Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Eastern Hillsborough County keeps getting more and more interesting. Finally got myself out the Sunday Market at the Wat Mongkolratanaram Thai Temple in Palm River (5306 Palm River Road, just off 50th Street). It’s like taking a day trip to Thailand. The people are friendly, the temple is stunning and exotic and the shady grounds on the banks of the Hillsborough River are lovely.

And the food is great, plentiful and cheap. For ten bucks, you can get a fantastic array of food that feeds two or three with some left over to take home. They cook it right there and serve it fresh, and you just point to what you want. Most fun is to go with a group so you can buy a lot of different stuff and share at one of the picnic tables by the river. Among my faves were the deep-fried sweet potatoes, tarot and bananas; fresh mango; pad Thai and Thai curry dishes.

There’s also a small part of the market where they sell plants and fresh produce and a busy stage with all sorts of stuff happening, from singing to Thai Jeopardy.

Market’s from 11am-1pm, but my advice is to go early.

(check our previous review of Wat Tampa - ed.)

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On the way back to town, I hit my new favorite place to buy wine, West Palm Wines/Beaune’s Wine Bar (2009 N. 22nd St.) on the eastern edge of Ybor. It’s basically a warehouse with a cool industrial-looking lounge, a huge wine storage area, and some great deals on wine. No supermarket wines, actually no American wines, but you can get some really interesting wines for less than $10 a bottle. The owner knows his stuff but is not snobbish about it. He was just as nice to me as I rummaged through the low-price bins as he was to a millionaire who shall remain unnamed who was there at the same time spending what looked like thousands of dollars.

As someone who lives on the Babe Zaharias golf course, I’ve always been a little leery of the stuff I see groundskeepers spreading on it. Sometimes the chemical smell is overpowering. Sometimes my dog and cat get inexplicable itchy blisters.

I worry about the ducks, squirrels, frogs, lizards, turtles, Sandhill cranes, ibis, bluejays, mockingbirds, and even hawks and spoonbills that hang out there. I never see a single rabbit, raccoon or possum, which were all plentiful in Seminole Heights, where I used to live. I also worry about the guys who work on the course every day and the kids and elderly people who live there, absorbing those chemicals through their skin and lungs.

Then the St. Pete Times ran a story about the Sports Authority using a dangerous chemical called Curfew at the Babe. Of course the Sports Authority says they use it properly, meaning within the guidelines set by manufacturer Dow Chemical, based on studies Dow Chemical paid for.

I know I trust chemical manufacturers to place my health above their profits. How about you?

I have dealt with representatives from the Sports Authority before on safety issues and can say that the ones I spoke with could care less about my health and safety. Even if you don’t live on the golf course or near it, those chemicals enter the air and the groundwater.

I love the Babe, but for the fact is that it is not currently being operated in a way that is responsible to the environment and the community. But there is hope.

More than 2,110 golf courses in 24 countries around the world have become greater assets and reduced the harm they do by joining and becoming certified by the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program for Golf Courses.

“The ACSP is an award winning education and certification program that helps golf courses protect our environment and preserve the natural heritage of the game of golf. By helping people enhance the valuable natural areas and wildlife habitats that golf courses provide, improve efficiency, and minimize potentially harmful impacts of golf operations, the ACSP serves as vital resource for golf courses… The ACSP is all about results. Participating golf courses improve environmental performance and community relations, reduce liability, save money, and contribute to the conservation of our environment.”

If you’ve got the time, drop in at the City Council meeting Thursday at 9am and tell the Tampa Sports Authority to show some intelligence and responsibility to the community and the environment. Based on my past experiences with them, I have a hunch they won’t do it unless forced to by the public.

The Babe, by the way, is one of Tampa’s more interesting historic sites. Creative Loafing ran a great story about the Babe some time ago.

If you’re looking for something a bit different to do over the next week, I highly recommend taking in the Young Dramatists’ Project at the Gorilla Theatre. It consists of five short plays written by local teenagers and directed by some of the area’s best local theater professionals, including David O’Hara, Ami Sallee Corley and Karla Hartley.

Now in its eighth year, the project is a gift to the local artistic community from Susan Hussey and Aubrey Hampton, who own the Gorilla. The competition is open to all Bay area middle and high school students. Winners get their plays produced along with mentoring from the project’s dramaturge (and very talented playwright) James Rayfield, as well as royalties for the production and paid membership into the Dramatist Guild. It’s really a great way to discover and nurture new talent, and the talent I saw in these plays is pretty impressive.

I went Wednesday night, which was a dress rehearsal and fundraiser for another good karma and very worthy organization, Sierra Club Inner City Outings, which introduces city kids to nature through guided hikes, kayaking, camping trips and other stuff. The whole evening, including a 15-minute intermission is about an hour and a half long and costs a mere $15. For that, you will see five very different and compelling short plays.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to be impressed, or even terribly entertained. I’ve been to plenty of kid-written performances over the years and usually they fall on the pleasure scale somewhere between watching bowling on tv and mowing the lawn at noon in July.

