Sister Myotis, whose views on thongs and "good Christian panties" are a Memphis theatrical hit and a YouTube sensation, is headed for New York.

The portly founder and president of "the Honeybee's Ladies Auxiliary at the 80,000-member Good Tidings Apostolic Holiness Christian Fellowship of Saints" aims to plant a sleeper cell of like-minded Southern ladies in the Big Apple. As usual, she'll be joined onstage with Voices of the South partners Velma Needlemeyer (Todd Berry) and Ima Lone (Jenny Odle Madden) under the direction of Jerre Dye in a 22-performance run of Sister Myotis's Bible Camp, which opens June 11th and closes on the Fourth of July.

Sister Myotis' four-minute bit on thongs, in which she passes out "Democrat panties with a godly cotton panel" to thong-wearers in the audience, has been viewed 2,531,000 times on YouTube since it was posted in 2008. Watch it. It's hilarious. Amen.

There's just one problem. "She" is Memphian Steve Swift, a 40-year-old actor working to make ends meet at the Memphis museums system. Needless to say, he does not have the backing of a mega-church. Voices of the South is a shoestring operation, much like the 59-seat off-Broadway Abingdon Theater where the play will run.

Sister Myotis and her friends need a little help. That's where you come in. Memphis is on a nice little creative roll these days, with Memphis: The Musical playing on Broadway, local restaurants featured on the Food Channel, and indie bars written up in the Travel section of The New York Times last week. Swift & Co. need cash or in-kind donations for travel expenses, living expenses, and lodging in New York. Or, Swift says, "We will take your love and support."

He made a low-key appeal last weekend at First Congregational Church before the performance of J&K's Self-Rising Cabaret featuring Madden and the equally talented Kim Justis. He never went into his Sister Myotis character, even when the crowd said "Amen." Pros don't step on each other's lines or steal the spotlight.

If Swift had a penny for every time the thong video has been watched he'd have more than $25,000, which would make this appeal unnecessary. Of course, that's not how "the Interweb," as Sister Myotis calls it, works. All he's gotten from YouTube, which is owned by Google, which is worth a zillion dollars, is a message full of legal boilerplate about "monetized video" in which he would basically give away all his rights.

Swift grew up in a Pentecostal family in Jackson, Tennessee. He went to college at the University of Memphis but almost dropped out because he was afraid of a required course in public speaking. Instead he took Oral Interpretation of Literature, where you could read aloud a poem or short story. He found out he could do that well, and he took an acting class and majored in theater. After college, he took a class on gender in performance in London. Sister Myotis — the name is a genus of bats and was chosen for its sound and uniqueness — debuted as a bit part in a Christmas play in 2002.

"I am a difficult look to cast," says Swift, who is trying to lose weight before going to New York. "For years I bemoaned the fact that I did not drop out of school and move to New York or California. But now I realize that this work I have done here I never would have been able to do in New York."

Sister Myotis was an instant hit, but Swift has modified her character and dialect for seven years. She is about "everything that is not important about church" and is often invited to perform at churches. About one-fourth of her audiences think she really is a woman. Swift will sometimes greet elderly female patrons in character after a show and talk about breasts or weight problems.

The thong video ("about the tamest thing we do") is especially big in Georgia and Texas but has been viewed in Guantanamo.

"I had that video for a year or two before posting it," Swift says. "The moment I let go of it it just kind of took off."

If you've ever watched it, thought of mixing ambrosia with a vibrator, or worn Democrat panties, it's time to buck up. Send $1 to Voices of the South, P.O. Box 11222, Memphis, 38111. Hell, send them $5 or $10. A sleeper cell of Honeybees in New York City could be just what this country needs.

This is a book plug, a rip-off, and a suggestion.

The book is Super Freakonomics, the follow-up to the best-selling Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. The rip-off is some of what follows. And the suggestion is that Memphis might profit from Oprah-style group readings of these works.

Among other things, the authors help explain optional schools and skate parks.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a great title is worth a thousand words and a thousand dollars, or in the case of Freakonomics, many thousands of dollars. If you have read this far, you probably have a general idea of what these books are about. If not, it's an unconventional way of looking at human behavior and incentives and questioning numbers. The full title of the follow-up is Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.

(On that last part, the short answer is that it throws off the terrorist profilers. The witty and talented authors are not shy about dispensing a thimble full of common sense in a gallon jug.)

Freakonomics has become a franchise. The authors and various contributors also do a freakonomics blog on The New York Times website. Dubner is a former New York Times Magazine writer and editor, and Levitt is an economics professor at the University of Chicago. Funny is hard. They are both funny and well-informed. And they don't flinch at risqué topics like prostitution and specific acts of prostitution. One of their sources is a Chicago prostitute who earns $400 an hour. How she got into the business and set her price is a story not to be missed.

So much for the plug.

Now the rip-off and the suggestion. If there was ever a city that lends itself to freakonomics, it is Memphis. Hard attitudes. Seemingly unsolvable problems. Racial divides. A genuine desire to do better. A gritty culture. Mistakes often repeated. A city of entrepreneurs. Home of the super-duper freakonomics idea, FedEx.

A few years ago, there was a reading fad. Communities chose a book like To Kill a Mockingbird, and lots of people read it at more or less the same time in the name of betterment, bonding, and literacy. The idea was not new, but Oprah's Book Club helped nudge it along. Group readings of the freakonomics books might nudge Memphis out of its ruts and get people thinking differently.

Take optional schools. Every winter for at least 25 years, hundreds of bundled-up parents have lined up at the Memphis Board of Education to get into the optional schools of their choice.

This behavior is easy to misinterpret. The line is not an endorsement of Memphis City Schools in general. More like the opposite. It is an endorsement of certain schools by certain people. In my day as a young parent, a phone call would announce that "the line" was forming and you better get your ass over there. Once your place in the line was secured, you had to hold it by reporting for roll call every morning until the actual sign-up day. Then your kid got into Grahamwood or White Station or John P. Freeman, and you and your younger children were set for years, thanks to a legacy rule.

Some years the line was unnecessary. There were more spots than candidates. But the mere rumor of a shortage was enough to start the line. Take no chances when your kid's school is at stake and you don't want to pay $10,000 a year for private school.

Of course, if you missed the line you were screwed, if demand exceeded supply. Merely calling more schools optional did not work. The game was rigged in favor of two-parent families who didn't work the night shift and knew the rules, which were not exactly written on stone tablets. In response to complaints, 20 percent of the spots are now awarded by a lottery. But 20 percent is less than 80 percent. "The line" lives. It still pays to pay attention.

