Murder Point: Here We Rest

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Lane Zirlott thinks he has the best oyster in Alabama. And I agree.

Lane Zirlott thinks he has the best oyster on the Gulf of Mexico. And I agree.

Lane Zirlott thinks he has the best oyster in the United States. And I’m inclined to agree on that, too (although I’ve not had them all).

Lane Zirlott thinks he might have the best oyster. Period. Full stop. And I’m not going to argue.

Lane Zirlott

Lane Zirlott thinks being on the water, being an oyster farmer, is his destiny. And after sitting in his office in his shop at Bayou La Batre for a while, listening to him tell the origin story of his family business, Murder Point Oysters, I think he is a man who could sell anything he believes in – especially if it comes from the saltwaters of Alabama’s Gulf coast. He talks about his love of working on the water, the adventure of “finding something you can’t see.”

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“Here We Rest” was Alabama’s first official state motto. It was adopted during Reconstruction so, of course, the people down in Montgomery decided to change it to something more combative during Jim Crow. Audemus jura nostra defendere is the state motto today – “We Dare Defend Our Rights” (both real and imagined rights, I’m afraid). I prefer “Here We Rest” and have an old habit of saying that phrase whenever I discover something to which I will instantly commit. The first time I tasted Murder Point oysters, I said, “Here We Rest.”

In fact, if I go to a restaurant and see Murder Points among the oyster offerings, I don’t need to look further. If Murder Points aren’t on the menu, I’ll pass. If I’m offered a plate with a variety of oysters, I will stick to the Murder Points, thank you. It’s the first oyster I don’t really want to add anything to. I might use a dab of mignonette and a sprinkle of lemon, but the buttery smooth one-bite oyster is fine just to slurp on its own.

Murder Points have a well-deserved national following now. They even ship them to Canada, which has previously been unheard of for an oyster from the Gulf of Mexico. The Zirlotts are a five-generation shrimping family and their oysters have only been on the market since 2012. When Auburn University’s Dauphin Island Sea Lab offered training to Alabama Gulf coast locals on off-bottom oyster farming, Lane Zirlott’s mother, Rosa, was the only person to attend the first session. She talked her husband, Blake, into taking the course with her. When Lane, who was shrimping full-time, returned from a shrimping trip, his parents encouraged him to explore the oyster aquaculture; the lure of still being on the water but being able to stay home with his wife and kids was all it took to make him a convert. An enthusiastic one.

There’s a well-known local tale about two oystermen a century ago in Alabama’s Myrtle Point who got into a dispute over oyster beds. The dispute accelerated until one of the men murdered the other on his front porch and “Myrtle Point” became popularly known as “Murder Point.” That inspired the Zirlotts to brand their product as “Murder Point Oysters,” with the catchy slogan, “Oysters Worth Killing For.” The oysters’ taste can sell itself, but I think the name and the slogan make it easier to remember and ask for by name.

Lane shares stories about the hustle to get his oysters in restaurants at the beginning, starting in New Orleans. It was a few years after Katrina, the event that changed the food scene in the city. He and his brother would go into the back door of the establishment with oysters and a shank. He said the back door of the restaurant would always be open – for deliveries, smoke breaks, fresh air. They’d give oysters to the kitchen staff – dishwashers, line cooks, sous chefs, pastry, cold station – until the chef would come to see what was going on. The staff would rave about the oysters, and the chef would taste, agree, and order them.

Lane has a scrappy smile and a twinkle in his eyes when he talks about the time in Charleston when the back door wasn’t open and he and his brother went through the front door and made their way to the bar during service. The manager chased them down and caused a scene, accusing them of being unprofessional, ordering them to get out. Lane slammed a bag of Murder Points down at the bar, yelled “Roll Tide” (“We’d just beat Clemson for the second year in a row”), and left. His brother had the presence of mind to slap a business card down with the bag before leaving.

About a year later, at a food and wine event, the chef of that same restaurant sought Lane out and wanted to start ordering Murder Points. “We still talk about that Alabama redneck and his oysters,” the chef said. It was obvious that Lane tells this story often. And with pride.

Lane contends that the Murder Point oyster “changed the perception of a Southern oyster.” Lane often refers to Murder Points as “the oyster of Alabama,” stressing that by discussing “broodstock,” the mature oysters that are used for breeding. While other Alabama oyster growers use broodstock from other states, he says, Murder Point only uses Alabama oysters, including Alabama broodstock. “A true Alabama oyster,” he says, “has to be a Murder Point.” The aquaculture method Murder Point uses to cultivate its oysters forces the oyster to close by bringing it out of the water daily. It builds the bivalve’s muscle and helps develop the deep cup that makes the oyster so appealing to eat raw. Referring to outdated perceptions of what a Gulf oyster is, he says, “don’t let people define you because of where you’re from.” At the end of that course at the Sea Lab, Rosa Zirlott was given 20,000 oysters to farm. Lane told me, before he went back to work, that they have “fourteen million planted today.”

