For years, metro school students boarded the bus in front of the Blue Bird Inn.
A parent complained to Messed Up, and within a day, the bus stop was eliminated.
School spokesperson Olivia Brown tells us the bus-stop is not technically the official bus stop, but that is where kids have been getting picked up for years.
Regardless: the school system has evaluated the stop, and as of October 23rd 2008, has eliminated the stop in front of the Blue Bird Inn.
Brown tells me that the children will either get on the bus at the stop prior to the Blue Bird Inn or after.
The mother of the two girls tells us she is ecstatic and thanks Messed Up for getting involved.
A Madison beer tavern doubles as a Metro school bus stop.
Two ideas that go together about as well as velcro hands holding a silk tie.
This conflict of imagery comes together 2 times a day, every school day at 606 East Old Hickory Blvd.
That is the metro school bus stop for at least 3 middle school children who reside in the Madison community.
It is also the business address for the Blue Bird Inn, a beer tavern that proudly proclaims you must be 21 to enter this private club that requires membership.
Neon beer signs and youngsters with back packs.
to me, the imagery creates a dramatic juxta-position.
One hand, you have beer signs and broken glass and questionable activity in vans.
On the other side you have cherubic faced school kids, wearing bright pack packs boarding a bright yellow school bus.
The vision conflicts angrily like hurricane induced waves smashing a rickety old pier.
Messed Up visits this location on a Tuesday morning around 8:15 am.
School children are gathering at their bus stop in front of the Blue Bird Inn.
Our cameras witness 3 children standing in front of the bar, and a variety of questionable characters meandering down the sidewalks toward them.
The middle school kids have been taught to avoid strangers. Their eyes look elsewhere as the man wobbles by.
The children tell us they have seen messed up, possibly dangerous things at their school bus stop in the past.
Alyssa is a sharp 7th grader wearing glasses and the typical garb of someone her age.
She eloquently tells me about life at the bus stop.
“One time, there was a guy sleeping in a van on the side of the building. So I went to look. Then a guy raised his head up.” She fumbles for words as she recounts that moment. “It scared me, and I came up here and told them, there was a guy in the van.”
Ashley is her younger sister.
“I don’t like it. It is a bar. At school they talk about not drining or doing cocaine, and we are standing at a bar.”
Her sister chimes in.
“They try and teach you a good example. This is not a good example. Standing at this bar. it is really not that good”
After 11 weeks of playing air guitar in class, we have some good news to report.
The 26 guitar students in Mr. Adams fine arts class at White’s Creek H.S. should be playing actual instruments starting Tuesday October 21st.
This good news, comes because of many charitable messed up viewers, including Samick Music Corporation in Gallatin, which donated 25 acoustic guitars to the school.
John Hawkins is the VP of the musical instrument division.
“We saw the story and felt compelled to help. 25 kids and no guitars. That is messed up.” He says from the show room stacked wall to wall with expensive 6 strings.
“School programs keep getting cut. It’s sad. For us, it helps us build a customer base and give back to our community.”
Outside a fork lift arrives with 25 guitars ranging in price from 250 to 500 dollars.
As the 40 or so employees pull the shiny guitars out of the boxes, you can sense their enthusiasm.
“How do you feel?”
“Great,” a woman responds holding a guitar says.
Another man strums the shiny new instrument he pulls from his box.
“In tune right of the box, “he smiles.
Carol Crittenden arrives with 2 vehicles to pick up the guitars. Crittenden is Metro Schools Visual and performing arts coordinator.
She too is smiling ear to ear.
“This is one of the greatest things to happen this fall. We are so blessed to have a community that believes in kids and music education.”
Now that White’s Creek has its guitars, I ask Crittenden if the donations should stop. She says the school system needs all the instrument help it can get.
“All donations of general use instruments will be put to use. Please donate we have other programs that can use them. A trumpet a clarinet we can put them to use to.”
So there you go Music City and surrounding areas.
I challenged you to respond and you stepped up big time.
You should feel good about keeping the music in music city.
And remember, if you still want to donate, you can, just do it by the guidelines stressed earlier.
If you want to donate guitars, here’s how:
Go to the Metro Board of Education at 2601 Bransford Avenue in Nashville.
Go to the customer service center. Be sure to leave your name and address so the school board can acknowledge your donation.If you want to call: 259-8673 Call Carol Crittenden (Metro Schools Coordinator for the visual and performing arts) Carol’s assistant: Nicole Reed.If you want to email: carol.crittenden@mnps.org
Little Kids Rock is a fantastic site if you want to donate money for guitars.