Skate parks are another example of more going on than meets the eye. The concept barely existed in Memphis 10 years ago. A small number of proponents worked the media and the Park Commission to generate awareness, support, and funds. Last week, a skate-park story made news when city councilwoman Wanda Halbert objected to its proposed location.

At this point, you might say "huh?" Why the interest? Why the opposition? And what the hell is a skate park? In a word, it's freakonomics.

The Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled against the city of Memphis in the Memphis City Schools funding case last week, but in its ruling, it overstated enrollment by more than 7,000 students.

The error raises doubts about the accuracy of MCS enrollment reports and could give the Memphis City Council some wiggle room in negotiations with the school board.

The appeals court wrote that MCS serves approximately 112,000 students, but the system has not been that large for several years. According to the MCS website, the system has "about 105,000" students. The Tennessee Report Card says the actual number is 104,829 students.

The per-pupil funding (from all sources) for MCS is $10,394. (For comparison, Davidson County/Nashville is $10,495 and Shelby County is $8,198.) Multiply that by 7,171 — the difference between the report card enrollment and the number the appeals court uses — and the result is approximately $75 million.

If the state Court of Appeals, which had months to review this case, doesn't know how many students there are in MCS, you have to wonder whether anyone does.

That should get members of the City Council doing some homework and demanding some answers before raising anyone's taxes and forking over more than $100 million to MCS for last year and this year. If MCS has been overstating its enrollment, then the system may not be due any extra funds.

MCS enrollment has long been a guessing game, with the difficulty compounded by population movement and the fact that there have been three superintendents in the last three years. Kriner Cash is in his second year. Dan Ward had the job in 2007-2008, and Carol Johnson was superintendent from 2003 to 2007.

For reporters, it takes a Freedom of Information Act request to the communications office under Cash to get this basic piece of information. You can find numbers as high as 118,000 and as low as 103,000 in various press reports, report cards, and MCS publications in recent years.

One thing is clear: The trend is down. In 2007, according to the Tennessee Report Card, MCS had 110,753 students.

But fewer students doesn't mean fewer teachers and administrators or school closings. The opposite is true. In 2007, MCS had 6,438 teachers and 359 administrators. In 2009 — with enrollment down 4 percent — MCS had 7,259 teachers and 439 administrators. And instead of closing underused schools, MCS built two new ones — Manassas High School and Douglass High School — which were well under capacity last fall.

The total proposed MCS budget for 2008-2009 was $931,966,343. The state funds 48 percent of that and Shelby County 29 percent.

The city has funded as much as 10 percent in recent years but reduced its contribution in 2008, sparking the lawsuit. Instead of appropriating the $84 million it gave MCS in 2007-2008, the Memphis City Council cut the appropriation to $27 million. MCS wants $57 million in make-up money for 2008-2009 and even more for this year and next year. A special property tax increase could be the only way to get it.

But wait a minute.

The appeals court and the Chancery Court in Memphis ruled that Memphis has a statutory school-funding obligation called "maintenance of effort." But there is an exception, which the appeals court noted near the end of its ruling:

"Revenue derived from local sources must equal or exceed prior year actual revenues — excluding capital outlay and debt service and adjusted for decline in average daily membership."

In other words, revenue can decline if enrollment declines.

The Memphis City Council should bring Superintendent Cash and his lieutenants to City Hall and ask them this:

What is the current enrollment, and how do you know this?

What was the enrollment for the last five years?

Why did MCS build Manassas High School and Douglass High, at a cost of more than $45 million?

What are your plans for closing schools in parts of the city where there are not enough students to fill them?

How much enrollment gain in MCS is due to annexation? Shelby County has been operating schools in annexation areas for years, then turning them over to MCS. Next up in the batting order is Southwind High School, with nearly 1,500 students.

Before we can decide how much funding Memphis schools are entitled to, and how the costs should be borne by city and county taxpayers, we have to have accurate enrollment numbers and an explanation for discrepancies.

On Saturday, I went to the Memphis Zoo and stared down the wolves in the Teton Trek exhibit that opened last year. Nice.

On Saturday night, I went to see George Clooney at Malco's Studio on the Square. Nice.

On Sunday, I went to the open house for the new 390-seat Playhouse on the Square, with a backstage rigging area that goes up seven stories and can fly Peter Pan over the audience. Nice.

Later that afternoon, I went to the Central Library, which opened in 2001, then over to Rhodes College, where tuition, room, and board costs $42,000 a year. Very nice.

And on Monday, I read that the owners of Overton Square can't come up with a deal for developing an empty parking lot in the heart of Midtown and have taken their proposed grocery store, demolition, and new buildings off the table.

So much going on in Midtown, so much investment, so much prosperity and potential, so many opinions, and so little going on at Overton Square. What is wrong with this picture? I asked the anchor tenants with money in the game: Jimmy Tashie of Malco's Studio on the Square and George Falls, owner of Paulette's.

Malco built its four-screen boutique theater in Overton Square 10 years ago after taking a pass — wisely, as it turned out — on Peabody Place downtown.

"We've been in the square since 2000," Tashie said. "There was a lot of talk at that time of bringing in all kinds of new stuff. Of course nothing has happened, other than moving Le Chardonnay and Bayou Bar and Grill over to impact our parking.

"When they moved everybody north of Madison, we knew something was going to happen. It's a shame to have that big parking lot with nothing going on. Finding the best use is subject to a lot of interpretation. What Malco wants is something pedestrian-friendly across Madison. We want something open where people feel it is all connected. A view corridor is an important component so people can look between the buildings and see activity on the north side of Madison.

"I have great respect for all the people saying that Midtown must retain its integrity. Whether they can use all the old buildings, I don't know. A lot of them are going to be difficult to deal with. That's a business decision for an investment group to make.

"Cooper-Young has got a little of the spark that Overton Square used to have but no longer has. You don't want a shopping center storefront look there.

"Our theater is doing fine. We've been very happy with it. If they're making the right kind of movies, then our business is healthy. We like having our film festivals and special showings there. The new Playhouse is a great thing. With that, you have live theater, good restaurants, and a movie theater. It just seems like maybe something good is about to happen."

Paulette's restaurant has been at Overton Square for 35 years.

"I want something over there," Falls said. "It is terrible not having something across the street. Ever since TGI Friday's went out, it just hasn't been the same. I would rather have something that may not be my first choice than nothing at all. The dream come true would be mixed retail and housing, but that's not going to happen.