Lane went out to start shipping oysters and TJ Lundy, who left a career in education to work with Murder Point, drove me out to the farm at Sandy Bay, Murder Point’s merroir. Leaving the main road, we traveled down an arrow straight dirt road for seven miles through protected freshwater marshland. I learned that it was the combination of the fresh water of the wooded marshes mixing with the saltwater of the bay that was partly responsible for the creamy buttery aftertaste of the Murder Point oyster.

Each piece is an oyster.

TJ introduced me to marine biologist Eric Stewart, Murder Point’s director of operations and the manager of the hatchery, while we examined the sprawling operation right in front of me and out across the bay. Eric explained the process in the hatchery filled with baby oysters at various stages of being ready to take down to the bay. He showed me buckets filled with what looked like tiny pieces of briny gravel. He took up a handful and separated one out for inspection. It was miniscule, but it was already clearly an oyster. Next he showed me others that were slightly larger and still perfectly shaped. By the time you get Murder Points in a restaurant, they are typically 2.25 to 2.75 inches across. The careful control that the tide tumbling aquaculture provides gives these oysters their reliable consistency and taste. After learning more than I ever thought I’d know about oyster cultivation, TJ took me down to the water and the long pier that provided a view of the operation in the bay and the baskets full of growing oysters.

We left the bay and headed back through the marshlands to the Murder Point store. After my tour, I had plenty of questions for TJ. I commented on how intense and time-consuming the farming of oysters is and that I had no idea until that day. TJ agreed that the people at Murder Point worked hard, but added, “It’s a lot easier to work hard if you’re having fun, too.” We briefly went to the building out back where the staff, including Lane, were busy preparing and packing oysters for a new shipment to go out across North America. And then I headed back through the hardworking fishing village of Bayou La Batre on the way to Birmingham.

Later, on the interstate, I remembered that I didn’t do one thing I always hoped to do if I ever made it down to Murder Point: I didn’t get to eat an oyster straight out of the water in the place where it was born.

Not to worry, though. Next time.

Review: The Volcano Keeper by Bradley Sides

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Bradley Sides’s new novel, The Volcano Keeper, is out today. In my review for Alabama Writers’ Forum, I call the book “a beautifully wrought novella of love, grief, persistence, resilience, and miracles set in pastoral Alabama, where the death of a beloved grandparent results in the emergence of a volcano in a cow pasture.” Read the full review here, and more importantly, read the book:

The Volcano Keeper – Alabama Writers’ Forum

Review: Work Lunch, Poems by Lee Bains

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Here’s a part of my review of Lee Bains’s debut book of poetry, Work Lunch, which was released today (10/13/2026):

To read these poems is to be regaled with tastes, to savor pulled pork that has “the texture of the ropy sawdust that unspools when a dull blade / chews up a rained-on board.” It is to learn more than you ever dreamed there was to know about the Greek-owned hot dog stands in Birmingham, and that Grandmama – even when given the chance to go “to the Bright Star / or the Red Lobster, she’d usually just / rather a good hot dog and some potato chips.” It is to learn how Birmingham’s early Greek immigrants managed to “transform wieners on whitebread into a cornerstone / of a blue-collar city’s unlikely culinary cathedral.” It is to remind us of the diversity of the hot dog stand clientele and to remind us that the word “Mediterranean” translates to “Middle of the Earth.”

But food is just a touchstone for Work Lunch. It’s a passionate consideration of our world and our individual places in it. Read the full review here: Work Lunch – Alabama Writers’ Forum

Growing Up with Atticus

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Birmingham’s Virginia Samford Theatre is celebrating its centennial in the 2026-2027 season. In 1927, it was founded as The Little Theatre, home to Birmingham’s community theatre. By the time I was growing up in the city, it was Clark Memorial Theatre, home to Town and Gown Theatre. When Town and Gown was dissolved at the turn of the century, the building was purchased and restored, renamed Virginia Samford Theatre, and continues to be a home for local live theatre.

The building has a rich history beyond the theatre and its shows. Writer and actor Fannie Flagg, as a shy fifteen-year-old, found her “tribe” at Town and Gown after volunteering to be a spotlight operator for a show and eventually became an actor on its stage. In the 1960s, Town and Gown gained a reputation for hosting successful auditions for major films looking for juvenile actors. Auditions for the film adaptation of Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, to be filmed in Selma, were held there and a young Sondra Locke lied about her age and landed the lead. I auditioned there for the juvenile lead in The Reivers, the film adaptation of William Faulkner’s last novel, starring Steve McQueen. I only got one callback but one of my classmates was flown to Los Angeles to audition with McQueen. Even so, a Hollywood kid was cast in that one. But Town and Gown’s most notable coup in film casting is the fact that Philip Alford and Mary Badham – neither of whom had previous acting experience – were cast as Jem and Scout Finch in the acclaimed and enduring film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Gregory Peck in his Oscar-winning role as Atticus Finch.

