Now in its 33rd year, the Scene’s annual Boner Awards issue was once upon a time named for former Nashville mayor and absolute scandal magnet Bill Boner. But frankly, some of Mayor Boner’s transgressions might seem downright charming compared to the bloopers, blunders and general boneheadedness that grace our pages these days.
From country stars’ loud-and-proud transphobia to state legislators trying to pull referees’ pants down and claiming that schoolchildren defecate in litter boxes (yes really), 2022 has been a year laden with Boner fodder. State and local politicians, media figures, bar owners, NIMBY types, ticketing behemoths — they all get Boner Awards this year.
Read on for a list of this year’s biggest screw-ups, compiled by the Scene’s editorial staff. See also: our petty-crime roundup, in which we highlight some of the dopes and ding-a-lings arrested for Boner-worthy behavior in 2022.
Accessories Sold Separately, Boners Included
Only in the past couple of years has it become more normal for country music personalities and their family members to speak up about their political and social views. In the case of country star Jason Aldean and his wife, conservative influencer Brittany Aldean, they’ve used social media to speak out against such grave threats to liberty as … COVID vaccinations. This year, the prior Boner Award recipients courted controversy with transphobic statements: Brittany captioned an Instagram video showing off a makeup look by thanking her parents for not mistaking her “tomboy phase” for gender dysphoria. “Im glad they didn’t too, cause you and I wouldn’t have worked out,” chimed in Jason from the comments section.
Much back-and-forth ensued, including fellow country stars calling the Aldeans on their bullshit. Maren Morris dubbed Brittany Aldean “Insurrection Barbie,” a tag Aldean leaned into with Barbie-themed T-shirts reading “Don’t Tread on Our Kids.” Tucker Carlson — Fox News’ answer to the question “What if Pinocchio turned into your worst uncle?” — interviewed Aldean, during the course of which Carlson described Morris as a “lunatic country music person.” Morris promptly put that slogan on T-shirts of her own, proceeds from sales of which benefit GLAAD’s Transgender Media Program and the Trans Lifeline. Meanwhile, Jason Aldean was very publicly dropped by the PR firm that represented him for years. The misinformation that makes the world less safe for trans people is no joke, but some of the people who spread it are.
Boner Emeritus Award
Throw a dart at Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s Twitter feed and you’re liable to hit a Boner-worthy statement. And it’s with that in mind that we award Tennessee’s senior U.S. senator with a, let’s call it, Boner Emeritus Award. Take her Oct. 4 offering: “We need a DOJ that isn’t afraid to investigate Hunter Biden.” Yes, she tweeted about investigating Hunter Biden on Oct. 4 of this year. Or back in April, when she said, “Biden decided that COVID is over for illegal aliens at the southern border but not for Americans.” Sen. Blackburn has a particular knack for pumping up political footballs that don’t really affect the average American while completely ignoring real crises happening in real time. How about weighing in on income inequality, or lack of health care access, or the ongoing opioid epidemic? Ope, that last one might be a little uncomfortable, given her cozy relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.
Blackburned
It’s not unusual for Marsha Blackburn to show up in the hallowed pages of Bonerdom. Tennessee’s MAGAriffic senior senator, after all, believes her duty is to “own the libs,” rather than to “serve the American people” or “protect democracy from collapsing under the weight of dangerous cult of personality,” and thus generally steps in it virtually every week. (See above.) Thus, it came as no surprise when, during committee hearings ahead of the (ultimately successful) confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Blackburn — showing the courage and oratorical elan that’s defined the U.S. Senate since the days of Daniel Webster — asked the judge to define “woman.” It was, of course, much lampooned. (The rush to the writer’s room at Saturday Night Live must have looked like opening day at the Franklin West Elm; Cicely Strong paid it off with a brilliant send-up during Weekend Update.) Meanwhile, back at the Metro Nashville Public Schools board, which like so many other school boards had dealt with scads of enragés mad about masks or books about seahorses or whatever else, board member Sharon Gentry was caught on a hot mic wondering, “Can we just go set Marsha Blackburn on fire?” Now, granted, the entire political ethos of the wing of the Republican Party to which Blackburn belongs is built around saying the quiet part out loud, so there’s more than a little rank hypocrisy in Blackburn’s office responding that “violent rhetoric has no place in political discourse,” given the nearly constant bootlicking she did for Donald Trump and his parade of horribles. On the other hand, it was a regrettable moment for Gentry to forget Michelle Obama’s hokey if useful advice to go high when others go low — as well as the advice given by every frazzled TV news producer to every semi-sentient drooling haircut to make sure the mic is off before saying something stupid.