"The landlord with Fisher Capital in Denver is a great guy, but he's not a developer. He seems to like the idea of the grocery store, and I'm certainly not opposed to it. They spent a lot of money fixing up the old buildings, but it didn't seem to help. I was disappointed when I heard about them withdrawing their proposal. I would love to see the development go through that these guys have planned.

"The movie theater hasn't been what I think some of the former landlords thought it would be. We were told we would have a 10 percent increase. I said I would take 1 percent. The thing is, a movie usually starts at dinnertime. We are doing okay, not what it was in the boom days, but we're doing all right."

Tom Lowe is president of Univest, co-owner of Overton Square.

"I think the economic window of opportunity is limited," he said. "We want to know where the community stands. We don't want to force anything. We're very impressed with Councilman Shea Flinn, and we'll see what he can pull together. We need cooperation, support, and realism from the community."

When Jeff Sanford took over as head of the Center City Commission in 1998, the Pyramid's empty space was being touted as the future home of a Grammy Museum; AutoZone Park and FedExForum and most of Peabody Place had not been built; office buildings were giving way to housing; and the shortcomings of a pedestrian mall were painfully obvious.

In other words, while some things about downtown have changed, some have stayed the same.

Sanford, 67, announced last month that he plans to leave his job in July to go into consulting. So when we sat down this week for an exit interview, it was really only half exit interview and half what's-your-last-act interview.

Exuberantly praised last year by Councilman Joe Brown for his "guts" and, uh, manliness, Sanford is an amiable, low-key guy with a reined-in ego, a small office across the plaza from City Hall, a staff of 15 administrators, and a $3.5 million operating budget. A member of the City Council himself from 1977 to 1983, Sanford reminded me that he still has six months to go and then honed in on nitty-gritty details of downtown infrastructure before we got to the big stuff.

The CCC to-do list for 2010 includes sprucing up streets and alleys, cracking down on panhandlers and sales of single beers and "pesky street behavior," and handing over management of street parking to a private company. A master of finding empty spaces and milking parking meters for a couple of hours on 50 cents, I looked nervously out the window at the mention of this one.

"We have not been very successful in finding the money to implement the 2001 Streetscape Master Plan for 80 square blocks of downtown," he said. "We have spent about $5 million of the $75 million that is needed."

The Center City Commission is a relatively modern invention, dating back some 35 years. What gave it clout was the blessing of key developers and its ability to grant tax freezes as an incentive to develop new properties like Barbaro Flats or fix up old buildings like Lincoln American Tower. Depending on your point of view, the glass is half-full or half-empty. Some $5 billion has been invested downtown in the last 15 years, but the four corners of the intersection of Union and the Main Street mall remain vacant.

"Changing a neighborhood or a city takes decades, not days," he said. "I've had to learn the true meaning of the expression that patience is a virtue."

Here's what he had to say about some hot-button topics.

On Bass Pro: "Given the choices, it is still the best option. It's that or an empty building."

On cars on the mall: "Someone came here and said it could be done for a few thousand dollars, but when you start looking at the details, it isn't easy. It would take $10 million to return cars to the mall. It's like forcing a square peg in a round hole."

On Mud Island park, which went from a $20 million project to a $60 million project while he was a councilman: "One problem has always been coming up with a reason to return. I'm hopeful that plans will include new reasons to make return visits."

On the Sterick Building and other "big empties": "As developers say, it simply doesn't pencil. Not as a hotel, residential, or office. Boarding up broken windows with plywood is not putting the best face on downtown. We need a higher standard."

On whether there is a need for both the CCC and Riverfront Development Corporation: "Next question. I've been asked that before, but I'm not in position to make a judgment."

On consolidation of city and county government: "I have been a proponent since before my council days."

On AutoZone Park: "Look for new ownership of the physical property as well as the team. Something other than it falling back on the taxpayers."

On whether Midtown, Whitehaven, or other areas should have development corporations: "New York has close to 60 CCCs. I see no reason why it couldn't potentially work in other locations."

On future consulting: "I plan to take what I learned here over 12 years and offer my advice to city builders in other cities and maybe even help analyze market opportunities here."

We were out of time. My parking meter had clicked over to red. No ticket. Another revenue opp lost. Take that, CCC.

It was a good year for doing more with less.

Think yoga, sliders, 401(k) accounts, blogs, the airlines, Starbucks, and interim mayors. Also Snuggies, Crocs, and 64-calorie beer, for which there will be special corners in hell.

Think "Hitler's Take on LSU" on YouTube, Lil Rounds and Alexis Grace on American Idol, Ole Miss running back Dexter McCluster (5'9" and 170 pounds) running wild against Tennessee, and the Grizzlies minus Allen Iverson.

Think advertising. Big corporations and the creative teams at their agencies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads for the Super Bowl every year. The Doritos "crystal ball" ad, chosen as one of the best of the lot, created by a pair of thirtysomething brothers, cost just under $2,000.

Think books and movies. Elmore Leonard advises would-be authors to leave out the parts readers skip. Cormac McCarthy, former East Tennesseean, used to write long books like Suttree and All the Pretty Horses with long sentences and paragraphs. His last two novels, No Country for Old Men and The Road, are short books with short sentences and utterances that are barely sentences at all. Both have been made into major movies.

There were also those who managed to do less with more.

Think big banks, the stimulus, Oprah, Tiger Woods, John "0 for 2008" Calipari, one and done, the movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, Congress and health care, Willie Herenton, Michael Jackson, another season of 24, Yahoo, and Tommy West's upcoming prepaid retirement.

Overton Square has some popular restaurants and a nice movie theater and lots of passionate supporters but can't get its act together. Where were the satirical publication The Onion and Christian Lander and his blog "Stuff White People Like" when city councilman Shea Flinn convened a hearing on what to do about the square?

As the Onionists might have written it, the largest ethnic minority group in Memphis, wearing colorful ethnic designer coats and seasonal footwear from Patagonia and L.L. Bean, rallied at City Hall to demand that attention be paid to the need for an ethnic market such Trader Joe's with exotic herbs and wines as well as boutique shoppes in historically significant buildings and parking areas restricted to Subaru Outbacks, bicycles, and skateboards.

Riverfront development and Beale Street Landing stalled as prices went up. The debate between pro-development types and preservationists is well and good, but holding future faceoffs in, say, the Raleigh Springs Mall or Fox Meadows might shed a different light on things.