That history gives added luster to the fact that Virginia Samford Theatre opened its centennial season with the world premiere of Growing Up with Atticus, starring Mary Badham – “Scout” from the movie, and Cecilia Peck – Gregory Peck’s daughter. Growing Up with Atticus, directed by David Strickland, is presented as a conversation between two life-long friends, amplified by clips from To Kill a Mockingbird, photos, scrapbook images, and footage from various projects by Mary Badham and Cecilia and Gregory Peck.

Mary and Cecilia have known each other since childhood and have remained close ever since. That bond is evident in the comfort they share with each other onstage, sitting in chairs with a pitcher of tea, as they reminisce about the filming of To Kill a Mockingbird. Mary was eight years old when she was cast in Mockingbird and was ten when she was nominated for an Academy Award as Supporting Actress in the film; she is still the youngest Supporting Actress nominee in Academy history. The supporting actress Oscar that year went to Patty Duke, another juvenile actor, for her role as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, still another film adaptation of an Alabama-set literary work. Growing Up with Atticus incorporates video from the 1963 Oscar ceremony, including Gregory Peck’s acceptance speech, with Mary Badham’s explanation of why the cameras couldn’t find her when her name was called as a nominee.

It is those kinds of personal, intimate revelations that make the two-woman stage presentation so captivating. The show is a lovefest – from the haunting film score by Elmer Bernstein that plays as the audience is seated to the testimonials of the audience during a second act Q&A. The Q&A makes each performance a unique and singular experience. At the matinee I attended, a woman in the audience recounted how her father was imprisoned for his political activism and was inspired by the example of Atticus Finch standing up for what is right. A young girl who asked a question was named “Scout” to honor the book and movie’s influence on her parents. Audience members spoke of traveling from Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia – just to see the show.

The performance includes content about the Civil Rights movement and the 1963 “Birmingham Campaign” in particular. Mary Badham recounts her chilling first encounter with racism on a Birmingham city bus with her nanny when the driver stopped the bus and separated her from her nanny so they would each be sitting in the racially “correct” seats.

During the Q&A that I attended, it was revealed that Sephira Shuttlesworth, the widow of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, was in the audience. Rev. Shuttlesworth was a guiding force in the Birmingham civil rights movement and Mrs. Shuttlesworth spoke briefly to the audience with words that were powerful, moving, and hopeful. After Mrs. Shuttlesworth was recognized, one audience member spoke up to say that Dr. King “got the credit” for the Birmingham Campaign, but Rev. Shuttlesworth “did the work.”

After I attended Growing Up with Atticus, I was asked if I enjoyed “the play.” I’m not sure how to respond since it isn’t really a play; it’s an event, an experience, and, at times, it feels like a revival meeting. There is one scene in the performance, however, that is theatrical in a way that elicits chills in the recounting. Cecilia and Mary discuss the pivotal nighttime scene when Atticus is sitting and reading in front of the courthouse, keeping vigil while Tom Robinson is imprisoned inside. On the screen above them, that scene from the movie is shown: A lynch mob arrives and confronts Atticus. Soon after, Jem, Scout, and their friend Dill arrive to check on Atticus. In the confusion that ensues, Scout recognizes Mr. Cunningham – the father of her classmate, Walter – and says “hey’’ to him. As Scout’s monologue continues, it is picked up by present-day Mary standing at the front of the stage. Another light comes up on Cecilia Peck standing beside the lamp, in the place her own father stood in the movie. As the filmed scene ends, Cecilia Peck and Mary Badham stand together, reflecting that powerful father-daughter moment on screen almost sixty-five years ago.

The magnificent performance and inspirational life-long influence of Gregory Peck is a focus of Growing Up with Atticus, but Harper Lee, Alabama, the Badham family, “the Book,” and “the Movie” also are prominently featured throughout. Ultimately, it seems, the conversation and interaction with Ms. Badham and Ms. Peck is about Family – the one we’re born into and the ones we choose. Cecilia Peck talks about the powerful bond her parents had with Harper Lee throughout their lives and her family’s annual visits to Lee in New York and, later, Monroeville. She introduced her husband, son, and the son’s girlfriend in the audience at that matinee. The son’s name – Harper Peck.

For their performance coda, Badham and Peck chose the words that Gregory Peck wrote in his notes at the end of his script for To Kill a Mockingbird – words that guide his portrayal of Atticus and words we’re urged to remember and live by: “Fairness, Courage, Stubbornness, Love.”

The Myth of Water Renewed

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Almost exactly ten years ago, I wrote about traveling back to my house after attending a reading in Decatur. It was a full moon, and I took the Upper River Road, a favorite rural drive through farmland just south of the Tennessee River. In the full moon afterglow of the reading, I noted the white intensity of the newly opened cotton in the fields and the freshness of a brief shower as I crossed the river that glowed in moonlight filtered through thin clouds. I had become more attuned to my senses – prompted in part by the poems I had just heard.

