There’s really nothing else to say here.
When Bad Spelling Happens to Good Signs
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There’s really nothing else to say here.
Category Archives: journalism
Why I Should Never Write About Fashion
You know how you get dressed in the morning and you
think you look perfect respectable and even nice but then somehow you get a glimpse of what you REALLY look like and It Is Not Good and you wonder “Why did I think I should wear that?” Yes. You know what I’m talking about. (Un)luckily, I got this opportunity recently when I covered a corporate cooking competition for a feature story for the TimesDaily newspaper in Florence, Ala. It was a hot summery day outside but I knew it would be below freezing in the building where we’d be, so I dressed in layers — that’s me in the pink pants and white sweater, taking notes. (Also, if you wear a white jacket/sweater to a cooking thing, be prepared to answer such questions as “Excuse me, but where’s the milk?” and “Do you think we should saute or broil this?”) From the front (photo on the left), you can see that my outfit works okay. Not the most flattering, but okay. However, from a side view, you can see that I should have never left the house in this and should be condemned to watching extra reruns of “What Not To Wear.” This is what happens when you wear six layers of clothing — underwear, jeans, camisole, belt, top and white droopy sweater. Also, when you eat cupcakes for breakfast. But I mainly blame fashion.
De-Cluttering
In honor of back-to-school re-organizing, I’m de-cluttering the random chaos that tends to take over my brain and leaves me unable to do even the simplest of tasks. (“Sweetie,” husband JP says to me, patiently, “is there some specific reason why you’re burning dinner?”) I mean, the blogosphere here graciously has gifted us with infinite white space to fill up with all my rabid mutterings share thoughtful and meaningful insights, so we should take advantage.
First, as we’ve been doing around here all weekend, let’s check the weather. My Southern state is approaching lockdown with news of Isaac “barreling toward,” “aiming at” or “targeting” — depending on your reporter — our coastal regions and beyond. (Grammar-geek-question-the-day: Can hurricanes actually “aim?” Discuss.) But we’ve got Jim Cantore to pull us through. I adore this guy! I think he personally is responsible for an uptick in Weather Channel viewership when hurricanes threaten. (Overheard in grocery-store line: “I can’t go to lunch with you. I’m headed home to watch the hurricane.”) Cantore’s devotion to giving us the full story while getting blown around by wind and rain is legendary. His intense yet calm warnings of potential doom sort of make me want to nail plywood over our windows even though my town is hundreds of miles away.
Second, it’s Freakin’ Finally Football here in the South. And probably other places, too — we just don’t think too much about them this time of year. High schools have been at it for a couple of weeks or so, and SEC play opens on Thursday with South Carolina visiting why-are-they-still-playing-football-please-just-let-them-stick-with-basketball Vanderbilt. As much as I harbor pure and unadulterated dislike for one specific team in my conference (Hint: It is not Auburn.), I’m an enthusiastic fan of all things SEC. And this year, I even have an SEC student — Younger Daughter is in Knoxville doing grad work at the University of Tennessee. I’ve already started collecting an orange wardrobe.
Third, that thing about Younger Daughter moving to Knoxville to do grad work? She’s a grown-up woman making grown-up choices and doing just fine on her own, thank you very much, yet I still cried when we moved her two hours farther away. Of course, the tears could have been my middle-aged body protesting after a couple of days of packing and lifting and tugging and toting — although she did most of the prep work herself — but I think I unconsciously was revisiting here first day of kindergarten, which I did not handle well AT ALL. She called a couple of days later while walking around campus. “How are you doing?” I said. “Fine,” she said. “It’s just me and 30,000 other students.” Welcome to the SEC!
Fourth, my incredibly cute and adorable grandsons are … incredibly cute and adorable. The 9-month-old is calm and relaxed and constantly entertained by everything going on around him, although he already seems dissatisfied with crawling and you know he’s thinking, “So, you just put one foot in front of the other and try to not fall down, huh? I bet I could do that.” The 4-year-old, on the other hand, is the one usually doing the entertaining — why sit quietly when you can pretend to be a pirate or Batman or a ninja warrior? Dirt, mud, water and sand are his tools of choice, yet he also enjoys a good tea party and, for awhile the other day, decided his name was Trixie. This bodes well for 21st-century manhood.