And some are doing more with more. Gadflys, comedians, and commenters in the blogosphere have had a field day with the pompous and pretentious. The bane of our public boards is conformity and bluff collegiality, which stifles dissent. I sort of miss Carol Chumney and John Vergos on the Memphis City Council and Walter Bailey on the Shelby County Commission. Bash public officials all you want, but at least they own up to their comments and do battle face to face.

Let's hear it for impolitic questions that make the powerful roll their eyes and gnash their teeth or grin and bear it. For years, a tall, plainspoken gentleman dressed in suspenders came to the FedEx annual stockholders meeting to voice his displeasure to Fred Smith. Sometimes the questions were off the wall, and once in a while they were pretty good. As a shareholder, he never got his way, but he always got his say. And I bet he went home happy.

And some prospered through thick and thin and thinner. A decade ago, White Station High School couldn't win a football game but was a basketball and academic powerhouse. New coaches and recruiting changed that, and this year White Station added a state football championship. So did MUS in the private sector, thanks to an infusion of black athletes at skill positions. Behold the emergence of the super schools.

And the super churches. Bellevue Baptist and Hope Presbyterian, among others, combine inner-city outreach with suburban megaplexes offering first-rate musicians performing on a concert stage, spiritual sustenance, motivation, a fitness center, outdoor team sports, adult education, and singles groups.

There's a big management job open at the Med, but filling it is not going to be easy. Anyone want to play captain on the Titanic?

In a commentary in The Commercial Appeal last week, Gene Holcomb, chairman of the board for the Med, said the hospital has no type of service that is profitable and only 10 to 13 percent of its patients are covered by commercial insurance. Without more financial support, he said, "The Med will eventually die a natural death."

A spokesman for the Med told the Flyer that the board of directors is seeking a permanent chief executive for a salary of $450,000 to $500,000 a year, starting in March. The Med, which receives an annual subsidy of around $32 million from Shelby County government, has outsourced its management to FTI Cambio since July 2007.

The executive search will be complicated by at least two factors. As Holcomb said, the hospital's future is uncertain, with its emergency room scheduled to close next year and its very survival at stake. The Med serves indigent patients from Arkansas and Mississippi as well as Tennessee but receives, at best, partial reimbursements from neighboring states.

The second problem is that executive salaries at both nonprofit and for-profit hospitals and hospital systems in this area far exceed the $450,000 to $500,000 that the Med hopes to pay.

It is not clear how much the Med paid to individual corporate officers under its two contracts with FTI Cambio, which included a bonus for cost savings. The IRS Form 990 for 2008 lists "outsourced management services" for $7,377,225 but no specific salaries for a chief executive, chief financial officer, or chief medical officer. Monica Wharton, legal counsel for the Med, said that information could not be obtained. In 2006, the year before FTI Cambio came aboard, the Med's CEO was paid $274,722.

In contrast, the price of executive talent tops $2 million a year at one local nonprofit hospital and $10 million a year at a for-profit system in Memphis, according to a Flyer survey of tax returns, proxy statements, and other public documents.

At nonprofit Baptist Memorial Health Care, according to the 2008 IRS Form 990, 11 executives earned more than $500,000 in total compensation. Baptist has a 32 percent share of the Memphis market. Chief executive Stephen Reynolds received $1,697,000; chief information officer Jerry Brantley received $2,294,000; and chief operating officer David Hogan got $2,392,000.

Nonprofit Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare has a 37 percent market share in Memphis. In 2008, chief executive Gary Shorb received $1,436,000; chief financial officer Christopher McLean received $744,700; and chief operating officer Peggy Troy got $665,000.

Baptist and Methodist compete for lucrative group accounts at corporations such as FedEx and local government entities such as the Memphis City Schools, entities with employees covered by insurance and able to pay their bills. They also battle over territorial rights in Olive Branch, Germantown, and other suburbs.

Bond analysts have noted that both hospital systems reported stronger-than-expected earnings and higher margins in 2009. Their tax-free status is justified by their mission of providing care for all in keeping with the tenets of their respective churches.

Indigent patients are a drag on earnings. If the Med fails, both Baptist and Methodist will get more indigent patients, says Arthur Sutherland, retired physician and founder of the Sutherland Cardiology Clinic.

"Nobody will escape this if the Med were to close," he said.

Here is the compensation for top executives at other hospital systems in the Memphis area:

• North Mississippi Health Services in Tupelo: John Heer, president, $774,000; Gerald Wages, treasurer, $695,000; Rodger Brown, vice president, $306,000.

• Baptist Health, a hospital network in Arkansas separate from Baptist Memorial Health Care: Russell Harrington Jr., CEO, $845,000; Allen Smith, senior VP, $460,000.

• Tenet Health Care, a private hospital network traded on the New York Stock Exchange, where compensation includes stock awards and options: Tenet has 14 percent of the Memphis market and operates St. Francis Hospital. According to Tenet's 2009 company proxy statement, the highest paid officers were: Trevor Fetter, CEO, $11,400,000; Biggs Porter, chief financial officer, $3,407,000; Stephen Newman, chief operating officer, $4,233,000.

• St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, a world-famous nonprofit specializing in the treatment of childhood cancer: William Evans, CEO, $711,000; James Downing, VP and scientific director, $604,000; Michael Canarios, CFO, $375,000.

You can probably win a bar bet with this one: Who is the only Memphian to have authored a New York Times number-one best-seller?

Not John Grisham, who used Memphis as the setting for some of his early novels but never lived closer than Southaven. Not Elvis Presley, whose autobiography doubtless would have been a best-seller if he had gotten around to writing one. Not Kemmons Wilson, who made the cover of Time magazine as the founder of Holiday Inns. And not Shelby Foote, whose three-volume history of the Civil War should be in every serious home library.

The answer is Don Hutson, a motivational speaker, business consultant, and co-author with Ken Blanchard of The One Minute Entrepreneur. As the title suggests, this is no tome. At 130 pages, it would fit neatly into Foote's footnotes or your coat pocket. Each of the 14 chapters is followed by a page of "one minute insights" summarizing key points (sample: "Keep your priorities in order"). The co-authors co-authored it with Ethan Willis, who shares cover billing. The Times, it should be noted, lists best-sellers by categories, one of which is "Advice and How-To."

Still, a best-seller is a best-seller. The One Minute Entrepreneur, like Blanchard's 26-year-old The One Minute Manager, is a modern publishing phenomenon. Books promote seminars and speeches, which sell tapes and more books in bulk orders or at $19.95 per single copy, which builds the brand. Hutson's claim to fame is the culmination of 40 years of hard work in the super-competitive business of sales training. At 64, he makes 75 speeches a year and embraces web-based technologies, blogs, and social media to promote himself.