The reading was by poet Jeanie Thompson presenting poems from her newly released book, The Myth of Water, a contemplative meditation on the life of Helen Keller. The poet breaks through the silence of Keller, who was struck blind and deaf after a fever at an early age. Thompson explores what Helen Keller must have been thinking, feeling, and seeing in her heart and in her mind’s eye.

Keller, of course, with the patient guidance of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, was taught to navigate and communicate with the world around her. She earned a college degree and became a beloved icon of strength, grace, advocacy. Her remarkable success and leadership inspired world leaders and she is a beacon of unfettered possibility whose spirit and courage still speak to us today.

In 2016, poet Jeanie Thompson’s book, The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller, moved beyond the public image and explored the possibilities and inner life of Helen, the woman. I had first read the poems on the page, but listening to the poet’s steady, clear, unhurried voice bestowed added texture and meaning.

In 2025, Thompson went into the Opelika, Alabama, recording studio of Grammy-winning guitarist/engineer/producer Larry Mitchell and added a new vision and texture to her remarkable poems of senses denied and discovered. The result is The Myth of Water: Go into Your Life, a CD and booklet containing Thompson’s reading of eight of her poems with sense-enhancing underscoring by Mitchell (www.jeaniethompson.com; available in digital format at The Myth of Water: Go Into Your Life | Jeanie Thompson).

Five of the poems are from the thirty-seven poem cycle The Myth of Water with three additional selections from Thompson’s previous books, Litany for a Vanishing Landscape, How to Enter the River, and White for Harvest. Those three poems, written before the Helen poems, remind the reader just how skillfully Thompson’s poems have always evoked the senses and the natural world. “Snapshot in the Red Fields,” from White for Harvest, provides a sensory depth that is thrilling and visceral as a farmer, surveying his newly plowed field, “would just as soon dive into it, and forget himself, / down into its depths, rather than to ever know / that season would not come again.” “The Lyrical Trees,” from Litany for a Vanishing Landscape, vividly paints a cold winter landscape as Mitchell’s chords emphasize the visual references and three trees rise “in twists that dancers dream to imitate.” Mitchell’s mesmeric percussive beat takes you into “How to Enter the River,” one of Thompson’s signature early poems, as the reader and the person paddling the boat become one with the nature that surrounds them.

It is in the Helen poems that the full triumph of the collaboration of words and music is felt. The first poem, “Dark Dancer,” addresses Helen’s great love, Peter Fagan, the man who “shook language / in my face and asked me to dance syntax / with you.” It is a poignant rendering of the occasion on which Fagan fails to arrive at Helen’s sister’s house for their planned elopement. Helen, alone on the porch, feels the morning arrive in “a rumble from the street / signaling day.” That sense of loss also finds voice in “The Little Boy Next Door,” inspired by the photograph of Helen with a young boy nestled in her arms. She “felt the quickening of a mother’s desire for his / small body on hers” and later, when Peter did not arrive, she “mourned the child lost / to me.”

In “River, Bridge, and Sky,” Helen is on a ship with Polly, her companion after “Teacher,” Anne Sullivan, has died. Helen and Polly each silently remember this day is the birthday of Teacher as Helen ponders the world that Teacher opened for her – as she “Begged me / to enter a land you / promised I would see.” Later, “Wave Memory” considers the moment at Ivy Green, Helen’s family home, when Helen, “just a babe,” experiences “the receding sound of Mother’s / breath at the phantom’s ear.” “No mooring, no anchor” is the plaintive refrain.

There is a moment in “River, Bridge, and Sky” when Helen acknowledges the whispers of some that “‘She who doesn’t know light, / much less a flower, writes this?’.” Many don’t realize that Helen Keller had sight and vision for the first nineteen months of her life; she later described vague, uncertain images as if from a dream (she even used the word “nightmare”). Even so, in these poems I am struck by Thompson’s ability to evoke the senses of touch, smell, and taste that Helen retained to capture the reality of her world.

There is triumph and resolve in “The Myth of W-A-T-E-R,” the final piece in this collection. In it, Helen clarifies the moment of finding language with Teacher at the pump and acknowledges the myth: “You may have your play, your frozen moment in time / if these please you.” In “The Myth of W-A-T-E-R,” Helen takes charge of her story and follows the command to “Go into your life!”

The Helen poems have a wistful longing, calm acceptance and resolve. Jeanie Thompson’s vocal performance has always served her words well and, with this collaboration, Larry Mitchell’s masterful guitar work, moody percussion, and evocative keyboard work have added new meaning and texture. Listen to the subtle shifts in tempo, the moments that words and music call forth excitement, anticipation, or loss. These are poems I have visited often over the years, but the addition of Mitchell’s music lends a different way to understand Thompson’s words and intent. Thompson and Mitchell have made some live appearances to perform their work on The Myth of Water. I hear there are more to come. Be watchful for those. I hope to experience these poems in a live setting soon.

