MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GO FUCK YOURSELF

I was in Savannah (the place that's the hottest club south of the Copacabana, as someone who was about to spend the summer there once joked to me after he first listened to the Barry Manilow song, although he didn't quite put it that way, of course) last week for a mediation - last Thursday. Thanks to a co-defending attorney's failure to read the mediation notice, I go there three hours early (or he, three hours late), so I had some time to walk around downtown. Ever buy the kind of tupperware with multiple pieces, each smaller one fitting, piece by piece, into the next bigger one? Savannah is literally designed like this concept - a concept, which as visualized as a street, and experienced as such, comes off looking like a maze. It's a very nice city, easy to get lost in one a "cross-street." For all of you Vulcan fans, the city dyes the river green on St. Patrick's Day, by the way.

As I walked through the maze, I observed a CourtTV truck, with a cameraman stading outside of it, doing what appeared to be reporting. What was the occasion, I wondered? Why was it Court TV and not Town and Garden?

I found out soon enough when I walked into a local bakery. "The Debutante Murder Trial" had just come to a conclusion that day, and the verdict was announced the next day. What was the Debutante Murder Trial? What is a debutante?

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/12/18/debutante.murder/index.html

(Link only answers former question). The trial involved the killing of a "Debutante Ball" girl. I have actually heard of this uniquely Southern tradition, and have even met a few Belles of this Ball (and no doubt others' - er, other, balls) since I began to live in Georgia. Naturally, since I had never heard of this story, it was national news.

Apparently the murderer forgot to realize that the excited utterances are typically made BEFORE the trial and not after.

By the way, in the interests of bizarre, irrelevant and full disclosure, the word "tummy" is a very special word to me. No joking here. I once, looking back on all of the problems that my stomach has had in recent years, commented to my mother, "Will it ever get a rest?" and then started crying as I patted my stomach and whispered mentally, "Poor Tummy." I now associate this word with sadness, and whenever I hear it in the context of a sad story, I cannot help but shed a tear (or more).

Sometimes, I enjoy hearing the word, though. I have a leopard gecko and couldn't help but smile as a veteriarian's book written in otherwise technical language simply referred to a leopard gecko's stomach area as "the tummy area."

Yes, I really have lost it (lost it a long time ago). But at least, as Tolstoy never said but others have said for him, trying to find a bright spot in his musings about unhappy families, I have lost it in my own way. Kind of Tolstoy mixed with Frank Sinatra. There's a song for ya!

I should note that Savannah is a beautiful town. Little did I know, though, that I was under surveillance in that most old-fashioned of public places, where everybody's gold hands are in their neighbors' lined pockets, and where the hands used to be in the pockets without a camera recording either. What next? The mouse finds the cheese?