The book is written as a fictional parable about "Jud," who, like Hutson, graduates from the University of Memphis, becomes a speaker, and starts his own company. Hutson says it's mostly fictional, although there are some real people and some incidents are drawn from his or Blanchard's personal experience. Hutson's company, U.S. Learning, does training for several Fortune 500 companies.

The book, published in 2008, was five years in the making. Hutson pitched it to Blanchard as a book about mentors. Blanchard and his publishing committee, swamped with proposals, were lukewarm. Hutson's proposal went on the back burner. Willis suggested changing the focus to entrepreneurs instead of mentors. Bingo.

"It wasn't so much any negatives about mentoring as it was excitement about entrepreneurship right now, with a lot of people getting laid off and doing their own thing," Hutson says.

The store of American proverbial wisdom goes back at least 250 years to Benjamin Franklin ("Time is money") and Poor Richard's Almanac. Famous practitioners include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain (as prolific a speaker as he was an author), Will Rogers, and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking). Peale and Memphis homebuilder and positive thinker Wallace E. Johnson, author of Work Is My Play, inspired a "Believe in Memphis" civic campaign after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Hutson was browsing through 25-cent books at a yard sale when he came across one written nearly a century ago called The Miracle of Right Thought by someone he'd never heard of, Orison Marden. It changed his life. He has collected 41 more of Marden's books, calls him his literary mentor, and reads him aloud with his wife for daily sustenance.

The public's appetite for self-improvement and inspirational maxims appears to be insatiable. Every celebrity, famous athlete, fallen angel, wronged woman, and aging politician grinds out a book that enjoys a few weeks of display in the book stores and on the "new releases" shelves at the library. It is an easy transition from the sweetness of Hallmark cards to the cynicism of Stephen Colbert's "Word" segment. A new book called Confessions of a Public Speaker, by Scott Berkun, says the real secret is that audience expectations are low, so practice, be early, and don't worry.

Hutson would call a comedian's one-liners "takeaways" (as in the pearls that audience members take away from a long speech) and a contrarian book about public speaking "product differentiation." He is a proponent of both concepts.

But more than ever, in these hard economic times, he believes in mixing hope and advice with wit. Like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, today's audiences are longing for "a little good news." As for whether a speaker should use humor, Hutson invariably says "only if you want to get paid."

Hoping to beat the holiday rush, I did a little fantasy shopping this week. Not for me and mine, but for Memphis. It went something like this:

Good to see you out here, sir. What may I help you with?

I'm looking for game-changers.

Yes, game-changers. I think I know what you mean. We have several possibilities, but this could take a while. How much did you want to spend?

Millions, maybe more.

That's the spirit. You seem to be familiar with the vocabulary of sports. Let's start over there. Football or basketball?

Both.

Coaches or players?

Both. A college football coach who can win seven games a year, put 35,000 people a game in Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium, and take the heat off R.C. Johnson and some of the load off Josh Pastner. And a pro basketball team that wins consistently and fills FedExForum like the Tigers and Josh Pastner do and gets people excited like Allen Iverson did.

Sorry, I'm a shopping consultant, not a miracle worker. You ever hear of one-to-a-customer? Or listen to Tommy West's rant? Or see those Iverson jerseys that were shipped this week to Tanzania? What else is on your list?

A game-changer for Shelby County.

That would be the new mayor, Joe Ford. You've heard about the Ford turnaround. This one comes with a lot of mileage and an unusual warranty. Instead of running for a long time, it promises to stop running for good after one year.

What accessories do you recommend?

Might I suggest relevance?

How about something for the new city mayor A C Wharton? He's so popular that he even got an invitation to the White House West Wing when he visited Washington last week. What do you get the man who has everything?

A Ford for a foil isn't enough? How about some help in the kitchen? Just make sure to remind him that he's the head cook.

Anything else?

How about a warmed-over consolidation recipe? We're running a special this year. Our research says it's very popular.

Your research wasn't listening when the County Commission chose a new mayor this month and half the members put their names in nomination for a job that will last eight months. What do you have that will provide lots of jobs?

Well, actually that would be two governments. More local government, not less, is the greatest jobs stimulus we have going. It makes it hard to sell our consolidation game-changer though.

I can see that. What do you have that's educational?

We can set you up with $90 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Sounds good. What's the catch?

Your schools have to be really bad, and you can't just use it to balance your checkbook. Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools, says her district spends more money per child than anyone, and their results are at the bottom. So we're packaging this with accountability and political courage.

I'll take it. What's behind that wall over there?

You can't go in there. That's where we keep grand juries. Sort of like Bad Santa's elves, 23 of them and a federal prosecutor, busy all year making nasty indictments for people who've been naughty.

Anyone in particular?

Let's just say you don't want a target letter in with your Christmas cards. If the target is an ex-mayor, then you've got your game-changer. A few years ago they gave one to Rickey Peete and Ed Ford. Did it in December, too. Call them sentimental.

But couldn't the elves say "no" to the prosecutor?

That's very rare. The prosecutor only needs 12 votes, and the elves have been working for more than a year. A target letter usually means you'll get a "gift."

I'm not sure that's the kind of game-changer Memphis needs.

We know. And it's not returnable either. People who get one have been known to make quite a scene. That's why we say, "Be careful what you wish for."

Last week, attorneys for Barron and the PGA argued his case in federal court in Memphis for more than three hours. On Monday, U.S. magistrate Tu Pham denied Barron’s request for a temporary restraining order that would have allowed him to compete this week in a qualifying tournament in Houston.

Strict liability strikes again.

“You are strictly liable whenever a prohibited substance is in your body,” says the first page of the PGA’s anti-doping manual.

Although Barron said he took testosterone and a beta-blocker drug for several years under a doctor’s care for treatment of a medical condition, the PGA Tour refused to give him a “therapeutic use exemption” (TUE), and Pham declined to give him a mulligan. Barron is the second Memphis athlete to make ESPN this year for alleged cheating. The first, of course, was former University of Memphis basketball star Derrick Rose, whose bogus SAT test cost the Tigers their 2007-2008 victories. (The university has appealed the NCAA’s ruling.)