With Friends Like These …
Let’s be clear — this Boner Award isn’t going to Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, who disparaged public school teachers earlier this year, saying they’re “trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.” Arnn may be a charter-boosting conservative, but he’s not a Tennessean. Bill Lee, however, is the damn governor, and he sat by and said nothing while Arnn insulted our public school teachers. While Lee later voiced support for educators, he refused to condemn Arnn’s comments, instead trying to reframe his adviser’s statements as commentary on “left-wing” education issues. But to teachers across the state, Lee’s silence came through loud and clear.
Stop the Vote
It seemed like everything that could go wrong did go wrong on Election Day this year. Friends passed around precinct questions and ID clarifications on group texts while cascading news reports shared voter horror stories — confirming that, no, you are not alone in your confusion and frustration about just how difficult it is to participate in the fundamental act of democracy. Hundreds of Nashvillians, abruptly redrawn into new voting locations, were given incorrect ballots and conflicting information about where to vote. That tally grew as the day went on. It was a glaring hiccup for the Republican-controlled Davidson County Election Commission, which has one job: run elections.
Strategic Communications
Wunderkind press secretary TJ Ducklo managed to unite Nashville politicos just a few weeks into his new job as Mayor John Cooper’s communications lead. Ducklo showed off his Beltway chops by sassing up a spicy response to a tweet from then-mayoral hopeful Hal Cato, who had just shared a favorable poll. “The Mayor has invested in 157 NEW emergency personnel to make our communities safer and help reduce crime,” Ducklo tweeted. “We refer all significant threats on him to the @MNPDNashville. Luckily, this ain’t one of them, in any way, shape or form.” Nashville Twitter promptly roasted the new guy’s irresistible combination of smug, earnest and cringe. You’d think a young professional banished from Biden’s press office after bringing too much heat on a reporter might get a second opinion before smashing the tweet button. Then again, there is a reason we call them bulldogs. And any press is good press?
’Grass Backwards
Kentucky bluegrass banjo master J.D. Crowe, who died Dec. 24, was known for a lot of things in his seven-decade career, including leading the influential group New South. In the 1970s, the band served as a springboard for such talents as Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas. One thing Crowe was not known for, however, was stealing the identity of bluegrass guitar legend Del McCoury. If you squint, the two men look a little bit alike, with halos of white hair. Unfortunately, someone at The Tennessean apparently misplaced their spectacles, and on Dec. 28 the paper ran an Associated Press obituary for Crowe alongside a photo of McCoury, who is thankfully still very much alive.
Californians Dreamin’
The Tennessean’s regional editor Michael Anastasi ruffled feathers when, in an interview with Gustavo Arellano of the Los Angeles Times, he said Nashvillians were “just beginning to understand diversity” thanks to an influx of Californians, including those he hired for the paper. That’s a patronizing assertion — local communities of color with rich histories and even civil rights landmarks predate the mass arrival of Californians, after all. Not only that, The Tennessean has platformed voices like noted Islamaphobe Laurie Cardoza-Moore, who are basically opposed to that mission of diversity. We can’t totally blame Arellano for seeing products like The Tennessean’s Black and Latino Voices newsletters and thinking the paper was doing something right — but in the end, he still delivered a fluffy profile of a dude who cuts staff with the vigor of a horror-movie slasher, with little acknowledgement of the great work Southerners of color had been doing for years in journalism and other industries. On the flip side, Anastasi’s boneheaded statement revealed some kernel of truth, as white progressives took to Twitter to badger Arellano, the thick-skinned former writer of the “Ask a Mexican” column, but seemed short on counter-arguments — and more mad about pompous Californians than any erasure of local communities of color.
