Arkansas Times | July 2021

A DOUGHNUT AUDIT | TALES OF AN EXPAT OPERA DIVA | ‘TACOS FOR DIPPING’

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JULY 2021

PAUL CAUTHEN: At Rev Room in July.

FEATURES

22 FROM SWEDEN WITH LOVE

How Barbara Hendricks, a soprano from rural Ouachita County, became both opera star and humanitarian ambassador.

By Stephanie Smittle

29 EMPLOYMENT, UPENDED Workers weigh in on the labor shortage, burnout and mapping new career trajectories.

By Austin Bailey, Rhett Brinkley and Lindsey Millar

42 ‘BEING ERASED’

The Arkansas legislature’s attacks on gender-affirming health care loom large for transgender youth.

By Rebekah Hall Scott 4 JULY 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

9 THE FRONT

Q&A: With V.L. Cox. The Big Pic: Sizing up the local doughnut scene.

13 THE TO-DO LIST

56 FOOD & DRINK

Quesabirria tacos have arrived, and La Casa de mi Abuelita Maw Maw’s is doing them right.

By Rhett Brinkley

Michael Warrick exhibits at UA Little Rock, Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s ‘Marie and Rosetta,’ Mary Gauthier at Fayetteville Roots HQ and more.

60 CLIMATE CONTROL

18 NEWS & POLITICS

66 THE OBSERVER

JFK’s letters reveal the Faubus family’s divided allegiances.

By Ernest Dumas

There’s a new tornado alley, some scientists say, and Arkansas is in its bulls-eye.

By Kenneth Heard

Suggestions for the dog days of summer.

ON THE COVER: Rhett Brinkley by Brian Chilson, styled by Mandy Keener.

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THE FRONT Q&A

ARTIST V.L. COX ACHIEVES ESCAPE VELOCITY KEEPING AN EYE ON HOME FROM HER PERCH IN PEEKSKILL.

V.L. Cox became internationally known back in 2015 for her “End Hate” installation series challenging entrenched racism and homophobia. She traveled with it across the country in the coming years, while also taking new commissions relating to social justice and this nation’s history of oppression. At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, however, she evacuated the East Coast and spent a year at the St. Joseph Center in North Little Rock. Back in April, upon being fully vaccinated, the Louisiana-born and Arkadelphia-raised Cox left her digs at this former Roman Catholic orphanage and departed the state once again for an artist colony in Peekskill, New York, located right on the Hudson River, just upstream from New York City proper.

You were holed up for about a year at the St. Joseph Center in North Little Rock.

How was that experience?

I can’t say enough about the St. Joseph Center. When I returned to Arkansas, I was so tired. After years of giving everything to the current movement, I had nothing left over for myself. I was exhausted and extremely burned out. The first place I went to when I returned was St. Joseph’s, where I have kept a studio off and on for years during my travels. Sandy DeCoursey walked out, gave me a long hug that I will never forget, and told me that I would always have a place there to rest and to work. She then immediately put me to work helping on the farm with chores and responsibilities. I needed that structure and discipline in my personal life along with my rigid studio schedule. I can honestly say it saved me.

Activism is not for the weak at heart. It’s grueling, at times unrewarding, scary, and it’s all consuming. It changes you forever because you don’t belong to yourself any more. You belong to humanity, and after that protective veil is lifted from your eyes, and you see people and the work for what they really are, you are never the same again.

What’s a country gal like you doing up in the greater New Yawk City metropolitan area? Are you in exile?

Ha. It feels that way sometimes. I was actually on a list for a live/work studio [in FAVORITE DRINK: Guinness Extra Stout, New York] before COVID-19 hit, so the or a mint julep from the Capital Hotel. “lost year” pushed my plans back a little.

That being said, though, besides growth CURRENTLY READING: “The White and opportunity, the unnecessarily cruel House Boys: An American Tragedy” by 2021 Arkansas legislative session defiRoger Dean Kiser, am halfway through “Unnitely influenced my decision to relocate. tamed” by Glennon Doyle, and have started We lost all the ground that we gained in What are you working on now? reading “The Autobiography of Alice B. 2015, plus some. I’ve been traveling the I have started a new large sculptural Toklas” by Gertrude Stein. country for almost six years now fighting piece called “Tent Revival” that conveys this type of discrimination, and I’m not the long-standing relationship of organized that young anymore. I deserve to have a religion and white supremacy, and another life and be happy. I can continue the fight from afar. sculptural series called “Shotgun Houses.”

Despite the ways of the South that do not fit within my worldview, I do care about Arkansas a great deal. If I said, “No, really, there are good Your art has long been political. Or maybe it’s better to say that your people there and it’s a beautiful state,” once, I’ve said it a thousand art has long been impolitic. Is the notion of “pure art” just a lot of times. I’ve had CEOs of billion-dollar international companies come up nonsense? to me at events and art openings over the past few years and say, “I’m I say create what’s in your heart. I’ve seen how the arts can cross very concerned about what’s going on down there.” They don’t care if religious and political boundaries and talk to people where other means Arkansas is a beautiful state. They don’t care about sports. They care fail. When you have evangelical ministers come up to you and say, “I about how people are treated and where to put their next multimilthink I’ve been doing it wrong,” after seeing your work, and ex–white sulion-dollar business expansion. They care about their investments and premacists thanking you and sharing their story of a lifetime of hatred, their reputation. then reconciliation, you realize the true power of the arts.

Has anyone given you shit for bugging out when you did?

