business.

Sta-Home beat the IRS a few years back after your company went for-profit. Talk about that.

(We were) required to do a valuation of the not-for-profit and pay fair market value for its assets. So we did in 1995, and the conclusion was that the liabilities of the company exceeded its assets. So the newly formed for-profit company merely assumed all the liabilities of the existing not-for-profits. The IRS challenged that valuation, and said that we had actually absconded with multi-millions of dollars from the public.

I

How do your revenue sources break down?

The bulk of our revenues are from Medicare, both on the hospice and the home-health side. Somewhere around 85, 87 percent of our revenues are Medicare. Another 3 or 4 percent is Medicaid. The remainder is private insurance.

How does health-care legislation affect you?

For the first time ever, hospitals’ bottom lines are going to be dependent on home health’s performance, how good we are at doing the things 26

Summer 2011

that we do to help knock down that readmission rate. The smart hospitals are figuring it out.

That sounds like a good thing.

It is a good thing. One of the sweet things about the bittersweet Affordable Care Act is that it forces people to recognize that home health is an integral part of continuing care. Hospitals can no longer just treat home-health care cavalierly.

How do to keep employees for so long?

Genuinely caring about people. People at Sta-Home know they have a voice. I personally meet with representatives from each corporation (who) bring their thoughts, their concerns, their beefs, bright ideas to the table. … At the end of every year, we’ll publish all of the actions taken as a result of these. We’ve made more than a dozen company-wide policy changes as a direct result.

You grew up here. How is Jackson doing now?

I went to law school in St. Louis, Mo., which had suffered from white flight. But by the time I was there, the neighborhoods were mixed. It was a real economic, social, neat thing. That kind of thing is starting to happen in Jackson in areas like Fondren; the city is starting to bounce back. It’s that kind of attitude, that kind of approach to life, that is going to fuel the bounce back. courtesy sta-home

n 1976, a nurse from Neshoba County decided that critically ill and elderly Mississippians needed to be able to stay home rather than pay hospital costs when possible. Joyce Faye Pope Caracci had worked at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and in nursinghome management. But she envisioned a way to send nurses directly to patients’ homes. Under the model she developed with her husband, New Orleans native Vic Caracci, Medicare would pay for the bulk of those services provided by the then-not-for-profit Sta-Home Health Agency.

“They just jumped off a cliff,” son Vincent Caracci, now the company’s CEO, says.

Thirty-five years later, Sta-Home has branched into three for-profit corporations in the state and netted $85 million in 2010. Many of its 984 employees work with the “Sta-Home family” for many years; the company just celebrated 35 years of service for one of its secretaries.

CEO Vincent Caracci spoke to BOOM from Sta-Home’s corporate offices in north Jackson.

The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals vindicated you, even making the IRS pay court costs.

(The court) said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.

This is ridiculous.’ … We were informed at the time that ours were the largest attorney fees that the IRS ever paid. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s what I was told.

In this industry you hear a lot about fraud. How do you ensure a good ethic?

I address every new person that we hire … and I stress to them that we bend over backward to do it right here. One of the things I want them to do is to be my eyes and ears out in the field. If they are not comfortable with a decision … (such as) with a hospice patient because they don’t think the patient is terminally ill, they are encouraged to ask questions.

Could the feds do a better job catching the bad guys without over-regulating the good?

They’re talking about mining data to detect

Nurse Joyce Faye Pope Caracci started Sta-Home with her husband, Vic, in 1976. boomjackson.com

Patients First Tate k. nations

M

Dr. Manisha Sehti has dual board certification in pediatrics and internal medicine. She also has twin baby girls.

// by Valerie Wells

anisha Sethi, 35, runs her Ridgeland medical practice like a hospitality business.

She grew up in a hard-working business family. Her father, S.I. Sethi, owns Jackie’s International, a Canton-based company that operates many restaurants, hotels and convenience stores in the South.

“The kind of business we were in was customer-oriented,” she says.

“It left a great impression.”

Sethi opened Internal Medicine and Pediatric in Ridgeland in 2005. Bigger hospitals offered her jobs, but she wasn’t interested in seeing a certain number of people per hour to generate a formula-driven profit. She prefers to take time with each patient to understand his or her history and concerns.

When the building for the prac-

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

tice went up, Sethi says it was like building her own home. She planned it large enough so her practice could grow. In 2005, it was just Sethi, one nurse and one office worker. Now, the practice includes two more doctors, plus a nurse practitioner. Sethi sees about 2,000 patients, and the practice serves the needs of about 4,500 patients. The practice is full and limits new patients.

“We don’t just pile people in all at one time,” Sethi says.

A native of Greenwood, Sethi entered Millsaps College when she was 15 and graduated when she was 18. She was a dual resident in pediatrics and internal medicine at University of Mississippi Medical Center.

She was chief resident of pediatrics when she was in her 20s.

“Failure was not an option,” the doctor says. “As long as you keep

trying, you can do everything you want to do.”

And people notice: Jackson Free Press readers voted her as Best Doctor in the 2011 Best of Jackson awards.

Sethi’s family encouraged and supported her academic life. While she was at Millsaps, she lived with her sister, Monica Harrigill, who is a vice president for Jackie’s International. Sethi and her husband, Vikram Malhotra, in 2007, have twin baby daughters, Asha and Priya.

Her practice will hold a free baby fair July 16 at the clinic with workshops for new parents.

“We want to give our new moms and dads an opportunity to meet our physicians and nurses face-to-face and be able to ask questions and get a sense of what our philosophy is at our clinic,” she says.

27

Medicine

by Ward Schaefer

28

Summer 2011

boomjackson.com

Rose Pendleton

Amazing

T

William Patrick Smith

he business of making people get better is exciting—and lucrative.

Nationally, health care and medical research are magnets for investment both public and private.

In Jackson, medical institutions are pursuing innovative procedures, state-of-theart technology and groundbreaking research.

Here’s a look at a few of the bright spots in the city’s booming health-care sector.

Hope for Mothers

Few mothers would wish a life-threatening illness on their child, but for years, mothers with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the virus that leads to AIDS, had essentially no choice. If they got pregnant, there was a substantial chance of passing on a life-altering disease to their baby.

At the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Dr. Ben Nash is giving HIV-infected mothers across the state a cause for hope.

Since 2001, Nash has directed the center’s obstetric clinic for HIV-positive women, seeing between 50 and 60 women a year.

In the 1990s, before treatment for HIV was available, between 25 percent and 30 percent of pregnant mothers with the disease transmitted the infection to their children.

“We start off by telling women that that’s good news; it’s not 100 percent, which everybody thinks is the case,” Nash says.

“It’s only about a one in four chance if nothing was ever done.”

With the advent of antiretroviral drugs that can fight the virus, though, the odds for mothers are even better. Nash’s clinic administers a three-drug cocktail, known as Highly Active Antiretroviral Treatment or HAART, to patients throughout their pregnancy. This reduces their “virus load,” the actual number of copies of the HIV virus in their blood.

Then, during labor, mothers receive the antiretroviral drug AZT in their IV drip. Nash says the goal is to “pre-load” the newborn baby with drugs to fight any remaining virus.

Nationally, this approach has had great suc

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

Dr. Hannah Gay, director of UMMC’s pediatric HIV program, and Dr. Ben Nash, director of the perinatal HIV program, help HIV-infected mothers and their children live full lives.

cess. The nationwide transmission risk for HIVinfected mothers to their children is now between 1 percent and 2 percent. Nash’s clinic has done even better, though. Since Nash started with the clinic, he has seen roughly 600 women.

Of those who stuck with the treatment regimen during pregnancy and through labor, he has seen no transmissions.

Testing the baby to check for HIV transmission is tricky. The conventional method for testing adults is to look for HIV antibodies in the blood—the body’s response to an HIV infection.

For newborns, however, such a test is worthless for the first six months, when the baby still has

his mother’s antibodies. Instead, Nash uses a test that searches for the actual DNA sequence of the virus on four different visits: after two weeks, after one month, at three months and at six months. Finding negative results from all tests is “really fulfilling,” Nash says.

Staying in the System

Nash’s work also presents an opportunity for important research. Since 2006, Dr. Aadia Rana, an infectious-diseases researcher affiliatAMAZING, see page 30

29

AMAZING MEDICINE, from page 29

Saving the Heart

Since the mid-2000s, “Time is heart” has become an article of faith among cardiologists.

It’s something Dr. Rick Guynes of St. Dominic Hospital believes wholeheartedly.

Clinical research across the world has shown that, at least for patients with a type of heart attack known as a STEMI or ST Elevation Myocardial Infarction, time is of the essence in 30

Summer 2011

clearing the blocked arteries that led to their heart attack. When an artery from the heart gets blocked, the part of the heart serving that artery stops pumping. If doctors do not restore blood flow quickly, that part of the heart muscle can actually weaken and die.

“The heart and the brain are pretty unforgiving,” Guynes says.

“You’ve got a few hours to turn this around and if not, the damage is irreversible.”

If doctors can administer clot-busting drugs and mechanically open the artery quickly, though, patients can recover more quickly and thoroughly.

Rose Pendleton

ed with Brown University in Rhode Island, has worked with Nash to study what factors keep HIV-infected women engaged in the healthcare system.

Beginning first as a research fellow, Rana reviewed files on all the patients referred to UMMC’s clinic between 1990 and 2006. What she found was alarming: Fewer than 40 percent of the women had visited their HIV doctor more than once since giving birth.

That meant that the majority of HIV-infected mothers in the state were not getting the health care that is the best predictor of their living a long and healthy life. Because HIV therapy also means a lower virus load and thus less risk of transmission, it also meant that these women were more likely to pass on the infection.

“For us, it was clear that this was an area that needs to be looked at more closely,” Rana says.

“There’s a lot of focus on HIV-infected pregnant women while they’re pregnant, in order to prevent mother-to-child transmission. The question was: What happens to these women after they deliver?”

Rana and Nash are now trying to answer that question, using a grant from the Lifespan/ Tufts/Brown Center for AIDS Research.

Their project uses surveys and interviews with women on both sides of birth, pregnant and postpartum, to suss out their reasons for staying or leaving medical care. As Rana sees it, Nash’s clinic provides a rare window for reaching HIV-infected mothers. “Pregnancy is sort of this unique opportunity, where women—even when they don’t want to engage in the medical system—end up at least once engaging with the health-care system,” she says.

The researchers’ primary suspects are the sorts of things that can overwhelm disadvantaged women and bedevil public-health efforts in many other arenas: substance abuse, depression, domestic violence and a community stigma against being HIV-infected. The next phase of Rana and Nash’s research, following this study, will be to try a remedy for these factors. It could be faith-based counseling, education or a more intensive health-care approach.

University of Mississippi Medical Center is a research magnet for the state.

With that knowledge, in the middle of the last decade, organizations like the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association began pushing hospitals to establish standard response times for patients arriving with STEMI heart attacks.

The industry standard for “door-to-balloon” time is now 90 minutes. That measures the time from when a patient arrives at the hospital doors to when cardiologists are able to use a tiny balloon, inserted through a catheter in the patient’s artery, to temporarily expand a blocked artery and allow blood to flow again.

Doctors then implant a stent, a more rigid metal tube, to keep an artery open.

St. Dominic’s door-to-balloon time averages between 58 and 62 minutes, even during the night, Guynes says.

“That’s our gunshot wound,” Guynes’ colleague and fellow interventional cardiologist Dr. Billy Crowder says, comparing the procedure to a trauma physician’s work. “We get the page, and we’ve greased every part that we can, and we’re still working to make it better.”

“For cardiologists, that is the fastest thing we do,” Guynes agrees.

St. Dominic is now trying to reduce its time further, using EKG (electrocardiograph) readings faxed from an ambulance transporting a STEMI patient to ready its catheter lab even more quickly.

Small Holes, Big Results

Crowder and Guynes, along with their colleagues in the Jackson Heart Clinic, are also working to expand the possibilities for treating non-emergency heart conditions through catheters. St. Dominic is participating in a clinical study, the PFO Access Registry, that investigates the use of a catheter-based procedure to treat a congenital heart defect.

The defect, known as Patent Foramen Ovale, or PFO, is essentially a hole in the heart, between the top two chambers, or atria.

“A lot of young people that have strokes and no other cause of stroke have this little defect,” Crowder says.

A new device, known as the Amplatzer Occluder, allows cardiologists like Crowder and Guynes to patch a PFO using only a catheter inserted at the groin, wrist or elbow.

Cardiologists thread a catheter through a vein or artery into the heart, push a collapsible patch through the catheter and then unfurl it onto the hole to close it. Made of a high-tech alloy known as Nitinol that was originally developed by the military, the Amplatzer Occluder is resilient enough to return to its original shape after being compressed.

“As they’re deployed, they kind of take the shape of an Oreo cookie, where you’ve got one side on one side of the (heart chamber) wall and then the other,” Guynes says.

“They kind of slam shut, like a clam shell, to seal the defect, without having to do a sternotomy and open-heart (surgery). When these guys (get this procedure), they spend one night in the hospital, and they’re back at work.”

The PFO study will follow patients who receive the Amplatzer device to see if it reduces their chances of stroke in the future.

Robots to the Rescue

For the past eight years, surgeons at St. Dominic have had a robot friend in the operating room. The da Vinci Surgical System allows doctors to perform minimally invasive surgeries with enormous amounts of control. This benefits patients directly: When a robotic arm is assisting the surgeon, there’s less stress on other parts of the body and less disturbance of other organs.

Dr. Paul Seago, one of only four gynecologic oncologists in the state, has performed nearly 500 operations using the da Vinci robot. Seago employs the technology for his most challenging operations, such as radical hysterectomies.

The machines robotic arms are far more mobile AMAZING, see page 32

boomjackson.com

Medical City

// by Adam Lynch

Courtesy UMMC

T

he size of the University of Mississippi Medical Center campus, when looking at it from North State Street, can be deceptive.

What looks like a large collection of buildings and a helicopter pad becomes a city-within-the city, complete with its own selfmaintained roads and byways meandering between loosely connected multi-story lumps of brick and cinder blocks.

UMMC’s 164 acres of sprawling territory snakes around Veterans Memorial Stadium and gobbles up an additional 24.9 square acres bordering Mill Street to the west.

So what does the secondbiggest employer in the state, employing 9,200 people, do with all that room? Research, mostly.

In fact, research is one of the three official commitments to which university leaders adhere. The other two are academic training and clinical work.

But it’s the research component that’s making enormous waves in Jackson, says Dr. David Powe, UMMC associate vice chancellor for administrative affairs and chief administrative officer. UMMC differs from other city hospitals in that it obviously is more than a hospital.

As part of a university, the facility is a jewel containing multiple facets.

The university, for example, receives millions of dollars in federal and private grant money to promote new medical treatments and bio-medical discoveries.

“In 2008, we had $39.7 million in research from outside funding. And in 2009 we had $60.9 million in research funding,” Powe says.

“In 2010, we had $75.7 million in research funding.”

If you detect steady growth from those numbers, you’re

Construction continues the Arthur C. Guyton Research Center, one of the newest buildings on the UMMC campus. It is dedicated solely to research and includes the new laboratory shown here. . catching on. UMMC’s next goal is to reach $100 million every year in external-research projects here on campus within the next four years.

UMMC has a bragging problem. It has a team of medical writers working full-time touting a growing list of innovative accomplishments in medical technology. Aside from running a $1.3 billion budget that makes up 10 percent of the economy of Jackson and 2 percent of the Mississippi economy, the university is among the first in the southeast to tout accomplishments like performing a “transcatheter pulmonary heart valve replacement procedure.”

The university is the proud owner of the UMMC Cancer Institute, as well as a Center for Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition, and the Center for Excellence in Cardiovascular-Renal Center. The last two are spread out over numerous buildings.

Besides allowing an openheart surgery patient to leave the hospital after just a single day of recuperation, this kind of research pays off big in economic development.

“For every dollar that we received in research funding, we put $1.80 back into the economy of the state of Mississippi,” Powe

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

says. “That’s a return that has a tremendous impact upon the economy. So in 2010, we had $75.7 million, and then you put $1.80 for every one of those dollars back into the economy.

That’s a huge impact.”

For every dollar the university draws in research funding, it receives about 47 to 49 percent for indirect costs, which Powe says means they get to keep 49 percent of every research funding dollar, which the university uses to reinvest in even more research. Forty-nine percent of all those millions of dollars they’ve managed to grab over the past few years is a good deal of cash.

Based on that formula, the total external dollars the university generated last year from research was $132 million.

But then there are the jobs created from research. Doctors are apparently spending long hours mining that medical research, and nobody’s doing it for minimum wage.

“These jobs require highly educated personnel that we’re getting from around the county.

They are highly compensated and, of course, this compensation turns over many times in the local economy,” Powe says.

“And as these research projects continue to grow, these highly

paid, highly educated people stay here to do the research at this institution. You’re not looking at jobs that move around or go overseas.”

This does not take into account the plans the university has for the future. UMMC’s student body has increased from 100 medical students per class to 165 per class within a period of 15 years, despite tight accreditation requirements, and the fact that the school of medicine does not have its own facilities. Classes are instead housed throughout the campus in several locations, unlike at many other schools.

Powe says, for this reason, the school is moving forward with a plan to put the school of medicine under a new roof. This is where all that land the university owns comes in handy.

“If you compare the amount of land space we have here and building space with 125 academic centers across the country, we’re only at 33 percent capacity here,” Powe says.

He points out that the university added approximately 520 new employees last year. “We have a tremendous amount of space that we build in,” he says.

The school finished a “35year master plan” this past year that proposes countless campus expansions, and now it is going to relocate streets and expand infrastructure to better accommodate the swelling number of students, researchers and patients.

Satellite territory bordering Mill Street is in for its own expansion. Powe says they plan to turn the old farmers market on the west side of the stadium into a biomedical research park.

“We have money in hand now for this development, and we’re moving forward with that. The significant potential to MEDICAL CITY, see page 32

31

Rose º

AMAZING MEDICINE, from page 30

than a human hand holding a surgical instrument and thus less likely to cause stress to a patient’s abdomen during the procedure.

For most procedures, Seago can operate the da Vinci through a small incision in the patient’s navel or through two small incisions on either side of the abdomen. To describe the advantages that the robot offers, he compares it to using a rear-view camera on a car.

“If you look at the camera and try to back up, you really can’t gauge how far you are because you only have one eye to look out of,” Seago says. “Well, with the robots, you have two eyes, so now you have depth perception. And

you have instruments that mimic your hands.

You can move any direction and you also have the ability to pinch. … It becomes pretty limitless what you can do.”

Robot-assisted operations are even superior to traditional laparoscopic surgery, the minimally invasive approach that uses fiber-optic cables and tiny telescoping video cameras to display the surgery, Seago says.

More than 70 percent of St. Dominic’s gynecologic oncology operations are performed using the da Vinci, Seago estimates. Those paAMAZING, see page 34

The UMMC campus is a medical city.

Source: UMMC

MEDICAL CITY, from page 31

old Fabricare building on Fortification Street, near Jefferson.

Emmett could not say when the new store would open, but said it “might” be near the end of July.

Pizza Shack is also planing a second restaurant in the Colonial Heights Shopping Center on Old Canton Road.