Laurie Cardoza-Less, Please
You’ve probably heard of Laurie Cardoza-Moore, the Islamophobe and conspiracy theorist who runs a nonprofit that’s been identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and who unsuccessfully ran in the Republican primary for state House District 63. Regretfully, she was reinstated as a member of the state textbook commission, which now has the power to ban books in Tennessee. We probably could have given state House Speaker Cameron Sexton a Boner Award for reappointing her, but Republicans are gonna Republican. What was more surprising, however, was that The Tennesseean let Cardoza-Moore run an op-ed claiming that former Nashville Public Library director Kent Oliver promoted “pornographic, racist, antisemitic and anti-American content” through the library system and its Freedom to Read campaign. The accusations are false, of course, and an editor’s note within the article attempts to explain that. If editors have to take space within an op-ed to explain why it’s misinformative, perhaps they shouldn’t run the piece in the first place?
Mini Cooper
File this one more under “Good-Natured Ribbing” than “Full-Blown Boner Alert.” In February, Mayor John Cooper humble-bragged in a tweet that the Nashville Department of Transportation had filled 3,569 potholes across the county in the span of roughly one month. He also posted a pretty silly picture of himself standing over a massive pothole, arms spread wide like a birthday-party magician. Naturally, the good people of Nashville took to Photoshopping the pic — including more than one version in which a miniaturized mayor was inside the pothole, submerged up to his waist. Patched potholes and Photoshop goofs — we’ll call that a win-win.
Hoisted by Our Own Boner
Let he who is without Boner cast the first Award. So to speak. Just after Christmas, the Scene sent out a marketing email promoting a Fox News-sponsored event at the Wildhorse Saloon, which its hosts proudly proclaimed would not require proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test. Not our proudest hour, and not a great way to kick off the New Year. But hey, we’ll own it — this Boner’s for us.
Dining Restrictions
A foray by Axios into dining coverage left readers a little under-informed in October. Katie Lewis, Nashville copy editor, tapped in to review Locust, the 12South outpost recently named Food & Wine’s Restaurant of the Year — and named Best Restaurant in the Scene’s Best of Nashville issue. A few sentences into her story, Lewis explained that she was pregnant and therefore unable to try much of that night’s menu, a contingency she apparently hadn’t anticipated. Her verdict — an adequate, uneven meal from an overhyped media darling — may have been useful for others dealing with her kind of dietary concerns. For a restaurant known for tartare and seafood, it left a good chunk of unpregnant people unconvinced.
If You Give a Maus the Ax …
Everyone will know about it. And everyone will want to read it. McMinn County in East Tennessee made national headlines in January for banning from its curriculum the first and only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer. Maus is about the Holocaust, inspired by the stories of author Art Spiegelman’s own father. The sin in question? Light swearing and nudity. To be more specific, mouse dicks and mouse cleavage. Shortly after, sales of the book grew 753 percent. Even the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum took notice, and publicly condemned the move. The waitlist for it at the Nashville Public Libraries has died down by now.