Oh yeah. I’ve heard, “Well, you left. You don’t have any right to say anything about Arkansas” so many times I’ve lost count. My response is this: I believe in transformation. With education and connections to people different from themselves, Arkansans can grow and come to understand that there are other ways to be relevant in the world.

What do you miss most about Arkansas?

Growing a quarter-acre of purple hull peas and tomatoes at St. Joseph’s.

I’m about to win some Northern hearts, though, when they taste my fried green tomatoes recipe.

—Guy Lancaster Find the full interview at arktimes.com.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2021 9

THE FRONT BIG PIC

SUMMER GLAZE Ranking Central Arkansas’s glazed doughnuts by the dozen.

BY RHETT BRINKLEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON Now that office life is back and we’re all piling into cubicles to do work we now know we could just as easily do from home, it’s time to grab doughnuts for our colleagues. Why do we tempt our co-workers with distracting, sugary, high-carb treats they probably had no intention of indulging in that day? Because it’s a time-honored tradition. We decided to eat glazed doughnuts all week from different places around town and rate them as if we were doing a sixth-grade science fair project. We weighed each doughnut and measured their diameters and compared them by price, texture and flavor. It was a delicious, educational experience that every office should try to sweeten the work week. We didn’t just learn about doughnuts, we learned about ourselves.

1. Mark’s Do-Nut Shop $13.07 per dozen. 4.25-inch diameter.

3.1 ounces

2. Shipley Do-Nuts $7.62 per dozen. 3.5-inch diameter.

1.702 ounces

3. Hurts Donut Co. $11.10 per dozen. 4-inch diameter.

2.9 ounces

The unanimous favorite, Mark’s continues to impress from its location at Camp Robinson in Levy. The first time I bit into a Mark’s glazed, I went into a meditative state. The texture and flavor is 10/10. One of our employees claimed that if he were left alone, he’d eat the entire box. The doughnuts were still warm when we got them around 8:45 a.m. The largest and weightiest we sampled, it’s also among the softest and most flavorful. If you really want to blow your co-workers’ minds first thing in the morning, stop by Mark’s.

As far as doughnut chains go, Shipley’s has the best glazed doughnut, hands down. The soft, airy texture is unmatched. Had we not weighed it, I’d have assumed that it would be the lightest doughnut we sampled. I was wrong. It’s not a diet doughnut by any means, but if you go back for seconds (or thirds) you could say, “It’s only about 1.702 ounces per doughnut.”

We learned that the glazed donut at Hurts is rather elusive. We tried to get a dozen around 9 a.m. on a Wednesday and Hurts was completely out. We asked when the glazed are usually churned out, and the employee basically told us, “Whenever someone decides to make them.” Good enough for us. We wandered over around 3 p.m. and scored a half dozen. Hurts, known for its outlandish flavor concoctions (the Cookie Monster, the Cereal Killer, the Dirt Worm), makes a fine glazed that was worth the wait. And the afternoon sugar rush. And the subsequent crash.

10 JULY 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

4. Paul’s Donuts $7.85 per dozen. 3.75-inch diameter.

1.9 ounces

5. Dunkin’ Donuts $8.99 plus tax per dozen. 3.5-inch diameter.

2 ounces

6. Community Bakery $11.04 per dozen. 3.38-inch diameter.

1.7 ounces

Paul’s occupies the former Shipley’s shop across the street from North Little Rock High School. The glazed donuts look average, but have a nice, subtle lemon flavor. A long line at the drive-thru moved fast. Although it seemed like only one employee was working, he had a system and met me on one side of the drive-thru, took my order and payment and then met me at the opposite side of the building with a dozen. That kind of efficiency can really inspire one for the coming work day.

If America really runs on Dunkin’, surely they’re talking about the coffee. The Dunkin’ glazed is a pretty run-of-the-mill doughnut.

After eating Shipley’s, the bread almost seemed tough, though the Dunkin’ barely weighs more at 2 ounces and shares about the same diameter. It’s not bad, but when I heard a Dunkin’ fan from the Northeast was planning on camping out outside of the former store on Cantrell before its grand opening years ago, I thought, “Those doughnuts must be amazing!”

Nah. Don’t tell Ben Affleck, though.

The truth is, I wanted this glazed doughnut to be better. It just didn’t taste fresh, and the texture reminded us of an old foam mattress topper. The color reminded us of someone who logged far too many hours in a tanning bed. But it was a doughnut with personality, and it was the lightest doughnut on the scale among our samples. Kudos to the friendly staff at Community Bakery for throwing in a maple glazed. If you go, we recommend sticking with the bakery’s signature iced sugar cookies.

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JULY 2021 11

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ARKANSAS TIMES

COURTESY OF WINDGATE CENTER FOR ART AND DESIGN

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

MICHAEL WARRICK: ‘CLAY, METAL, STONE, WOOD’ AND ‘SPIRITS’

THROUGH TUESDAY 7/20. UA LITTLE ROCK WINDGATE CENTER OF ART AND DESIGN. FREE. Metalworker Michael Warrick, named the 2020 Arkansas Living Treasure by the Department of Arkansas Heritage, has been at it for a while now. He learned welding in the late ’60s in a high school industrial arts class and, a few years later, found himself working on large-scale mining equipment and railroad cars. It didn’t take long for his industrial skill to take a turn for the artistic, though; Warrick’s metalwork sculptures have found homes in parks in Changchun, China, and Hanam, South Korea. Here in the Little Rock area, his installations can be seen at the National Park Services Central High Museum, the Central Arkansas Library System, the Statehouse Convention Center, the University of Arkansas Ottenheimer Library, the CARTI Cancer Center and Bernice Garden. This summer, two exhibitions of Warrick’s work will be up at UA Little Rock in the Brad Cushman and the Maners/Pappas galleries. The first is a snapshot of works in clay, metal, stone and wood created over the last decade. The second is a site-specific installation called “Spirits,” and features seven “meditation portraits cast in Hydrocal with fiberglass reinforcement,” suspended at eye level in low light and meant to represent mentors and spiritual guides. The UA Little Rock art gallery’s hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. weekdays, and patrons can call 501-916-3182 with questions or to confirm a campus visit to the galleries, or view the exhibit online at artexhibitionsualr.org.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2021 13

OZARK LIVING NEWSPAPER THEATRE: ‘A HONKY HYMN’

COURTESY OF GOOD WEATHER

SUNDAYS 7/4, 7/11 AND 7/18. KABF-FM 88.3. 4 P.M. FREE.