UMMC Awards Received $39,703,475 212 awards

¢ $34.56 M ¢ $1.27 M ¢ $1.69 M ¢ $2.18 M

$60,867,198 237 awards

¢ $55.22 M ¢ $1.70 M ¢ $1.47 M ¢ $2.47 M

$75,714,531 305 awards

¢ Federal ¢ State Agency ¢ Foundations & Professional Organizations ¢ Business & Industry

St. Dominic’s Impact

¢ $65.86 M ¢ $1.55 M ¢ $5.10 M ¢ $3.21 M

The University of Mississippi Medical Center got more than $75.7 million from 305 research awards in 2010. create products and companies in our research program is unlimited there,” he says.

The university plans to break ground on the first phase of that project this year.

Baptist’s Growth

Just down the street from UMMC on North State Street, the Mississippi Baptist Medical Center is leaping across State Street to territory formerly occupied by restaurants.

Baptist Health Systems will break ground this year on a new five-story, mixed-use building in Belhaven. The 180,000-squarefoot facility and adjoined parking garage will house four floors of 32

Summer 2011

medical offices and a ground floor of retail on the North State Street site where KFC and Pizza Shack sit now.

Baptist spokesman Robby Channell says the hospital does not have a start date for construction, which is linked in part with the relocation of Keifer’s restaurant across Poplar Boulevard. Channell said in May that Baptist had recently purchased the Keifer’s property.

Channell said in May that he is unsure whether KFC or the Pizza Shack would become tenants of the new building.

Larry Emmett, co-owner of Pizza Shack, told BOOM in May that the restaurant will re-open in the

Down Lakeland Drive, at the edge of UMMC, St. Dominic Hospital isn’t happy to stay put.

St. Dominic Chief Financial Officer Deidra Bell points out that the hospital is building a new chapel across the street from the main campus, on the north side of Lakeland Drive. But the most obvious construction is not the totality of the work going on.

“We’re constructing a new chapel, but we are planning, on this campus, $150 million in upgrades over five to 10 years,” Bell says.

“We’re looking at expanding our medical campus to meet growth in specialty areas like cardiac surgery and emergency services, and we’re building a new behavioral health facility.”

Bell adds that the non-profit hospital does not choose its development avenues based on profitability, but on community needs.

“Behavioral health is an example of that,” Bell says.

“Our current behavioral

health building ... has been limping along for some time now, and we considered whether or not to continue to offer behavioral services because, quite frankly, it’s one that’s a financial drain on the organization. But because it’s so core to our mission, and serves a very vulnerable population, we’re investing $16 million for a new building to continue providing mental-health services.”

The hospital is quick to point out its financial contribution to the community as well. Even though it does not engage in the kind of research investment its university neighbor indulges, St. Dominic’s adds plenty to the local economy.

“Based on a Mississippi Medical Society study on the economic impact of physicians in the community, St. Dominic has contributed 114 jobs and $13.2 million in salary to the community (per year),” Bell says.

Any physician who comes into the community, according to St. Dominic, generates almost $700,000 a year in related salaries and wages of staff he or she employs and spin-off businesses such as pharmaceutical sales.

Beyond the medical community, the same physician also needs a home, a car, amenities and cultural experiences that improve life for everyone in the metro area. boomjackson.com

Jackson Chamber Presents...

YOUNG LEADERS

an Le e Jo n at h P h a r r v id a n d Da

Meet our Past Presidents! Both David Pharr and Jonathan Lee served the Jackson Chamber when they were under 40 -- and continue as influential board members.

The Jackson Chamber welcomes younger leaders not only through our YP program, but at all levels of management and board leadership.

RED, WHITE and JACKSON!

a Ame r ic e t a r b C e le e 30 o n Ju n

Come celebrate Independence with the Chamber! On June 30, visit the Old Capitol Green for music, fireworks, crafts, face painting, and space jumps for the kids, plus food vendors, snow cones, tours of the Old Capitol Museum and more.

NETWORKING AND LEARNING

s . R h o de Re v. C.J Fo r um ay at Fr id

The Jackson Chamber sponsors Friday Forum at Koinonia Coffee House near downtown and Jackson State University, where local and national leaders and visionaries offer a variety of viewpoints and insights.

As part of the Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership, the Jackson Chamber also offers networking, after-work events and support for local business conventions and gatherings.

P.O. Box 22548, 201 S President St., Jackson, MS 39225 Phone (601) 948-7575 • Fax (601) 352-5539 www.greaterjacksonpartnership.com

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

33

AMAZING MEDICINE, from page 32

tients recover far more quickly and with fewer complications.

“I’ve had patients that had surgery on Wednesday, went home on Thursday, worked from home on Friday and went back to work on Monday,” Seago says.

Getting Stroke-Ready

Like St. Dominic, Baptist Medical Center knows the value of time. This spring, the hospital earned major recognition for its ability to quickly treat stroke patients. On March 4, the Joint Commission for Stroke certified Baptist as a Primary Stroke Center.

Dr. Keith Jones, the hospital’s stroke medical director, says that the award is a sign

that the entire hospital recognizes the need to treat stroke patients as quickly as possible.

“It’s been said that every minute decreases the chance of functional recovery by one percent,” Jones says.

“So, just like time is heart, time is brain.

Several million neurons are lost every minute if a stroke is allowed to take place.”

Like with heart attacks, the medical industry is developing a consensus standard for treating stroke patients. Hospitals now aim to administer the “clot-busting drug” tPA, or tissue plasminogen activator, within 60 minutes of admitting a patient to the emergency room.

Baptist’s certification from the Joint Commission recognizes that the hospital has specific protocols for handling patients with both

One Pound at a Time

34

Summer 2011

// by Lacey McLaughlin William Patrick Butler

C

hanging unhealthy habits and lifestyles is a daunting challenge, but over the last few years, leaders and organization have started laying the foundation to make Jackson a healthier city by combating obesity.

In March 2010, first lady Michelle Obama visited Jackson as part of her “Let’s Move” campaign to promote exercise and nutrition.

More than a year later, the excitement Obama brought is still palpable, although leaders will be the first to say there is still quite a ways to go. Mississippi ranks highest in the nation for obese adults and children, with an obesity rate of 34.4 percent.

Jackson got another boost in obesity-prevention efforts last fall when the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership hosted the 2010 Global Obesity Summit at the Jackson Convention Complex. The summit brought internationally respected scientists, clinicians, business leaders and health-care policy makers such as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to Mississippi. The summit also marked the beginning of UMMC’s effort to establish an obesity research center in Jackson.

The Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition Center will research the causes of obesity, including hormonal, metabolic and genetic factors. It will be in the school’s new Guyton Resources Center.

UMMC has funds to hire roughly 10 new faculty members next year. The center will also hire a director and lead researcher, using a $2 million endowment from Joe Sanderson Jr. of the Sanderson Farms chicken company as well as other outside grants.

Outside the medical arena, organizations such as the Mississippi Roadmap to Healthy Equity are taking grassroots approaches.

Located in the former New Deal Supermarket off Livingston Road, the Roadmap began in 2007 as a W.K. Kellogg Foundation-funded project to work with Jackson Public Schools students. Since then, project director Beneta Burt has expanded the project to include an indoor gym and a farmers market to serve residents in the area who needed an affordable option for exercise and fresh produce. After seeing the Roadmap’s progress, the foundation decided to issue another grant of $3.5 million, which will allow the program to serve the community for another five years.

ischemic and hemorraghic strokes, the two major categories of stroke. Neurosurgeons and neurologists at the hospital now consult on nearly every case, to help identify the cause of stroke and thus help prevent future incidents.

“It’s a complete climate change, from everybody that sweeps the floor to the physician that orders the tPA,” Jones says.

“It’s the recognition that you have a problem and the firing of several parallel processes. …

You have to have a culture change of awareness with all of your support staff, and then you have to do that with all of your physicians as well,” Jones says. “Because we’ve gone from a practice where a neurologist may or may not get a consult on a stroke to almost all are consulted. We’ve gotten entire buy-in from the hospital.” ¢

First lady Michelle Obama visited Jackson last year to promote her campaign to end the childhood obesity epidemic.

Burt says her organization received a $230,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to teach women who receive food coupons through its Women, Infants and Children program how to prepare healthy meals. Burt says she is looking for private sponsors who can help the organization install a kitchen in the former supermarket space.

The Roadmap is also the new site of FoodCorps, a federal publicservice program in which members spend a year educating communities and building community gardens. Ten FoodCorps members will work with the Roadmap and serve rural communities in Mississippi as well as Jackson starting in the fall.

Burt sees each incremental changes as a milestone for the state, and wants businesses to know that they have a role in fighting the epidemic as well. She suggests that employers have discussion about healthy living with their employees and try to give them 30 minutes each work day to get up and move.

“I see every day the differences around health in conversations,” Burt says. “Talking about it is very important so that it’s on our minds. If an employer can make it easier, that’s a positive way of looking at health in Mississippi.” boomjackson.com

HEART STUDY

Heart Work

predominantly white population in a Massachusetts town, the study group is black and southern.

Participants created a community with a newsletter, meetings and even a choir.

Since the study began, some

what makes his team’s work so significant in medical research.

“This is not science as usual.

At the core, we have a rigorous evaluation. However, we also recognize the responsibility to community, to raise the level of

UMMC

W

illiam Harkless has to find one grandson’s scooter before he goes to the other grandson’s baseball game. Before that, he has routine household chores to do. It’s a normal Saturday in Natchez Trace Estates for the 71-year-old retired Mississippi Employment Security Commission employee.

He tends to azalea bushes around his brick home. His wife, Maxine Harkless, wants a hanging ivy plant moved so it can catch more sun. A retired school teacher, she has a busy Saturday ahead as well. Wearing green and pink, she shows off a thick album documenting her activities with Alpha Kappa Alpha including being named Golden Soror. This afternoon, she has a sorority meeting. Then, later this evening, the couple is attending Mississippi Symphony’s last performance of the season.

They stay busy like this all week, but the couple keeps a relaxed mood despite their constant activity. Three times a week they go to Baptist Healthplex in Jackson to work out. They watch what they eat for the most part, but they also enjoy the southern food they love and grew up with.

They are just two of the thousands of participants in the Jackson Heart Study, one of the largest heart-disease studies ever tracked.

At least six neighbors on their block alone are also in the study.

For 10 years, more than 5,300 African Americans in the Jackson area have participated in the Jackson Heart Study. It employs 68 researchers on staff at three different institutions: University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson State University and Tougaloo College. This extensive study attracts attention worldwide.

Similar in scale and scope to the famous Framingham Heart Study, the Jackson Heart Study is noticeably different in that instead of a

// by Valerie Wells

Dr. Herman Taylor of University of Mississippi Medical Center is the lead investigator of the Jackson Heart Study.

of the older participants have died, leaving 85 percent of the original group still participating. The future might include studies of the second and third generations of participants.

What are considered norms in cardiovascular health today are largely based on the Framingham study, says Dr. Herman Taylor, principal investigator for the Jackson Heart Study. This is

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

awareness,” says Taylor, an Alabama native.

“When we began with 5,301 participants—ages 21 and up—we did detailed interviews and examinations,” Taylor says.

“It’s like starting with a snapshot and then looking at a movie with all the subtleties. The interview included medical history, dietary history, questions about stress, depression and job strain.”

Taylor’s team uses the standard tools and measurements used in other studies. It brings a lot of data together and looks at data differently. For example, Taylor explains that African Americans have high white-blood cell counts, but they tend not to have any more infections. It is because of a gene that protects against malaria. The old studies don’t reflect this, but they still contain important and valuable information.

“It’s like three-dimensional chess,” Taylor says.

“The good news is that in people with high blood pressure in Jackson, we found close to 70 percent of people in our study had it under control. That was a pleasant surprise.”

National data suggest African Americans have poor control of blood-pressure maintenance, but Taylor says those studies only looked at poor blacks. The Jackson Heart Study is more diverse and includes middle- and upper-income blacks.

Another factor Taylor considers in the study is how much access blacks have to medical care.

“When we look at health disparity, we look at excess deaths, deaths that shouldn’t have happened,” he says.

Comparing a group of black women and white women the same age, he has found 87,000 more deaths among black women.

More than a third of those deaths had cardiovascular causes.

“That’s bigger than some towns in Mississippi,” he says.

“Besides available health care, there’s so much more stresses and strains associated with the psycho-social milieu. We are trying to figure out those things that contribute,” Taylor says.

“There’s also regional disparity. We are at the confluence of the stroke belt and the coronary valley.

HEART, see page 36

35

HEART STUDY, from page 35 Valerie Wells

We are at the epicenter. We have lots of important work to do.”

Color Blind

UMMC

A common misconception about the study is that it’s only important to African Americans.

“We see more severe manifestations in African Americans, but hypertension is color blind. Heart disease is color blind,” he says. “We find that African Americans with a normal body mass index, when compared to whites in the Framingham study, had a three times higher rate of hypertension.”

One of Taylor’s goals is to put information to use as soon as possible.

“It’s not simple. We need to do a better job acting on what we already know. Eat less and move more. We can’t over-emphasize prevention,” he says.

Scientists make discoveries, but don’t always do the best job sharing the new information.

“For example, a study years back showed that three servings of whole grains daily reduces risk of heart attack by 25 percent average in African Americans. This was most profound. The question is, who knew? Scientists knew that. We need translation from the scientific literature to the public,” Taylor says.

The Jackson Heart Study makes information available with public gatherings, community health advisers and radio spots.

The study is also training a

Bill and Maxine Harkless are two of 5,300 participants in the study. new cadre of providers sensitive to issues of health disparity. At Tougaloo College, these students study public-health issues, ethics, bio-engineering and research design.

Scientists outside Mississippi are interested in the Jackson Heart Study, including those at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

“We have a network of scientific collaborations,” Taylor says.

“We have a staff of 68 scientists here and elsewhere analyzing data. We have a finite group of researchers in our city. We need the creative input of a broad group of scientists.”

The more effective that network becomes, the more it will accelerate discovery, Taylor says.

Young Hearts

D

Summer 2011

A Civic Participation

The heart study could have civic and political ramifications as they apply to public-health issues.

“We’ve got to work hard on improving the environment.

Bad air isn’t good for lungs, highcalories aren’t good for weight, salt isn’t good for blood pressure,” Taylor says.

“Tastes are developed, acquired. Personal responsibility

// by Valerie Wells

r. Jorge Salazar expects an emerging pediatric heart surgery program at Blair E. Batson Hospital for Children to be as good as any in the nation. Salazar is the Dr. Jorge new associate professor of Salazar surgery, chief of congenital heart surgery and director of the congenital heart program at Batson.

His recent experience at Texas Chil36

Multiple ancillary studies have already emerged, including one on diabetic retinopathy and one on how blood circulates throughout the body and how that might affect hearing.

“Changes in hearing may be related to changes in circulation.

It’s a harbinger of heart disease and stroke,” Taylor says.

is part of it, plus there’s societal responsibility. We need sidewalks and to enhance the notion we need greater opportunities for pleasant surroundings.”

The ultimate impact of the study will be to take the gift of this information that can help large numbers of people, not only other African Americans.

“It transcends ethnicity, and it transcends region,” Taylor says.

Funding for the Jackson Heart Study has been approximately $90 million at all three institutions since 1998. This doesn’t count the ancillary studies others are doing.

Taylor sees a need for the study to continue not only to follow this group of 5,300 people, but possibly their children and grandchildren.

“For the National Institutes of Health budget to be cut would be a tragedy. For us to back away from research goes in the wrong direction,” Taylor says.

Participants in the Jackson Heart Study serve on committees to advise the scientists on the best language to describe the findings.

William Harkless has done that, plus he serves on a committee to call other participants to make sure they are staying in the study.

“Traditionally in a study, you have investigators and subjects,” Taylor says.

“We don’t have subjects, we have participants in a community who collaborate and engage in conversation with scientists. It keeps us accountable.” ¢

dren’s Hospital in Houston will help Batson have its own comprehensive children’s heart surgery program, according to an article posted on the hospital website.

Salazar will build on the hospital’s twoyear partnership with Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He will recruit additional personnel in pediatric cardiology, pediatric intensive care and pediatric anesthesia, the website says.

The children’s hospital is part of the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Part of the hospital’s mission is “to lead the way to discoveries which will raise the health level of Mississippians” and to respond to community needs.

Salazar acknowledges his plans for creating a world-class congenital heart center are ambitious and there’s hard work ahead.

The doctor says, in the online article, that “the citizens of Mississippi deserve to have the very best care available within the borders of their own state.”

Salazar is a father of five. boomjackson.com

‘Best Doctor’

D

Courtesy Connie McCaa

r. Connie McCaa, an ophthalmologist at St. Dominic Hospital and at LASIK Laser Eye Center in Flowood, did it again.

For the 14th year in a row, McCaa is on a list of the Best Doctors in America.

The list represents the top 5 percent of doctors in the United States, according to Best Doctors in America Inc. The methodology includes polling of leading specialists and confirmation of credentials and expertise.

McCaa attended University of Mississippi. Besides a medical degree, she also has a doctorate in biochemistry.

Pediatric Heart Doctor

N

courtesy UMMC

atchez native Dr. Mary Barraza Taylor has been appointed professor of pediatrics at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, director of the pediatric cardiac intensive care unit and co-director of the congenital heart center.

Taylor was previously associate professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University and director of pediatric cardiac critical care at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt.

Taylor will head up and organize the pediatric critical care team that treats patients undergoing congenital heart surgery.

Celebrity Roast

Courtesy Doris Norwell

D

r. Rathi Iyer, sickle-cell specialist at Blair E. Batson Children’s Hospital, is the guest of honor at a celebrity roast event this summer. The roast is a fundraiser for the Mississippi Sickle Cell Foundation.

The roast is 6 p.m. Aug. 5 at Country Club of Jackson (345 Saint Andrews Drive). A silent auction is included.

Tickets are $75. Call 601-366-5874 for information.

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

37

AMAZING MEDICINE

T

he sudden explosion of medical advances in the Jackson area may have been too big and too fast for many region residents to realize what happened. So says Duane O’Neill, Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership president, who is working hard this year educating people who are still catching up on the advanced medical work that is now available right here at home.

“We’ve started a stakeholders’ group on the health-care sector, with 137 people on that group, including doctors and attorneys representing health care and things like that, and what we’re seeing is not only is it a growth industry, but we have to promote ourselves in this area as a destination for medical work,” O’Neill tells BOOM Jackson.

The Chamber hired local public relations firm Cirlot Agency Inc. to assemble focus groups in the city of Jackson and Hinds, Rankin, Madison and Warren counties to see what people thought about the health-care system here in town, consisting of multiple hospitals, including University of Mississippi Medical Center, St. Dominic Hospital and Baptist Medical Center. They discov-

// by Adam Lynch

Ward Schaefer

Keeping Health Care at Home

Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership President Duane O’Neill says not enough people in the southern region of the U.S. realize the kind of medical advances that are available right here in Jackson.

ered that the type of medical advances sitting in their own backyard blew people away.

“Somebody will think they have something seriously wrong with them, they get their diagnosis and think immediately that they need to go to the Mayo Clinic, UAB (University of Alabama School of Medicine) or something like that, only to discover from those other institu-

tions that some of the best doctors and service in the country for that venue is right here in Mississippi,” O’Neill says.

“They say, ‘we talked to the folks at Mayo, and they said such and such in Jackson is one of the best in the nation. The problem is that we’ve got to build this reputation and import more of our business,” he adds.

The city, despite astounding technological developments in open-heart surgery and cancer treatment, is still not perceived as the place to go for high-quality health care. Instead, when somebody in Meridian learns they suffer from a new form of cancer, they head off to UAB without a second thought.