Fifth, I help with a mediawriting lab at our local university. One of the first assignments this semester was a just-for-fun project to see how well the students did when they had to write something by hand. You know, with a pen and a piece of paper. Like the olden days. As they worked, I noticed they all seemed to have developed their own individual style of loopy or choppy sort-of printing — none of them used cursive anymore and most of them hadn’t written anything in cursive in years. Interesting …
More to come —
Newspapers ‘R’ Us
Husband JP and I are newspaper geeks. We met at a newspaper — 
Sidelines, the student newspaper at Middle Tennessee State University, in Murfreesboro, Tenn. We work for newspapers — he’s actually fortunate enough to get a regular paycheck from one. We talk and post and discuss and argue about newspapers (and also whose turn it is to clean out the cat boxes and which one of us forgot to buy beer). And we buy newspapers — you know, the old-fashioned kind made of paper — everywhere we go. When we travel, our hotel room is littered with newspapers. We take stacks into restaurants (although not the really good ones). We pile them in the back seat of the car and haul them home for additional perusal. In doing all this, we stumble across some fascinating things. Such as the fact that the May 27 edition of the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press — the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend — weighed in at an incredible 2 pounds and, when folded, was 1 1/2 inches deep. This is, we calculated, about four times bigger than your average regular daily paper and seemed mainly due to an inordinately large amount of advertising inserts. Most papers, it seemed to us, had a lighter number of inserts for Memorial Day Sunday. Anyway, this is the sort of stuff that fascinates us. Just wait until you hear our discussion on Times Roman versus Times New Roman.
Why I’m a Writer, Not a Photographer
You know that we are a newspaper family. My husband is the sports editor at the Daily Journal in Tupelo, Miss., and even
though I’m a former practitioner of an escapee from daily-newspaper writing, I still love it when he needs my help. He’ll say, “Sweetie, what are you doing on such-and-such a day? I really could use an extra hand,” which I’m pretty sure is not how he makes assignments to DailyJournal sportswriters. But I’ll take it. Some of the things I help him with are 10K runs, such as the annual Coca-Cola Classic Corinth 10K. Even the most organized runs — which the Coke Classic is — tend toward managed chaos at the finish line. This is especially true for sports reporters as they try to identify and interview winners whose top priority is to find shade and a shower and why-are-these-folks-following-me-and-sticking-cameras-in-my-face-when-I-really-can’t-breathe? Very tricky stuff. So when my husband covers one of these races, he hires me as his assistant. And while secretly I consider it my job to keep an eye on him as he interviews attractive young women as he runs around in the Mississippi heat and humidity, at the Coke Classic he wanted me to 1) photograph winners as they crossed the finish line and 2) keep up with where they were in the finish-line crowd so he could get quotes. For this past Saturday’s Coke Classic I managed the second assignment perfectly and helped my husband get a good story. The first, as you can see, not so much.
Spelling Bees and Me
Why I now will mark “be a spelling-bee moderator” off my list of “Things That Sound Really Easy and Fun and I Bet I’d Be Good At.” — from my upcoming column in the Daily Corinthian’s weekly Community Profiles edition
She said it was going to be easy. She said I wouldn’t have any problem at all.
“All you have to do is read the words,” my friend said. “Just read the words. Easy, easy, easy.”
Of course, when somebody works this hard to convince you that something’s “easy,” you perhaps should ask questions.
But I was so flattered she’d asked me to call the words at the Mississippi Association of Independent Schools district spelling bee in Columbus that I said “Sure! I’d love to!” before I could spell out “maybe I should think about this first.”
I’ve always been fascinated with spelling bees because – and I’m embarrassed to admit this – I’ve never been to one. When my daughters, 27 and 25, were younger, the hours we’d spend studying weekly spelling lists turned them off spelling for fun and they consequently avoided any chance of getting caught up in a spelling bee. So without any real-life experience, my only knowledge came from TV, where stern and somber-looking adults quizzed children relentlessly, and the Broadway musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” where people jump around and sing a lot.
I hoped my spelling bee would fall somewhere in the middle – while leaning toward the jumping-around and singing side.
Turns out, though, I was the one meant to provide the fun and good cheer.
“We need somebody who’s sweet and nice to call the words,” my friend said. “We don’t want to intimidate the children. You are the nicest and non-scariest person I know.”
Completely captivated by the image of myself as a smiling and benevolent word-giver, charmingly patting the grateful children on their heads, I couldn’t wait until the competition.
And here let me say that I thoroughly intended to carefully study and research every word on the list my friend gave me a few days before the bee. I did look over the pages and I did pronounce the words … to myself … in my head … well, most of the words. But since the words got progressively difficult and folks assured me the student spellers rarely got to the most advanced level, I didn’t worry about the super hard ones. I mean, what are the chances I’d have to correctly pronounce the words “hoomalimali,” “pickelhaube” and “Baedeker” and use them in sentences?
If I started stumbling, I told myself, I’d fall back on my role as the sweet smiling non-intimidator. Surely that would be enough.
