LOVING PINK

Today we visited the Pink Palace.  Hmmm.  If you’ve never heard of Memphis’ Pink Palace you are not alone.

What do you think it is?  An ice cream store?  A cotton candy kiosk? A hairdressing shop?  Mona worked at the Pink Ice Hair Salon in Lancaster, Pa. when I met her.  I’d vote for a hair salon, wouldn’t you?  And then we’d both be wrong.

It’s a museum.  And not about gay rights or the fight to end breast cancer.  It is the name of the Memphis Municipal Museum!  This is the south, baby.  Pink is HOT down here!

Seriously… the founder of the Piggly Wiggly Stores, a Mr. Clarence Saunders had built his chain of grocery retail stores to more than 1200 by the mid 1920’s when he got a crazy idea about making a lot of money in the stock market.  The long story – Google it.  The short story- he lost everything.  Including his almost completed mansion made of soft pink marble (I know I said all pink down here is HOT, but this is back when gay still only meant happy. Soft WAS hot).

The mansion went to the city and the city turned it into its first city-wide museum.  And we visited because (yea!) its free on Tuesday afternoons!

We saw one of Elvis’ army uniforms, one of W C Handy’s trumpets, slave manacles, yellow fever booklets, Civil War flags (ONLY Confederate. Imagine that), mastodon bones, a miniature circus and a reconstructed (slightly smaller) first ever Piggly Wiggly. AND   more.

We closed the day along the Memphis River bluff at Martyr’s Park.  The park honors those who cared for the yellow fever victims in the two horrible epidemics of the 1870’s only to catch the disease and die themselves. We caught the golden light of the setting sun and read till it was time to meander home the 10 miles to FROG in West Memphis.

BUT

The COOLEST thing we did today was meet Tammi Boatman, her sister in law Judy Boatman, her daughter Tiffany and Tiffany’s three week old PRECIOUS, Katie Bug! 

 

The Arcade, Memphis’ oldest restaurant, on South Main Street was crowded but they crowded us into a booth and we (Tammi and I) talked the other’s ears off for way over an hour.  Well, not Katie Bugs.  She slept through it all, even when Mona held her close (Mona made a phone call to say, “I’ve got her, Nan!”)

So here we are after dinner in FROG.  The A/C has cooled us down a bit and we are just chillin’.

We had thought we’d hang about a while longer but we’re ready to head on down the road now.  People ask us, “When and how do you decide where to go next?” and our only answer is, “When we feel like it.”  And that’s the very truth.

Sometimes we just look at each other till one says, “Lets go.”  This evening I asked Mona what else she’d like to see in Memphis and she replied that she thought she was ready to get out of the city.  Any city.  

So I knew she could not wait to get to Shiloh Battlefield!

-Ken