“This is nothing against those institutions, but we have such tremendous advances in what we’ve done here. We’re here to get that word out,” says O’Neill, who has spoken to people at Mayo about his own health issues and learned that the best help was sitting here at home.

“They gave me a doctor’s name and that doctor was at Baptist (Medical Center),” he says. “It’s clear that there’s a lot that lies ahead as we work to become a regional and national destination.” ¢

*Shower Restoration *Natural Stone Care

*Grout Cleaning and Sealing

*Recaulking *5 Year Guarantee

www.grout-works.com 601-940-8499

Perfect Grout Permanently!

38

Summer 2011

boomjackson.com

RATHBURN

CHIROPRACTIC CLINIC $2 !,!. . 2!4("52.

• Neck pain/headache • Car accident/whiplash • Lower back/leg pain 612 Hwy 80 E in Clinton, MS 39056

Office: 601.924.4647 Fax: 601.926.4799 Mon. Tues. Wed. Fri. 10-6 Thurs 8-2, Sat by Appt. Only

www.rathburnchiropractic.com

BareďŹ eld Workplace Solutions, in partnership with architects CANIZARO CAWTHON DAVIS, was proud to take part this year in an exciting renovation of patient recovery rooms at Methodist Rehabilitation Center.

BareďŹ eld is here to help make your workplace goals a reality, whether in healthcare, technology, professional or education settings.

Reach us today at 601-354-4960 or www.bareďŹ eldandcompany.com.

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

39

SHOP FONDREN Exclusive KĂŠrastase salon

william wallace salon

2939 Old Canton Rd 601-982-8300

Find us on Facebook

facebook.com/WWSalon

622 Duling Ave. #206 Jackson, MS in Historic Fondren | 601-982-5313 Mon. by Appointment, Tues. - Fri.: 10a.m.

- 7p.m. Sat.: 10a.m. - 5p.m.

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Summer 2011

Glass House Located in Fondren Corner Lobby 2906 North State Street

glass work by

Elizabeth Robinson & Kay Holloway www.spirithouseglass.com

boomjackson.com

Jackson summer2011 Menu Guide

In This Issue: Aladdin Beagle Bagel Cerami’s Cherokee Inn Cool Al’s Crab’s Seafood Eslava’s Grille F. Jones Corner Fenian’s Pub Fratesi’s Hal and Mal’s Haute Pig

M50 M54 M49 M55 M55 M53 M53 P81 M43 M42 M52 M47

Hickory Pit Last Call Local 463 Mezza McDade’s Market Mugshots Nandy’s Candy Ole Tavern Olga’s Fine Dining Penn’s Fish House Poets II

M47 M52 M44 M53 M51 M46 M56 M42 M53 M48 M48

Menu Guide (pages 41 - 55) is a paid advertising section.

Primos Café Shapley’s Sportsman’s Lodge Stamps Superburgers Time Out Sports Bar Underground 119 Vasilios Vintage Wine Shop Walker’s Drive-In Wingstop Wired Espresso Café

M45 M55 P59 M53 M52 M51 M54 M54 M44 M50 M53

Appetizers

Bruschetta .....................11.95 Spicy Cheese Fritters ........8.95 Grilled Mushrooms with Garlic Bread ..............................7.95 Spinach & Artichoke Dip ...8.95 Meatball & Olive Salad ......7.95 Garlic Loaf & Red Sauce ....3.95 Tortellini in Chicken or Tomato Broth ...............................5.95 Angel Hair Soup in Tomato or Chicken Broth .................. 4.95 Antipasto .......................12.95 Fried Ravioli ....................7.95

Entrees

Spaghetti with Meatballs ..................Sm 10.95/ Lg 12.95 Spaghetti with Sausage ..................Sm 11.95/ Lg 14.95 Ravioli ........Sm 10.95/Lg 17.95 Beef Lasagna ..................12.95 Rigatoni Supreme ...........14.95 Vegetable Lasagna ..........11.95 Veggie Pasta ...................12.95 Chicken Artichoke Lasagna ......................................16.95 Seafood Lasagna .............16.95 Ricotta Stuffed Shells .....18.95 Cannelloni ..................... 14.95 Chicken Parmesan ...........12.95 Eggplant Parmesan ......... 11.95 Fettuccine Alfredo ..........11.95 Shrimp Alfredo ...............15.95

Chicken Alfredo ..............14.95 Shrimp Scampi ...............15.95 Shrimp Marinara .............15.95 Veal Parmesan ................ 17.95 Veal Scaloppine .............. 17.95 Grilled Chicken & Angel Hair ..................................... 13.95 Grilled Chicken & Eggplant ..................................... 14.95 Tortellini Soup ............... 13.95 Fratesi’s Choice 8oz Filet..25.95 Fratesi’s Choice 14oz Ribeye ......................................25.95

Prize winning author, Eudora Welty, lived just around the corner until she was age 16. She frequented the store often and wrote a short story about it.

Desserts

Tiramisu ..........................7.95 Canoli ..............................6.95 Blackberry Cobbler & Icecream ........................................5.95 That’s Amore Chocolate Cake ........................................6.95

A True Taste of Italy

We have captured the essence of the South’s unique culinary flair and good ole fashioned home cooking inspired by the local fares of Jackson and New Orleans.

Cuisine ranges from Fried Green Tomatoes and Pimento Cheese Fritters to Seared Tuna Sandwich, Portabella Burger, and King George Burger to Gumbo, Red Beans & Rice, Fried Catfish and Country Fried Steak.

416 George Street Jackson, MS 39202 601-960-2700 www.oletavern.com myspace/oletavern (Call 601-960-2705 for Catering and Private Parties)

Restaurant: Mon.-Fri., 11a.m.-10p.m.

Sat., 4p.m.-10p.m.

Happy Hours: Mon.-Sat., 4p.m.-7p.m.

910 Lake Harbour Dr. Ridgeland | 601-956-2929 Open Monday thru Saturday 5 pm - until Summer 2011

The store was converted into a restaurant/bar in 1973.

In 2008, under new ownership with some renovations, it was renamed “Ole Tavern On George Street”.

Our night life includes: Tues.-Open Mic, Wed.-Karaoke, Thurs.-Ladies Night with D.J., Fri./Sat.- a variety of live music from locals and bands around the country,

Named one e pi Magazin of the Best Italian Rest aurants in Mississippi by Mississip

M42

T

Bar Hours: Mon.-Fri., 11a.m.-2a.m.

Sat.,-4p.m.-2a.m.

jxnmenus.com

Jackson Menu Guide

M43

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Jackson Menu Guide

M45

DRINK SPE CIALS

Grill & Bar ONO PUPAS Hawaiian for Great Appetizers Most of these delicious munchies are large enough to share …

CHA-CHA-CHIPS ‘n SALSA … 4.79 CHIPS ‘n ROTEL … 5.29 TEE’S CHEESE WEDGES … 6.99 SPENCER’S NACHOS … 6.99 SOUTHWEST EGGROLLS … 7.99 BUFFALO JACKS WANGS. … 7.59 CHUCK’S CLUCKS … 7.29 DAVIS’S DILL PICKLE CHIPS … 6.59 QUESADILLA ROLLS … 7.59 KATIE’S KICKIN’ CHICKEN BASKET … 7.59 O’ ONION TREE O’ ONION TREE … 5.79 BLANKENSHROOMS … 6.59 THE MOMBO COMBO … 9.79 AWARD-WINNING

MUGSHOTS GOURMET BURGERS A full half pound of choice ground round, grilled medium-well and served on a toasted sourdough bun with brew city’s very own beer battered fries MIDDLEBERGER … 8.29 PATO … 8.59 SAVELL … 8.59 add chili for .50

McDONALD … 8.59 STU’S MAGIC MUSHROOM … 8.59 GAMBLE … 8.59 WALKER … 8.59 TREVOR’S 1,000 ISLAND BURGER … 8.59 ANTHONY’S PEANUT BUTTER BURGER … 8.59 REISS … 8.59 BIG ROB’S 3 CHEESE BURGER … 8.59 COWART … 8.59 POWER … 7.99 PATTY … 7.99

SANDWICHES Served on toasted sourdough and served with brew city’s beer battered fries BOND … 7.79 PICOU … 7.79 BANCHERO … 7.99 COLIN’S CHICKEN CEASAR … 7.99 CAITLINS’ CAJUN CHICKEN … 7.99 CALLIE’S MAHI SANDWICH … 8.99 SCHMITTYS’ SHRIMP SANDWICH … 8.59 THE BEEFEATER … 7.99 THE BRISCOE INFERNO … 7.99 BIG BABY BLAINE’S COUNTRY FRIED STEAK SANDWICH … 7.99 … add sauteed mushrooms for .50 TUCKER’S PULLED PORK SANDWICH … 7.99 ... add a slice of cheddar cheese for .50 B.L.T.C. … 6.99 NANA’S CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICH … 7.99 HOWARD’S “HILL BILLY” PHILLY … 7.79 THE HICKS … 7.79

SIGNATURE SALADS Choice of Ranch, Honey Mustard, Blue Cheese, Balsamic Vinaigrette, Thousand Island, Sesame Ginger, Caesar or Fat Free Ranch BUFFALO BLUE … 8.49 ‘CRANE SISTERS’ CRISPY CHICKEN … 8.49 GRILLED CHICKEN CAESAR … 7.99 CHICKEN SALAD SALAD … 7.99 BIG WILLIE’S PHILLY CHEESESTEAK SALAD … 7.99 RAJUN “HESTER” CAJUN … 7.99 sub fried shrimp for 1.49 CAESAR SIDE SALAD … 3.29 HOUSE DINNER SALAD … 3.29

JU LIKADA PASTA RAJUN CAJUN PASTA … 8.99 PARMESAN CHICKEN ALFREDO … 8.99 BULL’S PHILLY PASTA … 8.99

FOR THE MINI MUGS (12 and under please) KAYLA’S CHICKEN BASKET … 4.59 EMMA’S GRILLED CHEESE … 4.59 BISHOP’S BURGER … 4.59 HAILEY P’S EGG SANDWICH … 4.59

SIDES & MORE SIDES Beer battered French fries, onions rings, and grilled or steamed fresh veggies … 1.95 Mabel’s mashed potatoes … 2.25 Load ‘em up for .50

4245 Lakeland Drive in Flowood, MS 39232 | 601-932-4031 More info. on our award-winning gourmet burgers & sandwiches at www.mugshotsgrillandbar.com M46

Summer 2011

jxnmenus.com

(a very high-class pig stand)

BBQ Plates

(All plates are served with your choice of two of our delicious sides: garden salad, slaw, potato salad, American fries, baked beans or Brunswick stew, cool months only, and Texas toast)

BBQ pork shoulder (smoked with hickory wood for 12 hours, then pulled and lightly chopped) BBQ beef brisket (smoked with hickory wood for 12 hours, then pulled and lightly chopped) St. Louis style ribs (slow smoked with hickory wood and hand rubbed with our dry rub or served wet when basted with our mild bbq sauce) Half slab Whole slab (enough for two people and served with your choice of four of our sides) Half smoked chicken (served dry or wet when basted with our mild bbq sauce) Queenie’s half chicken (smoked and hand rubbed with our dry rub) BBQ chicken (pulled off the bone of our smoked chicken and lightly chopped) Combination plate (served with 1/2 chicken of your choice and 1/2 slab of ribs, wet or dry and four sides of your choice; enough for two) Special Sandwich Platter Choice of smoked chicken, pork, beef, ham, turkey or hamburger and two of our sides

Salads

CHEF Salad, mixed greens, tomato, egg, swiss cheese, cheddar cheese, and your choice of ham and turkey, smoked chicken, pork, or beef w/ your choice of dressing (ranch, comeback, blue cheese, honey mustard, raspberry vinegarette, or oil & vinegar) Small CHEF

Po-Boys

Po-Boy Choice of pork, beef, chicken, ham, or turkey and one of our sides* (Dressed with lettuce, tomato and mayo) Club Po-Boy Smoked ham and turkey grilled with melted cheddar and swiss cheese and choice of one of our sides (dressed with lettuce, tomato and our special comeback dressing) Sausage Po-Boy Smoked pork susage dressed with grilled onions, bell peppers and mustard, and one of our sides*

Here’s the Beef Po-Boy Smoked beef brisket, sliced thin, piled high and topped with melted swiss cheese and caramelized onions, then dressed with lettuce, tomato, and sweet mustard; includes choice of one of our sides Add your choice of cheese to any Po-Boy

Sandwiches

(All sandwiches may be served on a regular bun, wheat bun, rye bread or Texas toast) Your choice of cheese, American, Swiss or cheddar may be added to any sandwich

Smoked chicken (pulled and lightly chopped then topped with slaw relish) Smoked pork shoulder (pulled and lightly chopped then topped with slaw relish) Smoked beef brisket (pulled and lightly chopped then topped with slaw relish) Smoked ham (grilled and served with lettuce, tomato &mayo) Smoked turkey breast (grilled and served with lettuce, tomato and mayo) Loaded hamburger (served with lettuce, tomato, pickles, grilled onions, mayo and mustard) Loaded double hamburger (served w/ lettuce, tomato, pickles, grilled onions, mayo and mustard) Grilled cheese (your choice of cheeses) GINNY PIG, our signature sandwich (smoked ham grilled with Swiss and cheddar cheeses and served on grilled garlic toast with lettuce, tomato and our special comeback dressing) The ultimate club sandwich, (smoked ham and turkey grilled with swiss and cheddar cheeses on garlic toast and served with lettuce, tomato and our special comeback dressing)

Dessert

(All of our desserts are prepared right here in our kitchen)

Our famous Hershey Bar pie Lemon pie

Pecan pie Heated and served a la mode Coconut cake

Carrot cake Heated and served a la mode

Jackson’s Best BBQ JFP’s Best of Jackson

2003 • 2006 • 2008 • 2009 • 2010 • 2011

Sandwiches

Extra Fixins

BBQ Chicken (chopped w/ slaw relish) Garlic Bread ............................. .85 ..................................................... 4.95 Brunswick Stew w/ homemade BBQ Pork (chopped w/ slaw relish) cornbread: 1/2 pint - 4.95, pint - 8.25, ..................................................... 4.95 1/2 gallon - 26.40, gallon - 49.50 BBQ Beef (chopped w/ slaw relish) Assorted Potato Chips ........... .95 ..................................................... 5.25 Onion Rings ............................ 3.55 Smoked Ham (lettuce, tomato & mayo) Fries (fresh cut taters) ................. 3.25 ..................................................... 5.75 Regular or Sweet Potato with cheese ................................ 6.95 Small Garden Salad .............. 3.85 Smoked Turkey (lettuce, tomato & mayo) (Come Back, Ranch, or Raspberry ..................................................... 5.75 Vinaigrette) with cheese ................................ 6.95 Chef Salad ............................. 10.75 Hamburger ............................. 4.35 (topped with cheddar and swiss (lettuce, tomato, mayo, mustard, cheese, boiled egg, smoked chicken or pickles & onion) with cheese ....... 5.50 smoked ham & turkey, with a choice Double Hamburger ............... 5.45 of Come Back, Ranch or Raspberry with cheese ................................. 7.25 Vinaigrette) Po-Boys your choice of Pork, Chicken, Beef, Ham or Turkey (lettuce, tomato, mayo & Ruffles) ........................... 9.50 with cheese ............................... 10.75

Tater Salad, Cole Slaw, Baked Beans, BBQ Sauce: single - 2.25, 1/2 pint - 2.95, pint - 4.59, 1/2 gallon - 16.80, gallon - 29.95

Grilled Cheese ........................ 3.75 extra cheese ................................ 1.25

Homemade Pies

Special Sandwich Platter ...... 8.55 (BBQ Chicken, Pork, Beef, Ham, Hamburger, or Turkey Sandwiches.

Choice of two fixins: garden salad, slaw, tater salad, home fries, sweet potato fries, onion rings or baked beans)

BBQ Plates Choice of 2 of our delicious fixins: garden salad, slaw, tater salad, home fries or baked beans and Texas toast!

BBQ Pork (chopped) ............. 11.75

Lemon or Pecan ..................... 4.35 Hershey Bar ............................ 4.95 Carrot Cake ............................. 4.50 Coconut Cake .......................... 4.95

We also sell Whole Pies!

Party Packs Serves 10 Adults .................. 44.95 (2lb. pork or beef or 2 whole chickens; 2 pints beans, 2 pints slaw & 6 slices of Texas toast or 10 buns)

BBQ Beef (chopped) .............. 12.25

1/2 Party Pack ....................... 23.75 Pork Ribs (wet or dry) Rib Party Pack (serves 4) ....... 52.15 1/2 slab ..................................... 14.95 (2 slabs ribs, 1 pint beans, 1 pint slaw, 1 whole slab ................................ 25.95 pint potato salad, 4 slices of Texas toast) BBQ Chicken (1/2 cluck) .......... 11.95 Combination (1/2 cluck, 1/2 slab) . .................................................. 22.75

We sell BBQ Pork, Beef, Ribs, Chicken, Ham & Turkey by the pound.

Ask About Our Catering!

1856 Main St. • Madison 601.853.8538

Jackson Menu Guide

M47

Stop by between 11am & 4pm M - F to check out our expanded lunch menu!

Appetizers:

Entrees:

Crab Cake Mini’s Spicy Thai Tuna Fried Pickle Chips Poet’s Nachos Fried Mushrooms Fried Green Tomatoes Quesadilla Mania Chicken Wings Chicken Tenders Soup of the Day

Chicken Penne Tuna Pontchartrain Catfish Filet Crawfish Pasta Crawfish Etouffee Crawfish Combo Poet’s Chicken Breast Max’s Perfect Filet Rick’s Daily Duo

Burgers:

Cobb Salad Asian Shrimp Salad Craw-Daddy Black and Bleu Salad Jumbo Dinner Salad

with fries. Sweet potato fries $.75 extra. House salad for $1.

Poet’s Burger Smokehouse Burger Black & Bleu Burger

Salads:

Kids:

Mini Burgers Chicken Tenders Creamy Chicken Pasta

Desserts: Sandwiches: with fries. Sweet potato fries $.75 extra. House salad for $1.

New York Cheesecake Poet’s Milkshake Turtle Cheesecake

Chicken BLT Shrimp Poboy Crawfish Poboy Catfish Poboy Smoked Pork Roast Chicken Sliders Tuna Sliders Buffalo Chicken Sandwich

1855 Lakeland Drive in Jackson 601-364-9411 | POETS2.NET

Follow us on Facebook

M48

Summer 2011

jxnmenus.com

Steak • Seafood • Pasta

Happy Hour

5-6 Half Off Cocktails & Beer Appetizers, Zuppa & Insalata Bruschetta - Diced tomatoes and basil with a slice of buffalo mozzarella on toasted bread.

Calamari - Slices of calamari fried and served with marinara sauce Antipasto - Provolone cheese, Italian meats, and variety of vegetables on a bed of lettuce surrounding a cup of creamy Italian dressing.

New Orleans BBQ Shrimp - Eight fresh gulf shrimp in a worchershire and butter sauce.

Cerami’s Stuffed Mushrooms - Four large mushrooms stuffed with our tasty melt-in yourmouth filling ~ topped with our chefs basil cream sauce.

Fried Mozzerella - Italian mozzerella cheese breaded in italian breadcrumbs and fried golden brown served with side of marinara Salad Wagon - Crisp mixed greens, fresh gorgonzola cheese, marinated onions, olive salad and creamy Italian or Italian Vinaigrette dressing.