As little as $50 dollars will put a guitar in the hands of a blossoming student. You can click here to give.
Or you can contact the Executive Director of Little Kids Rock - Daivd Wish at (973) 746-8248 fax (973) 746-8240
Holding the toxic pumpkin began to weigh on my mind.
What chemicals are lurking within the atomic structure of this fiendish plastic gourd?
What is Prop 65? And why do I care if a Chinese made pumpkin light is possibly dangerous to people on the Left Coast?
As I held the potential carcinogen, neatly trimmed in orange and white, I wondered, what toxins are seeping into my skin.
I shifted the potentially poisonous product from hand to hand. I envisioned an invisible virus, infiltrating my pores, attacking my cellular tissue at the molecular level.
Like little combat soldiers from China, I imagine the invisible array of prop 65 carcinogens storm trooping into my blood stream, sneaking up on my white blood cells. These birth defect causing commandoes, knives in their teeth, proceed to attack my entire body from within.
I shake my head like an etchasketch to erase this disturbing image.
I look at the somewhat innocuous Halloween decoration and wonder could this really make me sick?
I read the warning label again: the print is small. I imagine is done this way on purpose. It says: Made in China.
Birth defects? Cancer? Wash hands after use? Are you freaking kidding me?
It’s a plastic light up pumpkin for goodness sakes, not a sample of beryllium.
I suddenly laugh out loud wondering if this pumpkin could be the central plot for the next season of 24.
I see Keefer Sutherland parachuting out of a plane. Quick edits and gun fire. Then the plastic pumpkin is placed in a thick glass case, eventually detonated by a nuclear device.
The pictures are accompanied by a deep voiced announcer: “Jack Bauer parachutes behind enemy lines to locate the poisonous gourd. Jack must destroy the fiendish decoration before blood thirsty terrorists can melt it down in a microwave oven and disperse its toxic venom across the planet. This season the pumpkin panic permeates the planet! Don’t miss one moment of a new season of 24. Only on FOX.
So where did I get this deleterious creation of evil? In the Halloween department of a popular shopping center of course.
There are hundreds of these things. There are smiling faced pumpkins. There are skull and cross bone pumpkins. There are big pumpkins and small pumpkins. They are stacked from the floor to the ceiling.
Jack Bauer is going to need a lot more body bags I think to myself.
I look at my watch: There are roughly 2 weeks till Halloween and I am getting email warnings about dangerous plastic pumpkins lurking among us.
So I go to investigate.
The one I buy costs a mere five dollars.
I take the alleged chemically tainted decoration to the corner of Church and 5th. People stare at the news guy, wondering why the heck he is holding a pumpkin faced skull and cross bone.
A nice family approaches. They have two little girls, ages four and one.
“Let me read this to you,” I say holding the pumpkin in front of the dad. “It says, Prop 65 warning. That is in California. It says this product contains a chemical known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after use. But buy it for Halloween.”
I laugh out loud as does the man. The warning is really frightening, especially when it is attached to such a seemingly fun item.
“You want to touch it now?” I say extending the pumpkin toward him.
“No. No,” he laughs aloud, putting his hand out as if to ward off evil spirits.
“Want to hand it to your babies?”
The children’s mother intercedes. “No. They shouldn’t sell that.”
Go to the Metro Board of Education at 2601 Bransford Avenue in Nashville.
Go to the customer service center. Be sure to leave your name and address so the school board can acknowledge your donation.If you want to call: 259-8673 Call Carol Crittenden (Metro Schools Coordinator for the visual and performing arts) Carol’s assistant: Nicole Reed.
Little Kids Rock is a fantastic site if you want to donate money for guitars.
As little as $50 dollars will put a guitar in the hands of a blossoming student. You can click here to give.
Or you can contact the Executive Director of Little Kids Rock - Daivd Wish at (973) 746-8248 fax (973) 746-8240
Talk about your sour notes. No guitars in Guitar 101?
Welcome to the Music City Blues.
Josh Hood is a 15 year old boy with a shaggy doo hair cut and a smile that peeks out every so often.
Flanked by his family and friends, this laconic young man stands before the camera, and tells me about the frustration of trying to learn a musical instrument without the benefit of ever holding that instrument.
“Do you even know what that is?” I Joke as his sister hands him an electric guitar.