Why I Go: Notes on Sidewalk 2026

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Friday O, me of little faith. I approached the 28th edition of Birmingham’s Sidewalk Film Festival with no small amount of trepidation. After studying the schedule and the synopses of films, watching some trailers, and second-guessing the wisdom of buying a VIP pass for a festival that I wasn’t expecting to enjoy much – not to mention booking a hotel room in the midst of the festival so that I could park and walk for three days on a still-healing broken ankle, I entered the festivities with a grim attitude. It has been a rough year and I wasn’t expecting to be pulled out of my doldrums sitting in dark movie theatres on the last weekend in August.  But then, there was the cinephile temptation of a few hundred moving picture titles spread out over ten screens within walking distance of each other in the course of fifty hours. A doldrum-buster, perhaps?

So I parked my car for the weekend, checked in to the Elyton, walked around downtown for a while to loosen up my feet, got a really good bowl of gumbo from a food truck, and walked back to the Alabama Theatre for Opening Night. At some point in years past, the Sidewalk powers-that-be decided that the opening night was more about feel-good films and the party – before and after – than it was about serious movie-making. In recent years I have often opted to skip the opening night screening altogether. This year, though, I decided to give the Opening Night film, John Wilson’s debut feature documentary, The History of Concrete, a chance. It was funny for a while – an entertaining short was in there somewhere – but at some point it was tiring and ultimately I found it depressing and walked out of the screening. No offense to Wilson and his loyal fanbase – it’s not you, it’s me I’m sure. It has a really good trailer, by the way.

I was glad I walked out because everybody was in the theatre watching the doc and the streets were quiet and relatively empty. People were quietly preparing in anticipation of the block party. I have always felt invigorated walking the streets of downtown Birmingham – even in the bleak years before the downtown rebirth. The theatre marquees looked good up and down the street. I still miss the neon. I’m feeling old.

Saturday In the early years of Sidewalk, I tried to see how many screenings I could squeeze into a weekend. With 250-300 titles to choose from, depending on how many programs of short documentary and narrative films I worked in among the features, I could sometimes get in about three dozen titles. I was careful in selecting my programming, but it used to be a source of pride that I had the stamina for such an undertaking – and I realized even then that I still had only seen maybe ten percent of what was on offer.

I don’t do that anymore.

So on Saturday, after a good breakfast, I headed to the Carver Theatre for a double-feature of documentaries about the city of Birmingham. “As Goes the South,” directed by Brian “B+” Cross and Eric Coleman, is an enjoyable, booster-ish look at Birmingham personalities and success stories; “Birmingham’s Front Lawn,” directed by Michele Forman, is a deep dive into the genesis and evolution of Birmingham’s Railroad Park, a sprawling park in the middle of the central city that occupies once desolate land along the phalanx of railroad tracks that bisect downtown.

With my civic responsibilities fulfilled, it was off to Birmingham Museum of Art and the Polish film, Glorious Summer, directed by Bartosz Szpak and Helena Ganjalyan. It’s a dystopian enigma about three women, living a cloistered existence in a crumbling palatial pile, with all of their earthly needs fulfilled so long as they remain within the geographic boundaries set for them by disembodied voices and mysteriously appearing texts. The outside world’s presence is an occasional explosion or flames in the far distance. Two of the women employ ways of communicating through touch as they play, exercise, follow directions, contemplate their plight, practice their deaths, plot their escape. The film is cryptic, perplexing – beautiful to behold and baffling to contemplate. It lingers long after the closing credits and I’m still trying to come to grips with what it’s saying. In short, it’s why I go to film festivals.

Or maybe the reason I go to film festivals is the episodic situational comedies like Human Theories, directed by Jess Zeidman, with a cast of dozens that played at the Sidewalk Cinema in the afternoon. The New York of Human Theories is bleak, dark, and grimy – the antithesis of the crisp and glistening New York of Woody Allen’s best comedies. Warhol said that in the future everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes; the actors in Human Theories typically get only two or three minutes before it’s off to the next thing. It’s very funny and uncomfortably real.

It had been a lot of walking between screenings and my ankle was beginning to feel it. I decided to do something I used to never do at Sidewalk: Quit while I was ahead, have a good late lunch, go back to the Elyton, take a nap. Those were smart decisions. After the nap, I took a nighttime walk around the theatre district and decided not to take in any more movies that night. I realize that another of the reasons I go to the festival is for the opportunity to walk aimlessly around the city and feel its pulse, and mine.

Sunday After checking out of the hotel and retrieving my car, I found a perfect place to park in front of Sidewalk Cinema where I expected my weekend of movie-going to end. Then I walked the few blocks to the Carver Theatre to get in line early for my next program of short documentaries. There weren’t many people waiting yet and I quipped to a waiting couple that “I arrive early so I can get a seat in the back.” Old habits are hard to relinquish and I have been most comfortable in the back row of a theatre since my days directing plays, taking notes inconspicuously in the back. As we were taking our seats in the theatre, the couple from the lobby passed me settling in to my back row seat on the aisle.

“You really meant it,” the man said. “I thought you were joking. I thought people got here early to sit in the front.”