Caesar Salad - Romaine mixed greens tossed in parmesan cheese and homemade Caesar dressing. Add Chicken or Shrimp Soup of the Day - Chef ’s Choice Soup and Salad - Cup of soup of the day and salad wagon

Pastas Baked Lasagna - Heavenly layers of pasta, beef, cheeses and spices.

Pasta Primavera - Sauteed seasonal vegetables served over linguini pasta Eggplant Parmigiano - Fresh breaded Eggplant served with Linguini pasta, topped with Cerami’s tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese.

Cannelloni Florentine - Cheese, beef, and spinach stuffed in two homemade pasta crepes topped with alfredo sauce. One of our specialties!!!

Manicotti - Two homemade pasta crepes stuffed with blend of cheeses and spices topped with Cerami’s tomato meat sauce.

Early Bird Specials

$9.95 Tues - Thurs 5:30 - 6:30

Tortellini Alfredo - Spinach tortellini covered with creamy alfredo sauce.

Linguini with Garlic and butter Angel Hair and Pesto Add variety to your dish: Four Shrimp, Link of Italian Sausage, Chicken or Meatballs Substitute pasta for seasonal veggies

Carne & Pollo

(meat & poultry) AJ’s Spaghetti & Meatballs - Classic Spaghetti pasta with Cerami’s homemade meatballs Blackened Salmon - Our signature blackened salmon served with pesto cream sauce and delicate angel hair pasta 8 oz Filet with Pasta and Vegetables - Classic filet cooked to order with seasonal vegetables.

Veal Parmigiano - Breaded veal topped with mozzarella and Cerami’s tomato sauce over linguini pasta Veal Picatta - Breaded veal with a lemon & garlic butter sauce with capers and mushrooms with a side of angel hair pasta Chicken Parmigiano - Breaded chicken topped with mozzarella and Cerami’s tomato sauce over linguini pasta Chicken Picatta - Breaded chicken with a lemon & garlic butter sauce with capers and mushrooms with a side of angel hair pasta Chicken Alfredo - Breaded chicken on the side of linguini pasta and our creamy alfredo sauce.

Seared Tuna - Delicate tuna cooked to perfection with pesto cream sauce and angel hair pasta

Pesce (seafood)

Shrimp Cerami - Fresh shrimp sautéed in white wine cream sauce topped with capers, artichoke hearts, and mushrooms on top of angel hair pasta.

Cajun Pasta - Blackened tilapia & crawfish in a cajun cream sauce on top of angel hair pasta.

Desserts

Tiramisu - Layers of imported mascarpone cheese and lady finger trifle delicately soaked in espresso with a hint of liqueur.

Italian Canoli - Italian pastry shell stuffed with sweet cheese filling and miniature chocolate chips Spumoni - Three Flavors of creamy ice cream: Cherry, Pistachio, and Chocolate Crème Brulee Cheesecake - Creamy vanilla custard cheesecake topped with a delicious caramel crust topping.

Italian Cream Cake - Homemade - moist cream cake with pecans and coconut. Finished with a decadent airy icing mixed with more pecans.

Serenity’s Chocolate, Vanilla or Strawberry Ice Cream

Lunch Hours:

Dinner Hours:

Fri. & Sun. 11am-2pm

Tues. - Sat. 5pm-9pm

SUNDAY BRUNCH 11am-2pm

We also accommodate... Corporate meetings...Birthdays...Rehearsal dinners...Catering, and much more.

Linguini with Clam Sauce - Lots of open shell clams on top of linguini topped with a butter clam sauce and parmesan cheese. That’s Amore!!!

Shrimp Scampi - Succulent fresh shrimp sautéed in a garlic butter sauce served over linguini pasta Shrimp or Calamari Diablo - Fresh Shrimp or calamari with a spicy tomato sauce on linguini pasta.

www.ceramis.net *Menu Subject to Change.

5417 Lakeland Drive ~ 601-919-2829 ~ Flowood, MS 39232

Jackson Menu Guide

M49

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2.95 5.49 3.75 4.49 4.49 4.49 4.49 7.59 7.59 8.59

Add meat on your salad for 3.00 Add feta on your salad for 1.00

Appetizers

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3.99 4.99 4.99 4.99 5.49 5.49 5.49 3.75 3.99 5.49

1.95 2.00 1.95 1.65 1.65 1.65

Entrees

served with salad, hummus, rice and white or whole wheat pita bread

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RAMSEYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S GREEK SLIDERS

Two mini-burgers made with ground lamb and beef, topped with tzaziki sauce, feta mayo and a quick pickle of cucumbers and radishes. Served with sweet potato chips

SEAFOOD GUMBO

Made fresh with a rich, dark roux & homemade shrimp stock, served hot over rice

PORTOBELLO FRIES

Lightly breaded and sliced portobello mushrooms served with a Creole dressing

REJABIANâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S GRILLED CHEESE

Made with prosciutto ham and pepper jack cheese on French bread, topped with a pimiento-stuffed green olive, makes the perfect late night snack

SOFTSHELL 119 Best In The City!

A softshell crab sauteed in our house seasoning and brown butter served on a slice of toasted French bread, topped with a poached egg and served with choron sauce

SAUTĂ&#x2030;ED CRAB FINGERS

SautĂŠed in brown butter and blackening seasoning, served with French bread

UNDERGROUND WINGS

Four whole wings tossed in a citrus honey garlic sauce or poblano chili barbecue. With ranch or blue cheese

BEEF EMPANADAS

Spicy beef with black beans and pepperjack cheese rolled in pastry dough and deep fried, served with malted cheese and salsa verde

Jackson Menu Guide

Jumbo lump crabmeat with red & yellow bell peppers and pepper Jack cheese, served with a red pepper aioli

GRILLED TUNA WITH MISSISSIPPI PONZU

Seasoned crawfish tail deep fried and served with a Creole dipping sauce

CRAB QUESADILLA

Shrimp and red snapper, quick marinated in lime juice and sake and tossed with fresh herbs, tomatoes and vegetables. Served in a martini glass with toasted pita chips

FRIED CRAWFISH TAILS

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pickles, homemade mayonnaise, mustard and catsup. Add bacon and/or fried egg

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We start by grilling a hand-blended, hand-formed, half pund patty and dressing it with your choice of toppings. Choose from; mozzarella or pepper-jack cheese, lettuce, tomoato,

Spice-rubbed tuna steak lightly grilled, sliced thin and served with wasabi and our own sweet ponzu dippin sauce Made to order smoked sashimi tuna.

A hint of spice served with toasted French bread

CRAB DIP

Backfin crabmeat topped with parmesan cheese, served warm with toasted French bread

ROYAL STREET SHRIMP

Our chefâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s play on the Barbecue Shrimp made famous by Pascaleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Manale Restaurant in Uptown New Orleans. Served shells-off with grilled lemon and French bread

ROSEMARY GRILLED SHRIMP

Large Gulf shrimp brushed with our secret, bacon marinade and flashgrilled. Served with grilled lemon over toasted French Bread

FRIED GREEN TOMATOES *TOASTADAS*

Sliced green tomatoes coated with cornmeal and deep fried. Served â&#x20AC;&#x153;toastada-styleâ&#x20AC;? with pepper-jack cheese, seasoned pork and pico de gallo sauce

FISH TACO MARKET PRICE

Flash fried in beer batter, served in a tortilla with hoisin aioli slaw & horseradish, guacamole and Pico de Gallo

STUFFED PORK TENDERLOIN

Roasted pork tenderloin stuffed with boudin and andouille sausages served over cheese grits and topped with fig gastrique

JUMBO LUMP CRABCAKE Best In The City!

Maryland-style jumbo lump crab cake sautĂŠed and served with a roasted red pepper aioli

GRILLED STEAK WITH TWO SAUCES

Spice-rubbed beef grilled to order and topped with pureed spinach sauce and whipped potato sauce

LOLLIPOP LAMB CHOPS

Three lamb â&#x20AC;&#x153;lollipopsâ&#x20AC;? pan-seared with rosemary and garlic, served with a mint yogurt sauce for dipping

BREAD PUDDING

Made with day-old crusty French bread, but we left out the raisins and topped it with a Makerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mark sauce

Thoroughly cooking beef, eggs, lamb, pork, poultry or shellďŹ sh reduces risk of foodborne illness.

People with certain health conditions may be at higher risk if food is consumed raw/undercooked.

M51

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Touchdown (Burgers & Po-Boys) Mean Burger $6.99 Jalapeño Burger $7.99 Catfish Po-boy $7.99 Blackened Catfish Po-boy $7.99 Philly-Style Steak $8.99 Turkey Burger $7.49 Chili Burger $7.99 Shrimp Po-boy $7.99 Hot Roast Beef Po-boy $7.99 Club Po-boy $7.99

MVP (Panini Sandwiches) Roasted Chicken Panini $7.99 Roast Beef Panini $7.99 Club Panini $7.99 Meatball Panini $7.99

Wildcard (Salads) Garden Salad $5.99 (add-ons avail.)

Chef Salad $7.99 Blackened Catfish Salad $8.99 Taco Salad $7.99

Hall of Fame (Specialties & Platters) 6270 Old Canton Rd, Jackson

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Nachos 8.99 Sampler Platter 11.99 Catfish Platter 9.79 Chicken Tender Platter 7.99 * Above is just a sample of our full menu. Prices, specials, menu selection and hours subject to change.

www.lastcallsportsgrill.com 1428 Old Square Rd in Jackson 601.713.2700 M52

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Eslava’s Grille Seafood, Steaks and Pasta

HIGH DOLLAR DISHES

at Down-Home Prices 6954 Old Canton Rd. in Ridgeland, MS

601-956-5040 Open 11am - 2pm and 5pm - 10pm for dinner

Executive Chef/GM

2481 Lakeland Dr Flowood, MS 39232

601-932-4070 tel 601-933-1077 fax

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Change “Open for Lunch and Dinner” to “Open for Dinner”

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M-Th 11-2, 4:30-9 • F-Sat 11-2, 4:30-10 Jackson Menu Guide

Jackson

1801 Dalton Street (601) 352-4555 Fax: (601) 352-4510

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Strawberry Reverie • 3 Strawberries • 2 dashes Fee Brothers Rhubarb Bitters • 1 1/2 oz Cathead Vodka • 1/2 oz Orange Juice • 1/4 oz Maple Syrup

• 1/4 oz Pages Parfait Amour Crème de Violette Glass: Lowball Glass Tools: Muddler, Shaker andStrainer Muddle strawberries and add the rest of ingredients into a cocktail shaker. Shake well and strain over ice into a rocks glass.

Garnish with a strawberry.

Please Drink Responsibly.

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Summer 2011

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Home Cookinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; - Hot Lunches - Game Room - Cold Beer

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MONDAY: Chicken & Dumplings w/ salad or Hamburger Steak w/ rice & gravy, purple hull peas & cabbage

TUESDAY: Beef Tips or Meatloaf with rice & gravy or mashed potatoes, fried okra & lima beans

WEDNESDAY: Fried, BBQ or Smoked Chicken or Beef

Liver w/ Onions, mashed potatoes, turnip greens, & black eyed peas THURSDAY: Roast Beef w/ mashed potatoes, green beans, & salad FRIDAY: Country Fried Steak w/ rice & gravy, field peas w/ snaps & corn SATURDAY: Red Beans & Rice w/ sausage or Meaty Spaghetti w/ salad SUNDAY: Fried Chicken or Fried Pork Chops w/ mac & cheese or mashed potatoes, okra & greens

RIBS - $15/slab $7.50/half slab We smoke lrg. amounts of meat. Prior notic required.

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Summer 2011

Celebrating 30 years of Sweet Success 1220 E Northside Dr Ste 380, 601-362-9553 M-Sat, 10am-6pm | www.nandyscandy.com

boomjackson.com

BITES //

resident tourist

Story and photos by

Tom Ramsey

Camp David, Southern Style

A

s a pre-teen, I reluctantly watched as Jimmy Carter played host to the Camp David Peace Accords. I say reluctantly not because I opposed the efforts, but because I was 12, and there was bound to be something better happening on television than these three guys walking around and nodding their heads or playing chess for the cameras.

Since our TV only picked up five stations (we got an extra CBS broadcast because we were between Jackson and Monroe), I didn’t have the option of tuning in another program when breaking news from the president’s Maryland retreat interrupted the regularly scheduled shows. I vividly remember being slightly impressed or maybe just amused at the photo-op at the White House when Carter, Begin and Sadat all shook hands in a wonky three-way grip in the rose garden, but that’s about it.

Flash forward to the present day, and those images look like a rosy, long-past dream. The Middle East is still in turmoil, and a lasting peace among the nations, tribes and religions of that part of this fragile Earth is a far cry from reality.

What I think they all need is a big bowl of hummus. It seemed to work in my hometown of Vicksburg, and it is certainly working here in Jackson.

Vicksburg’s Melting Pot

In Vicksburg, we had a diverse population.

The city of about 25,000 people on the Mississippi River was one of the few places where highways and railroads crossed the Big Muddy. This allowed the city to flourish and brought all sorts of folks together. When these railroad workers, cotton traders, merchant bankers, riverboat captains and other tradesmen settled in Vicksburg, they brought their foods with them.

Growing up (before the advent of homogenized chains), we had a Chinese restaurant, a Jewish deli, a Lebanese diner, a couple of Italian restaurants and hosts of other ethnic eateries. Even the “standard” tea rooms and restau

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

Carlos and Arthur took part in Tabouli Tour 2011. rants featured family dishes of varying ethnic backgrounds right alongside the Sunday fried chicken and meatloaf. You could go to the Glass Kitchen Diner and get a bowl of matzo ball soup and a side of tabouli. We had our own little peace accords happening over lunch every day.

When removed from daily strife of fighting old battles and presented with delicious food, the old feuds just faded away into some collective memory and dissolved in bowls of homemade goodness, served up hot and fresh. Who wants to fight when you can eat instead?

Tabouli Tour 2011

I sat at Fenian’s (901 E. Fortification St., 601.948.0055), drinking a pint of Guinness and trying to recruit the Bon Vivant Arthur to accompany me on a two-day pork binge for this article. He wasn’t so keen on the idea and made a suggestion.

“Why don’t we go hit a bunch of Mediterranean restaurants instead?”

There it was, lightning in a bottle. Over another pint, we devised a plan to grab his roommate Carlos (visiting from Lebanon) and some other folks from “the old country” and compare Aladdin’s Mediterranean Grill, Petra Café, Mediterranean Fish and Grill, and Mezza. And there in an Irish pub, two Mississippi boys from Scottish and Lebanese descent hatched a very UNesque plan to launch “Tabouli Tour 2011.”

Perhaps the fluke of the Eastern Christian calendar and the Western Christian calendar sharing the same date for Easter and Holy Week this year unconsciously inspired me. On Palm Sunday (Eastern and Western), I met Carlos and Arthur for lunch at Aladdin’s (730 Lakeland Drive, 601.366.6033).

When I arrived, I found them sitting at a table outside, wearing suits and sunglasses and looking like a couple of agents from a spy novel. I snapped some photos, and we joked RESIDENT TOURIST, see page 58

57

BITES // resident tourist about their shady appearance as we ordered hummus, tabouli, kibbeh and lamb. Although it was all divine, the best dish of the bunch was the hummus. It was creamy with huge notes of garlic and lemon, and the generous red ring of sumac gave it just the punch it needed to transcend delicious into the realm of truly special.

My comrades explained to me the various forms of kibbeh and noted that the football-shaped ball of meat before us was the fried version or kebbeh mkabekbeh (don’t try to pronounce it, you might sprain your tongue). It had a firm crust, and the inside had a little pocket of pine nuts encased in meat and bulgur. It was steaming hot and served with a cool tzatziki sauce made primarily of yogurt and cucumbers.

We schemed to re-create our own peace accords and bring together a handful of people from different Middle Eastern backgrounds.

After a quick iPhone and Blackberry search, we came up with Dan (Jewish), Michael (Armenian) and Fouad (Lebanese). We couldn’t find any Turks or Egyptians, but we gave it our best on such short notice. We arranged to get everyone to meet for supper on Sunday and lunch and supper on Monday. Our task was to call our respective contacts and put out the invitations.

The buffet at Petra is impressive.

As it turned out, only Arthur and I could get together for supper at Petra Café (2741 Old Canton Road, 601.366.0161). We were greeted at the door by owner Ayman Al-Bataineh (Jordanian) who stopped us from ordering the mezza for two and pointed out that everything we wanted was on the buffet. Usually, I’m not a fan of buffets when it comes to anything other than KFC, but this looked interesting.

Arthur and I filled our plates with the usual suspects: tabouli, hummus, baba ghanouj, kafta and stuffed grape leaves. Ayman also let us know that there were two very special family recipes on the buffet as well. One was an okra and lamb stew, and the other was a lamb shank and potato soup he called tabkh chorba (which I later discovered simply means “homemade soup”). This 58

Summer 2011

from page 57

The hummus at Aladdin’s is, in a word, divine. is what I was looking for. Anyone who has read my work knows that I am a fanatic when it comes to simple, unpretentious peasant dishes that I affectionately call “poor people food.”

This soup was the real deal. You could taste that the lamb shanks were cooked slowly to float out the marrow and tenderize the meat. The garlic was no longer pungent, but friendly, warm and earthy. The potatoes were soft and melted in your mouth, and the broth was rich without being thick and gravy-like.

After two bowls, I was just too embarrassed to go back for a third. The rest of the food was cooked well and surprisingly fresh for a buffet, but the soup was so amazing that it overshadowed everything else and left it all in its savory wake.

I will go back to Petra, and I will order only the soup and some bread. Well, maybe some tabouli, too. Ayman told us that the exterior porch would be finished soon and perhaps a night under the stars with a hookah could be in my near future.

The next day, I got word from Arthur that his cousin Joe would be joining us for lunch at Mediterranean Fish and Grill (6550 Old Canton Road, Ridgeland; 601.956.0082). I had rounded up my Armenian buddy Michael, but my Jewish pal, Dan, had to bail on us.

To keep up the theme, I insisted on getting photos of my dining companions in sunglasses, and once we dispensed with that silliness we got down to the business of ordering food. Once again we ordered tabouli and hummus, and once again we went for the kibbeh, but this time it was the baked variety or, as Carlos instructed, kebbeh bil sayneeyyee.

This version of the Lebanese meat delight is baked in a deep-dish sheet pan and consists of one layer of meat, topped with a layer of sautéed pine nuts and another layer of meat on the top.

The whole sheet is then baked and cut into triangular pieces.

This was Arthur and Michael’s favorite, and I can’t say that I blamed them, but for my money, the star dish of this restaurant was the spinach pie. Layers of flaky crust surrounding sautéed spinach and a wealth of spices made this baked chunk of heaven worth the trip across County Line Road.

Almost as an afterthought, we ordered a plate of lentil pilaf. When it arrived, we all stared at this lovely dish of shiny and steaming lentils. They were perfectly cooked and retained just a bit of toothy resistance and none of the mushy mouth feel you can easily get if you leave lentils to simmer in broth for too long. They were well-seasoned and not overly salty and had just the right amount of garlic

The crew enjoyed kibbeh on Palm Sunday at Aladdin’s. boomjackson.com

After a Mediterranean feast, Tom Ramsey plays the oud for friends. and olive oil. The next time I make lentils, this is the target I will shoot for.

