There are certain rights of fall. Stadiums pack with fans. Craft fairs proliferate. Book readers gather, by the thousands, in open-air plazas.
Thus makes a Nashville fall. We are well aware that there’s plenty to do, but rather than simply list every event in the city, we’ve decided to offer a highly personalized assessment of what the autumnal months have in store for Scene writers. Herewith are various writers’ choices, some specialized, some targeted for general consumption.
Jim Ridley, film critic
Across the street from my house, there is a sugar maple that turned golden orange every October. It made my front window look like a fireplace. Thanks to NES, it now resembles some kind of arboreal Henry Moore sculpture. These other treasures of fall should prove more resistant.
1. Pesto sauce
Sweet basil is the only herb or vegetable I can’t seem to kill—which is wonderful, since it has lush green foliage, pretty spikes of flowers, and a smell of such earthy richness it almost makes me faint. Its reward for surviving is getting whacked on the cusp of the first frost, placed in a food processor with garlic, pecans, pine nuts and olive oil, and being spread on pizzas and linguini noodles all winter. Freeze it into ice-tray cubes for quick and ready use!
2. Bridge walking
Specifically, the Natchez Trace Parkway Bridge, spanning roughly one-third of a mile 155 feet above Highway 96 near Franklin. The view on all sides extends for miles, and thanks to its ingenious design—double concrete arches as the only visible support—a walk across its length in early October is like floating above an Impressionist landscape. Added attraction: the drive there and back.
3. 7th Annual Turnip Green Festival, Farmer’s Market
Maybe the goofiest of all the market’s vegetable-related celebrations, and my favorite for just that reason. It is a stubbornly Southern food: ornery, defiantly bitter, fixed in inhospitable soil, and forever wedded to its culinary soulmate, fatback. I am proud to stand in a line 50 people deep to sample a weedy delicacy Yankees would probably clear out of ditches.
4. Ella Fitzgerald, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” (from The Best of the Verve Songbooks, Vol. 1)
It wouldn’t be fall without Ella’s cooed surrender, the autumnally spare piano, or the insouciant spin she puts on the phrase, “Romance, fini.” I could put this record on in June and still sense leaves rustling. For more fortification against the coming chill, see also Frank Sinatra’s “Where or When” on Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, a recording of eruptive emotional force, or the gorgeous new Elvis Costello record North, an album of instant standards on the theme that new love is overwhelming, and scary.
5. The Dragon
This leaf season, while everyone else is creeping bumper-to-bumper through the Smokies from Gatlinburg to North Carolina, take a wild ride away from the crowd on US 129 to Deals Gap, N.C.—the lair of the Dragon, a wicked stretch of 318 up-and-down, side-to-side hairpin curves in a scant 11 miles. As a reward, you can pull off at Tail of the Dragon (tailofthedragon.com), an awesome souvenir shop for survivors. (I’ve had people ask about my T-shirt as far away as Canada.) Directions available on the Web site.
6. Cornbread dressing
My grandmother, Ruth White Ridley, was born in 1906, when Teddy Roosevelt was president and the Titanic hadn’t even been built. She died this summer after 97 years on this earth. She loved holidays and had a recipe for every occasion, but her favorite may have been Thanksgiving. Every November, even last year with her health winding down, she cooked up huge fragrant pans of cornbread dressing and fussed over them like her own children. When the weather gets cold this fall I will try her recipe, and hope that if I somehow mix the magic proportions of stock and sage and celery, the ones that she never wrote down, I will follow that scent to the kitchen door and find her, once again, on the other side.
Brittney Gilbert, freelance writer
1. Listen closely to a stranger.
Make plans now to attend the National Storytelling Festival held in historic Jonesborough, Tenn. Oct. 3-5. The National Storytelling Festival is a 30-year-old tradition begun by a high school journalism teacher inspired by Jerry Clower’s account of a coon hunt. The teacher began more than a festival, he inspired a movement in storytelling. Take a blanket.
2. Watch Twin Peaks.
What better time than in the fall, when the air is crisp with a sort of electricity, when the leaves on the ground are the very color and texture of that small Northwestwern town? Twin Peaks captured a nation a decade ago, and if you haven’t seen it in it’s entirety, then you might invest the time.