Snowstorms and Shitstorms
Back in mid-January, Nashville saw a pretty gnarly winter snowstorm — and local reporter Stephanie Langston’s Twitter mentions saw a pretty gnarly shitstorm. “Ace Hardware in West Nashville got a truck load of sleds this morning and they are already sold out!” the WKRN journo tweeted. “Guess how many? 5,000. They sold 5,000 sleds today.” After some pushback from dubious local Twitter sleuths, Langston tweeted that she “didn’t believe it either” until an employee confirmed it to her. But doing a bit of back-of-napkin math, Scene operatives quickly deduced that 5,000 sleds by late afternoon would’ve meant the Ace sold roughly 555 sleds per hour — or nine sleds per minute. Ultimately, Langston rang the store back, discovered that the actual number was “a little over 600,” and deleted the offending original tweet. But not without earning a Boner Award.
Misinformation Age
In July, local ABC affiliate WKRN ran a story headlined “ ‘I thought I was dying’: Woman hospitalized after picking up $1 bill in Nashville.” In the piece — which ran as a segment during the outlet’s 5 p.m. news broadcast — WKRN’s Stephanie Langston reported that a Kentucky couple experienced what they believed to be an accidental overdose of “fentanyl or a similar drug” due to picking up a $1 bill in a Bellevue McDonald’s. As has been noted many times by many experts, misinformation about the risk of fentanyl overdose due to touching or inhaling the drug is widespread, particularly among law enforcement. And the possibility that a person can touch an item with fentanyl on it, then touch their partner, and their partner also experience symptoms of an overdose — while neither person has experienced any sort of high? Um, extremely not possible. The next day, WKRN and Langston ran a follow-up quoting an epidemiologist who noted the “incredibly, incredibly small” risk of experiencing a fentanyl overdose via such means, and they added an addendum to the online version of their first story. What’s that Jonathan Swift quote? Oh, right. “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.”
We Did Nazi That Coming
In a hearing for a bill to ban camping on public property, state Sen. Frank Niceley (R-Strawberry Plains) told a very weird story about Adolf Hitler being homeless because … well, it’s still not clear why he did it. Niceley falsely claimed Hitler lived on the streets to endear himself to common people, and then said it was proof that unhoused people “can come out of these homeless camps and have a productive life. Or in Hitler’s case, a very unproductive life.” Was this meant to inspire folks? Warn that the next homeless person is the next Hitler? We don’t know. But it made national news, and weeks later, Niceley was accused of making antisemitic remarks for a new batch of strange comments about Morgan Ortagus, a Jewish politician endorsed by Donald Trump — he claimed only the ex-president’s Jewish relatives would be upset she was booted off a congressional election ballot.
The Sound and the Furries
Any average American might struggle with defining what a “furry” is, so it’s no great surprise that Tennessee’s Republican lawmakers — who are indeed American and oh-so-extremely average — would have similar challenges in understanding the subculture built around people dressing up in mascot-like costumes. Costumes that, in one particularly mind-numbing Facebook thread (and that’s saying something), a Cheatham County schools official conceded with more than a little bit of admiration are often “elaborate” and “quite impressive.” Tennessee’s GOP legislators have, however, in their usual way, completely missed the mark, believing that a “furry” is a child who identifies as a household pet. Now, surely, there is a name for such a thing. Something like “a child pretending to be a household pet,” which is a mouthful, so following the great advice of Strunk and White, we can eliminate unnecessary words and instead call them “a child pretending” or, even better, “a child.” Why are state lawmakers worried about children pretending to be cats and dogs, something literally every child does at some point? That’s something you, the owner of a fully functioning brain stem, may ask. Well, naturally, it’s because these same children are being allowed to use litter boxes and the like at school. At least, that’s what Rep. Mary Littleton and Sen. Janice Bowling believe, as they made clear during a hearing about the state’s education system — which, ranking 49th nationally in per-pupil spending, is now perfect but for the kids pooping in litter boxes. Technically, Littleton and Bowling “have heard” about Skylars and Braylands using litter boxes — the lawmakers employed the well-worn rhetorical device of “some people are saying.” Well, some people are saying that’s completely bonkers. It would actually be comforting to assume that Littleton, Bowling and the alarming number of other people who buy this nonsense are cynically using hyperbole to prove a slippery-slope point. “We let transgender people pick their bathrooms, and if we do that, then AP History is going to be interrupted with litter box breaks.” Sort of a “Modest Proposal” situation, but with scoopable poop instead of Irish babies. However, much as they’ve no actual evidence of kids pooping in school-supplied litter boxes, we have no actual evidence they’re that clever or cunning.