Nope. It wouldn’t. Because these kids meant business. We quickly found ourselves in the advanced, extremely difficult, you-will-never-ever-use-this-word-in-real-life sections. And they were smarter than me – at least, they apparently had studied the list instead of watching reruns of “The Office” and “Cougar Town” as I maybe did. One speller after another questioned my definitions and corrected my pronunciations – even familiar words such as “taupe” and “ersatz” are minefields when you have to enunciate them in front of eagle-eared parents. The intimidation factor rose steadily as the spellers looked at me pityingly and proceeded to demolish every advanced word we had. The organizer had to call spelling-bee headquarters for more words and I wondered if I should retreat to the snack room and let one of the kids take over.
Thankfully, we took a half-time break and the judges gave me a pep talk.
“You’re doing fine,” they said. “But toughen up. Don’t smile so much. Be a little intimidating.”
Their advice worked. When I stopped tentatively requesting that the students spell a word and started authoritatively telling them to do so, the competition flowed much more smoothly and everybody seemed happier.
But I think I’ll rest “a spell” before I try this again.
Valentine’s Day Desserts — and a Worthy Cause
Oh my cookies! And cupcakes. And brownies. And fudge and cheesecakes 
and truffles and trifles and all sorts of all things yummy and sweet and delicious. Imagine walking into a room filled with every bite-sized dessert imaginable, and your only responsibility was to wander around and eat as many as you could. Imagine Butterfinger Cake and chocolate gelato chased by peanut-butter balls and chocolate-covered strawberries. Imagine strawberry-lemon parfait topped off with a pina colada Italian ice.
A Valentine’s Day fantasy? A dessert lover’s hallucination? A never-to-come-true unattainable dream? Nope. This was a reality — at least it was for one night at the Community Center in Selmer, Tenn., where the local newspaper, the Independent Appeal, hosted a fund-raiser for the McNairy County Literacy Council. The council had lost much of its United Way funding, and Independent Appeal publisher Janet Rail was determined to help make up the difference. So the Independent Appeal asked folks to bring their best desserts to the community center, set up some tables and brought in a band and for $5 you could buy a ticket and enter Dessert Paradise. Almost 25 churches, clubs, businesses, restaurants and other groups were there, tempting you with chess squares and cake pops and peanut brittle and other things you didn’t even know you wanted until you saw them and had to have some. I believe I said “Just one more trip around the room to make sure we didn’t miss anything” at least 12 times and we still didn’t sample everything. Here’s hoping this becomes an annual tradition — and a successful fund-raiser. Because I’m willing to do my part and attend every single time.
Men at Work
My husband, John Pitts, at work. We're at the Tad Pad -- the Tad Smith Coliseum on the Ole Miss campus in Oxford, Miss. He's the one in the tie. Because he believes that as the sports editor of his newspaper, he should look professional. But, thankfully, the wife of the sports editor doesn't have to.
Bowling for Fashion
We’re making our way through college football’s bowl season leading up to Monday’s Bowl Championship Series once-in-a-century twice-in-a-century showdown between SEC West powerhouses LSU and Alabama. And the most pressing
question is not “What? Them again?? When is ‘Dancing with the Stars’ coming back on???” but rather “How can I look stylish and exhibit team spirit while squashed between screaming drunk people while it’s 35 degrees outside?” At the recent Music City Bowl, Mississippi State fans pretty much took over the downtown area of host city Nashville, Tenn., and swamped the LP Stadium at game time with maroon and white. But opponent and eventual loser Wake Forest showed up with a few fans who braved the freezing temps in black and gold.
When I Grow Up …
When I grow up, I want to be just like Felice Green, this wonderful woman here. Felice is a local retired educator, and I imagine
that if you had her for a teacher, your life was changed forever. For one thing, she has a gorgeous voice. It’s rich and gracious and she enunciates every syllable so distinctly that you’re like, “Oh, so that’s how that word is supposed to sound.” Also, Felice does not put up with foolishness. Of any kind. She just looks at you and you know that by the sheer force of her will, she simply Is Not Stand For It, thank you very much, so you’d Better Straighten Up and Fly Right. (I still call her “ma’am” when I talk to her. I can’t help it.) And then there is Felice’s style. Like her tutorial counterpart Mary Poppins, Felice is practically perfect in every way. She is impeccably groomed and immaculately dressed and I only wish I could rock this over-sized man’s suit jacket hand-painted with a Santa Claus and other symbols of holiday cheer that she found in a vintage boutique. But instead of looking chic and stylish and even sort of royal as Felice does, I think I’d simply end up looking foolish — a word that’s probably not even in her vocabulary. I first met Felice when I was a staff writer for the local newspaper and she helped with her sorority’s annual hosting of the Ebony (magazine) Fashion Fair, the world’s largest traveling fashion show. Fashion Fair brought high-end designs and runway productions to the normal everyday small-town Sears-clearance-rack-wearing folks like me, and I loved every minute of it. I’ve tried to talk Felice into organizing our own version of Fashion Fair, but she’s too busy hanging out with her grandchildren and doing good works. And looking fabulous, as always.
Coffee with Cathy 