For four decades now, the merry, merry month of May has occupied a central place on Memphians’ annual to-do list, thanks largely to the efforts of untold thousands of our fellow citizens who donate hours and days beyond counting to put together the city’s biggest annual festival.
Memphis in May has created two key lynchpins of our city’s social calendar — the Beale Street Music Festival and the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest — not to mention the celebratory events every year honoring a particular foreign country (this year it’s Colombia, with the international gala on May 12th). And while many of us miss the Sunset Symphony, the new 901Fest, created to be an annual celebration of ourselves, promises over time to become an equally emphatic exclamation point at the end of the month that Memphis has made famous.
Since most of us stick around town during May — the weather is usually splendid — we at Memphis realize that May is an ideal time to focus our editorial energies upon exploring the Memphis hinterland. In this month’s magazine, therefore, you’ll find lots of information about places you probably don’t know lots about.
I bet not all of you are aware of the fact that a major $80 million cultural museum attracts a million visitors annually outside Union City, Tennessee, just two hours away up Highway 51 (see page 44). Then again, I’m certain that hardly anyone reading this is familiar with all four of the restaurants “out in the country” that we feature this month as our destination-dining discoveries (see page 50). For that matter, you don’t even need to get out of town to discover something new. Check out the new overnight digs at Graceland (see page 38). Or just hang out around the house, and go listen to the legendary Joyce Cobb at Bosco's at Sunday brunch in Overton Square (see page 28).
May is already special, but grumpy curmudgeon that I am, I have long wondered why we’ve never fully developed the oh-so-obvious concept of doing an autumnal version of Memphis in May, yes, in the merry, merry month of October. Why do that? The answer is obvious. October is autumn’s mirror image of Memphis in May. Generally beautiful, halfway cool, it too is a great month to be outdoors.
And yet we as a city do very little to make October a community focal point. Yes, I know, October is the middle of the college football season, and many locals scurry hither and yon following their favorite SEC team wherever it goes. But really: There are plenty of us who don’t go anywhere. Why not develop some kind of “October in Our Own Backyard” festival (yes, it needs a better name), creating the same kind of wonderful weekend events that Memphis in May has been rolling out on our behalf since 1977?
Instead, these days we hear weird rumblings, as we go to press, that the city’s powers-that-be intend to take the traditional (and logical) closing of Riverside Drive during May’s event-full celebrations and extend them through Labor Day. Plans evidently are in place to close large sections of the street all through the desperately miserable Memphis summer.
That makes about as much sense as opening an outdoor tanning salon in Siberia in January. Who in their right mind wants to play pick-up basketball or roller-skate on Riverside Drive in mid-August, when a cool day is in the low 90s? We have had more than our share of half-baked downtown development schemes over the decades, but this one, Mayor Strickland, takes that concept to a whole new level. This one’s fully baked.
My view of all things in life is that you play with the cards you’re dealt, as best you can. If you’re Memphis, you deal with meteorological reality. Listen to nature: Accept that the concept of outdoor recreation in Memphis in July and August is something of an oxymoron. Closing down Riverside Drive in the summer to allow folks to frolic outdoors sounds like a concept someone in a place like Saskatchewan — or Siberia — might have dreamed up.
I’m not opposed whatsoever to the periodic closing of Riverside Drive. But I’m also completely in favor of developing a parallel festival in October downtown that mirrors what Memphis in May does so magnificently. That would give future editors of this magazine another month’s worth of real local excitement that may well merit two “Stay-Cation” issues every year.