Gesturing to the whole room, as more people began to come in, I said, “It’s all yours.”

A woman seated near the front said, “I love watching films at Sidewalk on a Sunday morning.” I have said the same thing over the years; some of the Sidewalk films that stick most vividly with me were viewed on a Sunday morning (Family Portrait, 45365, and Icepick to the Moon come immediately to mind from past Sidewalk Sunday mornings).

I initially chose this set of nine short documentaries because of the film, “The Chukker: Nation of Misfits.” The Chukker was a seedy and superlative watering hole in downtown Tuscaloosa for almost half a century. Every strata of society was welcome – except perhaps for the strata that was embarrassed to be in such a diverse and rich smorgasbord of people. University of Alabama students Nate Billings and Charlotte Gale, who were probably born right around the time the Chukker went away to be replaced by a fountain in a public square, gathered up footage to create a history of the bar and its ongoing cultural legacy. Since I first went to the Chukker as a toddler in 1957, the year after it opened, when it also served food as a grill during the day, I have always had a soft spot for the place and its history.

Another short film in the program, “Adi,” directed by Sukanya Subramaniyan, was recommended to me by my physician, who is also a musician. It features the musical trio Vishnu, Davis, & Haleigh, who have forged a distinctive and ethereal sound from musical traditions of Appalachia and India. Following doctor’s orders, I introduced myself to Davis and Haleigh in the lobby and found another group of musicians I plan to follow. Theirs is a lovely sound.

By noon, morning had passed, but the film The Birds Tell Me All There Is to Know, the debut feature by director Aidan Cronin, will no doubt remain in my mind in my personal pantheon of “Sunday morning films at Sidewalk.” It provided a needed balm in a challenging year. Using outdated video cameras, non-professional actors, and an analog point-of-view, Cronin has crafted a moving and beautiful film about memory, loss, youth, and aging. Cronin is a patient director and his film demands a patient and attentive viewer. He lingers, his cast lingers, and the audience must linger to get the full benefit of what this deliberate film has to offer. Its quiet power is a challenge to achieve and I hope to see more from Cronin in the future.

The Ark, a documentary by Viacheslav Rakivskyi and Jeremy Chilnick, is urgent and topical, taking place during Russia’s current incursion in Ukraine. A Ukrainian family, in the process of establishing a place for healing, is asked by a soldier to care for his goats while he is away in combat. The floodgates are opened and the family finds itself the caregiver for hundreds of animals displaced by the Russian invasion, including a donkey amputee who becomes the heartbeat of the film. Against all odds, the film is inspirational and uplifting and a call for all to fight oppression in its many forms.

I left The Ark screening with another “must see” on my list and a couple of others that I might try to get into. A quick survey of the rivulet of lines coming out of the Sidewalk Cinema entrance convinced me that I wouldn’t get in, so I dashed to my prime parking spot and went on my way. As always, it was a great weekend.

Why do I go to Sidewalk? To see films and meet artists that I may not have discovered otherwise. I am rarely disappointed.

A Late Summer Splash

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There is still plenty of summer left. Labor Day is still over a week away and the first day of fall is another two weeks on from there. Judging from this probable hottest summer on record we are currently experiencing (one I try not to complain about, knowing that I’d rather be too hot than too cold any day), I expect the heat to linger well into October in Alabama.

On a really hot day, I find that an icy cold gin and tonic comes to mind and over the years I have managed to fine-tune one that always seems to please. The basics are simple – gin, tonic, and a splash of lime – and that will always suffice. And I won’t tamper with the essentials. But I find that my enhancements that have evolved over the years make my gin and tonic something people seem to like.

To be clear, I am not reimagining or deconstructing the humble G&T. I remember my irritation years ago when Garden & Gun featured a cherry-colored sno-ball looking thing on its cover and referred to it as a mint julep, the invention of some New York bartender, who called it a “Concord Grape Mint Julep.” I wrote a snarky letter to the editor, saying that it was undeniably pretty and probably tasted quite good but that it was most certainly not a mint julep. They published my letter under the snarky title “Julep Police.” At least it was pictured in a julep cup.

So I’m not messing with the classic gin and tonic. But I have some suggestions to brighten it and give it a little intrigue (I am frequently asked what my secret is).

First, I don’t garnish it with a lime slice; garnish often seems to get in the way, don’t you think? Instead, I slice a whole thin round of lime and put it in the bottom of the glass before I add the ice. I imagine that the weight of the ice begins to release more of the lime juice. Then I fill the glass with ice.

Now that the glass is ready, pour two tablespoons of Rose’s Lime Juice into the glass. I was in a place in New Orleans once and ordered a G&T. When I asked the bartender to put a splash of Rose’s in it, she looked at me like I had offended her and told me they didn’t have Rose’s. It was one of those bars with jars of fermented stuff all over the place that prided itself on its unique concoctions and I realized that she had taken my request as that of a rube. Anyway, if I make your gin and tonic, it’s going to have a generous splash of Rose’s in it.