GOOD WEATHER: HUNTER FOSTER’S ‘LAYMAN’

THROUGH SATURDAY 7/10. BURNS PARK, NORTH LITTLE ROCK. NOON-3 P.M. If part of an artist’s job is to make us view ordinary things through a different lens, then curator Haynes Riley is doing it right. Riley’s “Good Weather” pop-up art shows, often displayed in site-specific ways in a garage in the Lakewood area of North Little Rock, tend to tinker with the viewer’s feelings about gallery etiquette, time and even space; the press release for this exhibit lists its location in the form of latitude/longitude coordinates: “34°48’09.0”N 92°18’25.8”W.” Here, an offsite exhibit from fellow Central Arkansan Hunter Foster includes nine paintings situated “within a sculptural form of woven strips and opaque metal walls located in the center of a forested public park” — in this case, south of Burns Park’s dog park and just west of the Funland area. Made of dyed canvas, Foster’s pieces overlay the concentric circles of painted wooden tree rings, “engrained,” the creator said, “with a refusal of certainty (antagonistic, even, towards aboutness).” Good Weather’s pop-ups thrive on human interaction — an element sorely lacking in the world of visual art over the course of the pandemic — so visit during these Saturday afternoon “gallery hours” if you can.

MOVIES IN THE PARK

WEDNESDAYS 7/7, 7/14, 7/21, 7/28. FIRST SECURITY AMPITHEATER. SUNDOWN (8:30 P.M., APPROXIMATELY).

FREE. The Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau and River Market Operations are bringing back this summer movie series on the riverfront, with screenings of “Wonder Woman 1984,” July 7; “Raya and the Last Dragon,” July 14; “Bill and Ted Face the Music,” July 21; and Clark Duke’s “Arkansas,” July 28. Don’t bring: glass containers. Do bring: lawnchairs or picnic blankets, bug spray, leashed pets and picnic snacks. An adult must accompany all children under the age of 18, and an ID is required.

14 JULY 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

This lively Central Arkansas theater company was born in 2016 from a class UCA professor Adam Frank taught on theater and social justice, and has since been partnering with nonprofits like El Zocalo Immigrant Resource Center, Lucie’s Place and Just Communities of Arkansas to create unconventional theater work, often with the use of handcrafted masks and puppetry. Here, the company puts playwright and Hendrix-Murphy Visiting Fellow Andy Vaught’s radio play “A Honky Hymn” on air for three Sundays in July, with music from multi-instrumentalist/rock goddess Rachel Ammons. The play, Vaught said in a press release, is “part poem, part sermon, part country song cycle ... . It follows the paths of four friends from childhood, through the war that separates them, and through the beliefs that seal their fates. It is the story of an America where the past mixes with the present, where the conflicts of yesterday find expression in the language of the modern age.”

Catch it on KABF, or stream it on ozarklivingnewspaper.org beginning July 19.

‘MARIE AND ROSETTA’ TUESDAY 7/13-SUNDAY 8/1. WAR MEMORIAL PARK. $45.

The Arkansas Repertory Theatre, much to the delight of anyone who’s watched it navigate the twists and turns of a financial roller coaster over the last few years, is back, with outdoor productions in July and August. “If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s how much we all crave being out in the world, and sharing experiences with our families, friends and neighbors,” The Rep Executive Artistic Director Will Trice said. “That’s exactly what live theater provides, and these immersive productions give us the chance to enjoy our city’s beautiful community spaces in a whole new way.” The first of those productions, “Marie & Rosetta,” puts the spotlight on Cotton Plant native and gospel/rock icon Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and on her relationship with contralto Marie Knight.

Steve H. Broadnax — Little Rock native, Penn State University professor and longtime Rep collaborator — directs this production of George Brant’s 2017 musical, which takes place in a “Rep Revival Tent” on the grounds of War Memorial Park.

Tickets go on sale July 1; visit therep.org.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2021 15

LAURA E. PARTAIN

ARGENTA PLAZA SUMMER SERIES: SYNRG, THE RODNEY BLOCK COLLECTIVE

MARY GAUTHIER

SUNDAY 7/18. FAYETTEVILLE ROOTS HQ, 1 E. MOUNTAIN ST., FAYETTEVILLE. 7:30 P.M. $60-$120.

From the minds that brought the food/music hybrid Fayetteville Roots Fest to Arkansas since 2010 comes an outdoor series worth the road trip up to Northwest Arkansas, particularly when the series offers you a chance to see the likes of Rodney Crowell, Parker Millsap and Mary Gauthier. Gauthier, whose own confrontations with homophobia and heroin form the backbone of her formidable talents, is the folk sage behind “Mercy Now,” “I Drink” and “The War After the War,” and is possessed of a knack for quieting a room with a whisper instead of a wail. When we went to press, the option to reserve a table for three was out, but tables for two or four were still available. See fayettevilleroots.org for tickets, and check out the rest of a compelling series lineup while you’re there.