One Man’s Trash
Nashvillians rang in the year with piles of recyclables after Metro halted curbside pickup for more than a month. Red River Waste Solutions, the city’s primary garbage pickup operator, filed for bankruptcy in October 2021, but many residents didn’t notice until Metro suspended recycling collection on Dec. 21. It was particularly poor timing during the holiday season, and bins overflowed with shipping boxes, gift wrap and other crap residents couldn’t get rid of without driving to a recycling center themselves. Curbside pickup resumed in February, and Metro approved new contracts with two waste collection companies in July to prevent future stoppages.
Mold News
Mold is gross, but it happens — especially in old buildings. We get that. What we don’t get, however, is Vanderbilt University’s repeated failures to properly address mold issues in its dorms. Allegations of toxic mold in dorms surfaced back in January, along with related health issues. And it turns out it wasn’t the first time. Vanderbilt’s student publication The Hustler has reported similar issues in 2019, 2014 and 2008. If you’re going to make students live in student housing all four years, the least you could do is make sure it ain’t moldy.
Thug Life?
It’s rare to see elected officials say what they mean. When public figures show how their brain connects thoughts and chooses words, it can be oddly refreshing. Nashvillians have seen the Metro Council advance racist policies while certain members, skewing toward retirement age and majority white, deny their own personal racism. Back around the start of the year, District 27 Councilmember Robert Nash argued what he was really thinking when the body debated license plate readers. Nash was eager to adopt the surveillance tools in order to protect upstanding Nashvillians from “thugs” — a very loud dog whistle for viewers who, like Nash, sometimes prefer to reduce a complicated world into simpler categories. In a too-cliché follow-up, Nash explained that his wife had cleared him of any wrongdoing after consulting Urban Dictionary on the meaning of the term.
Trump Chump Dumps on Ump
In June, former local sports-talk radio blowhard turned national conservative-talk radio blowhard Clay Travis took time out of his busy schedule bootlicking Donald Trump and fomenting outrage against school boards to take on America’s true enemies: poorly paid Little League umpires. Travis got the old heave-ho from his kid’s baseball game after the aforementioned progeny was called out for interference. Travis, a self-proclaimed attendee of hundreds of baseball games, claimed he’d never seen such a call! And directed at his child! Well, you can understand why a well-educated grown man would get so mad, particularly during such a high-stakes event as an early-summer baseball tournament for 11-year-olds. Surely, once having calmed himself down, Travis would see his anger and instinct to stand up for his kid, no matter how poorly expressed, had gotten the best of him, and he’d be properly chastened and embarrassed. Which is what a person with a well-developed sense of shame and perspective and also Jeremy Faison (see above) would do. Wrong. Instead, Travis doubled down and took what almost certainly would have remained a mostly private matter public and bragged about it on the numerous platforms he has at his disposal to make money off people like the MAGA-hat cousin you only have to see once a year, thank God, and anyone who celebrates College Colors Day. Having the (multiple) errors of his ways pointed out did nothing to dissuade Travis from the notion that his cause was righteous, because Clay Travis has never been wrong in his life, and in any case, all attention — good or bad — gives him happy feelings in his lifestyle-brand khakis.
