Choose Charleston

Well, one is, anyway.

Maria Sharapova, who just regained the world’s No. 1 ranking, has signed on for the Family Circle Cup tennis tournament. The 35th annual Family Circle Cup will be held April 7-15 on Daniel Island. The last time Sharapova played in this tournament was in 2003, when she won two qualifying matches to make the main draw and then lost in the first round.

According to the Post and Courier, that gives the Family Circle Cup five of the top six players in the world and four current or former No. 1 players. This includes No. 2 Justine Henin-Hardenne, No. 3 Amelie Mauresmo, No. 5 Svetlana Kuznetsova and No. 6 Martina Hingis. Only Kuznetsova has never held the top spot.

The Family Circle Cup was the first women’s professional tennis event to offer $100,000 in prize money and the first to be televised on national network TV. In 2001, the tournament moved to Charleston from Sea Pines Resort on Hilton Head, where it had a 28 year run. This year’s purse is $1,340,000.

The perennial question asked by so-called comedians looking for a laugh at the expense of a large portion of the population of the United States. Ofcourse, the real answer to the question is a newspaper sold by boys, recruited through advertisements in comic books.

Now, if you are interested in Southern culture and cuisine, a better question to ask would be: “What are grits?”

Grits were first produced by Native Americans centuries ago. They made both grits and hominy grits. Grits are white or yellow corn that has been dried and then soaked in lye. The corn is rinsed several times and the acid neutralized before the resulting product, hominy, is produced. Once the hominy is made, this is dried and ground into Grits.

Like the shrimp, which Bubba* kept a constant monologue running about for his entire stay at boot camp, grits can be served in a variety of ways. Despite what you may hear from some people spouting fake “Southern” accents, there is no wrong way to eat grits.

Many Southern restaurants serve grits as a side dish with breakfast (although, most allow you to substitute hash browns). Some other popular ways to serve grits are, baked with cheese, sausage grits, with red-eye gravy, Nassau Grits, and ofcourse, Shrimp-grits, plus hundreds of other recipes. And, yes, it’s OK to put butter and sugar on them. I’ve done it myself.

Although grits are a primarily Southern dish, I have found them served as far away as Alaska. This is a treat for a traveling Southerner, for even instant grits are better than no grits at all.

There’s even an annual Grits Festival, held every April in the town of St. George. Some of the activities include: hand crafts, parades, a carnival, contests, dancing, music, and more….. and, ofcourse, Grits.

Southern Cuisine Recipes

_{* If you don’t get the reference to Forrest Gump, you need to rent the movie.}

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a thousand written words can be more effective than the spoken word, especially when it comes to history. Many find that historical manuscripts can bring history alive better than any lesson in school.

California real estate investor, David Karpeles, discovered this in the late 1970’s while visiting the Huntington Library in Santa Barbara California, which houses a famous manuscript collection. He was intrigued to see how the documents caught the attention of his children. “It suddenly made history come alive for them”, he said. This sparked his interest in collecting historical manuscripts, which lead to the largest collection of privately owned manuscripts in the world. His first acquisition was a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Lincoln.

In 1983, Karpeles opened the first of seven museums to house his collection and renew a “sense of purpose for our children and ourselves.” His goals are set forth in the Creed he wrote for that opening. Charleston became the latest addition to the list in 1995.

Admission to the museum, located at 68 Spring Street, is free. There isn’t even a box begging for donations. The manuscripts on display will change approximately every three months and will depend on community interest.

Besides his copy of the emancipation Proclamation, the collections also includes music from Beethoven and Mozart, manuscripts from Poe and Kipling, notes from Einstein and Darwin, as well as manuscripts on important events like Space Travel, Women’s Rights, and Medical History along with over 1 million other documents. Currently, Charleston’s location has an exhibit about the Spanish American War, as well as original documents about The Wizard of Oz, and many other items.

If you’d like to go, the museum’s hours are from 10:00am to 5:00pm daily. It’s located in the former St. James United Methodist Church at 68 Spring St.

What is it with those Kia commercials playing in the area? You know the ones. The guy goes into a confessional and says, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I hate my car.”

Can anyone explain why the priest sounds like Bela Lugosi?

I attended an oven the other night.

Normally, I would say that I went to a concert, but the Charleston Music Hall was so incredibly hot. The Charleston Symphony performed wonderfully, but it must have been 80 degrees. During intermission, we were told that the heat had been turned off, but no one opened the doors, because the temperature did not drop noticably.

As part of the CSO’s Casual Classics series, Resident Conductor, Scott Terrell led a pared down orchestra in a program called “Something Old/Something New. It featured Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances, Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, Kreisler’s Liebeslied and Stravinsky’s Suite from Pulcinella. Guest soloist was Yuriy Bekker, Charleston Symphony Archestra’s new Concertmaster.