But each one of these five plays was good. The first was Order by Sierra Almengual, a junior at Shorecrest. It’s a short, dark piece about two brothers that reminded me a little bit of Sam Shepard’s True Grit. Next was Aftershots by Blake HS sophomore Elizabeth Klette, which takes place after a Colombine-style shooting at a high school and explores the way various subcultures react. I was especially impressed with the way Ms. Klette captured the distinct voices and perspectives of a nerd, an emo girl, a black kid, an overachiever, a skater, a prep and a jock. Fable de Veras by Eric Davis (senior at Palm Harbor UHS) was an artistically ambitious look at a young girl born in the US to Mexican parents. Shorecrest junior Alexander Nunnelly’s Red Cross was a polished gem featuring a Red Cross rescue worker with a secret and the woman he is trying to save against her will.

Gabriel Neustadt’s Destruction Room ends the evening with a bang–literally. Actually several bangs. It’s a sophisticated and wry satire that takes on the power and commercialization of violence, and if you didn’t know it had been written by a junior at Shorecrest high school, you might well imagine an older, more experienced playwright had written it.

If you have ever complained that Tampa is a cultural wasteland, you owe it to yourself and to the cultural life of this area to support the Gorilla Theatre, the Young Dramatists’ Project, and these young talents (and the actors are just as impressive as the directors and playwrights, btw). It’s only fifteen bucks and less than two hours of your time. Plus, you can have a glass of wine, a beer or a brownie while you’re watching the show in a cool, dark, air conditioned place. What have you got to lose?

Gorilla Theatre is in Drew Park, and the production runs through June 8.

I actually really love Tampa and Florida; I just abhor some of the things people do here to destroy what’s left of our natural resources and make us all look like a bunch of carpetbaggers (Jeb! Bush), swampwater yahoos (Rhonda Storms and Brian Blair), and bilious scalawags (Buddy Johnson).

But there are plenty of political opinions out there far more informed than mine, and I do want to start out on a positive note if it’s not too late. So I’ll tell you about a faboo new restaurant that has been open only eight weeks and is already on my list of favorite places to hang out, especially in North Tampa. The Toasted Pheasant dwells in a nondescript strip mall at 14445 North Dale Mabry, but what’s going on inside is truly special. The freshly prepared food is exceptional, the wine list interesting and affordable, and the service is friendly and unpretentious. You’re going to be hearing a lot more about this place soon. The Weekly Planet has already reviewed it and the owner told me the SP Times reviewer has also called a few times to ask questions, so get in there and enjoy before it’s mobbed by bored South Tampa yuppies slumming north of Kennedy. (Damn, I am acerbic, even when I’m being positive.)

Okay, now for my cranky side. Have you been to Apollo Beach lately? Developers have been busily building new ghettos down there. It looks like one big public housing project down there with miles and miles of cookie-cutter, cheesy faux Seaside-style buildings and ugly, sterile, bauhaus-looking condos, at least half of which are unfinished and even more of which sport for sale signs. And best of all, that glorious view of the pollution-spewing smokestacks of Big Bend power plant. Who would want to live there?

No, really, I’m asking. Do you live there? If so, why?

The subhed in this morning’s headline in the St. Pete Times provides a perfect example of the stuff that bugs me about the boneheads in Tallahassee working hard to destroy what’s left of this wonderful state.

The hed:

“Budget gets final slicing“

Subhed:

“The deal cuts money to classrooms and nursing homes. Only state troopers get raises.”

Kinda says it all. You cut money for education, you’d better increase money for police.

I love and respect cops, glad we’ve got em, believe they deserve more money and bennies than they currently get to do a damn tough job. However, I honestly believe that if we took better care of our kids, we would need fewer troopers and prisons. As for cutting aid to nursing homes, remember that old saying about the measure of a civilization being the way it treats its most vulnerable members? What’s next, are we gonna launch the elderly into the Gulf on rickety rafts to we don’t have to bother with them anymore? Maybe we can put them to work selling lottery tickets to support our schools.

I’ve been a Sticks lurker for quite a while but just started commenting recently, and now I get to join the party. So I guess I should be polite and introduce myself.

First, I should confess that Lara Diamond’s not my real name. It’s my pen name for a novel (Man Overboard) I wrote that takes place in 1920s land boom Tampa. A few people have asked me why a pen name and why such a fake-sounding one at that. Truth is, I’d rather use my real name but my day job required me to use a pen name for this book. Since the book takes place in the 1920s and is written in the noir style popular at the time, I wanted something that was a little bit Guy Noir, a little bit Sam Spade–something that made a smoky sax solo play in your head. The main character’s last name is Heart, and Club is a crummy last name, so Diamond it was.

If you want to know more about the book, you can visit my website at www.manoverboard.us (There’s some info in there about the fabulous Burgert Brothers historical photograph collection and some other stuff about Tampa, including a couple of tours.)

I’m sarcastic and opinionated, which apparently makes me perfect for this newfangled thang called blogging. In my real life, I spent many years as a social worker and public servant before becoming a writer, editor and journalist. I adore Florida’s exuberant eccentricity and have spent more than two decades digging up odd bits of it for various projects. My fascination began in the mid-1980s, when I worked on a five-part documentary on eccentric Florida architecture. The doc won a bunch of awards including an Emmy, and I was hooked for life on the area’s peculiar charm and amazing history.