With full bellies, we lingered over the dishes and scooped up the last bits of garlicylemony-spicy goodness from each plate with the few remaining triangles of pita bread and shared tales of church dinners, family recipes and crazy relatives before having to depart for either a bit of work or a nap. As we paid the generously affordable tab, the blinking red light on my Blackberry alerted me to the fact that my wife was at home and hungry so I grabbed some baba ghanouj from the to-go counter and ordered some sliced lamb to take to my lovely bride.

Great Conversation

For dinner that night, I was worried that without Dan, we wouldn’t be able to recreate the Camp David theme that we had worked so hard to come up with. My fears were unfounded. When I finished teaching a cooking lesson around 8:15 p.m., I checked my phone to make sure that my guests had not abandoned our plans to meet at 8 p.m. at Mezza (1896 Main St, Madison; 601.853.0876).

Indeed, they had not, and they were waiting for me with a table full of great food.

In addition to Carlos and Arthur, Fouad and his girlfriend, Malka, joined us.

They completed the peace accord. You see, Fouad is Lebanese, and his girlfriend is Jewish. Not only is she Jewish, but she is the ninth child of a Hasidic rabbi from Brooklyn, N.Y. After getting photos of them in sunglasses, our theme was complete.

All we had to concentrate on was the food, and it was glorious.

Mezza is more upscale than the other places we visited. It boasts white tablecloths, low music, an open kitchen and all the bells and whistles.

Although the food was good everywhere else, Mezza upped the ante and combined the food with a more pleasing atmosphere and artistic presentations. To make sure we gave everyone a

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

fair shake, we ordered hummus and tabouli but picked a few dishes we hadn’t seen before.

If you have the opportunity to visit an authentic Lebanese restaurant, do your best to bring along an authentic Lebanese person. This makes ordering so much easier.

Carlos and Fouad ordered foul (a bowl of garbanzo beans marinated in garlic and olive oil), fattoush (a salad of fried pita bread, mixed greens and seasonal vegetables tossed in a citrus vinaigrette), kibbeh balls and my favorite dish of the evening, fatteh (yogurt, chick peas, cashew nuts and fried pita bread).

With the comparisons and the photos behind us, we got to real business of a great dinner—the conversation. Our gathering of varying ethnicities all leaned forward hanging on the words and relishing the different accents. We discovered that our differences were trivial and served only to make us more mysterious and interesting, while our similarities were abundant.

We howled over jokes and tales of being misunderstood by a suspicious public.

When I complained about a particularly hard time I had at the Paris airport, the guys at the table laughed and gave me a look as if to say, “Try being me flying into the U.S.A.”

Long after the last table was cleared and the staff at Mezza had cleaned up every table around us, we reluctantly departed. In the parking lot, we decided to end the night at Arthur’s where the guys played the bouzouki and the oud (guitar-like instruments with round backs and intricate woodwork) and banged on the doumbek (goblet shaped drum) and even got me to pose for a picture wearing a keffiyeh or Arabic headscarf.

We never got around to taking any pictures of us trying to perfect the multi-cross handshake made famous by Carter, Begin and Sadat, but we did make plans to get back together soon, invite more friends from locales near and exotic and cook the food of our parents. That is where true harmony exists. ¢

Lentils make the must-have star dish at Mediterranean Fish and Grill.

59

BITES // global

by Andrew Dunaway

Designer Sushi

Meet Chef Scott Meinka of Fatsumo

C

BOOM: Tell me where you’re from.

Scott Meinka: I always tell people I was born in the South; I was born in South Korea, but I was raised an hour north of Detroit, Mich., in a town named Utica.

So you’ve always had that focus on classical French and Italian? You never dabbled in pastry or any other fields?

No. Before I went to school, I dabbled. I did a little butcher apprenticeship. I did a little pastry apprenticeship, but then I really wanted to focus on gaining experience through working with talent.

60

Summer 2011

You’ve covered a wide range of food styles. Do you have any Korean influence to your cooking style?

The closest thing I have as far as influence from Korean food is spiciness.

Being a sushi chef and dependent on fresh seafood, where do you get your seafood?

Well, last week I ran to the Coast, and I picked up about 300 pounds of fish for our opening week. I’m hoping we’re going to be a leader in helping grow a better availability of high-end product here.

Since you’re now operating two sushi bars and are establishing yourself in Jackson, what do you think sets you apart from the other sushi bars in the city?

We’re making a bid to be recognized as a top-rated eating establishment in Jackson. We want this to be a casual, high-end place and maybe fine dining. I’d really like to refer to it as designer sushi without being stodgy. How we differ is that we make everything in-house here. We make our own rice vinegar here.

In 90 days, we’re going to release our own house blend of soy sauce. I am the only one who has the recipes for all these sauces, and that is how this company is going to be maintained.

If you could cook for anyone in America, who would it be?

The last guest, because we’re only as good as our last meal served.

Biz2Biz

Chef Scott Meinke, Fatsumo Sushi, Opened April 2011 “I reached out to Stephen D’Angelo at Nick’s Restaurant who I knew from the Coast. He graciously loaned us about 30 chairs for our soft opening. They even delivered and picked them up. Joan Hawkins Interiors and Marcy Nessel at Fischer Gallery (next door) have been receiving deliveries from Fed Ex, and helping make we get the things we need. Most of all, Mike Peters and his super, Don Egdorf, have bent over backward for us.”

Stephen D’Angelo Nick’s Restaurant

boomjackson.com

Marcy Nessel Fischer Gallery

William Patrick Butler; marcy nessel

I read that you worked with celebrity chef Brian Polcyn, coauthor of “Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing” (Norton, 2005, $35). Does that mean you have a background in charcuterie?

No. I have background in classical French and Italian from attending the Culinary Institute of America.

Chef Scott Meinka brings his version of sushi to Fondren.

xxxxxx

How long have you been cooking professionally and in general?

I’ve been working in the food business since I was 15. At 15, I worked on a specialty produce farm called Gass Centennial Farms.

It’s a 100-year-old farm, and they supplied all the high-end restaurants in Michigan. That’s how I got my foot in the door. It’s really that cultivation of produce that’s been the foundation of my career.

Andrew Dunaway

hef Scott Meinka, 39, has come a long way from his days on a 100year-old farm in Ray, Mich. After working under celebrity chef Brian Polcyn and studying classical French and Italian cuisine at the Culinary Institute of America, Meinka moved to Mississippi.

In 2008, Meinka opened Fatsumo, a sushi restaurant, in Orange Grove on the Gulf Coast. Meinka’s concept focuses on approachable designer sushi that everyone can appreciate.

In its short lifespan, Fatsumo has become a darling of the Mississippi Coast.

In November 2010, Meinka decided to bring his version of sushi to Jackson. Situated next to Fischer Galleries in Fondren, this second Fatsumo (3100 N. State St., Suite 102, 769216-7448) opened in April.

// by Ward Schaefer

Charles Smith

Praise Fufu

Linda Emmanuel at Chitoes serves Nigerian cuisine to Jackson.

Russian Flair

lga’s Fine Dining celebrated its third anniversary in April with live music, drink specials and cake. Anyone who came could have a piece, said Olga Abramovich, co-owner of Olga’s.

The cozy restaurant specializes in seafood and steak with Russian flair. Hearty, authentic fare includes borsht, the rustic beet soup and creamy pirogis, a type of dumpling.

Olga’s, located at 4760 Interstate 55 North next to Cullen’s Play Pen and Havana

Olga’s Fine Dining 4760 Interstate 55 North, Suite D 601.366.1366 www.olgasfinedining.com Hours: Tues.-Sat. 5 p.m. until the last person leaves.

Private lunches and catering are available anytime.

Olga and Yuriy Abramovich

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

Smoke Shoppe, has been in business for seven years, three of those in Jackson.

Abramovich, her husband, Yuriy, and their then-2-month-old son, Michael, moved to the United States from Russia in 1991. Now, the Abramovichs are teaching their sons, Michael, now 20, and Alex, 10, how to run the family business.

“(Yuriy) worked in many other restaurants, and as the years went by, he wanted to work for himself,” Abramovich says. “His own business, his own restaurant, his own recipes.”

Now, Abramovich and her husband manage and run Olga’s. She takes care of the patrons and the restaurant front, while her husband commands the kitchen, giving each dish his full attention and special touch.

To future entrepreneurs, Abramovich of-

KENYA HUDSON

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// by Rose Pendleton

Olga Abramovich takes care of the front of her North Jackson restaurant. fers the same advice that she follows.

“Be prepared for long hours and to work hard. You have to love what you are doing. And when you work so hard, it comes back to you,” Abramovich says.

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ucked into a shopping center on Terry Road in south Jackson, Rosemary Emmanuel’s business introduces diners to a cuisine almost entirely new to the capital area. Chitoes African Deli serves dishes common to much of West Africa, but its focus is on the food of Nigeria. Emmanuel left Nigeria in 2004.

A former high-school science teacher, Emmanuel came to

Jackson with her husband, Emmanuel Nwokocha, and their two children. Emmanuel, 47, went to work as a nurse’s assistant, first at St. Dominic Hospital and later at the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield, where her husband still works as a medical technician.

Last year, though, Emmanuel decided to open a restaurant serving food from her native land.

Chitoes opened in April 2010, after nearly a month of extensive renovations. Emmanuel had the floor retiled and the bathrooms and kitchen completely overhauled with new fixtures and appliances. Now, pink mums sit on a round table, while a row of booths line one wall with zanily angled windows—a leftover from previous restaurants. The restaurant’s name combines the traditional names of Emmanuel’s two eldest children: daughter Chidimma (meaning “God is good”), who goes by Linda, and son Tochukwu (“Praise God”). Both occasionally help at the restaurant, with the youngest sister, Vivian.

Chitoes’ menu boasts an array of aromatic rice dishes flavored with coconut milk, tomato stews or curries. The ample portions usually come with a choice of meat—goat, fish, shrimp or chicken.

Traces of the African cuisine served at Chitoes are in classic southern foods like gumbo and jambalaya. But many of the spices—and combinations of spices—used in Emmanuel’s cooking are deliciously unfamiliar, either on their own, or in combination: nutmeg, curry and thyme play starring roles, along with African ingredients like onga, egusei melon and fufu, a mild, fluffy mash of powdered white yams.

Unlike much southern fare, Chitoes’ dishes are usually not fried and far less salty, she notes, wrinkling her nose a little. While Emmanuel loves to introduce customers to new tastes, she’s also had to expand beyond a purely African menu for business reasons. Chitoes now offers fried chicken wings.

Chitoes (1700 Terry Road, Suite 5, 769.233.7647) is open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

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YOUNG

IN FLU ENT IALS 2011 Photos by Tate K. Nations Styled by Meredith W. Sullivan and Natalie A. Collier Assisted by ShaWanda Jacome and Valerie Wells Hair and Makeup by Molecules Every summer, BOOM Jackson features some of the area’s most impressive Young Influentials.

Watch this sassy group.

They want only the best for the area—and won’t take no for an answer.

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

Whitney Giordano is wearing a Rubber Ducky strapless party dress, $114.95, Dara Ettinger ring, $105, gold bracelets, $22.95-$78.95, gold Hobo International clutch, $86.95, and pink and gold necklace, $22.95, all from Material Girls; nude patent KORS Michael Kors Reno shoes from Coattails, $195.

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YOUNG INFLUENTIALS 2011, from page 63

TJ

left

TJ Harvey, philanthropist

by Valerie Wells

T

J Harvey, 28, raises money for causes he supports.

He’s found money for community programs, disease research and the arts. He has worked for the Mississippi Republican Party as political director and Gov. Haley Barbour’s 2007 campaign. He now is vice chairman of Mississippi Young Republicans and is a member of Young Leaders for Philanthropy, a United Way affiliate.

“Philanthropy happens at any level,” he says. “Whether you give a little bit of time or just a dollar to a cause, it’s important to be involved and make society better.”

It’s just as important for young people to vote and to get involved in politics, he says. A self-described moderate conservative, Harvey recruits new young Republicans to get involved from the county level on up, running for office or working on campaigns.

Young Leaders for Philanthropy raised more than $40,000 last year to buy books for young children in Jackson through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.

Harvey also participated in two half-marathons, raising more than $4,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

He has ideas for more fundraisers for other agencies, the kind “doctors’ wives” want to attend.

The Foxworth, Miss., native and Mississippi State University graduate admits he’s also considering running for the state Legislature one day.

Tameka

TJ Harvey is wearing a navy linen blazer, $295, tan AG jeans, $148, brown leather belt, $95, from The Rogue & Good Company; TOMS classic shoes in burlap from Buffalo Peak Outfitters, $54; gray shirt is his own.

Whitney

Tameka Wilson, scholar

by ShaWanda Jacome

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previous page

Whitney Giordano, material girl

by J. Ashley Nolen

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hitney Giordano has dreamed of owning her own fashion store ever since she was in sixth grade and received the “bestdressed” award.

“Other kids were getting toys, and I just wanted a new outfit,” Giordano, 28, says now.

She graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi in May 2005, but she found no need to wait until then to begin her dream. The first location of Material Girls opened six months earlier in November 2004.

It is no normal southern fashion boutique, though. Giordano and her 64

Summer 2011

facing page

team travel across the United States looking for the hottest trends.

“Anything that is out there and going to be a trend; we will have it,” the entrepreneur says.

Material Girls now has an online store in addition to Ridgeland, Flowood and Oxford locations. Customers are valued in a special way, as Giordano and her team update their Facebook page often with new arrivals, text customers about hot items and even have a video blog called “Behind the Seams.”

Visit them on Facebook, online at shopmaterialgirls.com, or at material girlsms.blogspot.com. Text “Material Girls” to 601-896-5289 for information.

rticulate and poised, Tameka Wilson is an ardent proponent of higher education and a force to be reckoned with. Wilson, 28, is the international president of Phi Theta Kappa, an honors society for two-year college students to promote and develop academic excellence, leadership and service.

Wilson moved to Mississippi in 2009 and started classes at Hinds Community College in Raymond right away. While inquiring about honors courses, she learned about the honor society and joined.

While serving in the U.S. Air Force as a linguist from 2001-2004, she did one tour of duty in Afghanistan. It was an eye-opening experience that stays with her today.

“(The Afghani people) were very humble and appreciative … I would look around at the surroundings, they would be staying in a building with no running water, the walls blown out, but they’d still be thankful for the small things,” Wilson says.

Wilson is an active member of the Gamma Lambda Chapter at Hinds. She’s coordinated a program where honors students tutor those prepping for the GED test. For the upcoming year, she will work on outreach efforts to advocate for college completion and Phi Theta Kappa.

A business and language major from San Bernardino, Calif., Wilson plans to attend law school. boomjackson.com

Tameka Wilson is wearing her own gray suit and green silk blouse; bangles, $30, and iridescent heart earrings, $25, from Lipstick Lounge; nude cocktail ring from Pink Lamborghini, $25; white chloe shoe by L.A.M.B. from The Shoebar at Pieces, $325.

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

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YOUNG INFLUENTIALS 2011, from page 65

Sham

left

Sham Williams, supplier

by J. Ashley Nolan

S

ham Williams, 28, may be a lending assistant at the Adkins Branch of BankPlus, but that is only her day job. In 2007, Williams partnered with her mother, Lesia, to start the Maresa Williams Foundation, a growing organization that purchases school supplies and uniforms for children who are unable to afford them.

The foundation honors Williams’ sister, Maresa, who lived life to full capacity, although she suffered from Down syndrome. Maresa unexpectedly passed away in a house fire in 2007.

“She was a learner and took in all the information she could,” Williams says.

The foundation has helped two children every year since 2008, but has a new goal of helping 100 children for the upcoming school year. “There is always a need,” Williams says. “We just want to get out there and do what we can.”

For information about the Maresa Williams Foundation, email themwfoundation@ aol.com.

Sham Williams is wearing a pink and white tank from Material Girls, $32.95; a black sequined mini skirt from Posh Boutique, $45; nude Bamboo peep-toe platforms and pearl cluster bracelet from Lipstick Lounge, $50 and $40; and gold necklace from Pink Lamborghini, $25.

Facing page: Whitney Grant is wearing a red halter with sequins, $20, white sleeveless cardigan, $12, and black and gold chain link necklace, $6, all thrifted from Consignors Boutique; white watch from Lipstick Lounge, $40; stacked enamel rings from Materials Girls, $15.95 each; Betsey Johnson lime green wedges from The Shoebar at Pieces, $185.

Christopher Paige is wearing a red plaid Rufus shirt, $215, Joe’s jeans, $165, and leather belt, $85, from The Rogue & Good Company; tan suede Vans from Swell-OPhonic, $49; watch is his own.

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Whitney

left

Whitney Grant, architect

by Laney Lennox

W

hitney Grant, 25, is dedicated to supporting art and sustainable structures in the Jackson community. Originally from San Antonio, Texas, she went to high school in Cleveland, Miss., and graduated from Mississippi State University School of Architecture in 2009. Upon graduation, she began working for the Jackson Community Design Center, where she is now a research associate. On a daily basis, Grant writes proposals for projects that promote underdeveloped and under-utilized areas, such as in Jackson midtown.

“I’ve seen a lot of life happen in Jackson,” she says.

Grant is also a board member of Jackson Bike Advocates, which promotes community development through activities such as community bike rides and generally promotes sustainability in the Jackson area. She was a producer for the FIGMENT Art Festival, which she pushed to bring to Jackson. It took place in May at the former Coca-Cola bottling plant on U.S. Highway 80.

Christopher

right

Christopher Paige, barber

by Laney Lennox

C

hristopher Paige, 33, owns Custom Cuts and Styles on Terry Road, a barber and beauty shop that has been open for one year. He says that owning a small business helped him to realize the possibilities Jackson can expand upon economically as the state capital. He firmly believes in local businesses and the citizens of a community working in correlation to build unity and a sense of togetherness.

“Businesses need to help bring community back, bring Jackson back,” Paige says.

In an effort to pass along this sentiment to younger generations of Jackson, Paige held a food drive for Stewpot. Every child 13 and younger who brought three cans of food to his shop received a free haircut, which Paige says was an effort to teach the kids about giving back to their city. He teaches night classes at the Academy of Hair Design, and he placed second in Best of Jackson’s choice for best business owner in the city. Jackson Free Press readers chose him as 2011 Best of Jackson Rising Entrepreneur.

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

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YOUNG INFLUENTIALS 2011, from page 67

Matt

Chiquentia Jenkins is wearing a black and silver dress from Half of Half Name Brand Clothing, $15; and black teardrop earrings from Material Girls, $12.95.

facing page, left

Matt Collette, entertainer

by J. Ashley Nolen

F

or the last seven years, Matt Collette, 37, has escorted others into the fun entertainment of music and, particularly, song singing. His job offers folks who may never personally pursue a musical career a chance to work off their stress and take the stage as they sing their favorite songs.

Collette enjoys karaoke jockeying because he enjoys seeing others have fun.

“This is not ‘American Idol.’ Just get up there and have fun,” Collette says to potential participants who follow him from venue to venue. He describes himself as a cat lover who also enjoys movies and playing card games. He’s a huge believer in fun, and spreading it.

Collette says adults and children act the same, asking when they’ll be able to sing their favorite songs. You can find this former Toys R Us employee around town, as he KJs at Martin’s, Fenian’s and at other locations. But get in line: He has a huge following.

Matt Collette is wearing a pink dress shirt with green Ted Baker tie from Mozingo Clothiers, $175 and $98; brown leather belt, $85, khaki pants, $145, and tan bucks by Hush Puppies, $125, from The Rogue & Good Company.