PAUL CAUTHEN

SATURDAY 7/31. REV ROOM. 8:30 P.M. $25.

We may well have ruined the words “outlaw country” through sheer overuse, but we can still spot its spirit when we hear it. Paul Cauthen’s music bears all the DNA of ancestors like Waylon and Hank and Willie, and the wayward biography to accompany it: a childhood set to the soundtrack of Church of Christ hymns, turning 20 years old in prison, two druggy years in a crumbling Dallas hotel. For a primer, stand next to the fire of the March 2021 solo piano version of Cauthen’s “Slow Down,” shot in one continuous, glorious take by Amos David McKay. Then pair that with the darkly comedic meta-disco masterpiece that is Cauthen’s “Cocaine Country Dancing.” This Rev Room show is gonna be a barnburner, and Kentucky soprano Leah Blevins, opening the show, is bringing the matches. Get tickets at revroom.com.

16 JULY 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

SATURDAY 7/17. ARGENTA PLAZA, 510 MAIN ST., NORTH LITTLE ROCK. 5 P.M. FREE. Even well before the pandemic forced such a skill set upon them, The Rodney Block Collective was great at funneling energy into a room even when there wasn’t a “room” to fill. With trumpet player Block at the core and the SYNRG trio opening the show at 5 p.m., this free outdoor summer series of concerts beckons Little Rock residents to heed the Dogtown mantra local creator Bang-Up Betty recently cemented into a T-shirt slogan: “Stop being a snob about coming to North Little Rock.” Bring lawnchairs.

‘COOL GLOBES: HOT IDEAS FOR A COOLER PLANET’ THROUGH 12/31. CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL CENTER. FREE.

The Clinton Presidential Library and Museum reopens July 1 after its pandemic-induced hiatus, but you won’t need a ticket for its newest temporary exhibit, which illuminates the crisis and impending challenges of climate change through a series of 26 globe-shaped sculptures, each designed by a different artist. Situated around the park’s outdoor landscape and designed for self-guided wandering, the globes have been circling the actual globe since 2007, positing accessible solutions to environmental crises in their themes: “Carpool,” “Conserve Water,” “Bee Mindful.” (Is it too late to add a “Hold Giant Corporations Accountable” globe? Asking for a friend.)

NEWS & POLITICS

THE SAGA OF BONNIE AND JACK MESSAGES TO JFK FROM THE FAUBUS CLAN REVEAL A HOUSE DIVIDED.

BY ERNEST DUMAS

JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

W

‘JIMMIE HIGGINS’: Orval’s father Sam Faubus, in a letter to former Gazette editor Harry S. Ashmore, reveals he’d been writing the Gazette for years under a pseudonym.

18 JULY 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

ith your forbearance, I shall recount an important and long-ago but poorly noted interlude in Arkansas and American history in which I was a callow spectator. It involved the soon-to-be assassinated president of the United States, an aged leftist hillbilly in the Arkansas Ozarks, the hillbilly’s adoring daughter, the governor of Arkansas and assorted politicians and journalists.

Those events of 58 years ago offer a good lesson and perhaps an antidote to the craziness that afflicts Arkansas and the nation this spring. I refer to the revival of so many old conspiracy myths that, at least since the Red Summer at the end of World War I, sometimes plagued but more often only enlivened the body politic. You know: The socialists/communists are coming.

They are coming for your guns. They are driving working people into unions to destroy capitalism and freedom; erasing history by banishing memorials to heroes like Robert E. Lee who betrayed the nation; trying to steal elections from Donald Trump; ennobling Black people at the expense of others; and teaching schoolchildren racial theories to make them hate America.

You heard all those plots from the lips of Arkansas legislators and Trump Republicans everywhere this spring as they passed laws to protect memorials to defenders of slavery, stop teachers from talking about the role of race and discrimination in Arkansas and American history, reverse the easy access to the ballot that produced a historic tide of votes during the pandemic of 2020 (adding 11 million votes, by the way, to Trump’s total from 2016), and even prevent transgender youngsters from getting medical assistance, which socialists are supposed to believe they should be able to get.

Too much there to refute, so little space. Let it suffice that you will be hard-pressed to round up 10 real socialists in Arkansas, from the ivory towers to the hills and swamps.

But let’s think only about the biggest absurdity — the horror of talking about race or any other form of bias in classes where kids are supposed to learn history. It arises from fury around the discovery of the latest — critical race theory or The 1619 Project — of thousands of ideas postulated by academicians, educators and failed commanders about how the lineage, successes and failures of nations and states should be treated by teachers and historical writers.

The owner of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and other newspapers was so scared of the race-theory plot that he humiliated himself and his publications by using his $25 million gift to the University of North Carolina to try to stop the school from hiring a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist because she supported the idea of emphasizing race in history studies.

Southerners horrified by critical race theory and the idea of recognizing the introduction of slavery to America as somehow important could profit by reading a few books

by Arkansas’s own historians, including the greatest one, C. Vann Woodward, the author of “The Strange Career of Jim Crow.”

America is not alone among nations or peoples plagued or driven by some form of nationalism or chauvinism, whether it is race, tribe, nationality, religion or mere class. It is embedded in the history of every nation and its wars, declines and advances. America is unique, not because it exploited slavery and conquered, killed or expelled Native Americans, but because it was founded on the idea of the equality of everyone on Earth and uniquely across two centuries advanced steadily toward that ideal and also fought to guarantee human rights to people in other lands.

