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Gardens, Laughs, Soul Food and High-Rise Students


Garden Tour Features Pulaski Street

The Boulevard Gardening Club knows how to make digging and delving (almost) fun. They certainly have a good time with their annual Roving Garden Party, and the 2016 outing is concentrated along Pulaski Street, which has evolved into an intriguing mix of the old with the new, including gardens. And, as usual, your ticket includes food and drinks.

They’re not going to wait around on you, though. Show up at Pulaski Heights BBQ, 675 Pulaski St., at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, May 1 to get your ticket. The tour is 3–5 p.m., and no more tix will be sold after 3 p.m. Tickets are $15 for club members and $20 for non-members. For $30 you get the tour and your annual membership in the club. Tickets are limited and can be purchased on the day of the tour or in advance at boulevardgardeningclub.com. For information, call 762-728-0575. This ramble through one of our most interesting intown neighborhoods happens rain or shine, but not for kids under 12.

Three Performances Only

If you have felt the twinges of age or know somebody who has or you just enjoy a good play performed by good actors, remember that Town & Gown’s  A Month of Sundays runs Friday and Saturday, Apr. 29 and 30 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, May 1 at 2 p.m.  And that’s all. Here today, gone tomorrow. This is a busy time with a lot of good stuff happening all over town, and this play is well worth considering in the mix. Lots of laughs, some tears and some whiskey help us smile at the inevitable. Tickets are only $5 and are available at townandgownplayers.org. The Athens Community Theatre is behind the Taylor-Grady House at the corner of Prince and Grady avenues. And, yes, the director makes me smoothies most mornings.

Soul Food Leaves Piedmont

Alas, Piedmont College’s Café on Prince is closing Wednesday, Apr. 27. Piedmont needs the space for its nursing program and its library, which have been housed off campus.
The Café is the cafeteria staffed by cooks who used to work at Wilson’s Soul Food before it closed on Hot Corner downtown. This is where you could get macaroni and cheese delivered from Heaven every day, along with fried okra, squash casserole, green beans, stewed cabbage, your choice of meats, cornbread, cobbler, etc.

Is there no restaurant in need of a ready-made staff with loyal customers eager to follow them to a new location? Maybe that’s just what we need at Flagpole: newspaper offices upstairs and The Café on Prince downstairs. Feed the mind; feed the body.

The College That Ate a City

This one is about Texas State University and its hometown, San Marcos, TX. Several people shared it on Facebook recently, and you can read it on nextcity.org. There’s a lot of other good stuff on that website, too, about getting urban living right.

San Marcos, like other college towns, has been overrun by student housing, so this is a cautionary tale for Athenians, too. A common thread in the San Marcos story as well as our own is how local government just sat by and watched the city irrevocably changed practically overnight and did nothing. Very late in the game, the San Marcos citizens are finally waking up and electing a government that will respond to their needs. Any chance of that happening in Athens?

Bern, Baby, Bern

Whether or not Bernie is toast, he has been incredibly consistent since he announced his candidacy a year ago. This is from his first email announcing his candidacy, but it could be from this week:

“It’s not just that, for 40 years, the middle class has been disappearing. It’s that 99 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent, and the grotesque level of wealth and income inequality today is worse than at any time since the late 1920s. The people at the top are grabbing all the new wealth and income for themselves, and the rest of America is being squeezed and left behind.

“The disastrous decisions of the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case and in other related decisions are undermining the very foundations of American democracy, as billionaires rig the system by using their Super PACs to buy politicians and elections. And the peril of global climate change, with catastrophic consequences, is the central challenge of our times and our planet.”

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