The Axe is black, reflecting the sun, which is setting through the trees in this campestral Joelton neighborhood.
The sheepish, White’s Creek H.S. sophomore takes hold of the guitar. He nestles it in his arms, almost caressing it like a prized puppy.
“Show me an A chord, dude?” I shout.
There’s that furtive smile again.
I watch as his fingers twitch, beginning their desultory trek along the neck of the guitar. Like watermelons rolling off the back of a truck in a nasty, gooey, mess, his fingers bang into the strings, each digit clumsily searching for the combination of strings and frets and fingering positions that will achieve the note.
He is unsuccessful and all my mind’s eye sees is a quagmire of watermelon guts soiling a musical highway.
“Pop quiz,” i shout, almost snorting, as I focus the camera on the upper quadrant of the guitar.
“I don’t know,” he says, his open palm sliding up and down the neck, like he is petting a baby giraffe.
“Come on dude,” I shout from behind the camera. “It’s an A - Chord. It’s one of the easiest fingering positions, what is the problem?”
He shakes his head, his smile disappearing, his eyes sinking behind a mop of brown hair that waggles down over his eye brows.
“Because we don’t have a guitar to know how to do it,” he says.
And there you have it, a guitar class in Music City without any guitars.
To me, that’s like flying a plane without any wings. It’s like Sea World without Shamu. It’s like Benny Han flipping burgers.
“It’s messed up,” Josh’s dad, David Revell says.
Revell is an even tempered guy who speaks about the problem with a parental concern.
“He has been taking classes for 9 weeks now, and we don’t have any guitars in the classroom. the teacher brings his guitar, but there are 25 kids. Getting to touch it the guitar, is next to never,” he says smiling slightly. “If they are going to give a guitar class, and they give grades, and to keep his GPA up, it’s important, that if you take a class you need to learn it. And hands on, this is a guitar class, so without a guitar you are learning how to read sheet music or something from inside a book.”
Revell is well spoken. He has thought this out. He doesn’t stammer or stray from the point which to him is crystal clear.
“I understand the economy is tight, and getting materials is hard. If you are going to offer it then you need to back it up and provide the materials. If it is not in the budget and you cannot afford it then you should offer something you will have materials for so you can properly learn it.”
I go to White’s Creek H.S. and talk to Ryan Adams, the school’s Fine Arts Teacher.
“Our problem? We don’t have the guitars or the funding for the program we started this year.”
Adams is a young man with an artistic looking veneer. He wears his mustache like an extra on Pirates of the Caribbean.
He has passion and he obviously is yearning to teach his kids how to wield an axe.
“We started the program, to be part of the new academy, for music and fine arts, getting real excited about it, we had a plan and how it would go and how we would get our guitars, and it just didn’t happen. So we have no guitars at all,” he says with a sigh.
I look around the room. It is bright and airy. There are paintings and caricatures on the door. There are musical charts on the wall. The room screams music, except there are no guitars.
It’s arguably a woman’s most special moment. Wedding Day!
The day she ties the knot. The day she takes her vows, for better - for worse, in sickness and in health. Every detail is important. The location, the food, the cake.
But to a bride-to-be, perhaps nothing is more important than her wedding dress.
A man wears a tux. So what? A bow tie, a cummerbund, cufflinks.
I’m yawning here.
Honestly, a guy in a tux is unremarkable at best. The groom could be a waiter or the President of the United States.
A tux is a tux is a tux. But a Bridal Gown?
Hold on to your garter everyone, now you are talking serious!
A bride and her dress are focal point of the entire wedding.
It is the beacon in the light house, the star at the top of the Christmas tree.
When you look at the ubiquitous wedding picture your eye almost automatically gravitates to the bride.
The wedding dress in the wedding photo is the image that people stare at on your wall or on your desk at work.
You might not say it aloud for fear of being castigated and run out of town on a rail, but mentally, you say to yourself, man that bride looks: fill in the blank.
Like a fortune teller’s Ouija board, does the wedding dress dictate the course of the marriage? In other words, if your dress is a mess, is your matrimonial bliss off to a bad start?
I’m not sure Amanda Jones would go quite that far, but she does tell me she has had a lot of miserable, sleepless nights lately.
Why?
Because of what she calls the wedding dress from Hell.
Jones is getting married October 18th. The 23 year old is petite to be sure.
She enters the room, gliding effortlessly across her South Nashville home.
At first glance, the gown is attractive. It is strapless and fits snugly from the chest to the waist.