Noreen

facing page, right

Noreen Waithaka, interventionist

by Laney Lennox

N Chiquentia

above

Chiquentia Jenkins, open sister

by J. Ashley Nolen

C

hiquentia Jenkins, 31, values the importance of letting every person play their own special role in society.

In January 2009, she and a few other women formed Mississippi’s first non-collegiate social sorority for openly gay lesbians.

In most collegiate sororities, the unspoken rule is that no openly homosexual women are allowed to join. Eta Epsilon Gamma Sorority, where Jenkins serves as vice president, gives the opportunity for females to fit in to a group 68

Summer 2011

that is particular to their interests. Community service is one of the main aspects of this organization, as the sorority sisters serve both inside and outside the homosexual community. Although Jenkins is from New Orleans and came to Jackson after Hurricane Katrina, she says she has found a sense of family within Eta Epsilon Gamma.

“I love serving others and seeing them smile,” Jenkins says.

To learn more about Eta Epsilon Gamma, visit them online at epitomeofroyalty.org.

oreen Waithaka, 32, is a crisis intervention specialist who works for Catholic Charities, a private organization that provides services to the community. She provides therapy for children ages 3 to 18 in the comfort of their own homes. The purpose of this six-month program is to create family stability by working with children who exhibit behavioral problems at home and in school.

“As early as I can remember, I have always had an interest in the human mind, what makes us tick, makes us happy, how people react to situations in life and what makes us behave as we do,” she says. “Irrespective of the culture, location or environment a person is from, humans have a tendency to react in similar ways.”

Waithaka first came to Jackson from Kenya to pursue a graduate degree at Jackson State University, where she began her work in counseling. She started with Catholic Charities as an intern at their Rape Crisis Center and has been compassionately sharing her desire to heal with this organization ever since.

Noreen Waithaka is wearing a sheer ruffled top from Consignors Boutique, $8; blue CORPUS jeans, $10, and gold belt, $5, from The Orange Peel; gold sandals from Lipstick Lounge, $19.99; braided leather bracelets from The Museum Store at the Mississippi Museum of Art, $12.75 each; earrings are her own. boomjackson.com

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

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YOUNG INFLUENTIALS 2011, from page 69

Timothy

left

Rev. Timothy McGregor, chaplain

by ShaWanda Jacome

A

warm smile radiates from the Rev. Timothy McGregor. McGregor, 35, has worked for four years as a board-certified chaplain at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He visits patients in the bone marrow transplant unit, hematology, oncology, pediatric intensive care, pediatric palliative care and the neonatal intensive care unit at the Wiser Hospital for Women and Infants. McGregor doesn’t see what he does as work, but as a blessing to meet many resilient people who are full of hope. His patients encourage him.

“It’s just not work for me. I get paid to do what I love to do. Everybody can’t say that,” McGregor says.

During his formative years in Minneapolis, his mother, Jacqueline, died when he was 15.

He spent a lot of time at the hospital and says it was “preparation for the future.”

McGregor was called to the ministry at age 20 while at Tuskegee University in Alabama. He graduated in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in math education. He taught for a while, but felt the tug to ministry. In 2003, he completed his master’s of divinity at the Christian Theological Seminary in Indiana.

McGregor, who has lived in Jackson for six years, is the founding pastor of Proclaim the Word Ministries. The community-centered outreach church, based in south Jackson, is helping to address education, poverty, crime and housing development.

He and wife, April, have two daughters, Jacci and Lela.

Timothy McGregor is wearing tan striped linen pants, $150, lavender linen shirt, $165, dark brown leather belt, $95, and Sandro cognac loafers, $135, from The Rogue & Good Company.

Facing page: Wesley Brisendine is wearing an Orian pink shirt, $195, and Joe’s jeans, $165, from The Rogue & Good Company; belt and jewelry are his own.

Faith Jackson is wearing a colorful silk dress, $62.95, leather wrap belt, $62.95, and gold bamboo hoops, $14.95, from Material Girls; studded wooden bangle from Pink Lamborghini, $25.

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Wesley

left

Wesley Brisendine, plumber

by ShaWanda Jacome

O

ur favorite mullet-clad (business in the front, party in the back) young plumber is funny to boot and has a big heart. Wesley Brisendine, 24, won the 2011 honor of best plumber in the annual Best of Jackson competition. He believes in paying it forward and lives it.

“If I see someone who needs help, I’ll stop and help,” says the 2005 Terry High School graduate. He takes that philosophy with him to work.

“I’ve seen real bad situations where people really don’t have the money,” he says.

Brisendine is a family man who attributes his success in life to the influences of his grandparents, aunt, fiancée Nikki, daughter, Layla Grace, and his dad, Donny Brisendine.

“My dad is my hero for sure,” he said. His dad, now retired, was a legend in the race car scene.

“A lot of my favorite memories are at the dirt track,” he says. He shares his dad’s passion for all things fast and furious. He raced BMX and motocross in the past and would love to race cars in the future. “I don’t know how to describe the feeling of being out of control and totally in control at the same time,” he adds.

Faith

right

Faith Jackson, card carrier

by Laney Lennox

F

aith Jackson, 20, is a junior at Tougaloo College, where she is a political science and pre-law major, with an African American histor y minor. She is president of the Tougaloo chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. She started the Tougaloo chapter of the ACLU after viewing a presentation on the organization’s need for a collegiate presence.

Jackson grew up in Moss Point, where at her elementary school she was for a time one of only two African American children.

“Civil rights became important to me after experiencing racism growing up,” Jackson says.

She also interns at the capitol for Mississippi Rep. Kelvin Buck.

She assists Buck by attending meetings, transcribing minutes, doing research and drafting memos. She also prepares research and entries to go in publications of Mississippi legislative histor y. Upon graduation from Tougaloo, she plans to attend law school to become a civil rights lawyer and, later, a legislator.

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

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YOUNG INFLUENTIALS 2011, from page 71

Details WHERE2SHOP Mozingo Clothiers, Highland Village, 4500 Interstate-55 N., Suite 140, 601.713.7848; Half of Half Name Brand Clothing, 813 S. Wheatley St., Ridgeland, 601.206.1689; Material Girls, 182 Promenade Blvd., Flowood, 601.992.4533; The Rogue & Good Company, 4450 Interstate 55 N., Suite A, 601.362.6383; Swell-O-Phonic, 2906 N. State St., No. 103, 601.366.9955; Lipstick Lounge, 304 Mitchell Ave., 601.366.4000; Pink Lamborghini, 303 Mitchell Ave., 601.850.9613; Buffalo Peak Outfitters, Highland Village, 4500 Interstate 55 N., Suite 115, 601.366.2557; Kinkade’s Fine Clothing, 120 W. Jackson St., No. 2B, Ridgeland, 601.898.0513; Consignors’ Boutique, 131 Gateway Drive, F, Brandon, 601.825.2030; The Orange Peel, 422 Mitchell Ave., 601.364.9977; The Shoebar at Pieces, 425 Mitchell Ave., 601.939.5203; The Museum Store at the Mississippi Museum of Art, 380 S. Lamar St., 601.965.9939; Posh Boutique, 4312 N. State St., 601.364.2244; Coattails, 111 W. Jackson St., Ridgeland, 601.853.1313.

Thanks!

Special thanks goes to the unbelievable Mississippi Children’s Museum (2145 Highland Drive, 601.981.5469), which allowed the BOOM Jackson team to shoot the Young Influentials there on a busy Sunday afternoon in April. And thanks to all the parents who allowed their kids to “play” in the shoot.

See boomjackson.com for additional photos.

Butch

above

Butch Bailey, beer geek

Butch Bailey is wearing a light blue print shirt from Mozingo Clothiers, $175; jeans, belt and shoes are his own.

by Rose Pendleton

O

ne can wonder how a forest conservationist from Pearl becomes a core member of Raise Your Pints, a grass-roots organization concerned with the enhancement of Mississippi’s craft beer culture.

“Some people are geeks about stamp collecting or NASCAR,” says Butch Bailey, 33. “I’m a geek about beer.”

Bailey now lives in Hattiesburg and is a field forester and instructor for Mississippi State University, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in forestry.

But it is Bailey’s dream for the conservation of Mississippi’s beer culture that makes 72

Summer 2011

him so well known in the capital city.

Four years ago, Bailey and the other like-minded Mississippians met to discuss all things beer. The group became Raise Your Pints Inc.—Mississippians for Economic and Beverage Advancement. Now, members work to get the ban on high-gravity beer lifted and promote a craft-beer culture in the state.

Aggressive membership and fundraising drives are underway. Upcoming events for Raise Your Pints include Mississippi’s Craft Beer Week, the last week of July, and Brewfest. For more, go to raiseyourpints.com

Bailey is married to Toni Bailey, and they have a toddler, Liam.

Butch Bailey and his cutie-pie son, Liam. boomjackson.com

frieze frames http://www.friezeframes.com 661 DULING AVE.•JACKSON in the Historic Fondren District TRISH HAMMONS WWW.CUSTOMOPTICAL.NET 601.362.6675

Where We Dress You From The Shoe Up! 601-939-5203 MONDAY - SATURDAY 10AM-6PM 425 MITCHELL AVE. in Historic Fondren

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

73

Do-Gooders Rose Pendleton

Lyrics in Action

Jason Thompson mentors young people and expresses himself through hip-hop.

J

ason Thompson scans the Northwest Jackson Middle School cafeteria filled with hungry and energetic middle schoolers to find his mentees, Sam and Johnnie. He gently nods as the teenagers talk about preparing for upcoming standardized tests and their weekend plans.

To these eighth-grade boys, Thompson used to be just an older guy who visited them three times a week, suggesting that they pull up their pants and do homework.

That was before his guest freestyle performance of Alicia Keys’ “Unthinkable” during the school’s talent show last year.

Thompson, who is also rapper PyInfamous, had mentored teenage boys for a few months before they discovered his hip-hip persona. Thompson admits that he doesn’t wear the title of rapper on his sleeve. He wants people to see him for more than that. After his performance, however, his mentees were intrigued.

“It excited some of them. It opened a different side of me up to them,” Thompson says.

“I think it added a kind of cool factor in their eyes. It did similar things for the entire student body. Some of the other kids who saw me frequently, but didn’t know anything about me, started speaking and asking me questions. It made me realize, in large, the positive influence I could have.”

By day, the 29-year-old is the youth programs coordinator for the Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi, a tobacco-education organization.

By night, he is a co-owner of Suite 106, a venue he opened last December with his two brothers and two friends. They opened the South Jackson nightspot to provide more entertainment options for young professionals in the city.

But Thompson is perhaps most passionate about artistic expression and inspiring young people. As a teenager, the Crystal Springs native began writing his own lyrics about growing up in the South and race relations.

After graduating from Ole Miss with a bachelor’s degree in marketing and management in 2004, he began working with the national Truth anti-smoking campaign.

As the campaign’s emcee, Thompson rapped at events and urged teens to stay away from tobacco.

When Thompson was in fourth grade, a high-school student started showing up to mentor him in class. Having a positive figure to con-

‘Tipping’ Our Neighborhoods

W

e often hear that we all should mentor young people to get them on the right path. But you may not know that the mere presence, or absence, of “high-status” individuals (such as Jason Thompson above) in a neighborhood can “tip” it toward suc74

Summer 2011

// by Lacey McLaughlin fide in made a long-lasting impact on Thompson.

He has wanted to give back ever since.

Last year, Thompson, along with a group of teachers and citizens, formed MAN LAW (Men At Northwest Leading A World) and started meeting with the young men. In addition to helping the teens with homework and eating lunch together, the mentors take them on field trips to reward them for making good grades.

A recent field trip to a screen-printing business, for example, helped the boys understand what it takes to own a small business.

“If it’s not somewhere they have never been, it’s somewhere they don’t go frequently,” Thompson says. “For them, it’s a big experience. We try to immerse them in different ways.”

Thompson says that he has to deal with misconceptions about being a rapper. Though his lyrics are generally positive and speak from experience, Thompson faced criticism in 2009 from a north Jackson newspaper for performing at a community event where children were present.

“As people, we tend to narrowly define things we don’t understand. On the music end, we have to work at presenting positive images and promoting the things that we do on a greater scale,” he says.

In his song, “One Take,” Thompson raps about slavery and calls for reconciliation. His lyrics tap into the bigger picture that Thompson always seems to focus on:

“Brothers ducking and diving cause our

mindset is stuck on surviving.

I see it everywhere I go. It’s

nothing surprising.

That’s why I’m building a team of brothers

to ride with.

I’m not sure how we got off track, but we

react so the streets can take hip-hop back.”

by Donna Ladd

cess or failure—and put the children of the community on an upward or downward spiral.

A seminal 1991 study by University of Illinois sociologist Jonathan Crane showed how a neighborhood’s demise, or improvement, can be predicted by the percentage of “high-status” residents (teachers, professionals,

managers, etc.) living there.

In his article published in The American Journal of Sociology and featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” in 2002, Crane revealed that neighborhoods with 5 to 40 percent of professionals showed little difference in adolescent pregnancy rates or school drop-out rates—and no

gradual decline. But when high-status residents dropped below 5 percent in a neighborhood, those problems exploded. For black children, when professionals dropped from 5.6 percent to a 3.4 percent tipping point, dropouts and teen pregnancies doubled.

The lesson? Just being present can make a difference.

boomjackson.com

By teaching children and inspiring families, Operation Shoestring ensures we all rise together. We thank the passionate people and organizations across our community that make our work possible.

www.OperationShoestring.org

www.facebook.com/operationshoestring

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

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Do-Gooders // sharing

A

cultural gem at the heart of Jackson’s downtown, the International Museum of Muslim Culture is inside the Arts Center of Mississippi at the corner of East Pascagoula and South Lamar streets. Founders and life partners Sababu and Okolo Rashid opened the museum in April 2001 to highlight the European-African connection during the Majesty of Spain exhibit at the Mississippi Arts Pavilion.

That connection, still so visible in the Islamic art and architecture found throughout Moorish Spain, wasn’t something the exhibit’s organizers at the Mississippi Commission of International Cultural Exchange embraced; however, the fledging IMMC had about 25,000 visitors during the six months of the Majesty of Spain display.

When the Majesty of Spain exhibit closed, the IMMC remained open, providing grounding and identity for black Mississippians.

“Most people don’t know that over one third of the enslaved Africans that were brought here were Muslims,” Okolo Rashid says.

Culturally, their new masters stripped every nuance of their former identity from the Africans forcibly brought to America to work the fields.

Generations later, the museum is a stunning

// by Ronni Mott

Charles Wilson

Explaining Islam

Okolo Rashid, a founder of the International Museum of Muslim Culture, says the museum shows how Islam embraces research and learning. answer to the question “Where did I come from?” for a group of people with little access to their African roots. It also affords visitors a chance to explore the rich Muslim culture and its traditions of

Doctors in Training

O

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// by Anita Modak-Truran

cians who donate their weekend time to the cause, medical students “manage primary care issues, such as diabetes and high cholesterol and other chronic illnesses,” May says.

“I’ve been coming to the clinic since January,” says Patrick Payton of Jackson. “The care here is top notch. They (the medical students) take time to listen to you. You can express yourself and get the care you need.”

Services include examination, treatment, education, preventive care and referrals to community resources when necessary. The services and basic laboratory work-ups are free.

The clinic averages 16 to 20 patients on any given Saturday, says Bobby Tullos, a third-year UMMC medical student. The clinic’s goal in the upcoming year is to double patients treated by opening additional examination rooms, upgrading its website and increasing the clinic’s visibility to the community it serves, he adds.

The Saturday before Easter, a half-dozen patients waited for their names to be called. Behind the doors, a team of doctors and doctors-in-training took blood pressures, filled out patient his

tories and scheduled follow-up visits. Groups of professionals in the conference room discussed various courses of treatment.

“We can spend time with the patients,” says Matt Rhinewalt, a fourth-year UMMC medical student. “It’s part of our mission to provide quality medical service to patients and valuable teaching opportunities for students.”

Rhinewalt explains that “M3s and M4s” (third- and fourth-year medical students) train the Anita Modak-Truran

n a quiet residential part of Martin Luther King Drive, the Jackson Free Clinic sits a few feet back from the road in the shade of trees. A wooden sign marks the clinic, which is open Saturdays only, from noon until 5 p.m., depending on the number of patients. They can make appointments in advance, but walks-in are welcome.

“I heard about the clinic through word of mouth,” says Rochelle West of Jackson, who in April was making her second visit to the clinic.

“They make you feel relaxed and talk to you and help you with the medicines.”

University of Mississippi Medical Center students started the clinic in 2000. Teams of motivated med students from their first through fourth year operate the clinic, although is not affiliated with UMMC. An independent volunteer board of physicians, medical students, lawyers and community leaders run it.

“We serve people in the Jackson community who don’t have access to medical care or Medicaid,” says Jennifer May, a fourth-year student.

Under the supervision of licensed physi-

freedom and scholarship, so different from what most hear about Islam from the daily news.

“It’s really more of a transformative experience,” Rashid says.

In the permanent exhibit, “The Legacy of Timbuktu: Wonders of the Written Word,” visitors can learn how Islam spread deep into the continent of Africa. As a religion and a worldview, Islam embraces and celebrates research and learning, and did so centuries before the European Renaissance followed suit. Its academic traditions include medicine, math, science and the beauty of the written word.

Timbuktu, located in what is now the West African nation of Mali, held a sophisticated university and trading society that flourished there for 700 years beginning in the 13th century. Recently rediscovered, the 25 manuscripts in the exhibit are a small part of an estimated 1 million books and other documents hidden from the French, who colonized the country from 1892 until 1960.

In addition to the precious manuscripts, among the highlights of the unique museum— the only one of its kind in the U.S.—visitors can learn about the rise and fall of the great empires in the area that rivaled Rome, the daily life of the

Saturday is the only day the Jackson Free Clinic is open. From left, Dr. Allyn Bond and Dr. Anthony Gannon confer with students Ocheowelle Okeke and Chris Hope, right. boomjackson.com

people and artisans in the sub-Saharan region, the slave trade and, surprisingly, the African and Muslim roots of Mississippi’s blues music.

Last February, the IMMC partnered with Tougaloo College to host a conference, “Islamic West Africa’s Legacy of Literacy and Music to America and the World.” The conference was made possible by a “Bridging Cultures” grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The partnership was one of eight recipients nationwide sharing a total of $1.7 million to enhance understanding and respect for diverse cultures.

The museum has applied for a second grant from the NEH in hopes that it can take a version of “The Legacy of Timbuktu” exhibit to other cities across the country.

“We’re hoping for the next five years to do at least six to eight cities,” Rashid said.

The International Museum of Muslim Cultures is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $10 for adults, $9 for seniors, $5 for students.

Children under 5 get in free, and school groups are welcome. Visit www.muslimmuseum.org or call 601.960.0440.

M1s and M2s (first- and second-year students).

Colette Jackson and Clark Walker, both firstyear students, work with Rhinewalt on getting patient information, counseling and coming up with a treatment plan before taking the plan to a supervising physician. These students appreciate the real experience. “This is what we want to do when we are done,” Jackson says.

“It’s also about giving back to the community,” Walker adds.

Walker gave me the tour of the facility, which is a lot bigger than it looks from the outside. The biggest emergency the clinic faced on the day of my visit was a hole in the roof. Students not only provide patient care, but also maintain the facility, from doing the IT work when the phones go out to patching the roof. Walker has roof-fixing duty because he has worked construction.

The Jackson Free Clinic, 925 Martin Luther King Drive in Jackson, survives on grants and donations, and because of its 501(c)(3) non-profit status, donations are tax deductible.