3. Take in a drive-in movie.
Summer nights in Tennessee can be downright sticky, so see a double-feature under the cool canopy of a harvest moon instead. The Stardust Drive-In is now open for business and just a short drive away in Watertown, 35 minutes from Nashville on I-40.
4. Hoop it up.
You haven’t hula hooped since grade school and here is the reason why: You can’t keep it up. Kid-size hoops are great for kids, but adults need something more substantial. Hoops built for big-kid hooping are bigger, heavier and stay up longer, making tricks and tosses much easier. It is also said to be meditative and a delightful intestinal massage. Hooping is something of an underground movement, with jam band concert-goers often swinging their hoops. See oping.org for more information.
5. Hike by the light of a full moon.
Join others in Edwin Warner Park site #9 on Sept. 10 for a mid-night hike lit by a lunar lamplight. No reservation is needed, only walking shoes, water and a flashlight.
6. Get buzzed enough to do the Chicken Dance.
One need not be German to take full advantage of Nashville’s annual German festival in historic Germantown on October 11. Polka bands go best with enormous amounts of beer and sausages and girls in dirndls, all of which the Oktoberfest proudly boasts.
Martin Brady, theater critic
Brunch with a cool lady at the Loveless Cafe sounds nice. So does a day trip to a Civil War battlefield. So does hitting a bucket of golf balls at a driving range. (I won’t do it well, but there’s still hope for the newbie.) And yes, I’ll spend a Sunday afternoon at the Coliseum watching Steve McNair and Eddie George work magic—gimme a call when you’ve got an extra ticket.
If it’s solitude I crave, but my apartment’s four walls are closing in on me, I can grab a good book and park myself under a tree at Centennial Park. After that, if I’m lucky, I could meet a good friend at Rio Bravo for some al fresco Margaritas.
But maybe best of all, for those of us who still revel in the lively (and “live”) arts, there are a host of upcoming fall theatricals that may keep me indoors but will nonetheless engage with their assortment of cutting-edge performances and/or dramatic words from the pens of major modern writers. Tennessee Repertory Theatre kicks off its 2003-2004 Mainstage season with Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart (Sept. 17-28). Later, the Rep’s Off-Broadway Series weighs in with a highly anticipated production of David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre (Nov. 11-22). Vanderbilt University’s Great Performances Series inaugurates the fall with a one-night only touring production of Anne Nelson’s acclaimed reflection on 9/11, The Guys, performed by renowned actor-director Tim Robbins’ Los Angeles theater company, The Actor’s Gang (Sept. 26). Mark Cabus’ Green Room Productions jumps back into the Nashville theatrical mix with an original revue of female performance art, Conjure Women, bringing together talented local ladies such as Minton Sparks, Carol Ponder and Jennifer Jewell in a celebration of movement, music and poetry (Oct. 3-11). Actors Bridge Ensemble resurrects things familiar with a re-staging of Marcus Hummon’s now-revised musical take on the life of Jim Thorpe, Warrior (Oct. 10-11), then serves up something brand-new with Marie Jones’ one-man play A Night in November (Nov. 21-30), starring Bill Feehely as a provincial Belfast civil servant befuddled by family and society. Mockingbird Theatre is on the boards with a tantalizing version of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love (Oct. 10-18), the first time this esteemed company has taken on one of America’s most uncompromisingly challenging playwrights. ACT I, everyone’s favorite ambitious community theater, takes a stab at Edward Albee with its production of his 1994 Pulitzer Prize winner Three Tall Women (Sept. 12-27).
For the young at heart—that’s still most of us, I hope—Nashville Children’s Theatre will present the opener of its 72nd season, Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs (Sept. 22-Oct. 5), under the direction of the play’s author, Moses Goldberg. Finally, for those who want to mix their high art with Tennessee history, the Nashville Ballet will mount their rendition of The Bell Witch, the company’s joint season opener with the Nashville Chamber Orchestra (Oct. 17-19).