Here’s the most controversial part of my mix: I put a whole Bing cherry in the glass. I don’t add any extra syrup from the jar – just the cherry. I put it in and let it sit there and just do what it does. Until I tell people, they usually don’t realize there’s a cherry in there somewhere. The friend who introduced me to the cherry trick feels that it takes a bit of the bite out of the mix without adding a sweet cherry flavor. I think of it as a lagniappe to be enjoyed at the end.

Pour two ounces of Hendrick’s gin over the ice and the Rose’s. Top the glass with Fever Tree tonic (I find that the 5 oz. cans of Fever-Tree Premium Tonic Water are just the right size), squeeze some of the lime over the top, stir, and you have a classic gin and tonic that makes people ask what makes it so elevated.

At home, I serve the drink in a tumbler from the Uncorked Glass Company of Atlanta. They take used wine bottles and cut them down into the perfect-sized tumbler (with a dimple in the bottom).

Sip it outdoors on a sultry summer day and the temperature seems to drop a few degrees.

Here’s the recipe again:

2oz. Hendrick’s gin

2 tbsp. Rose’s Lime Juice

5 oz. Fever-Tree Premium Tonic Water

1 round lime slice (and fresh lime to squeeze on top)

1 Bing cherry

  1. Put lime slice in bottom of the glass.
  2. Fill glass with ice.
  3. Pour 2 tablespoons of Rose’s over ice.
  4. Put 1 Bing cherry in glass with ice.
  5. Pour 2 ounces Hendrick’s over ice.
  6. Fill glass with Fever-Tree tonic.
  7. Squeeze lime on top and stir.

And thanks to the friend who called this “the best gin and tonic” she’d ever had and inspired me to share the recipe. Happy Summer. Enjoy the rest of it.

Lee Bains

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Lee Bains | photo by Rick Journey

I love words. The first thing I noticed when I discovered the music of Lee Bains and the Glory Fires was Bains’s masterful use of language in lyrics. I was first drawn to the music by a title, actually: Their 2012 debut album is called There Is a Bomb in Gilead. Growing up in Alabama, attending a Baptist church, reading the Bible, that title’s play on the much-recorded spiritual “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” from a passage in the book of Jeremiah, struck a chord and I had to check it out. Now, in 2026, those lyrics from fourteen years ago seem especially prescient for the current Netanyahu/Trump-driven mess in the Middle East. It begins:

Children of Abraham, don’t say you ain’t been warned,
For there will come a burning day.
Strait are the checkpoints to your enemy’s house,
And narrow is the way.

Bains’s hard-driving and unapologetic lyrics continue to be front and center in music that Rolling Stone describes as “Southern Gospel Punk.” After … Bomb in Gilead, other infectious albums and those addicting lyrics followed: Dereconstructed (2014); Youth Detention (Nail My Feet Down to the Southside of Town) (2017); Live at the Nick (2018); and Old-Time Folks (2022).

Lee Bains is a native of Birmingham, now living in Atlanta, and when he’s not touring with his music, he’s working as a handyman. His working class Southern roots inform his writing and his authentic, unfettered, and progressive resistance gives voice to the things that many Southerners are thinking but some may be hesitant to say. In “We Dare Defend Our Rights,” his response to Alabama’s state motto (which was adapted in 1939 by Marie Bankhead Owen, a “Lost Cause” advocate, in a contentious mood), he shout/sings “Show me what you can build up / Show me what you can burn down.” In songs like “God’s A-Working, Man” and “(In Remembrance of the) 40-Hour Week,” he extols the virtues and laments the hardships of those who actually work hard for the money. I’ll admit that I basically stopped keeping up with new bands around the time Talking Heads and Television split up, but Bains’s music hits me in a visceral way; it’s energizing.

In 2021, Bains accomplished a bit of a writing coup when several of his poems – not to be confused with his lyrics – were published as part of a photo essay called “Work Lunch” in The New Yorker. Now, those poems will be published as part of his upcoming book of poetry titled Work Lunch (Hub Press; publication date: 10/13/2026). I suggest you preorder it now.

In the meantime, Bains has a new live solo album, Free South 2025, that was just released. His international tour for the new album kicked off with a performance at Seasick Records in Birmingham’s Lakeview District on August 7. By the time this essay is posted, he’ll be performing in Norway and traveling on to Sweden and the United Kingdom before returning to the U.S., launching his book, and going back on tour with his solo music. See www.thegloryfires.com for the tour schedule.