But from the hips down, there are some issues, like a road under construction.
Poofy and bunched and extra, I don’t know, just extra stuff hanging off the side.
If this dress were a traffic project, orange cones would be sewn into the sides.
“What am I afraid of?” she says, pulling the ample amount of white fabric away from her slender form.
“I feel fat in this dress. It doesn’t flatter me whatsoever”
“They’re paint over it. They’re painting over it.”
The children stand at the fence, their fingers gripping the chain link.
Each shout echoes off the nearby building next to their daycare.
“They’re painting over it.”
Their words reinforce to me that the imagery they see everyday is a part of their existence, part of their scenery.
They look at this pornographic material when they play in the yard.
The big bold letters on the nearby building is a part of their four-year-old landscape, much the same as swings and trees and playground toys.
I look at their innocent little faces, then to the dark paint on the building.
Some of the graffiti is unrecognizable as much more than geometric patterns of paint.
According to Metro police, some of the graffiti is surely gang-related, dripping with soiled imagery of Bloods and Crips.
For close to a year, Hermitage residents have complained about the gang and pornographic graffiti.
While it is on the back of a business, it is in plain site of neighbors, senior citizens, grandchildren and people cutting their lawns.
“Makes you feel like you are in the ghetto.”
Nedra Harper has been complaining about the graffiti for months and is fed up.
“You see it from your kitchen sink. You see it from your breakfast table.”
Harper’s hair is bright red. It seems to ignite her intensity in which she discusses this neighborhood scourge.
“I feel like it is degrading, like my neighborhood is going to the dogs,” she says.
Harper says she’s sick that her five grandkids have had to look at it.
“My grandkids ask, ‘What is that? What is that?’”
It’s a simple question asked by children, with answers so complicated that adults struggle to answer it with appropriate language.
“Some of these things are depicting things they should not know about,” Harper says angrily.
Harper said she began complaining to the business owner where the graffiti is in November 2007.
“He said he would have it handled and we called again and called again.”
Harper said after nothing got done, neighbors began calling the city for action.
“I called codes. Codes said call Metro. Metro said call Codes. I called and called everyone.”
By this time, a pleasant looking woman comes to the fence. She is with the daycare, Kinderland Learning Academy
I ask her what she thinks about the pornographic graffiti.
“I am surprised it took so long to fix,” says Darlene Olds. “It’s a shame it took this long to clean up.”
After months of frustration, Harper calls that is messed up.
The day we arrive a painter is hard at work, reportedly hired by the business owner.
“Maybe it is the cosmos coming together; the master tumblers of life clicking into place,” I laugh out loud. “I’m here and you are here and it’s getting painted. Is that a coincidence or is this Messed Up working for you?”
She laughs as well. Her hair is flaming red and burning with intensity.
“I’m just thankful,” she says. “Maybe it is red headed determination. Maybe it is calling you.”
Metro police said in February of this year officers from the vice office did go to the location.
Because the taggers could not be identified, it was not deemed a police issue and passed on to the Metro Codes department.
Codes officials tell me they only recently got an email from Ms. Harper. They were about to send out a crew to assess the problem when I called and told them that the graffiti was gone.
Officials tell me that if they do get a request the city will send an abate notice giving the property owner 15 to 30 days to fix it or risk going before the judge.
In a phone call, Metro Codes officials tell me, “We don’t have a case on this address.”
They were in the process of generating a report, and then I called them to let them know the painter was all ready on the scene.
The also inform me that police and Codes have a joint program.
“We do have a new joint program with Metro Police Department to get minor property violations corrected,” said Bill Penn, director of Metro Codes.
The new program is a notice program and they started training the officers last year.
If the cops were out and about and saw a codes problem they could just deal with it.
“The question I don’t know is if the cops initiated something, it would come back to our system,” Penn said.
“I feel like they are shoving this down our throats.”
Nedra Harper is a business woman who doesn’t mince words. This grandmother and wife has bright red hair and a passion for life. She understands her community and the economics of today’s world that directly affect her life.
“When I go for a small biz loan they will scrutinize me so closely for anything I ask for, but in Washington, or on Wall Street, they sign the checks. Those guys are asking for money on paper that does not exist.”
Harper and her husband manufacture and install carport tops and awnings. She tells me that she has had to let personnel go in the past, but they currently still employ three people.
We walk through her back yard. There is an RV covered by a car port. She tells me that she and her husband manufacture these. The one in her back yard, she says, would cost around 7 thousand dollars.