Bruce Barry, political writer/Vanderbilt professor
1. Social Climbing
With 12 years as a season ticket holder for Vanderbilt football, making it to an average of about five games a year, ascending about 50 steps to my Section R seat, say, three times each game—that works out to an estimated 9,000 steps I’ve climbed for the Commodores (roughly 7,500 of them to watch the home team go down). Yes, I’ll be up there again this fall, but I’ll be pondering those steps and how many more I want to pay to climb. Silver lining: lagging ticket sales means better seats and fewer steps this year.
2. Unreality TV
When the leaves fall and the nights turn brisk, it’s time for this political junkie to lay in the Jack Daniel’s and spend more quality viewing time with, yes indeed, C-Span. The autumn before a presidential election year means hour after hour of “Road to the White House”—that sublime entertainment genre featuring politicians in painfully awkward conversations in small-town diners and strangers’ living rooms. You can’t get enough of this stuff (and C-Span will cheerfully make sure of that).
3. Show Me the Way
If you were in college when “Frampton Comes Alive” was released in 1976, there’s a good chance you burned copious brain cells to the gaudy improvisational stylings of “Do You Feel Like We Do.” (I wouldn’t know, of course.) Peter Frampton plays the Ryman Oct. 4, part of a busy summer/fall tour that will presumably help live down a 2000 appearance on “Live With Regis & Kathie Lee.” The Ryman show promises to either [a] be great fun or [b] really suck. Songwriter and guitar phenom Joe Bonamassa opens.
4. Board the Titanic
Those of us who opposed the deal that brought the Titans here, and who see the Coliseum as a monstrous plaything built on the backs of public school children, have a personal relationship with Titans football that is aloof at best. But one of those kids who get to pee in a filthy bathroom at a Nashville public school is mine, and he seems to think the Titans are okey dokey. Time to lighten up a bit? Hard to say, but Phil Bredesen and the Metro Council sold out our civic priorities, not Frank Wycheck and Samari Rolle. This fall, I’ll pay attention and act like I care.
Wayne Wood, humorist
1. Swimming
I plan to spend a lot of time this fall in the swimming pool. No kidding. I’ve been a dedicated swimmer—as in, I get in the water and clumsily paddle around for a while several days a week—for about 10 years. But there is something special about strolling through a crisp autumn morning to the Vanderbilt Rec Center and slipping into the water. It’s like hanging on to a little of summer, and for us summer people, fall is an exercise in delay.
2. Listening to summer music
Another delay in accepting that the horrors of winter are near is to continue to listen to music from summer. This has been a good summer for music: Fountains of Wayne’s Welcome Interstate Managers is my favorite summer album of several years, and I’ll continue to keep it in heavy rotation, along with the angry girl rap stylings of Northern State and the two Woody Guthrie Mermaid Avenues by Wilco and Billy Bragg, which came out several years ago but I discovered this year on my birthday thanks to my wife Sharon. As the Boss said many, many summers ago, “As those sweet summer nights/Turn into summer dreams...”
3. Hiking Ganier Ridge
This is where the fixation on summer ends and I embrace a Tennessee autumn and I can sum up this embrace in two words: Radnor Lake. This is what I think of the as THE Nashville place to go in fall. There is nothing like walking up Ganier Ridge on a cool morning, pausing to catch your breath, looking out over the changing leaves, and pitying all those people who live places where the seasons don’t change.
4. Studying
I enrolled last fall in the Master of Liberal Arts and Science program at Vanderbilt and I learned again what it was like to stay up late working on a term paper. The program is for people who are interested in a graduate degree that has broad and interesting subjects and fellow students. This fall’s class for me is called Biological Clocks, which sounds a) fascinating, and b) like it’s going to be one mofo of a term paper.
Christine Kreyling, architecture and urban planning writer
First things first: Open the windows. A northern front comes through, leaving in its wake—in the words of Hal Borland—“a wider horizon more clearly seen.” I turn off the thermostat, turn on the attic fan and pull fresh air into the house. Then I sit back and listen—to bird chatter, sidewalk voices, the cheers and groans from pick-up football games in the park across the street.