The Caucacity
A group of West Nashvillians rallying under the banner Reclaim Brookmeade Park has been complaining for years about a homeless encampment that grew on the greenway. Social media accounts for the group don’t shy from harsh language, and have at times labeled the campers “vagrants” — a term most professionals and even Reclaim Brookmeade co-founder Becky Lowe recognize as a derogatory term. A mystery user of the Reclaim Twitter account seemingly defended the term, posting a definition of the word. While “vagrant” is apparently a fair word to throw around, it seems free speech goes only one direction. When Metro Councilmember Ginny Welsch called the West Nashvillians “white” at a public meeting, one of the aforementioned white people shouted “racist” at her in response. One member even went so far as to file an ethics complaint over the matter, which — no surprise! — was dismissed. Pearl-clutching, lack of empathy and a waste of public time? Sounds about white to us.
Hall Pass
All the glamour of holding local political office comes with just a little bit of paperwork — a lesson learned the hard way this year by District 1 Councilmember Jonathan Hall. He’s racked up $360,000 in fines for 36 campaign finance violations and is ineligible to run for office until he figures it out. A couple big red flags point to potential personal expenditures with campaign money, and Hall doesn’t really want to talk about it. When he does, he explains his situation as the unintended consequences of a too-busy public servant snared in government bureaucracy.
Slacking Off
There are plenty of horror stories out there about parents losing their tempers at their kids’ sports games, but state Rep. Jeremy Faison (R-Cosby) raised — or lowered? — the bar when he tried and failed to pants the ref at a high school basketball game over a call involving his son. Again, we have to emphasize that he failed in this strange endeavor. This grown man, an elected member of the state legislature, managed to tug on the official’s pants with both hands but seemingly lacked the strength, leverage and/or determination to pull them down. Well, that or the ref has the finest belt in sports. Things could have gotten uglier for Faison — The Tennessean reports that the ref requested a call to the police, but it didn’t happen. The lawmaker later apologized online saying he “totally lost [his] junk,” a weird but fitting piece of punctuation to the whole episode.
No Glen in Sight
After a well-documented fall from grace that earned him the title of “King Boner” in 2019, former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada finally announced his retirement from the state legislature in late 2021. He then launched a campaign for Williamson County clerk, a bureaucratic position in a county that had reelected him six times, even amid his many scandals. Despite his sizable $270,000 campaign fund, almost all of which he contributed himself from his statehouse campaign fund, Casada didn’t even earn 25 percent of the vote total in the Republican primary. At least he had time to change out of his bathrobe when FBI agents arrested him and former top aide Cade Cothren for bribery, wire fraud and other charges in August.
Taking Some Liberties
The Metro Nashville Police Department was caught censoring body-cam footage over the summer — not a good look for local law enforcement, which has spent the past few years fighting the perception that police keep things behind the Blue Wall to avoid public accountability. When the Community Oversight Board — formed by referendum in 2018 as an added layer of citizen accountability for police misconduct — realized in July that it was getting redacted video footage from the cops, it was hard not to hear the collective, “Are you kidding me?” The department pledged to end the internal practice of editing out profanity used by officers, but the damage lingers for a relationship already struggling with trust issues.
Oh No: LoDo Marks New Low
“Music City” is such a rock-solid nickname for a city that developers have taken it upon themselves to conjure quasi-trendy, generally bad names for Nashville’s rapidly changing neighborhoods. The phenomenon reached a new low in a July Nashville Business Journal “exclusive” in which developer Ray Hensler christened the area south of Korean Veterans Boulevard “Lower Downtown.” Inevitably, it was shortened to “LoDo,” joining NoGu (North Gulch), WeHo (Wedgewood-Houston), LoBro (Lower Broadway) and other duosyllabic monikers in the “things to say to show people you just moved here” phrasebook.
Trench Warfare
A few months after Google started cutting “microtrenches” into Nashville roads to install Google Fiber, its high-speed internet product, lines have begun to erode across the city. After the same thing happened in Louisville, Ky., and Google exited with a brief apologetic blog post, the tech giant swore it would be better. Instead, the city appears to have welcomed a corporation that is actively creating potholes that will only get worse with rain and cold temperatures. The Metro Nashville Department of Transportation says Google’s on the hook for repairs. Meanwhile, Google Fiber isn’t getting great reviews from Nashvillians either.
