|
Sneaking In
"She tried to roll me," said Mike Knotts, a volunteer with the White House advance team in charge of setting up the presidential visit Tuesday. Knotts was assigned the task of screening the VIPs for the rally at Cherokee Aviation. He had a list of local dignitaries and was ordered not to let anyone else into the area. Things went pretty smoothly until he was approached by a woman who wanted into the VIP area.
"She started all sweet and nice and recited a long litany of how she'd been involved in city government a long time.... I told her 'I'm only allowed to admit people on the list who are invited guests of the President,'" Knotts said.
Knotts stepped away, and when he returned, the woman had gotten in.
"She conned the other guy," Knotts said. "After she got inside, she came over and joked with me and gave me one of those really fake smiles."
Before she left, Knotts said the gate-crasher approached him and asked him his name and for whom he worked.
"Mike Knotts," he said.
"Knox?" she asked.
"No, Knotts, like Don," he said.
"OK, OK. I'll remember that," said former City Council member Jean Teague.
Sleeping In
Among those who made it onto the dais was Vice-Mayor Jack Sharp, who spent his moment in the sun snoozing, checking out the UT band, and staring out into space. Since Sharp frequently sleeps through City Council meetings, one wag suggested he was demonstrating his versatility.
The identity of the rest of the people on the platform probably indicated that Mayor Victor Ashe is still ticked off at the majority of Council for defying his wishes and repealing the election cycle referendum. The list included a passel of Ashees; Sharp and wife, Doris; former law director Tom Varlan; Deputy to the Mayor Craig Griffith and family; Bob and Diana Samples, who live across from the J. Allen Smith house.
1, 2, 3, What Are We Fighting For?
The antiwar demonstration on Henley Street that coincided with President Bush's visit to the convention center Tuesday prompted very different estimates of the crowd's size. WATE, which had a camera crew on location, estimated the crowd at 300. But in their simultaneous report, WBIR, which was not conspicuously on the scene, tallied only "about 100." On Wednesday, the News-Sentinel wisely split the difference, putting it at "over 200"; Metro Pulse had a reporter on the scene, and that strikes us as the safest guess.
Yee-Haw!
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's original Will The Circle Be Unbroken album was a '70s classic, present by the hi-fi in every suburban den and hippie garrett. The band's brand-new album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. III, looks like a must-have, too: its all-star cast includes everybody from Johnny Cash to Iris Dement. But we're especially proud of the CD cover. It bears the inimitable style of the letterpress geniuses at Yee-Haw Industries, at 413 S. Gay Street. Just a block or two away from the old WROL studios, Keven Bradley and Julie Belcher use antique printing equipment to design retro-rustic specialty art like this cover, which features a portrait of Mother Maybelle (Carter). Yee-Haw has gotten a good deal of attention from the print industry, but this may be their biggest mainstream exposure.
About two years ago, you may recall, some big plans for making nearby Market Square conventioneer-friendly called for booting Yee-Haw out of their quarters. We're grateful they didn't succeed.
October 10, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 41
© 2002 Metro Pulse
| 