For information, call 601.355.5161 or check www.jacksonfreeclinic.org.

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

Girl Power

S

WILLIAM PATRICK BUTLER

The Ladybug Club started with just six girls at a sleepover.

Now, it boasts 47 members.

// by Quita Bride

ix young girls sat in Tonja Murphy’s midtown living room seven years ago, eating pizza and listening to advice for how ladies should act and dress. Some of her nieces had come to spend the night with Murphy’s daughter.

Then they kept coming back for more advice. And they brought friends.

Murphy, 37, director of mentoring services at Lutheran Episcopal Services in Mississippi, still cannot believe how monumental her midtown youth organization, Ladybug Club, has become. A few sleepovers turned into a 47-member outfit.

“It was never supposed to be this big,” Murphy says.

Since 2004, the Ladybug Club has grown by “leaps and bounds” into a source of empowerment for girls age 7 to 14 in the midtown community. Murphy started the Ladybug Club to promote confidence, community awareness, education, family unity and life sufficiency among girls.

Murphy’s “ladybug lessons” range from the importance of RSVPs to fashion dos and don’ts. The girls have a “drop it like it’s hot” test that requires them to take a good look in a full-size mirror. If cleavage is showing from any angle or a panty line is above the pants, Murphy or the other girls will suggest a more presentable look.

The girls host holiday parties for the elderly and work with community organizations such as the United Way. They also take field trips to events such as the International Ballet Competition to broaden their cultural tastes. One of Murphy’s main ob-

jectives is to teach the girls sound etiquette skills, including table manners.

Ultimately, Murphy says, the group fosters an environment of accomplishment, accountability and opportunity that will usher the girls into womanhood.

Community leaders and mothers of members united with Murphy to make the Ladybug Club a success. The Midtown Partners, a nonprofit formed this year by the merger of Good Samaritan Midtown and the North Midtown Community Development Corp., fund many of the group’s activities.

Northminister Baptist Church donated space for its annual mother-daughter sleepovers.

The mothers are heavily involved in planning and organizing activities, and they participate in various events with one especially for them, the Mom’s Exhale Party.

Murphy’s nurturing spirit stems from her own solid and loving upbringing, she says. Her father was a minister, and Murphy admired the commitment that her mother, a homemaker, showed to her family. She dispensed advice as well as listened.

This is what drives her to make sure that her girls have the same supportive and caring figures in their lives. Murphy is always on hand to lend a shoulder or an ear to her ladybugs because, she says, she understands that sometimes parents just don’t understand. She’s also a sounding board for the mothers when they need to vent.

Life experience and faith have equipped Murphy with the wisdom to face anything, she says, and she hopes to help build the same strength in her ladybugs.

77

William Patrick Butler

MELODIES // harbingers

The Long Road // by Garrad Lee

Furrows includes, from left, Brandt Parks, Jason Daniel, Tyler Kemp, John McNaughton and Cody Cox.

G

uitarist and lead singer Cody Cox, with his shirt half-unbuttoned and beer within reach, has the look of a weathered rock star as his band Furrows tunes up for a show behind Sneaky Beans after the Zippity Doo Dah Parade. Multiinstrumentalist Tyler Kemp fiddles with his keyboards and horns, putting everything in a spot that looks eerily familiar. This is not Furrows’ first attempt at a rock show.

Even though Furrows celebrated its twoyear anniversary in March, the members are all well-seasoned veterans of the Jackson rock scene. Cox was the front man of punky-folk rockers Goodman County. Guitarist Jason Daniel played in the fusion band Circus of the Seed. Kemp, who plays everything from keyboards to trumpet, was a member of southern garage-rockers Jonezetta. John McNaughton on bass and Brandt Parks on drums round out the Furrows line-up.

This piecemeal approach could have disastrous effects on the chemistry of a band, but not in Furrows.

“We work really well together. We instantly started writing songs when we started hanging out, and it has progressed from there,” Cox says. Cox, Daniel and Kemp certainly have fond memories of their past bands, but their excitement is focused in the present with Furrows, they say.

“Goodman County was my first band, so it will always hold a special place for me,” Cox says.

“That band was known and loved for being loud and sloppy. But my songwriting has progressed, and Furrows songs are highly arranged.”

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Summer 2011

“That is very deliberate,” Daniel says. “The older you get, the longer you do it, the more honed your playing gets.”

On record, Furrows is “more precise,” Daniel says, and that is evident on the band’s most recent release “Malcontent and Adored.”

The track “Strings Overhead,” with its layered multi-instrumentation, careful timing and perfectly placed trumpet stabs, is testament to this more grown-up style of songwriting and arrangement.

“There’s a very thin line between being technical and being listenable,” Daniel says.

Sometimes, bands that focus so much on technicality can come across as pretentious at best and downright boring at worst. Furrows avoids this trap with honest lyrics and a pop sensibility that keeps the songs approachable, with catchy hooks and melodious lines.

“We sometimes wonder just how catchy we actually need to be,” Cox says, laughing.

On top of the songwriting and pop awareness, Furrows keeps things interesting by letting its rock flag fly a little bit more loosely in the wind during live shows. The musicianship, sonic layers and technicalities are still there, but in concert, Furrows sounds more like a traditional rock band than a group that is intently focused on precision and perfection. It creates a nice tension for the band that allows it to explore different themes in different settings.

Besides, being in a band is supposed to be about playing for the fans. “We have a responsibility to get on stage and make music for people.

The whole reason I like to do this is for the interaction and crowd response,” Kemp says.

Furrows uses live settings to “try stuff out,” Cox says. The band is likely to debut neverbefore-heard songs at any show, leaving the crowd unsure of what they might hear on any given night.

The band has taken the show on the road, playing cities such as Hattiesburg, Pensacola, Fla., and Tulsa, Okla., among others.

While the band enjoys these excursions, the members say they are the happiest when playing at home.

“We don’t get the same exchange of energy on the road that we get at home. It’s just a little different,” Cox says. “The bands are very supportive of each other. I’ve been playing music a long time in Jackson, watching it build slowly. We are really excited for the city right now.”

Besides his duties in the band, Cox owns and operates the band’s label, Elegant Trainwreck, and releases not only Furrows music, but music from a growing number of Jackson-based bands and solo acts. He also books bands at several of the city’s venues, adding to the band’s standing as harbingers of the overall Jackson music scene, a role the members of Furrows take seriously, Daniel says. “We just want to encourage people to come out and enjoy us and other bands like us,” he says.

“We all just feel really fortunate that people are willing to come out and give us money to play music.”

Visit www.furrows1.bandcamp.com to listen to and download Furrows music. Visit www.myspace. com/furrowsband and www.elegant-trainwreck. com for tour dates, news and booking information. boomjackson.com

Sequins with Jackie

J

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

her signature move, Bell shakes her hips without moving any other part of her body. Women always ask her how to do it. Her favorite part of a show is when she picks out certain women from Charles Smith

ackie Bell is a favorite among Jackson blues lovers who have voted her the Best Blues Artist many times. The lady can sing, and often does at F. Jones Corner.

She’s a true performer with stage presence for days. Billed as the Sweetheart of the Blues, Bell has a personal style and sultry moves.

Bell’s musical and personal styles blend old and new and appeal to a diverse audience. Her musical style, she says, comes from studying greats like Etta James, Coco Taylor and Bessie Smith. She likes the sound of old jazzy blues, but tries to update it while keeping it authentic and infused with stories from personal experiences.

That sense of making things personal extends to her shows. “The audience pulls the energy out of me because I like to involve them,” Bell tells BOOM Jackson.

Observing the crowd, Bell adapts her performance and song choice to the mood.

“If they’re having a good day, I try to enhance it; if they’re having a bad day, I try to improve it,” the singer says.

The best part of performing, Bell says, builds on that audience involvement. She loves getting people on stage “when they need a dance.” In

// by Julie Skipper

Sultry Jackie Bell sparkles in sequins.

the crowd to try the move on stage with her.

“It makes them feel like part of the show, and they want to come back and do it again,” Bell says. “I love to see that.”

Bell has studied gymnastics, ballet and modern dance since age 4, so movement comes naturally after all those years.

She integrates the dance moves she’s learned with her natural physicality.

“Dance is an expression of one’s emotions, and I try to put that together with the songs,” she explains.

And we can’t ignore her fabulous clothes and all the sparkly sequins.

Bell says she is particular about her show wardrobe and loves to shop at specialty stores and local boutiques. She tries to stick to simply cut dresses for more formal venues, and jeans and a simple top or jumpsuits for more casual ones.

One side of her closet is dedicated entirely to show clothes, Bell says, and she considers several outfits before determining what will work for a given performance. She pulls it all together—song, sequins and shaking it—into one sweetheart of a package.

Catch Jackie Bell performing the blues regularly at F. Jones Corner (303 North Farish St., 601.983.1148) or find her online on Facebook.

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MELODIES // jukin’

Don’t Label Me

// by Lance Lomax

Susan Margaret Barrett

What gets you fired up when you’re on stage?

The main thing that gets me going is that I love to play. Bob and I have gotten into a good place musically. We have fun and get satisfaction playing with one another. If you’ve got a crowd that’s there to hear the music, it makes all the difference.

How did Jackson change during the years you were gone?

I was gone a while—15 years. It’s definitely more cosmopolitan.

This was already starting when I left. It’s still Mississippi. It’s still Jackson, (but) it doesn’t feel as isolated. In terms of diversity, I think it’s much better now.

We live in one city, and we’re one community. Maybe in the past, people didn’t look at it that way. I think the revitalization of downtown is a wonderful thing in Jackson. It’s good for musicians; it’s good for the city. It’s really great to live somewhere with such a feeling of creativity.

Scott Albert Johnson loves to play to a crowd. And knows how.

S

oulshine Pizza Factory is packed. At 7:30 p.m., music paraphernalia litters the small space. Anyone looking for a seat has to squeeze through people crowded at the front. Scott Albert Johnson is the night’s featured artist.

Blues fills the room and mellows out the restaurant’s chaotic scene.

Slow tunes turn chatter to silence. The crowd shifts its focus toward the front, and we all sit and watch Johnson as he, from time to time, reaches into a box, arms-length away, to trade out harmonicas.

Later, Johnson and partner Bob Gates pick up the tempo a bit, playing a few of Johnson’s originals. I think: “Is this blues? Is this folk?” After a while, I give up trying to label what I hear.

Johnson believes categorizing music is “more of a corporate marketing trick than a real thing,” he tells me after the show. So he plays all types of music, making guest appearances with Jimmy Jarrett, Jamie Weems, Chalmers Davis and Sherman Lee Dillon, among others.

A St. Louis, Mo., native, Johnson moved to Jackson with his family when he was 10 years old. As a small child, he had big dreams. After high school, Johnson went to Harvard University and kicked for the Harvard Crimson football team, before earning his master’s in journalism at Columbia University.

Johnson returned to Jackson in 2003 and started dating Susan Margaret Barrett, a photographer. The two married in 2005 and live in the Fondren area with their three young children.

He has toured around the world over the last few years, but he is proud to call Jackson home.

Is there a defining moment in your musical career? Something that made you say, ”Hey, I know I’m supposed to be doing this”?

The one time that really stood out was the 2007 Mississippi Grammy celebration to commemorate musicians who’ve either won or been nominated for Grammys. Jerry Lee Lewis and the North Mississippi Allstars were there. I got to play during that—got to trade solos with James Burton. This guy used to be Elvis’ guitar player.

One of those things you dream about is to be on stage with people of that caliber. I got to talk to these people after the show. That was a moment where I really felt at home at this event.

What instruments can you play?

I used to play the violin a little. I could get back into the bass with about a week of practice.

You can make the harmonica do anything. I like to emulate sounds and phrases I hear with other instruments. I’m influenced by some of the great harmonica players but more by other musicians.

About eight years after graduating from college, I started singing in an acoustic duo with a co-worker. I wanted to do more than just sing, but I didn’t want to play bass, as I had never really cared for singing and playing bass at the same time. So I decided to pick up the harmonica and see what I could do with it.

I very quickly became obsessed with it, and also realized that I had much more natural ability on the harmonica than any other instrument, including bass.

Find out about upcoming shows at www.scottalbertjohnson.com.

Best of

Best Music 2011

Best Live Music: Hal & Mal’s 200 S. Commerce St., 601-948-0888 Best Gospel Artist: Dathan Thigpen Best Local Singer, Best R&B Artist: Akami Graham Best Original Band: Horse Trailer 80

Summer 2011

courtesy Akami Graham

b e s t o fj a c k s o n . c o m

Best Singer/Songwriter, Best Local Musician: Taylor Hildebrand Best Rock Band: Storage 24 Best Country Artist, Best Cover Band: The Colonels Best Jazz Artist: Barry Leach

Jackson’s best singer, Akami Graham boomjackson.com

Lunch is served weekdays from 11am - 2pm www.fjonescorner.com

appetizers and starters Fried Gritz 6 Fried Pickles 5 Onion Rings 6 Fried Mushrooms 6 Fried Combo 8 Chili Pie 5

Jackson’s Premiere Entertainment Venue

sandwiches and baskets The F�n Burger 8 The F�n Chicken 9 The F�n Crab Burger 10 Pulled Pork Sandwich 8 Chicken Finger Basket 8 Fish Finger Basket 8

desserts Seasonal cakes Chocolate chip blondie brownie 3

sides

drinks

sweet/unsweet salad 2 tea 2 fresh cut potato coffee 1 fries 2 (free refills on tea fresh cut sweet & coffee) potato fries 2 sodas/bottled cole slaw 2 water 2

Open Thursday - Saturday | 6107 Ridgewood Rd. www.electriccowboy18.com

daily pasta & salad specials

AVAILABLE MONDAY - FRIDAY House Beans and Rice 8 Frank�s Fettucine Alfredo chicken 8 shrimp 11 MONDAY Frank�s Fettucine Alfredo chicken 8 shrimp 11 Corner Club Salad chicken 8 shrimp 11 TUESDAY Momma�s Chicken Florentine 8 Fresh Spinach Salad 8 WEDNESDAY Pasta Picatta chicken 8 shrimp 11 Corner Club Salad chicken 8 shrimp 11 THURSDAY Mean Marsala 8 Caeser Salad chicken 8 shrimp 11 FRIDAY Shrimp and Gritz 10 Crab Cake Salad 10

Now Serving Bugers, Blues Dogs and BBQ Late

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

81

ARTS // motifs

Garden of Delight

// by Valerie Wells

T

ou rt es yM ar t

ha

Fer ris

his time next year, trees changing blooms will form outdoor a music theme. The motifs will carry over to park benches, giving rooms for meetings and lunches in a downtown Jackson spot. the park cohesion with repeated images of guitars, wooden spoons Children will squeal and splash in shallow pools nearby. At and wildlife.

Jennifer Torres, another Mississippi artist, is creating nine tall night, a jazz band will play in the open air in this same space in front of the Mississippi Museum of Art. boat sculptures that will twirl in the wind like a classy pinwheel. The

Before he died earlier this year, landscape shortest is 8 feet tall; the tallest is 12 feet. Grown men can architect Ed Blake shared with MMA board walk easily underneath the sculptures. members and volunteers his vision for

Fletcher Cox, a Jackson artist best The Art Garden. In 2007, he gave known for his woodwork, is crafting a them a quick survey course, an twisted-metal proscenium arch for the extensive overview of public music stage. The way the metal twists spaces, going back to ancient in the model sitting in the MMA Egypt and Babylon. Tall, lanky boardroom is similar to an ancient Blake stressed that whentwisted wisteria vine in a forgotever a civilization created ten backyard. a specific green clearing Vicksburg artist Martha among its government, Ferris is making bright mosacommerce and religious ics for the bottom of the two buildings, they created a shallow wading pools. The space for celebration and turtles have distinctive desocial times. signs on their shells that mim “That’s where they ic Choctaw basket weaving.

The lilies will have jets of water were joyful and relaxed,” shooting from their centers. says Betsy Bradley, director Perhaps the best view of all of the art museum. this art imitating life and life in She has often said that side art is across the street from the the museum is like Jackson’s livsecond floor of the Jackson Convention ing room and as such, its garden C Martha Ferris’ mosaic snake Complex. should be the city’s front yard. will live in The Art Garden.

The museum wanted the green “We hope they will wander over,” Bradley says of future conventioneers. space all along. It was part of the plans for

The Art Garden will occupy a parking lot that the new building that opened in 2007. Up until provided 90 spaces for cars. Plans for diagonal parking on now, the future green space has remained a parking lot, one shared with trucks that unload sets and instruments at neighbor- Lamar Street plus additional parking alongside Thalia Mara Hall and behind the museum show the creation of 95 new parking spaces, ing Thalia Mara Hall.

The museum broke ground last December for the green space. Bradley says.

The museum has raised most of the money for the $5 million projThe first order of business was constructing a wall between the gar- den space and Thalia Mara’s back dock, a wall that climbing plants will ect. It still needs $500,000. Using state, federal and private funding, the museum budgeted $3 million for construction, $1 million for the art eventually cover.

Experts found the hot spots in the proposed garden, where the and another $1 million for a maintenance endowment.

Bradley and the MMA board already have plans for many activiwind was strongest, where the sun visited least. All the trees, plants ties. One idea is to have the symphony plays scores for silent movies and water features fit into a plan that consider all these variations.

The museum garden replaces the parking and provides a place for shown in the park. The museum will show Crossroads Film Society children to play, a stage for bands to perform, benches and tables for screenings on an inflatable outdoor movie screen next spring.

All in all, the museum is planning outdoor activity at the garden, visitors to sit outside and get a free Wi-Fi connection.

“We’ll have festivals flow into Lamar Street so it seems like one including an all-day arts festival, Friday happy hours for downtown big plaza,” Bradley says, looking at a three-dimensional simulation of a workers to unwind at the end of the week, jazz lunches, gospel dinner-on-the-grounds on Sundays, dog days for pet owners to bring their walk through the green space.

Art is integral to this garden. Ed McGowin, a Hattiesburg artist, pooches and their pooper-scoopers, and many more events this fall.

Security is a high priority for the museum to help encourage peodesigned four cast-stone columns with bronze bands that depict dif- ferent aspects of Mississippi. One is called “Gumbo,” and the bronze ple to come to these events, stay a while and return many times again section shows celery, onions and spoons. Another column will have for rest and relaxation. “Safety comes with activity,” Bradley says.

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Summer 2011

boomjackson.com

Creative Space

Y

// by Lacey McLaughlin

Rose Pendleton

Director of Art Events Jonathan Sims has ou never know what you might find at The Commons at Eudora Welty’s Birth- his hands in every aspect of the Commons—orplace. One night, you might find yourself ganizing events, renovating spaces, and creating learning how to contra his own sculptures and art. dance. Another night, you can Sims says he is scheduling watch a play by an award-winmore formal events such as ning playwright. a Halloween ball and a New

Tucked behind Ole Tavern Year’s Eve party to draw a larger population to the area. on George Street in downtown Recently, the coffee shop Jackson, the space includes a Victorian home, the Common began serving soups, and Grounds Coffee Shop, Tattered Sims says The Commons Pages Book Store and a large hopes to buy its own sound bronze statue of Eudora Welty. system for concerts soon.