Lee Bains at Seasick Records | photo by Rick Journey

The Seasick event was an intimate affair, a homecoming of sorts, and Bains seemed at ease with people he knew as they gathered among the stacks of vinyl. Like Springsteen, he often introduces his songs with personal reflections and occasional battle cries – and he’s not shy about sharing his points of view. His guitar work is outstanding and his songs are delivered with grit, energy, and passion. The set kicked off with a snarling rendition of “Old-Time Folks” and was relentless from then on. Anyone who is a student of the South and the issues that afflict the South and the nation as a whole will find something to recognize and connect to in Bains’s music. Chuck Reece, writing for The Bitter Southerner after the 2014 release of Dereconstructed, opines “I think this kid Lee has made the record I’ve been waiting for somebody to make since before he was even born.” He goes on to say it’s “the most important record to address the Southern thing in 13 years, since Drive-By Truckers’ 2001 ‘Southern Rock Opera’. And it may be the most important record about the South ever released.” The first time I read that, I thought Woah boy, get a grip, but then I thought Can you name another contender? Nope. I can’t, actually.

I recently introduced myself to Lee Bains in the hopes of writing a magazine article about him and his poetry. He was agreeable and we’re going to try to work in some conversations while he’s on tour, promoting the book, and generally working nonstop. In the course of the introduction, I mentioned that both of my grandfathers had been steelworkers in Birmingham. He responded, “Being the grandson of two steelworkers is about as Birmingham a story as it gets!”

Lee Bains | photo by Rick Journey

Poet / Musician / Handyman Lee Bains’s trajectory from East Lake to wherever he’s going next seems to be a pretty singular Birmingham story, too.

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The Bright Star’s Night in New Orleans 2026

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The August summer night in Alabama, humid and hot, replicated a midsummer night in New Orleans as the Bright Star restaurant’s annual “Night in New Orleans” arrived back in Bessemer for its 2026 edition. The Bright Star event started in 1989 with Jamie Shannon of Commander’s Palace as the guest chef. The late Bright Star co-owner Jimmy Koikos got the idea on a visit to Commander’s after he met and befriended Shannon. Jamie Shannon continued to travel to Bessemer for the event until his death in 2001. A series of chefs has followed; the thing that connects all of them is a stint at Commander’s.

Eric Cook has been the chef for “Night in New Orleans” since 2022. He was the founder and executive chef of popular New Orleans Magazine Street eatery Gris Gris and, later, Saint John in the French Quarter. For this year’s event, Cook was joined by Bradley Marshall, the former chef de cuisine at Gris Gris. I was sad to learn that Cook made the difficult decision to close Gris Gris, effective July 31, so I had the opportunity to eat his food less than a week after he closed his flagship New Orleans restaurant (he had previously left Saint John). I look forward to seeing where he’ll land next.

For the Bright Star event, the menu always consists of classic Bright Star offerings in addition to the New Orleans menu of the guest chef. Anne, my companion for the dinner, stuck to her Bright Star favorites and I gladly checked out the New Orleans offerings. It has been a few years since I attended “Night in New Orleans” and it was good to be back and to see the crowd that arrived for the festivities. The servers were slammed, but cheerful. Our server, Lisa, was experiencing her first “Night in New Orleans” and handled it like a pro. I have noticed through the years that the chefs, who occasionally circulate through the dining rooms, seem to be having as good a time as the guests. Live jazz kept the room hopping and the energy up.

Oyster BLT

Anne started her meal off with a platter of crab claws – plenty to share – while I opted for Chef Eric’s signature Oyster BLT. The BLT is a deconstructed version of the classic sandwich with smoked pork belly (B), arugula (L), and tomato jam (T) embellished with fried oysters from the Gulf of Mexico. After that appetizer, we each passed up the salads for a cup of Bright Star’s singular seafood gumbo, one of the best gumbos around.

As tempting as Chef Eric’s braised lamb and double cut pork chop dishes sounded among the entrees, I opted for his cast iron snapper, served with tomato sauce, popcorn rice, and charcoal lemon, with flavors reminiscent of so many meals I’ve enjoyed in New Orleans through the years. Anne stuck with another of my favorites, Bright Star’s beef tenderloin Greek-style; it looked amazing, as always, but I enjoyed my delicious fish and knew that the tenderloin would be there next time I drop by.

Dessert for me was Chef Eric’s buttermilk biscuit peach shortcake with Chilton County peaches and Chantilly cream. On any given day, you can’t go wrong with Bright Star’s dessert menu and Anne’s slice of chocolate almond pie was a reminder why I always leave room for dessert at the Bright Star.

Cast Iron Snapper

It’s always good to be at the Bright Star, a 2010 James Beard Award-winning American Classic that will be celebrating its 120th Anniversary in 2027. And to be able to enjoy award-winning chef Eric Cook’s New Orleans flavors there was a special treat. As we left, the jazz was playing, a crowd was waiting in the lobby for their seating, and the revelry reminded me that I need to plan a trip back to New Orleans soon.

Book Review: The Battle of Danziger Bridge

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In The Battle of Danziger Bridge, Amos Jasper Wright IV’s loquacious chronicle of New Orleans, he “provides a complex portrait of a complicated and flawed place in which misery and joie de vivre coexist. It is a scathing and frequently hilarious exposé of the American character. As one of the characters opines, ‘In fifty years people will look back on today and want to know what the f__k was going on’.”

Here is the my full review of the raucous book for Alabama Writers’ Forum:

The Battle of Danziger Bridge