A Swift Kick
The presale for tickets to Taylor Swift’s upcoming stadium tour was an absolute nightmare, with myriad glitches, confusing information, scams aplenty and so many tickets sold that the regular sale was canceled. Whoever at ticketing behemoth Ticketmaster wrote this line in a statement following the debacle deserves an award for Understatement of the Year: “We strive to make ticket buying as easy as possible for fans, but that hasn’t been the case for many people trying to buy tickets for the Eras Tour.” Swift herself got a bit closer when she made a statement berating Ticketmaster: “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.” Cultural critic Elamin Abdelmahmoud might have the best take of all, as he tweeted: “Swifties being radicalized against monopolies and getting ready to do some anti-trust lobbying good luck ticketmaster.” After the dust settled a bit, The New York Times reported that, prior to the fumbled on-sale, the U.S. Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation focused on whether Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation has been abusing its power.
Since the Woolworth Theatre opened earlier this year at the historic site of lunch counter sit-in protests and famed civil rights leader John Lewis’ first arrest, the biggest misstep was hosting the premiere of The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM, a film directed by Candace Owens for far-right website The Daily Wire. Aligning with Ye (formerly known as Kanye West), who attended the event, is an insane move — though the venue already did align with the Aldean family. After seeing the crass fever dream that was Shiners, it makes sense that the play was the written and executed by Chuck Wicks, one of the owners of the building and the husband of Jason Aldean’s sister. Not making it clear that it was an adults-only show got them dropped from the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp. Shiners, which treats same-sex relationships and tribal dance as kooky, felt a little ick, but doing it at a civil rights landmark was a big ick.
Never Let the Party Die
Steve Smith’s iconic downtown bar Tootsie’s secretly collapsed and was rebuilt this spring in what is perhaps the year’s best metaphor for Broadway, the city’s tourism industry and maybe Nashville itself. We can only assume the internal second-floor ceiling crumbled under the weight of various alcohols — we’ve all been there, right? Thankfully, no one was hurt. In fact, the average passerby wouldn’t even have been able to tell. Management cordoned off a live construction site while patrons continued to party everywhere else, effectively managing to keep the good vibes going and the strong drinks flowing.
Oh What a Feeling — When We’re Crashing Through the Ceiling
Jesse Kloot was a few things when he came from Canada to visit Nashville — highly intoxicated and clearly without a touch of claustrophobia. We don’t know why he felt so intent on allegedly climbing into the ceiling of the men’s restroom at Honky Tonk Central, which then led him to crash-land in the women’s restroom, but he was charged with felony vandalism nonetheless. On top of his quite creepy, weird and dangerous move, he committed a true party foul — the bar had to close for the day.
A Big Fork-Up
The Melting Pot’s location on Second Avenue still has not reopened since the Christmas Day 2020 bombing that destroyed historic buildings, injured eight people and terrified a city on a normally peaceful holiday. Someone apparently forgot to remind the restaurant’s corporate communications team, which sent out an email in October of this year encouraging customers to stop in for deals on fondue. You’d work pretty hard on a public apology after dropping the ball that hard, right? You definitely wouldn’t just say, “Sorry, we dropped the fork,” in a follow-up email a day later, right? Right?
Raised by Wolves
The Nashville Zoo is a great place to spend a lot of time, the site of epic end-of-day battles between parents and kids, specifically those who find their way to the multi-structure Jungle Gym and its iconic tiers of climbable netting. The dream of staying at the zoo forever turned into a nightmare this summer for one Alabama child, who was left behind during a school trip. Zoo employees, adept at placating unknown creatures far from home, kept the juvenile human “safe in a room” where he watched cartoons and napped. Fellow zoo inhabitants tried to hold it together when his parents came to take him home.
Ambulance thieves and, apparently, every 35-year-old in the state — here are some boneheads who were arrested for Boner Award-worthy high jinks