In total, the Commons has six The Commons provides a buildings on the property. The much needed and affordable bookstore’s second-story balspace for the Jackson’s art cony overlooks the Greenwood community, says daniel johnCemetery where Welty is burson, an organizer for the Misied. The yellow house she was The Commons at Eudora sissippi Improv Alliance and a born in at 714 N. Congress St. is Welty’s Birthplace offers board member for the Jackvenues for artists. adjacent to the property. son Arts Collective. “It’s an

Owners David Morris and important venue to anchor out into that area of town, Joe Nassar want to provide a place where artists can gather. The business where we didn’t have a venue before,” says partners purchased the space in 1979, and re- johnson (who does not capitalize his name).

“It provides a variety of space to use on site ceived façade grants from the city of Jackson to renovate the old buildings. In 2008, the Com- and is a great space to do different types of art. mons officially opened.

It’s a blessing to have a space like that.”

Mississippi Museum of Art

Japonisme

// by Natalie A. Collier

“The Iris Flowers of Hori Kiri, Tokio” by Theodore Wores is at Orient Expressed.

A

rt from Belgium, France, other European countries and the United States at the Mississippi Museum of Art celebrates Japanese culture with the museum’s exhibit “The Orient Expressed: Japan’s Influence on Western Art, 1854-1918.”

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

With 200 pieces, from wall hangings to sculptures and clothing from the 19th and 20th centuries, the exhibit honors the cultural phenomenon called Japonisme (a French-created word to describe the eastern nation’s cultural influence).

“The Orient Expressed” introduces ageold Japanese artistic expressions that westerners made their own.

Even the fashion of the Japanese people appealed to western women, and museum goers have the opportunity to see (but not touch!) actual kimonos and portraits of women dressed and lounging in them.

Young and young-at-heart can do Japanese-inspired drawings, find reading materials that delve deeper into Japonisme or sit in the corner-set teahouse.

Mississippi Museum of Art (380 S Lamar St., 601-960-1515) exhibits “The Orient Expressed” through July 17.

83

Events // bluesy I Met a Girl Who Sang the Blues

United Way Day June 2, 7:05 p.m., at Trustmark Park (1 Braves Way, Pearl).

Bring a baby-care item for United Way’s Labor of Love drive and receive a $5 ticket to the Mississippi Braves game.

Donations welcome; call 601.948.4725.

2 - “Love, Sex and the IRS” (through June 5), at Black Rose Community Theatre (103 Black St., Brandon). Steve Sutton directs the comedy about out-of-work musicians and roommates who pretend to be married to trick the IRS. Show times are 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. $15, $10 seniors and students; call 601.825.1293.

5 Jonny Lang, 6 p.m., at MSU Riley Center (2200 5th St., Meridian). With a varied career that spans blues, rock and soul, Lang has toured with The Rolling Stones, Buddy Guy, Aerosmith, B.B. King, Blues Traveler, Jeff Beck and Sting. $50, $44; call 601.696.2200.

6

Zoo Camp (through July 8), at Jackson Zoo (2918 W. Capitol St.). Children will get up close and personal with animals, play games, make crafts and learn about nature at the one-week camps.

Sessions are divided by age groups, and topics and times vary. $150, $140 members, $35 optional lunch, $12 extra T-shirt; call 601.352.2580.

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Summer 2011

9

48th Annual Medgar Evers/ B.B. King Homecoming (through June 11). June 9, the gospel memorial show at Friendship Church (2948 Bailey Ave.) is from 6-9 p.m., and gubernatorial candidate Bill Luckett is the guest speaker. June 10, the parade at Freedom Corner (Medgar Evers Blvd. and Martin Luther King Drive) is at 10 a.m., and the concert at the Elks Lodge (3100 John R. Lynch St.) is at 5 p.m. Free gospel show, $50 banquet, $40 blues show; call 601.948.5835.

“Bedlam in Cabin B,” 7 p.m., at Petra Cafe (2741 Old Canton Road).

The Mississippi Murder Mystery dinner theater is about antics on a haunted dinner cruise boat. Seating is at 6:30 p.m.; RSVP. $36; call 601.366.0161.

Business Workshop for Teens (through June 17), at Millsaps College (1701 N. State St.). Teens in grades 9-12 will learn how to safely and effectively use online social media sites and other tools to market a service or product-based business. Register by June 6. $125; call 601.974.1130.

13

15

Sushi Workshop, 6 p.m., at Viking Cooking School (Township at Colony Park, 1107 Highland Colony Parkway, Ridgeland).

Topics include buying ingredients and making sushi rice, nigiri-zushi and maki-zushi. $99; call 601.898.8345.

18

19 - Father’s Day Car and Bike Show, 10 a.m., at Jackson Zoo (2918 W. Capitol St.). Enjoy live music and an exhibit of vintage cars and bikes. Registration is free for the show, and the zoo will award prizes for the most unique car and bike. Fathers get in free with a paying child’s admission. $9, $8.20 seniors, $6 children ages 2-12, members/babies free; call 601.352.2580.

20

Mississippi Time Travelers Kids Camp (through June 24). Students ages 8-12 learn about Mississippi history through activities at the Old Capitol Museum, the Governor’s Mansion and the Eudora Welty House. Pre-registration required. $40; call 601.576.6800.

The Market in Fondren, 8 a.m., at 3270 North State St. in the parking lot across from Mimi’s. Local artists and food producers will sell their goods. Entertainment provided. Also on July 16 and Aug. 20. Free; call 601.832.4396

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TTOCCS REKARP, 9 p.m., at Fire (209 S. Commerce St.). The group and J-TRAN give a send-off show as they begin their “Picture This Tour” summer tour. Its performance features AJC on vocals, and Rotary Downs performs. Ticket price TBA; visit ttoccsrekarp.com.

Art Remix, 6 p.m., at Mississippi Museum of Art (380 S. Lamar St.). Enjoy food by chef Luis Bruno, a cash bar, art and music from bands including Dangermuffin. Enter the drawing to win a special prize. Free admission, food $5 and up; call 601.960.1515.

FILE PHOTO; FILE PHOTO; COURTESY JONNY LANG; MONKEYWING; HEINRICH KLAFFS; FILE PHOTO; COURTESY LEUVEN RECORDS; DANGERMUFFIN; FILE PHOTO; FILE PHOTO;MARKET IN FONDREN; FILE PHOTO; EUDORA WELTY; JUNE HARDWICK; FILE PHOTO

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Forever Friday, 10 p.m., at Suite 106 (106 Wilmington St.). Enjoy local music, poetry and art displays. Stay tuned for details. $10 before 10 p.m.; call 601.454.8313.

National Conference on Civil Rights (through June 21), at Pearl River Resort and Hilton Garden Inn (Highway 16 W., Choctaw). The theme is “Rise, Advocate, Educate and Cooperate: Lessons From the Civil Rights Movement.”

Speakers include Choctaw Indian Chief Beasley Denson, educator and activist Dr. Leslie McLemore, content editor Nichelle Smith and Philadelphia Mayor James Young. $200, $75 June 20 or June 21 only, free for high school students; visit civilrightsconference.com.

Red, White and Jackson, noon, at Old Capitol Museum (100 S. State St.). In conjunction with Fourth of July festivities sponsored by the Jackson Chamber of Commerce, the museum keeps its doors open until 8 p.m. and offers free craft activities for children.

Enjoy food from local vendors, music, and fireworks from the Old Capitol Green. Free; call 601.948.7575.

JACKSON AREA EVENTS UPDATED DAILY AT JFPEVENTS.COM.

POST YOUR OWN EVENTS OR SEND INFO TO EVENTS@BOOMJACKSON.COM

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Events // freedom Nothing Left to Lose

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Fourth of July Celebration, 9 a.m., at Mississippi Craft Center (950 Rice Road, Ridgeland). Activities include making soap, crafting, Native American dancing, old-fashioned musical instruments, stickball and more. Food available for purchase from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Artisans give demonstrations and sell goods.

Free; call 601.856.7546.

Celebrate America Balloon Glow, 6 p.m., at Northpark Mall (1200 E. County Line Road, Ridgeland). The event includes live music, food vendors, a hot-air balloon display and fireworks. Free admission; call 601.853.2011.

Watermelon Classic, 7:30 a.m., at Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum (1152 Lakeland Drive). The annual race includes a 5K run, a 5K walk, a one-mile wellness run and a Tot Trot for children ages 3 and younger.

Watermelon served after the race. Register by July 1. $20 5K, $15 one-mile by June 24; $25, $18 after, free Tot Trot; call 601.982.8264.

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“Give My Poor Heart Ease” Photography Exhibit (through Aug. 5), at Southern Cultural Heritage Center (1302 Adams St., Vicksburg).

The Mississippi Museum of Art presents images by Bill Ferris. Hours are 8 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays. Free; call 601.631.2997.

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“Gold in the Hills” (through July 30), at Vicksburg Theatre Guild/Parkside Playhouse (101 Iowa Blvd., Vicksburg).

Shows are at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Call 601.636.0471.

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JFP Chick Ball July 9, 6 p.m., at Hal & Mal’s (200 Commerce St.).

This fundraising event benefits the Center for Violence Prevention.

Seeking sponsors, auction donations and volunteers now to help fight domestic abuse. More details: jfpchickball.com and follow on Twitter @jfpchickball. Get involved, volunteer, donate art/money/gifts at chickball@jacksonfreepress.com.

Be a sponsor for as low as $50. Call 601.362.6121, ext. 16.

9 - Magnolia Roller Vixens Roller Derby, 7 p.m., at Jackson Convention Complex (105 E. Pascagoula St.). The team takes on the Priskilla Presleys. $50 season passes are available ($20 for children). $12 in advance, $15 at the door, $5 children; call 601.376.9122.

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Pieces of the Past: Spoils of War (through July 10), at Old Capitol Museum (100 S. State St.). The rotating Civil War artifact exhibit features a 19th-century garnet necklace taken from a Jackson resident during the Union occupation. Free; call 601.576.6920.

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11 - Viking Golf Classic (through July 17), at Annandale Golf Club (419 Annandale Parkway, Madison). Watch PGA players battle it out for the top prize or celebrity chefs demonstrate their cooking skills. $20-$100, parking fees vary; call 601.898.GOLF (4653).

14 “Guys and Dolls Jr.” (through July 17), at New Stage Theatre (1100 Carlisle St.). Participants in the Broadway Jr. Summer camp present the play based on Damon Runyon’s short stories.

Show times are 7 p.m. July 14-16 and 2 p.m. July 17. $10, $7 children 12 and under; call 601.948.3533, ext. 222.

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16 - Trustmark Ice Cream Safari, 11 a.m., at Jackson Zoo (2918 W. Capitol St.). Visitors sample more than a dozen ice cream favors scooped by media celebrities, and vote for favorite flavor and favorite celebrity scooper. $2 plus regular admission; call 601.352.2580.

16 - Farmers Market Day, 10 a.m., at Mississippi Children’s Museum (2145 Highland Drive). The event includes product samples, healthy activities and a watermelon seed-spitting contest. $8, children 12 months and under free; call 601.981.5469 or 877.793.5437.

17 Tougaloo Art Colony (through July 22), at Tougaloo College (500 W. County Line Road, Tougaloo). Classes in drawing, painting with pastels, ceramics, printmaking, creative writing and more will be offered. Continuing education credits are available. $25 deposit, $400 tuition; call 601.977.7839 or 601.977.7743.

15 - Jackson State University Karate Club 40th Anniversary Celebration, 6 p.m., at Jackson State University (1400 John R. Lynch St.), in the Student Life Center. The club celebrates grandmaster Lindsey Horton Ticket price TBA; email jacksonstatekarate club40@gmail.com or call 601.957.6785 or 601.955.3848.

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Crape Myrtle Festival, 10 a.m., at Green Oak Garden Center (5009 Old Canton Road). The theme is “The Flower of the South.” Free; call 601.956.5034.

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“Oklahoma!” (through Aug. 7), at Black Rose Community Theatre (103 Black St., Brandon). The classic musical tells the love story of Curly, a cowboy, and Laurey, a farm girl. Show times are 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 2 p.m Sunday. $15, $10 seniors and students; call 601.825.1293.

JACKSON AREA EVENTS UPDATED DAILY AT JFPEVENTS.COM.

POST YOUR OWN EVENTS OR SEND INFO TO EVENTS@BOOMJACKSON.COM

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FILE PHOTO; MICHELE BREAUX; COURTESY MICHAEL RUBENSTEIN; BILL FERRIS; JANET & NICOLE BIRCH; FILE PHOTO; OLD CAPITOL MUSEUM; VIKING CLASSIC; FILE PHOTO; STEVIEWONDERBABY; FILE PHOTO; FILE PHOTO; COURTESY DANNY JONES; FILE PHOTO

july

Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

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Events // languorous

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Miracle Treat Day, at Dairy Queen (724 Raymond Road). $1 or more from every Blizzard sold will be donated to Children’s Miracle Network. Visit miracletreatday.com.

Craft Exhibit (through Aug. 24), at Mississippi Craft Center (950 Rice Road, Ridgeland). See works by Jennifer Taylor. Free; call 601.856.7546.

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Four-Day Calligraphy Workshop (through Aug. 25), at Southern Cultural Heritage Center (1302 Adams St., Vicksburg). Cecil Evans is the instructor.

Sessions are on Thursdays from 6-7:30 p.m. Registration required. $115, $95 members; call 601.631.2997.

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5 - Mississippi Wildlife Extravaganza (through Aug. 7), at Mississippi Trade Mart (1200 Mississippi St.). Come for hunting and fishing exhibits, lectures and animal demonstrations. Aug. 5 is Kids’ Day, and children under 12 get in free while adults receive a $1 discount. $8, $4 children ages 6-12, free for children 5 and under; call 601.206.5703.

5 - Celebrity Roast, 6 p.m., at Country Club of Jackson (345 Saint Andrews Drive). The honoree is Dr. Rathi Iyer, sickle cell specialist at Blair E. Batson Children’s Hospital.

Silent auction included. Proceeds benefit the Mississippi Sickle Cell Foundation. $75; call 601.366.5874.

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5 - Bill Medley, 7:30 p.m., at MSU Riley Center (2200 5th St., Meridian).

The former member of the Righteous Brothers is known for hits such as “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin” and “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.” $46, $40; call 601.696.2200.

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Yoga for Nonviolence - 108 Sun Salutations, 9 a.m., at Arts Center of Mississippi (201 E. Pascagoula St.).

All levels of ability and endurance are welcome to participate in the yoga mala. Free sun salutation classes given in July at many Jackson yoga studios. Proceeds benefit the Center for Violence Prevention. $25, donations welcome; call 601.500.0337 or 601.932.4198.

6 - Back to “Zool,” 10 a.m., at Jackson Zoo (2918 W. Capitol St.). See how and what the animals do while they are at “zool.” Meet zoo docents and education staff, and learn what animal education is really like. $9, $8.20 seniors, $6 children ages 2-12, members/babies free; call 601.352.2580.

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10 - “Assassins” (through Aug. 14), at Warehouse Theatre (1000 Monroe St.). Fondren Theatre Workshop presents the musical about assassins and potential assassins of American presidents against the backdrop of a carnival game. Tickets sold after July 15; call 601.982.2217.

Joan Rivers 8 p.m., at IP Casino Resort and Spa (850 Bayview Ave., Biloxi). The legendary actress-comedian performs stand-up comedy. $30, $40; call 800.745.3000.

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Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival (through Aug. 14), at Delta Blues Museum (1 Blues Alley, Clarksdale).

The event includes an extensive lineup of performers including David Brinston, Terry “Harmonica” Bean, Dorothy Moore, Kenny Brown, Bill Abel and Cadillac John. Free; visit sunflowerfest.org.

20 - Step in to School Event, 10 a.m., at Mississippi Children’s Museum (2145 Highland Drive). Celebrate going back to school with immunization information, healthy lunch options, educational television programming and more. $8, children 12 months and under free; call 601.981.5469 or 877.793.5437.

11 - Storytellers Ball, 6:30 p.m., at Arts Center of Mississippi (201 E. Pascagoula St.). The theme is “Flashback to the ’80s,” and includes a silent auction and Gary B. Sure.

Proceeds benefit the Greater Jackson Arts Council. $50; call 601.960.1557.

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13 - Bright Lights, Belhaven Nights, 5:30 p.m., on Fortification Street. The annual festival includes live music on five stages, children’s activities, food and artisan booths. $6, $1 children 12 and under; call 601.352.8850.

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“Soul of the Man: Bobby Blue Bland” 5 p.m., at Lemuria Books (202 Banner Hall, 4465 Interstate 55 North).

Charles Farley signs copies of his book; reading at 5:30 p.m. $35 book; call 601.366.7619.

20 - Dance with the Stars, 7 p.m., at Jackson Marriott (200 E. Amite St.), in Windsor Ballroom. The dance competition pairs celebrities and business leaders with local ballroom dance instructors. Dinner is served before the competition, and the Capitol City Stage Band performs afterward.

A 6 p.m. cocktail reception precedes the performance. Ticket price TBA; call 601.960.2300 or 877.MSOPERA.

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27 - SneakyFest Outdoor Music Festival, time TBA, at Sneaky Beans (2914 N. State St.). Enjoy local and regional hip-hop, rock, indie and jazz music, kids’ activities, a facial hair fashion show, coffee, beer and food from local vendors. Call 601.487.6349.

Jackson area events updated daily at jfpevents.com.

Post your own events or send info to events@boomjackson.com

boomjackson.com

chris feeley pierson grant; file photo; file photo; courtesy doris nowell; bill birk paradise artists; file photo; jackson zoo; file photo; storyteller’s ball; betty smithson; charles william bush; elaina jackson; university Press of Mississippi; file photo

august

Down by the Lazy River

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Work. Live. Play. Prosper.

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MY LOCAL LIST

Transcendent Things

While contemplating her Jackson Local List, { Tara Blumenthal } had an epiphany: it’s not the “what,” as much as it’s the “who.” It’s the bright and talented folks of the bold new city and its surrounding communities that make it so great for this yogini and chick-about-town. Be it slightly unconventional, here are her musts.

WILLIAM PATRICK BUTLER

10. Highland Village Chevron (1361 E. Northside Drive, 601.366.9016): A great place to re-fuel your ride. They are the best!

9. Wilai (2906 N State St., No. 103, 601.366.9955): Chane’s Fondren Corner boutique has handbags, perfumes, candles—love it all!

8. Hal & Mal’s (200 S. Commerce St., 601-948-0888): Good times and good tunes by Jackson’s finest musicians at the legendary local downtown hot spot.

7. Rainbow Whole Foods and High Noon Café (2807 Old Canton Road, 601.366.1602): Be it products or produce, they can help you get your daily dose of vitamins and veggies.

6. Aqua Pedicure by Kalisha Lindsey (4465 I-55 N., No. 102, 601.362.9514): Get your yoga toes on.

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5. Jerusha Stephens at Mon Ami Spa (4500 I-55 N., Suite 128, 601.366.7721): Be well with treatments from an acupuncture activist.

4. Massage Therapist RMT 718 Brenda Vaughn (2620 Southerland Drive, Suite 205, 601.506.9953): Relax, rejuvenate, replenish.

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3. Energy in Motion (200 Park Circle, Flowood, 601.932.7700 ) and Butterfly Yoga (3025 N. State St., 601.594.2313): Get strong, get flexible, get bliss—get to yoga!

2. Local 463 (21 Colony Crossing Way Madison, 601.707.7684): The way to a girl’s heart is through her stomach! My very favorite restaurant, co-owned by my favorite Jacksonian (and hubby) Dave Blumenthal.

1. Family, friends and students who live in Jackson and the surrounding area: They are the biggest “must have.” They are the priceless.

Love to you all!

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