It’ s the end of tomato season. I buy a bushel of Bradleys at the Farmers’ Market and pull Marcella Hazan off the cookbook shelf. I turn to stained pages with recipes for “Tomato Sauce III”—the fruit reduced to its essence—and “Bolognese Meat Sauce.” I saute and simmer and stir all day. By evening there’s a freezer full of pasta sauce to get me through the winter.
I’m not into lawns. But August reduced my postage stamp of green to sod-in-crisis—a sickly blond thatch punctuated liberally by weeds. The advice of landscaper friends: Don’t wait for spring. So I’ll scatter fescue seed, add water and watch the grass grow.
For art appreciation, I’m doing fall at the Frist. First there’s “Art of Tennessee,” a celebration of Volunteer aesthetic expression through the ages. Next it’s artsy celebs in photo-portraits by Jack Mitchell. An October symposium has the intriguing title: “Ignorance or Prejudice? Changing Perceptions of Tennessee and Southern Furniture.” Justice for wood work?
As a journalist, I typically point my bifocals at other journalism. I ingest two newspapers a day—well, one (New York Times) and a half (Tennessean)—and stacks of weekly and monthly magazines. Finding time for hundreds of pages in hard covers is problematic. But I make an exception for the Southern Festival of Books. Each October I shuttle among the authors, then cruise the sale stalls and stock up on enough printed words to last until same time next year.
Willy Stern, investigative reporter
1. Adventures with Zack
Along with my canoe partner (an accomplished bowman who happens to be my 7-year-old son Zack), we like to point the car for Flatwoods, Tenn. There, some 90 minutes from Nashville, is a great put-in for overnight camping on the peaceful Buffalo River. We rent a canoe from Flatwoods Canoe Base (931-589-5661), and take in the fall foliage, turtles and snakes as we float the river. Eventually, we’ll find a secluded gravel bar, throw up a tent and settle in for a magical evening of hot dogs, marshmallows and stargazing.
2. Look for wild turkeys on the 11.5 mile perimeter trail at Montgomery Bell State Park
About an hour west of Nashville, between White Bluff and Dickson, sits often overlooked Montgomery Bell State Park. Aside from the cabins, golf, boating, dining and whatnot, the park has a fabulous rim hiking trail, 11.5 miles in all. It’s broken up by a series of campsites with shelters for overnight hikers. But the adventurous can trek over—or even run—the entire loop trail in a day. Be on the lookout for wild turkeys.
3. Shelby Bottoms tree hike
In early October, along with a Metro parks nature guru, I’ll join a hike in East Nashville’s Shelby Bottoms. The fall colors are spectacular, and park employees are informative without being annoying. On this year’s two-hour trek down the Cornelia Fort Trail (Oct. 7), we neophytes will learn about trees. A great trek and a better education. It’s free, but you have to register for a spot (352-6299).
Randy Horick, sports writer
1. Attend a Women’s World Cup game
I missed the two most recent World Cups hosted by the United States. Third time will be a charm. In late September, the American women’s team plays in Columbus, Ohio. And they’re hosting the perfect enemy—North Korea.
2. Hike Pickett State Park
Comparatively few people visit Pickett, since its better known neighbor, Big South Fork, is just across the road. But I hear that Pickett is every bit as spectacular and unspoiled, and you can feel like you have it almost all to yourself. On a weekend this fall when the leaves are turning and the air is crisp, I plan to find out.
3. See the Buford Pusser death car
Fear of embarrassment deterred me from visiting Twitty City and the Elvis-o-rama before they closed forever. Now, determined no longer to live a life of regret, I have resolved to see the famous deathmobile owned by the West Tennessee lawman before Pigeon Forge becomes too upscale for it.
4. Memorize a poem
In the film from the early ’70s, Jack Nicholson says you can become a concert pianist if you know five easy pieces. Similarly, I’ve learned people will think you’re erudite if you can recite a little poetry. So my self-improvement goal each fall is to memorize a short poem. Thus far, I’ve managed a Keats sonnet, W.H. Auden, Yeats and a Polish poet whose name I can’t remember, much less pronounce.