But this was to be about Bonnie and Jack, so let’s get to the story. *** In the summer of 1963, President John F. Kennedy, the “Jack” of our tale, faced the second climactic juncture of his brief presidency, after the Cuban missile crisis. He had narrowly won the presidency in 1960 by only vaguely championing civil rights and carried most of the South because he had put a Southerner, Texas Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson, on the ticket with him. One of his opponents, the candidate of the National States Rights Party in several states, was the governor of Arkansas, Orval E. Faubus, who got 45,000 votes.

By the early fall of 1963, the slow pace of Southern school integration had come to a standstill. Kennedy had introduced a weak civil rights bill in January but it was going nowhere.

The voting rights marches and demonstrations in the Deep South were producing nothing but violence against Blacks and their occasional white allies. In early September white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four Black girls and injuring 14 people. Police killed two other children trying to disperse the angry crowd. In Little Rock, the infamous Birmingham police chief, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, urged a crowd of white supremacists to use force — dogs, fire hoses or whatever, as he had at Birmingham — to stop Black people from integrating any place in Arkansas.

On June 11, emboldened by his vice president, Jack Kennedy had made the first strong civil rights speech of his life and eight days later sent Congress the outlines of what would become, but after his assassination, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It included a section integrating public accommodations and ending hiring discrimination. That law and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which enfranchised Blacks across the Deep South, would change America like nothing since the Civil War. They brought Black men and women into the mainstream of American life, from sports to commerce and arts and entertainment. But in September and October 1963 the issue seemed to assure for Jack Kennedy nothing but defeat in the next election because he would lose the Southern states that

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JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

‘THO ARE AFRAID TO SPEAK OUT’: Governor Faubus’ sister writes the President. had put him over Richard Nixon in 1960.

Work was ending on the Greers Ferry Dam on the Little Red River at Heber Springs and Rep. Wilbur D. Mills, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and the man who was writing the health care bill (Medicare and Medicaid) that would fulfill Kennedy’s campaign promise, asked the president to come down south to Arkansas to dedicate the dam.

Kennedy agreed and on Oct. 3, 1963, made the visit to Heber Springs and Little Rock. Seven weeks later, he would make a second political trip south, to Dallas, where Lee Harvey Oswald shot him.

It was the first presidential visit to Arkansas since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. While he was campaigning in 1960, I watched Kennedy step across the border into Arkansas at Texarkana and make a few remarks.

Six Arkansas members of Congress, all powerful committee chairmen, were on the platform with Kennedy at Greers Ferry Dam, each of whom he lauded lavishly. Each of them, incidentally, had signed the Southern Manifesto 20 JULY 2021

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and would vote against all the civil rights bills that were coming.

Covering the event for the Arkansas Gazette, I was seated at the foot of the stage, right below Kennedy and the man who would introduce him, Governor Faubus. Kennedy was tanned and glowing in the midday sun. Faubus, like the others on stage, seemed pale by comparison but unlike all the others was unsmiling, even sullen. Faubus’ introduction hardly mentioned Kennedy but mostly was an attack on his civil rights bill and its public accommodations section, which he said was unconstitutional. He called it the “civil wrongs bill.”

I thought it was amazing discourtesy. Kennedy sat next to the lectern impassively, his arms crossed, perhaps even with a faint smile. He got up, thanked the governor and joked about the power of Mills and the other Arkies on the stage (he said he would happily have sung “Down by the Old Mill Stream” if asked). He proclaimed his and the nation’s debt to all of them and spoke of the great progress he hoped Arkansas would make by the investment in projects like

the dam and its hydroelectric power. He didn’t mention civil rights.

I would later discover the cause of Kennedy’s equanimity that day and perhaps even a reason he had accepted Mills’ invitation. It is all in the presidential papers at the JFK Library at Boston, now online.

Afterward, Faubus and Kennedy flew back to Little Rock and the president made an appearance at the state fair. Under a tent where the president was supposed to lunch, he sat with Sam Faubus of the Ozark hamlet where his son, the governor, grew up. Sam took his son’s seat. I never asked but I presumed that Orval arranged for his somewhat estranged dad to lunch with the old man’s idol. Sam had written many letters to the Gazette, a few praising Kennedy and others mildly critical of Orval over the school crisis, all under the pseudonym “Jimmie Higgins.” Higgins was an imaginary figure who represented the ideal of the young communist. Sam had been an organizer for the Socialist Party in the 1920s.

While Sam was munching, the president told him that he had been told about the supportive letters that Sam had written and that he had received a wonderful letter from Sam’s daughter — Orval’s sister — assuring him that he was on the right course with civil rights and that he had the support of all her family except Orval and that he would carry the South again. Sam told Patrick J. Owens, my friend and exemplar, about the president’s conversation a few days later.

Her letter was more than a paean to a job well done. It was a lament of the white supremacy that dominated the rural mountain society where she had grown up. Here is the letter: August 29, 1963 6032 San Yuba Way Buena Park, Calif.

Dear Mr. President, I’m writing to you in great hope — that you will read this (So you who opens this, please give it to the President). My purpose in writing is to give you hope in the fight for civil rights — I want you to know there are many in the South who are for you tho are afraid to speak out.

I am the sister of the Governor of Arkansas, born and raised on a hill side farm — scratching out a bare existence — from the land.

We knew dire poverty which was hardest to bare in time of sickness — But we knew much joy and happiness also as we had the beauty of the Ozarks and each other — My mother died when I was 13 leaving 2 younger than me, 7 children in all — 3 boys and 4 girls.