She tells me that customers are not buying product right now because she says they are afraid of the economy and they can’t obtain loans.
“So in a nutshell, this might cost me 7 grand,” I say. “I might not have the liquid cash, so in the old days, I get the loan, I improve my property, you pay your people, everyone makes good, I have a new carport, everyone is happy, right?”
She nods her head.
“Now a days I don’t get the 7 grand from the bank, so I don’t put this up, and you don’t have a job making that thing because I could not get the loan.:
“Exactly!” she exclaims.
Harper says Washington and the Wall Street crowd created this problem, and now she and other small business people are being asked to bail the system out.
“You go to bed with that sick feeling in your stomach, knowing it won’t be better, and thinking it is going to be worse. You go to bed making those decisions. Yes, it is a hard struggle. Hard decisions and no There is no help.”
“What is more messed up than what is going on in Washington,” I ask. “What they are doing to us in America. It just seems like gross mismanagement. No one is happy. Everyone is angry. It permeates and saturates our society at every level. What is more messed up than this?”
She doesn’t hesitate.
“What it does to the families who make minimum wage. It is more messed up trying to feed their kids. Walk in and make the decision whether they are going to buy meet or soup!”
Meat or soup! Wow. So simple. So complex.
Meat or soup? It summarizes the mood and the angst and what the little man is going through.
I am energized by her passionate enthusiasm and ability to poke the issue in the eye with force and forethought.
“Exactly, you got all these fat cats. In D.C and they throw around figures like a Trillion dollars or 700 Billion dollars. And you are talking should I buy meat or buy soup for the kids?”
“Exactly. Peanut butter and soup or whatever.”
“It is two worlds colliding. Washington and its talk of 700 billion dollars!!! Or Meat or soup tonight for dinner.”
I slam my hands together completing the sound effect.
BAM!
“Right,” she says, not missing a beat. “And everyone passing you is struggling with this. Do we pay the power bill, the gas bill? Do we gas up the car, or take the kid to the dentist. It is that bad.”
For years a South Nashville neighborhood has been waiting for a sidewalk to be completed.
Many pedestrians wonder, what is the hold up?
Why build a sidewalk along Edmondson pike that suddenly ends in a quagmire of hub caps and weeds and jagged insanity.
It should be a no brainer. Finish the sidewalk. It’s only about 20 yards long.
There’s nice smooth sidewalk before the abrupt eye sore that lines one side of this busy thoroughfare.
There’s nice smooth sidewalk after the debris filled danger zone.
Right in the middle, like a festering boil on a super model’s face, is this stretch of Earth that nobody wants to take responsibility for.
Metro Public Works tells me that the builder should finish his work. The builder so far has refused.
While this battle plays out in the legal system, some pedestrians who live along Edmondson Pike complain that someone is going to be hurt or killed.
“As you saw I stepped over car parts.”
21 year old Mary Bishop frequently walks this way to work.
The mother of a small child says she pushes her son in his stroller and she thinks about the danger the unfinished sidewalk presents for her.
How unsafe is this?
“Very unsafe. Its dangerous going across the street hoping a car will slow down.”
While interviewing Bishop, a young man in a McDonald’s uniform begins walking through the danger zone. His arms are outstretched as if he is tight rope walking in the circus.
“Hey be careful,” I shout.
The young man tells me he walks this way every day.
“That is dangerous?,” I holler.
“Yeah,” he says insouciantly.
George Stripling lives nearby too.
“People drive crazy around here.”
The 38 year old says this sidewalk to nowhere has been here for years, and he is fed up.
“What would I say to my city leaders?,” he ponders. “What is the problem? We pay taxes! Get it done.”
According to Metro officials, this sidewalk silliness started in 2003 when the developer received his permit to build this shopping center.
Metro City Engineer Mark Macy says the builder is required by code to complete the sidewalk, but has refused to because of its precarious perch on top of a culvert.
“Why can’t Metro pay to finish the job, and then chase down the builder for the money spent?,” I ask. “At least it will be safer, and nobody will get hurt, right?”
“I wanted to do that,” The city engineer tells me. “But I was advised by my attorney’s not to do that.”
“What is the hang up?,” I blurt out. “It is just a freakin’ sidewalk, right?”
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Talk about your sour notes. No guitars in Guitar 101?
I go to White’s Creek H.S. and talk to Ryan Adams, the school’s Fine Arts Teacher.