5. See a baseball playoff game
In most major league cities, your chances of scoring playoff tickets hinge on having connections or a willingness to spend obscene amounts of cash. But in Atlanta, where the playoffs are an annual fixture, the regularity (and boringness) of the Braves’ success has made playoff seats a lukewarm and readily available ticket.
Jack Silverman, copy editor, guitarist
When it comes to outdoor adventures, my eyes are usually bigger than my available free time, but a few things are on my radar this fall. From Sept. 27-Nov. 5, Blue Heron Nature Cruises offers three-hour “Fall Foliage” cruises down the Cumberland through the Cheatham Wildlife Management Area, aboard a 40-foot pontoon boat. For more info, call 385-7007 or visit www.cumberlandrivercharters.com.
This may finally be the year I brave Team Green’s annual Ocoee white-water rafting trip, on Sept. 27. Team Green, an adventure club sponsored by Lighting 100 radio station, offers a variety of events throughout the year. Check out www.teamgreenonline.com for a schedule.
Jack Daniel’s “Bike to Jack & Back” (www.msmidsouth.org), a benefit for National Multiple Sclerosis Society on Oct. 4-5 featuring a 150-mile round-trip bike ride to the famed distillery in Lynchburg, is not a race, but a leisurely ride, which nonetheless would surely test my endurance.
Cumberland Transit (www.cumberlandtransit.com), the outdoors/bike shop on West End, programs all sorts of outdoorsy stuff, including an Oct. 11 kayak trip/camp-out at Nickajack Lake, near Chattanooga. And no matter how little free time I manage to scrounge, I can always squeeze in a dog-walk on the trails in Percy Warner Park, where—particularly on weekdays—the combination of solitude, foliage, canine companionship and a leisurely stroll can be infinitely restorative.
Fear of embarrassment deterred me from visiting Twitty City and the Elvis-o-rama before they closed forever. Now, determined no longer to live a life of regret, I have resolved to see the famous deathmobile owned by the West Tennessee lawman before Pigeon Forge becomes too upscale for it.
4. Memorize a poem
In the film from the early ’70s, Jack Nicholson says you can become a concert pianist if you know five easy pieces. Similarly, I’ve learned people will think you’re erudite if you can recite a little poetry. So my self-improvement goal each fall is to memorize a short poem. Thus far, I’ve managed a Keats sonnet, W.H. Auden, Yeats and a Polish poet whose name I can’t remember, much less pronounce.
5. See a baseball playoff game
In most major league cities, your chances of scoring playoff tickets hinge on having connections or a willingness to spend obscene amounts of cash. But in Atlanta, where the playoffs are an annual fixture, the regularity (and boringness) of the Braves’ success has made playoff seats a lukewarm and readily available ticket.
Jack Silverman, copy editor, guitarist
When it comes to outdoor adventures, my eyes are usually bigger than my available free time, but a few things are on my radar this fall. From Sept. 27-Nov. 5, Blue Heron Nature Cruises offers three-hour “Fall Foliage” cruises down the Cumberland through the Cheatham Wildlife Management Area, aboard a 40-foot pontoon boat. For more info, call 385-7007 or visit www.cumberlandrivercharters.com.
This may finally be the year I brave Team Green’s annual Ocoee white-water rafting trip, on Sept. 27. Team Green, an adventure club sponsored by Lighting 100 radio station, offers a variety of events throughout the year. Check out www.teamgreenonline.com for a schedule.
Jack Daniel’s “Bike to Jack & Back” (www.msmidsouth.org), a benefit for National Multiple Sclerosis Society on Oct. 4-5 featuring a 150-mile round-trip bike ride to the famed distillery in Lynchburg, is not a race, but a leisurely ride, which nonetheless would surely test my endurance.
Cumberland Transit (www.cumberlandtransit.com), the outdoors/bike shop on West End, programs all sorts of outdoorsy stuff, including an Oct. 11 kayak trip/camp-out at Nickajack Lake, near Chattanooga. And no matter how little free time I manage to scrounge, I can always squeeze in a dog-walk on the trails in Percy Warner Park, where—particularly on weekdays—the combination of solitude, foliage, canine companionship and a leisurely stroll can be infinitely restorative.