My father was not a church going man but he taught us right from wrong — He read everything he could beg or borrow as did we all.

Most of all he taught us to never judge a man by the color of his skin — never to discriminate against him because of his race or religion.

We all grew up with this in our hearts and practiced it in our daily lives — We grew up to

be good citizens — Many in our “neck of the woods” hated colored people but we defended them and wished them well — My heart ached as a child when I’d pass thru “nigger town” on the edge of Fayetteville, Arkansas — You see I knew what poverty was but I was lucky I wasn’t yelled at, sneered at and denied the right to attend the movie, eat in a cafe or go to school.

My brother Orval, the oldest of our family, was the only one to obtain a highschool education. We did not have his driving ambition and dropped out along the way.

I shall never forget the times we rooted for Joe Louis — After working in the fields all day we’d rush home, do the chores — run to the creek near by for our daily bath — eat our supper (usually cornbread and milk) and walk two miles to hear the fight on our neighbors radio.

Most of the crowd wished his defeat because he was a “nigger” but we always defended him because of his great skill.

We were a close family and loved each other dearly. As we grew up we drifted away in search of a better way of life — all of us but Orval — he started teaching school at 18 — after that came county politics then at last the Governor of Arkansas — you can imagine our pride and joy in him as we’d always looked up to him.

But in Sept. 1957 we were shocked as was the nation when news of Little Rock shook the world — first we searched for the “true” facts so that we’d understand his actions.

We found no “true facts” that would justify his actions as we searched our hearts — altho we have struggled and suffered together and love him dearly we find we must speak out for what we know is right — my father is 78, very lame — can’t walk without crutches but his mind is keen as ever — lately he has been defending you by writing letters to the local paper.

Many of them are returned but he does what he can — 5 of my brothers and sisters are for you also. I speak out when ever I think it will help you — We not only agree on the civil rights issue but the Medicare bill and the one for the aged must be passed for the good of our country — Please do not dispare there are many for you who are afraid to speak out but when no one is looking over their shoulder — will vote for you.

I’ve written to let you know you have supporters where you least expect them.

Before I close, I wish to say my family—my husband Raul my son Reginald 17 and my 14 yr. old daughter, have grieved with you in the loss of your darling baby. [President Kennedy’s 2-day-old son had died 20 days earlier of a respiratory syndrome.]

May God be with you in your fight for peace and justice.

Bonnie Faubus Salcido Bonnie Salcido never spoke to her eldest brother again nor attended his funeral in 1994.

She died in 2013 at the age of 93.

But there is a little more to the story, according

to the Kennedy papers. A letter written by Sam Faubus a few weeks earlier to Harry S. Ashmore, the former executive editor of the Gazette, then with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in California, had reached Kennedy, thanks to Ashmore and a mutual friend, the editor of the Miami News.

Bruce Bennett, the fire-breathing attorney general of Arkansas, a subject of mine at the state Capitol and earlier when both of us were around the courthouse every day at El Dorado, had been in Washington testifying before Congress on the evils of Kennedy’s civil rights bill and of racial integration. It was all a plot directed in Moscow. Bennett resurrected Commonwealth College, the socialist self-help school at Mena where Orval Faubus went to school and was president of the student body.

Bennett had tried to beat Faubus in 1960 by outsegging him and then got back into the AG’s office in 1962 to await another chance to racebait himself into the governor’s office.

Ashmore read about Bennett’s nutty testimony in California and sent a whimsical letter to the Gazette noting Bennett’s factual errors and ending by sort of defending Governor Faubus against Bennett’s hints that the governor of Arkansas was soft on the Negro question because of his old socialist school experience. He ended his letter, which the Gazette printed July 23, this way: “Now that a new season of wanton character assassination has reintroduced the Commonwealth College case to public discussion, I recognize a duty to again make my findings available to the readers of the Gazette: Mr. Faubus is not a Communist, and he knows it.”

Sam read the letter and scribbled a note to Ashmore in Santa Barbara, California, thanking him for the somewhat kind words about his son. He revealed that he was the Jimmie Higgins who had written the letters to the Gazette over the years.

Ashmore sent Sam’s letter to his friend, the Miami editor, who forwarded it to his friend Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy’s secretary, suggesting that she share Sam Faubus’ and Ashmore’s letters with the president. “Perhaps the attached will lighten the President’s burden for a moment,” he said.

I like to think that the faint smile I detected on Jack Kennedy’s face as Faubus ranted that October day was his recollection of reading the words of Bonnie, Sam, Orval, Ashmore and my rabble-rousing neighbor Bruce. We cannot be sure, but all of the Faubus correspondence may have more than amused the president. Even greater personal misfortunes but posthumous victories beckoned. In Arkansas on Nov. 22, some schoolchildren reportedly cheered intercom announcements of Kennedy’s murder, but in four more races for governor Orval Faubus never again ranted about preserving segregation. He endorsed Jesse Jackson for president in 1988.

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JULY 2021 21

HOW BARBARA HENDRICKS SANG HER WAY OUT OF RURAL ARKANSAS, ONTO THE WORLD’S BIGGEST OPERA STAGES AND INTO THE LIVES OF REFUGEES ACROSS THE GLOBE.

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

T

MATTIAS EDWALL

here’s a recording of Barbara Hendricks singing Maurice Ravel’s “Vocalise en forme de habanera” with the National Orchestra of Lyon, France, on New Year’s Eve 1988. Even at two-and-a-half minutes — a breezy length, by classical standards — it’s a staggeringly difficult piece to sing, with fluttering trills and virtuosic leaps and rapidfire swoops up and down the scale. Chances are, if you’re harboring a flaw or two in your technique, Ravel’s brief and wordless wonder will find that flaw and crack it wide open for all to hear. No such thing happened on the last day of 1988. Hendricks’ soprano glides around seductively and deftly, seeming to change colors in midair — voluptuous and warm one moment, feathery and delicate the next. It’s an electrifying sample of what she can do vocally, and a three-minute master class in human agility.