By ordinary standards, Barron, 40 years old, is an excellent golfer. By PGA standards, he is a journeyman battling to qualify for a tour card in the PGA’s pressure-packed “Q-School.” In June he got a break: a sponsor’s exemption into the St. Jude Classic. He played two rounds, shooting 9-over-par 149 and failing to make the cut but not before he was drug tested. Barron did not dispute the positive test results and admitted to continued use of testosterone and propranolol. After again reviewing his medical records, the PGA Tour suspended him for one year.

With that, the relatively unknown Barron joined fellow athletes such as track star Marion Jones, cyclist Floyd Landis, and baseball player Manny Ramirez, all of whom were penalized for illegal drug use. Attorney Jeff Rosenblum argued that Barron is “disabled” under the Americans With Disabilities Act, because low testosterone levels “impair a major life activity,” namely intimacy with his wife. The beta-blocker, he said, was for treatment of a racing heart, and Barron’s doctor was trying to wean him off of it.

“This is an outrageous penalty when you compare it to baseball or football,” Rosenblum said.

Not so, said Rich Young, the PGA Tour’s lawyer. The rules are the rules, and Barron signed off on them and broke them.

“This isn’t fun or easy for anybody, but it’s the right thing for a sport to do,” Young said.

The drugs are banned because they’re performance enhancers that increase strength, speed recovery, and calm nerves. Young described a situation where a golfer needs to make up one stroke on the 18th hole and can either play it safe or go for the green on his second shot to get the last qualifying spot. On such decisions, tour cards are earned, and fortunes are made. Steve Stricker came through Q-School in 2005 and earned $6 million this year. And Memphian Shaun Micheel came out of nowhere to win the PGA Championship in 2003. Micheel’s name came up in court. Last year, he got a medical exemption to use testosterone. He and Barron are friends and are the same age. Micheel told ESPN.com last week that the PGA’s drug-testing process “nearly drove me out of the game” and made him question whether it was worth it to play pro golf. Young said he wouldn’t talk about Micheel “but if the facts had been the same, then his TUE request would have been turned down.”

Barron’s wife and this reporter were the only spectators at the hearing. The case has attracted international attention. Pham took three days to issue his 33-page ruling after first saying he might have it in a day. He called it “a close case.”

“If Barron is permitted to play in the second qualifying stage (Q-School), it could raise substantial public policy concerns regarding the enforcement of anti-doping policies in professional sports,” he wrote in his conclusion. Rosenblum hinted that he will probe the inner workings of the PGA Tour through the discovery process if the case goes to trial. It has been assigned to U.S. district judge Samuel H. Mays. In golf parlance, Barron went for the green instead of laying up, and his ball landed in the water. Now he has a year to think about it.

Headlines can mislead us. The financial crisis that could close the emergency room at the Med is a special case. Nonprofit hospitals in Memphis make a lot of money, they're expanding out of Memphis, and their balance sheets are flush with cash.

The two giants are Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation, with 32 percent of the Memphis market and rising, and Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, with 37 percent of the Memphis market. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital specializes in childhood cancer and has a small share of the market.

In a report in October affirming Baptist's "AA" bond rating, Standard & Poor's noted that Baptist "has identified more than $933 million of fixed income and equity assets," commonly known as stocks and bonds. In the 11 months ending in August, Baptist's revenues exceeded expenses by $88 million, up from $36 million in 2006, when it was in a slump. This year's results and 5 percent operating margin have far exceeded the hospital's own forecast of an operating margin of less than 1 percent.

Methodist isn't doing quite as well but has a very strong balance sheet and an "A" credit rating. According to its third-quarter financial statement, Methodist has $711 million in cash, an increase of $88 million this year. Patient service revenue increased by $23 million, or 2.6 percent over the same period last year. Methodist's operating margin is 4.5 percent, with operating income of $56 million for the first nine months of 2009.

The term "nonprofit" as opposed to "for-profit" hospital systems such as Tenet Healthcare, which has 14 percent of the Memphis market, does not mean Baptist and Methodist don't make a lot of money. They do, even during a recession and a national "health-care crisis." They don't pay taxes, because they each provided more than $275 million of charity care last year, by their own accounting.

So did the Med. And if the Med cuts back or closes, that charity care will have to go somewhere else. And there's the rub. Charity care is crucial for mission statements and tax exemptions but bad for balance sheets and credit ratings. The founders' vision is the financier's risk.

Baptist hospital was founded in 1912 by churchmen in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi "to render quality health care to all in this area in keeping with the tenets of our church." Methodist's mission is "supporting and extending the health and welfare ministries of the Memphis, Arkansas, and Mississippi annual conferences of the United Methodist Church."

For nearly a century, a Baptist hospital of some sort was a Medical Center landmark, until its 20-story building between Union and Madison was closed in 2000 and demolished in 2005. Baptist now has 14 hospitals and one rehabilitation facility but nothing in the Medical Center. Its growth has been in the suburbs and the tri-state region. Its board of directors includes only one Memphian: president and chief executive officer Stephen Reynolds.

This is how the audit and financial reports describe indigent care: "Hospitals may be susceptible to economic and political changes that could increase the number of indigents or the hospitals' responsibility for caring for this population." And this: "The indigent care communities could constitute a material and adverse risk in the future."

From this perspective, Methodist could be more "at risk" than Baptist, because its hospitals are closer to indigent populations. In addition to expanding its Germantown hospital, it is replacing Le Bonheur on Dunlap. If the Med closes, Methodist could see its market share increase but its revenues decrease as doctors and paying patients migrate eastward and non-paying patients go to Le Bonheur or Methodist University hospital on Union Avenue.

The Med has a proud 180-year history and a lousy balance sheet. In 1981, it was incorporated as the Regional Medical Center for indigent care for a six-state area. In partnership with the University of Tennessee medical school, it has trained more than half the physicians practicing in Tennessee.

But it loses money. The Med lost $33 million from operations in 2005, $38 million in 2006, $39 million in 2007, and $40 million in 2008. The loss was partially offset by a contribution from Shelby County government of $25 million to $31 million a year.

Hospitals are desirable talent magnets for cities, part of the "eds and meds" equation. The issue is who's going to take the hit for indigent care?

So this is what $751,000 buys these days in Memphis: a big house or the Raleigh Springs Mall.

Even in a real estate crisis, some numbers jump out at you. At that price, you might think the mall on Austin Peay Highway is closed or bulldozed, like the old Mall of Memphis.

