For those of you who didn't know-

and there are apparently many throughout the world, my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee got flooded during a torrential bipartite downpour last weekend. There are a horrifying number of people who have lost everything- their homes, their possessions, their vehicles, their pets, some would say their very selves.

I was lucky. Luckier than most.

My house flooded, I lost a bunch of stuff, and I've spent the past week hopping from one friend's couch to another, trying to keep on keeping on, as the axiom goes. I'm back in my home, with a place of my own to sleep in, and I am grateful.

But I can't even begin to express the surreality of the situation, and part of me (perhaps praeteritively) questions whether I should even try. The water shortages are a hurdle, to be sure, and there's nowhere in the city you can go that isn't offering up personalized devastation, sitting in the front of thousands of yards. And the number of homeless pets is heartwrenching; I've seen so many animals in and around the city, with collars and a frantic look on their faces, trying to find home.

But there's something that feels completely off in the air, and it isn't just the near-omnipresent stank of stagnating water (or the mosquitoes that ensue in such situations). I love this city, in the way that you can only love something that occasionally threatens to push you over the edge into madness. I love this city like an old married couple who occasionally exchange gunfire at one another while remaining completely devoted to one another.

The way to avoid feeling helpless, they say, is to help others. And that's exactly right.

In the words of Haven Hamilton, "They can't do this to us here in Nashville! Let's show them what we're made of."

A Trip down Elm Street (after).

So, in addition to all the other horrifying foolishness that happened last weekend, I saw the Elm Street remake. You can read my thoughts on it in the Nashville Scene. It's a staggering disappointment.

At the movies: Notorious.

Thank to the folks at the Nashville Scene, here's my pick for this week's Belcourt screening of 1946's Notorious. Which for some reason is illustrated with a photo from the Notorious B.I.G. biopic. Which is kind of funny.

A Trip down Elm Street (before).

Louisville gets the Original, uncontaminated by the remake.
Elm Street 1.0

Why You should come to Midnight Movies at the Belcourt.

So I mentioned the proposal that happened at a midnight screening of The Room a little while back, and there's video. I pop up around 2 minutes in, the proposal happens at 2:55.

Never a dull moment, and that's how it should be.

In memoriam: Dixie Carter.

I just found out that Dixie Carter had died, and it hit me very hard. For my entire adult life and most of my childhood, she has been the personification of wit and great lines, because of Designing Women, yes, to a certain extent, but mostly because of Filthy Rich, a sitcom that ran on CBS from 1982-1983.

Carter's character, Carlotta Beck, was scheming and conniving and willing to do anything to get at the fortune left by her deceased father-in-law Big Guy Beck. But along the way, she had some of the great lines of television history, and next to no one knows about this show. So as a tribute to the memory of the late, great Dixie Carter, here are my seventeen favorite lines she ever delivered on this underseen gem.

You may recognize some of these, if only because I've been quoting them for the past twenty-five years.



"I became confused and forced it out of a small child's hand."

"You want to know what happened to me, I'll tell you what happened to me. I fell into the Mississippi River."

"We do not serve- gristle."

"If you refuse to pay servants, you leave us no choice but to adopt small, pliant children from underprivileged countries."

"This should be put on wheels and taken around to people everywhere to show that it could happen in your home too."

"How I hate it when she pummels us with clever repartee..."

"Yes, I want you hurt."

"If I looked in the mirror I would see someone demented, and frothing, and looking for just the right size axe."

"Kathleen, dear, I suggest you stay out of this or I will verbally annihilate you. I will cut you off at the knees. I will take that two-cent accent and perfectly coiffed hairdo and stuff it down your demurely concealed, but nevertheless dimestore cleavage!"

"We prefer not to seriously consider the opinion of a woman whose dog wears hot pants."

"Bootsie Weschester's taste in men ranges from King Kong to Lil' Abner and unfortunately, you do not fall into that category."

"It must be all that fresh morning air you get on those long taxi rides home."

"Marshall- thunder!"

"Our only regret is that we did not have time to purchase an appropriate gift. Perhaps a silver platter with rabbits on it."

"You've been meditating again... your pupils are dilated."

"Don't tell us! Random House has decided to publish your autobiography, I Was an Elementary School Virgin."

"Nouveau white trash."

At the movies: The Runaways.

I'm superspsyched- my corporate overlords have started to run some of my stuff in The Tennessean as well as Metromix, and you know me- I love attention.

So you can get all of that right here. Yay.