The concert was great, but once again, I was disturbed by poor etiquette. No one should be allowed to enter once the performance has started until there is a break in the music (during intermission or between pieces, not movements). On this particular evening, the usher escorted a latecomer in and indicated her seat after the first musical selection had begun. Not only was this a distraction, but she then noisily clopped to her seat and mere moments later, her cell phone went off.

Lest someone think I am picking on Charleston, my wife and I visited New York last fall and enjoyed a wonderful performance of the NY Philharmonic. Unfortunately, during one piece a cell phone went off there was well. I couldn’t understand why I continued to hear the classical music ring tone for so long until we realized that the phone was on stage. I wonder if that musician is still employed.

It all began with a small hole I spotted in our back yard. “Honey, look at this,” I called to my wife. “Could be a snake,” she replied, backing away quickly. I stepped back, too. We don’t like snakes. (This doesn’t apply to our daughter, who is more than willing to pick one up.)

I used some of the dirt I had removed to plant some flowers and filled in the hole. I knew it wouldn’t stop a clever snake, but it made me feel better. I never connected this with a statement a neighbor had made the previous week about seeing a rat in our neighborhood. I knew it hadn’t come from our yard, anyway.

Not being one to visit the yard very often, and then only at threats from my wife, I didn’t notice anything else odd for some time. (Of course, when you do your mowing and other chores either blinded by the bug repellent in your eyes, or by the bugs, which are attracted to the repellent, you don’t tend to notice much, anyway.)

Then, the “Incident” happened.

I call it the “Incident” because my wife gets upset at just the mention of it. This was the second time our dog had found something dead he wanted to play with. Now, it’s the nature of most dogs to want to play with dead critters, but it’s also the nature of my wife to try to stop them. Both times, she brushed his teeth before she’d let him lick her again.

This “Incident”, was a little different, though. The first dead thing was obviously a squirrel, this one, which he dropped in the street in front of our home, looked like a rat to my wife. I was immediately called at work, and instructed to search for rats in our yard when I got home. This was not the way I had planned to spend my afternoon.

When I got home, I went out to the street to look at the evidence. Yep, it was dead, alright. It also wasn’t a rat. One look at the pointy nose, and I recognized it immediately. This was a mole. I still didn’t connect this to the hole I’d spotted weeks before. When Caroline got home, I told her that it wasn’t a rat. “Apparently, someone in our neighborhood has moles,” I said. “One of them must have tried to cross the street and been hit by a car.”

“How do you know it wasn’t from our yard,” she asked.

I was shocked. A burrowing rodent wouldn’t dare infest my territory. Would he?
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If you are reading this, you may just be into computers. How techno-savvy are you? Do you have a laptop? Are you looking for places to use your wifi enabled laptop? Do you know what wifi is?

Well, we can help you with at least one of those questions. Here is a brief list of places in Charleston that offer free wifi:

• CharlesTowne Cafe & Coffeehouse
  Francis Marion
  387 King St
  843-853-5282

• Port City Java
  Cannon Park Place
  261 Calhoun St
  843-937-9352

• Rutledge Coffee & Cream
  511 Rutledge Ave
  (843)723-2232

• Kennedy’s Market and Bakery
  60 Calhoun St
  843-723-2026

• Rising High Bakery Café
  480 East Bay St.
  843-958-8596

• SweetSmith Bakery & Coffee
  1124 Sam Rittenberg Blvd

• Manny’s Greek-American Restaurant
  1680 Old Towne Rd
  843-763-3908

• Bobby Hartin’s Sports Grill and Raw Bar
  1124 Sam Rittenberg Blvd.

• Atlanta Bread Co.
  1850 Sam Rittenberg Blvd.

• Kudu Coffee
  4 Vanderhorst St.

• Ashley Marina - facing the water
  33 Lockwood Blvd.

• Residence Inn by Marriott
  90 Ripley Point Dr.
  843-571-7979

• Springhill Suites by Marriott
  98 Ripley Point Dr.
  843-571-1711

• The Elliott House Inn
  78 Queen Street
  800.729.1855

Charleston prides itself on pedigree.

One of my favorite authors is Carolyn G. Hart, who writes wonderful mysteries based in a fictional Lowcountry town. I was fortunate enough to meet her several times a few years ago when I was running an online forum for mystery lovers. She said to me that in many places people would ask who your parents were, but in Charleston, they asked who your grandparents were. That is so true.

I have been places, especially in the mountain communities of the Carolinas and Georgia where the third cousin twice removed of old Ned two peaks away would beconsidered almost kin. If you can’t trace your lineage in Charleston back more than one generation, you are still a newcomer.

My wife likes to remind me that I’m a transplant. Of course, the same could be said for her. Despite coming from an old Charleston family, with ties to the Carolina Yacht Club, she was born in Columbia, so the clock starts over for our daughter. Still, when people ask me where I’m from, I tell them with pride that Charleston is my hometown.