It’s also but one of the ways she has used her voice over her lifetime.

Now 72 years old and a Swedish citizen, Hendricks has carved out parallel paths as a world-class lyric soprano and longtime ambassador of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. She’s been speaking out against oppressive political systems for longer than many of us have been alive — and at a time when celebrities weren’t necessarily expected to do so. Once, in her operatic heyday, a journalist asked her why she had stopped singing to devote her time to working for refugees. She explained that she had, in fact, not stopped singing at all, and was fully booked. “I assumed that since my career was going full blast,” she said, “and I was singing for full halls in Europe, North and South America and Asia, I did not need the publicity for myself. … I prefer that my career serves this important cause and not viceversa.” When I spoke with her from her home north of Stockholm earlier this year, she made it clear that she’s come to see her activism as a calling, one she answered because of where she was born, when she was born, and to whom she was born.

Hendricks’ voice was heard for the first time in 1948, at her grandparents’ farmhouse in rural Stephens (Ouachita County), where she was born. She remembers her childhood as pastoral, if regimented. Calendar years were marked by week-long church revivals in the sweltering Arkansas humidity,

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LYRIC SOPRANO, REFUGEE ADVOCATE: Ouachita County-born Barbara Hendricks has carved out parallel paths as an operatic soprano and humanitarian ambassador.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2021 23

FERNAND FOURCADE

A NIMBLE TRAJECTORY: Hendricks had completed a degree in math and chemistry before a teacher urged her to pursue singing at The Juilliard School in New York.

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AT HORACE MANN HIGH SCHOOL, HENDRICKS WAS AN HONOR STUDENT WHO HARBORED A PREACHER’S DAUGHTER’S PENCHANT FOR REBELLION; DESPITE THE DISDAIN SHE’D DEVELOPED FOR BEAUTY CONTESTS AS A BUDDING FEMINIST, SHE WAS CROWNED HOMECOMING QUEEN IN 1964 AFTER ENTERING ON A DARE. oranges at Christmastime and the seasonal rhythms of the family’s subsistence farm. Her father, Malvin Hendricks, was a gifted preacher in what was then called the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and his advancement within the ministry meant that Barbara and her siblings — Geneice, Malvin Jr. and Michael — were exposed to Black communities beyond rural Ouachita County, worshipping at some of the same churches that would become spiritual cornerstones for the civil rights movement in the South. The spirituals they sang, she said in her 2014 memoir, connected her to the emotional landscape of American chattel slavery. She counts her father’s sermons, on the other hand, as her first experiences of theater — “in no way fake or make-believe,” but punctuated with the elements of a great drama: electrifying descriptions of heaven and hell, call-andresponse improvisation and impassioned monologues followed by musical interjections.

In 1957, the Hendricks family was living in Pine Bluff where her mother, Della Mae, taught school. When classes ended, they’d pile into a black Ford and spend the summer break in North Little Rock, where Malvin preached at Miles Chapel CME Church. Hendricks doesn’t remember exactly why they were still in North Little Rock on Sept. 4, 1957 — Jefferson County started their school later, perhaps? But she was.

The Hendricks family didn’t own a TV, but the neighbors did, and catching glimpses of the violent clashes at Little Rock Central High on the news that month changed her entire life’s trajectory. “I began to understand what that ominous cloud was about, what the adults were sometimes whispering about,” she said. “Yet I understood nothing at all.” She pieced together the story of Emmett Till from snippets of overheard conversations and magazine articles in Ebony and Jet. Later, she’d incorporate “Strange Fruit” into her concert repertoire, and said she thinks of Till every time she sings it.

Subject to the ministry’s call, the family moved to Chattanooga, then to Memphis, then back to Little Rock. There, Hendricks landed in the soprano section of the choir Art Porter led at Horace Mann High School. She was an honor student who harbored a preacher’s daughter’s penchant for rebellion; despite the disdain she’d developed for beauty contests as a budding

feminist, she was crowned homecoming queen in 1964 after entering on a dare.

Equipped with years of experience looking after her younger brothers, Hendricks got a gig babysitting the Porters’ four children — one of whom would become a heralded jazz saxophonist — while the Art Porter Trio played jazz sets in hotels and nightclubs. Once the kids were asleep, she dug into the Porter family’s record collection while she studied, discovering Ella Fitgerald and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane and Count Basie.

Hendricks left home in 1965 for Lane College, a CME school of her parents’ choosing in Jackson, Tennessee, selected in hopes that Hendricks’ strict upbringing could continue, isolating her from the social awakening happening on campuses elsewhere in the country — SNCC’s sit-ins and voter registration drives, dissent against the Vietnam War, the rise of psychedelic experimentation and Bay Area counterculture.

It didn’t stick.

Hendricks, who had studied a year at Nebraska Wesleyan University through an exchange program with Lane, attracted the attention of university officials connected to the nine-week Aspen Music Festival and School in Denver, Colorado, and was offered a full scholarship to study there with an acclaimed mezzo-soprano named Jennie Tourel, despite not being a music major. At Tourel’s invitation, Hendricks fast-tracked her degree in chemistry and mathematics so she could start her undergraduate music studies from scratch at New York City’s Juilliard School. In New York, she earned rent money by working at a shoe store, then at an insurance company. She’d sign up to work fundraisers and receptions at Juilliard for extra cash, and took in as many theater and dance performances as she could afford, relying on friends who worked as ushers at Carnegie Hall to help her slip into an empty seat at the last moment before the hall’s doors shut, or scouring the Village Voice for free workshops and off-off-Broadway shows.