But the doors of the main entrance were open at 8 a.m. this week, and the woman mopping the floor said walkers can come in at 9 a.m. and shoppers at 10 a.m. There are about 30 tenants listed on the building directory, including fast-food restaurants, sporting-goods stores, jewelers, and a Malco 12-screen theater with five screens currently in use. A Sears that was not part of the sale remains open. But Dillard's and JC Penney are gone, their signs stripped off the anchor stores, leaving only the shadow of their names. An expressway-style flyover provides quick access from Raleigh's main drag to Interstate 40 and newer suburbs.

The mall is a symptom of what ails Memphis. There are vast empty spaces from Raleigh to Hickory Hill to the fairgrounds to Overton Square to the Pyramid looking to hook up with Bass Pro, Target, Trader Joe's, or some other retailer. But planners say there is a simple reason why there's not much action.

"There is way too much retail for this community to support," said Robert Lipscomb, head of the Memphis Division of Housing and Community Development. "There is not enough demand to support all these malls."

Less than a mile from the Raleigh Springs Mall on Austin Peay Highway there is a Kmart store and a Walmart. Lipscomb, along with the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce and neighborhood leaders, tried to get the Walmart to move into the mall, but Walmart could not find a user for its current building, so it is staying put.

Dexter Muller, senior vice president of community development for the chamber, said Memphis malls have been cannibalizing one another for years as the population moves east and south.

"The beginning of the end for Raleigh Springs was when Wolfchase Galleria opened," he said. "The next new mall blows out everything behind it."

Muller and Lipscomb said Raleigh's "fundamentals" are still good. There are more than 100,000 people who live between Frayser and Raleigh. The Raleigh Community Council is one of the strongest neighborhood groups in the city.

"Raleigh is a diverse community with stable incomes and good neighborhoods," Lipscomb said. "We've got to make it work."

The city has hired a planning firm, Looney Ricks Kiss, to help research the market and figure out what to do. Federal stimulus money could play a role. Muller said Southland Mall in Whitehaven has survived the loss of key anchors, but battling decline and attracting new businesses "is like trench warfare." If neighborhood residents don't "buy everything they can within the neighborhood" then retailers fail, he said.

Several remedies already have been tried, including the movie theater, which was lured by an $11 million investment by the mall's previous owner. Lipscomb notes that multiplex theaters have had crowd problems recently that can drive away more business than they attract. The current mall owner, Whichard Real Estate based in North Carolina, has not announced its plans. A Memphian who is familiar with the company from when it owned Southland Mall calls them "speculators."

"I don't know what the best prospects are," Lipscomb said. "Probably some kind of retail unique to the area. That's one reason to bring in the outside expertise."

Kevin Brooks, president of the neighborhood council, has lived in Raleigh since 1997. He and his wife raised three children there. He hopes the new owners, whom he has not yet met, can attract an anchor tenant. The mall is "beautiful on the inside" despite little patronage.

"Something like a Target store would conform with the status of Raleigh," he said. "We don't have a whole lot of low-income areas, and we don't have many high-income residents. We are pretty much a good representation of Memphis in the middle class. We do have the perception of being a violent area, but if you look at police reports, they actually pulled police out of our area and sent them to other areas. I hate to see the news pointing fingers at Raleigh."

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Ole Miss fans figured it out a long time ago. Good football teams and great quarterbacks come and go, but an excellent picnic spread in the Grove never disappoints.

The rest of us are catching on. Food is the new football. Me and my remote control used to live in ESPN Land. We hung out with Boomer, Matt, Tom, Dan, Sterling, Mike, Jimmy, and lantern-jawed Bill Cowher. We talked about Tom and Peyton and "length" and "athleticism" and the fine points of the nickel D. We lived for the play of the day and those lists of the 50 greatest of all time.

Something happened. My wife set the remote on Channel 69, miles and miles from ESPN Land, in a place called the Food Network. The superstars were perky Rachael Ray, blabby Paula Deen, gorgeous Giada De Laurentiis, spiky Guy Fieri, and Memphians Pat and Gina Neely. Every time I came home, the Barefoot Contessa was smiling at me and whipping up a tasty plate of something or other for her grateful slouch of a husband and, vicariously, for me and the wife.

Last weekend, we crossed the Rubicon, reached the tipping point, made the break. It helped that our favorite football teams, Michigan and Tennessee, recipients of our children and our treasure, lost and did it nearly simultaneously. Michigan's loss was especially painful, because it clearly won't be the last one this year and the weather in Ann Arbor was cold and rainy. Half the crowd in their maize-colored slickers looked like they would much rather have been warm and cozy inside somewhere eating a corned beef sandwich from the famous Zingerman's Deli.

As for us, we were pigging out on a tasty pork shoulder from Corky's and a side of homemade slaw, so the pain of defeat was, well, practically painless. At the party we went to that night, nobody was talking about UT's blocked field goals or Michigan's demise. Why would they when there was a dining-room table heaped with a spread of baked cheeses, cakes, sausages, and dips that would have made Martha proud? When the talk turned to movies, Where the Wild Things Are was widely panned but foodie-favorite Julie & Julia was still getting raves.

On Sunday, the lower channels were packed with pro football from noon to nearly midnight, but it was too pretty to stay inside and the Titans were off and, so far this year, awful. While the NFL was drumming up fans by playing a game in London, we were wondering what David Thornton, the executive chef at Miss Cordelia's, would do with a piece of Alaskan salmon we had given him to cook for three couples. He did not disappoint us, burying the salmon under a pile of apple salsa and resting it on a bed of parsnips. The man deserves his own cooking show, as do the estimable food bloggers for this and other publications. In the age of YouTube, they could instantly save us from the stultifying boredom of those political talking heads, preachers, and sales pitches in the television ghetto between Fox and ESPN where WKNO and WYPL deliver what passes for local programming.

On Monday Night Football, the Washington Redskins were featured despite their losing record. The Washington Post reported that morning that the Redskins are failing to sell out their stadium for the first time in years. They lost again, and the game reportedly was a bore.

But what a night it was on the Food Network! You should have seen the battle of the Dr. Seuss cakes in the form of Horton, the Grinch, and the Cat in the Hat. The suspense was unbearable when the Cat in the Hat cake had to go back into the kitchen for repairs — and under the 15-minute rule, no less! If they had dropped that sucker, it would have been all over. Talk about a clutch performance. It was better than the battle of the Iron Chefs.

An hour later, Guy Fieri was in Cleveland, where a grill cook was preparing smoked salmon BLTs and barbecue nachos. The artistry was amazing, the commentary superb, the photography almost pornographic in detail.

I was struck by a sudden desire for more salmon and, against all logic, a road trip to Cleveland.

Final score: Food, 4; Football, nothing.

