Beach Bashing?
To the Editor:
I would like to respond to several comments
that Bianca Phillips made in her recent article regarding
my club, South Beach (“Miami Vice,” June 19th issue).
South Beach has a strictly enforced and
nondiscriminatory dress code that is posted on the front door.
As Phillips stated, the club doesn’t cater to any
particular crowd but to “folks of all colors, shapes, and sizes.”
That, to me, is a good thing. As to her comments about
the dancing, she failed to mention that South Beach has
a new, improved hardwood dance floor that is large
enough to handle a wide range of dancing styles and tastes.
Now a word about Bloody Marys: If Phillips
prefers spicy Bloody Marys, she should communicate
this to her server in advance.Bartenders will not make
it spicy unless the customer requests it that way.
And why was she surprised that we serve “pub
grub”? She was in a club!She should go back to Midtown
if she’s looking for a vegan menu. I feel that she used
her article to get back at the club for refusing to allow
“her escort” inside. I’m sure not everyone from Arkansas is
as vindictive as Phillips. Shame on your paper for
allowing her to bash a nice place to dance and party.
Cal Millner
Memphis
Misfire?
To the Editor:
The “Fly on the Wall” column in your June
19th issue went amiss in several particulars.
First, because people at AScribe Newswire told
gun dealers that they were buying a gun for someone
other than themselves, the writer concluded that the
dealers were willing to sell guns to persons who
planned to give them to felons. The fact that said caller
told the gun dealers that their boy/girlfriend really
“needs it” seems to have been proof positive of this evil
intent. His conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow.
The most logical conclusion to be drawn is that
said friend was not a felon but merely some innocent
soul who needed a gun to protect himself. Surely, your
writer doesn’t deny such people or their loved ones the right
to self-defense. Surely, your writer knows that a
Department of Justice study concluded that the single most
effective means of coming out of an encounter with
an attacker alive is to defend yourself with a gun, and that
is true whether or not the attacker is armed with a gun.
Your writer doesn’t know the first thing about
the subject matter. If he did, he’d know that the
Second Amendment protects the right of people to “keep
and bear arms” for self-defense. Finally, he’d know
that, although we may not like it, the Constitution
prohibits denying the right to keep and bear arms to
convicted felons. What is constitutional and what we
like are not always the same thing.
William T. Mitchell
Memphis
Just Retribution
To the Editor:
When I wrote “Parked in Traffic” (June 5th
issue), I assumed it would be obvious to everyone that it was a
tongue-in-cheek look at an admittedly trivial but bothersome daily
problem for myself and 60,000 or so other people who bear
the same commute. It seems that this fact eluded Gil Hayes
(Letters, June 19th issue), along with the real point of the
article, which he inadvertently made again with his letter — that
any inconvenience suffered by suburban deserters is considered
nothing more than just retribution by many of those inside the
240 loop.
There is, of course, no real defense for the
unpardonable choice I and my fellow suburbanites made, but I would beg
you to consider this: Much of the latticework of asphalt we call
Memphis proper was “greenspace” (whiner-speak for
cotton and bean fields) when I was born. The reason the
current arrangement is so livable and, apparently,
smugly self-satisfying is that the planning commission and
zoning board of half a century ago didn’t allow the
ONLY road to your house to become a retailing combat
zone. Any remedy we try now is certainly a poor substitute
for adequate planning in the 1980s, but something must
and will be done, in spite of Hayes’ heroic willingness to
endure the suffering of others.
Dan Johnson
Memphis
Accurate Diagnosis
To the Editor:
In “‘Real’ Memphis” (Viewpoint, June 19th
issue), Mary Cashiola wrote that “Robin … complained
about having to get a bikini wax, about getting her hair
dyed, having to work out, doing a photo shoot with a
snake, and so on … “
That caused me to recall what the late William
Ernest Hocking wrote in his Types of
Philosophy: “Anyone can complain; but to see precisely what is wrong is a
gift. Accurate diagnosis comes from a unique power of
vision and indicates the likelihood of an equally unique
capacity to remedy the fault.”
Mary Cashiola has both.
Arthur H. Prince
Memphis
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