Elsewhere in this issue, we Flyer staffers offer our two cents' worth to the new mayor. Dick Hackett and Jim Rout are former mayors who moved out of Memphis after leaving office but whose political instincts are still sharp. What do they think the next city mayor should do?

By way of introduction, Hackett, 60, is head of the Children's Museum of Memphis. He was elected mayor of Memphis in 1982 in a special election when he was just 33 years old. It was the end of the era of white men in suits. The majority of city council members were white males old enough to be his father, and none of them had active mayoral aspirations.

Rout, 67, is head of the Mid-South Fair. He was elected mayor of Shelby County in 1994 as the consensus Republican candidate in a crowded field of Democrats and independents in a Republican landslide year. He succeeded charismatic Bill Morris and preceded lawyerly A C Wharton, the odds-on favorite in Thursday's election.

The political landscape is different today. We have more mayoral churn than ever — probably three different city mayors in three months this year and possibly three different county mayors between next week and next September. We have more media exposure, debates, and commentary than ever. But fewer people care. Both Hackett and Rout predict Wharton will win and that the turnout could be half the 254,000 who voted in the 1982 special election. Memphians, says Hackett, "are apathetic about their own city." To Rout, Willie Herenton's resignation was the big story, and the election is anticlimactic.

Flyer: What advice would you give the next city mayor?

Hackett: "I think the interim mayor has the authority to start over and create their own staff and their own identity. Normally, you want to be aggressive with an abundance of caution. But these are not ordinary times. I had to be cautious. I was young, and if you really mishandled something you didn't have time to recoup. Now I don't think we have the time. It has to be a bold two years. We have to be aggressive, and I think that will be rewarded."

Rout: "If there was ever a time in the history of Memphis that we need a particularly strong vision, it is now. It is not business as usual. The problems of the economy, taxes and finance, crime, and school dropouts going to prison call for a clear vision of where somebody thinks they can take this community."

What is the easiest mistake for a new mayor to make?

Hackett: "Getting too wrapped up in the fanfare of being the mayor. Some people just can't handle that."

Rout: "I had 16 years on the county commission. I knew the budget inside out, but I had to learn to think like a mayor and not like a commissioner, to shift gears."

What was the best advice you got?

Hackett: "It came from [former Memphis mayor] Wyeth Chandler. Keep your sense of humor and be yourself. Don't let the job or the people around you change you. It sounds simple, but it's easy to allow that job to consume you in such a way that you try to be everything to everybody. I did not like the entourage part of being mayor. I was a husband and a dad too."

Rout: "You will never ever be as popular again as you are the night of the election, because when you start showing leadership and making decisions there are going to be people who are not going to go along with you."

Does consolidation have a chance in the next few years?

Hackett: "No. I don't think it can be pulled off. You almost have to write two years off because the unknown is the next county mayor and where they will stand on the issue."

Rout: "Not in the next few years or in my lifetime. As long as the law requires it to carry in both the city and the county outside the city of Memphis, it is going to be very difficult before credibility is reestablished. It is a huge waste of time and resources to continue to deal with this issue at this time given the other problems that we have."

It's becoming clearer every week that by his fourth term as mayor of Memphis, Willie Herenton was in it for the money.

In May 2004, five months into his fourth term and embattled on many fronts, Herenton asked finance director Joseph Lee to process his request for a payment of $72,000 for 108 "carryover vacation days not taken during the last term due to the nature of my responsibilities as mayor for the city of Memphis."

If you're scoring, that's 27 days of unused vacation a year for a mayor who boasted of being on the job every day and never taking vacations, although many Memphians would have loved to have sent him on an extended one.

Herenton made similar requests each year for the next five years to be paid amounts ranging from $7,333 to $14,291 for unused vacation. In all, he collected $132,000 in extra pay on top of his salary.

All of this and more came to light and to saturation television coverage Tuesday at the Memphis City Council, including copies of the former mayor's W-2 Wage and Tax Statements to the Internal Revenue Service. It's a new day at City Hall for public disclosure, and the trend is likely to continue no matter who wins the special election this month. The lights are on, and the cat is out of the bag.

Herenton's W-2 forms show that he earned $139,148 in 2003. In 2004, he bumped that to $230,853; in 2005 to $165,428; in 2006 to $169,672; in 2007 to $171,019; and in 2008 to $184,143. It is not clear why the amounts vary beyond the sum of the mayor's salary and payments for unused vacation or what the other sources of income were.

Herenton's fourth term was a turning point for the worse. He kicked off the year with an angry speech at a New Year's breakfast. He denounced members of the City Council. He openly worried about an FBI investigation of an MLGW bond deal. The Commercial Appeal and Jack Sammons, then a council member and now chief administrative officer for interim mayor Myron Lowery, called for a Watergate-style investigation. In June 2004, Herenton succeeded on his second try in replacing Herman Morris with Lee, only weeks after Lee, as finance director, signed off on Herenton's vacation-days bonus.

And the mayor, who had trounced John Willingham three to one in the low-turnout 2003 election, apparently thought he was underpaid. The burr under his saddle was Morris. Herenton appointed Morris in 1997 and recommended that his salary be increased to more than $200,000. It was set slightly below that. Former councilman Rickey Peete proposed raising the mayor's salary to $200,000, but the council, including Lowery, balked.

In 2003, Morris and Herenton fell out and the mayor declined to reappoint him. In the aftermath, Herenton disclosed the details of what he called the "vulgar" severance package Morris proposed for himself, saying it was more appropriate for a corporate CEO than a public employee.

What the public and the City Council did not know until this week was that while Herenton was pointing his finger at Morris, he was secretly padding his own bank account with vacation pay. The payments to the mayor and CAO Keith McGee were known only to the finance director and a few others but did not come before the council for approval.

"I'm sure this is not the case, but if you wanted to hide it from scrutiny you could not have done a better job," Councilman Jim Strickland told personnel director Lorene Essex and finance director Roland McElrath, who were not in those jobs in 2004 when the payments began but did sign off on the later ones.

Herenton was not the first mayor to sweeten his paycheck, although he is apparently the first to seek it retroactively while he was in office and only for himself and his CAO. Former mayor Dick Hackett got paid for unused vacation days after he left office in 1991. Hackett collected $50,000 for vacation days plus $1,269 in "bonus day" pay and $20,623 for unused sick leave. His division directors and chief administrative officer got smaller payments. Shelby County government adopted a policy of paying the mayor a salary and nothing else beginning with Bill Morris some 30 years ago.