Most importantly, she soaked up several years of instruction from, and companionship with, her teacher, after whom Hendricks would name her second child. Tourel, a Jewish refugee from Russia, employed the sort of nononsense instruction that shaped Hendricks

into a formidable lyric soprano — one who had no qualms about speaking up in rehearsal about matters both ethical and artistic, and who eschewed any whiff of celebrity-fawning in favor of fastidious score study. Before Tourel died, she gifted Hendricks a copy of Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin’s autobiography, a passage of which Hendricks has said she memorized and adopted as a personal mantra: My life has as its leitmotif the struggle against: The sham glitter that eclipses the inner light The complexities that kill simplicity The vulgar externals that diminishes true grandeur.

By the mid ’70s, Hendricks was singing under the batons of George Solti and Herbert von Karajan, interpolating chamber works and contemporary oddities with the conventional opera canon. And, it became increasingly clear, she was not a wallflower. Conductors either loved or hated the fact that she wasn’t a sycophant.

Hendricks stood up to venerated soprano Maria Callas after Callas put Hendricks on probation for an upcoming master class, apparently not having been greeted with enough reverence at their first meeting. Hendricks’ career blossomed anyway, particularly in Europe. Her 1994 recording “La voix du ciel,” which ranges from aria to Lieder to spiritual, went double gold.

She’s made over 100 classical studio recordings, and in more recent years has delved into recording blues and jazz. She’s performed at pretty much every major opera house on Earth.

And she’s nurtured collegial relationships with dedication. When Porter’s lung cancer was in its late stages, Hendricks visited Porter at his home in Little Rock, lamenting that they’d missed one another during the Clinton inauguration festivities at which they both performed.

Hendricks invited Porter to her upcoming Duke Ellington tribute at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1994 — her “first real jazz performance,” she called it — but Porter died in the interim.

And, as her career unfolded, she fell in love with a Swedish pianist and opera house director named Martin Engstrom, with whom she had two children, Jennie and Sebastian. Hendricks worked through both pregnancies at a 119-yearold festival called Choregies d’Orange, singing

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BENGT WANSELIUS

A VERSATILE VOICE: At 72, Hendricks’ repertoire traverses between operatic aria, Lieder, jazz, blues and the spirituals she sang as a child.

Micaëla in Bizet’s “Carmen” while she carried Jennie, Pamina in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” while she carried Sebastian.

Her political involvement deepened over time, too. In New York in 1970, she’d joined a bus of students traveling to D.C. to protest in the wake of the Kent State shootings. She’d begun to identify with critics of the Vietnam war. She sported an Afro and blue jeans instead of the fur coats her colleagues suggested might behoove an opera diva. She became increasingly interested in anti-apartheid movements and other social justice issues outside the United States, and spoke out about her political opinions in media interviews, a habit the classical singing world has historically frowned upon. And in 1987, Hendricks became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations’ refugee agency. That same year, Hendricks guest edited an issue of French Vogue, insisting that a letter she’d penned campaigning against apartheid be included along with her curated collection of interviews with Maya Angelou and Italian conductor Riccardo Muti. It was published.

In May of 2020, Hendricks appeared on French television ahead of a fundraising concert for 26 JULY 2021

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the agency, and spoke about the ways in which COVID-19 lockdowns gave privileged people a fleeting sense of what it felt like for refugees “all of the time. They’re wondering, ‘When will our kids get to school again? What’s our life going to be like? When can we start a normal life?’ ” At one point, the broadcaster asked about the Martin Luther King Jr.-inspired concert title, “The Road to Freedom,” and Hendricks seized the chance to drop into the conversation the names of women who, she points out, also shaped the civil rights movement: Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer and Daisy Bates, who Hendricks’ parents knew and worked with in Little Rock during the school desegregation crisis. Hendricks is now the longest-tenured ambassador in the agency, and quite possibly the only opera singer who carries a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in her purse.

“Our mandate in the UNHCR,” Hendricks told me earlier this year, “is that we take care of people once the conflict has begun, we’re an emergency organization. We’re like the fire department — we come after the fire has started.” In recent decades, she’s become

increasingly interested in what lights the match to begin with, but as any expert in international relations can tell you, that part can be wildly complicated.

The last refugees Hendricks spoke to before the pandemic were in Greece. They’d come from Istanbul, fleeing Syria. Hendricks was taken with a young mother of three children, all under the age of 10. The woman, a clothesmaker by trade, had reached Greece on her third attempt to flee by boat. Neither she nor any of her children could swim. Another woman, also from Syria, told Hendricks she often dreamed of the garden she left behind when she fled, and how the smell of oranges wafted through it.

“When we look around us,” Hendricks told me, “we’ve all come from somewhere else.”

She remembered her teacher Tourel, a refugee herself. “Just knowing how enriching the refugees have been to society and culture and science! People don’t flee from their homes unless they have no other choice. ... . Most refugees are in countries that are bordering their home, and they’re hoping to get back. They’re just waiting for that moment when somebody says, ‘It’s OK, it’s safe to come home.’ ” When it comes to refugee advocacy, and humanitarian work in general, Hendricks says, it’s important for her feet to be on the ground in affected countries. COVID-19 halted that, and she missed the schedule of in-person visits she kept before the pandemic, because talking with real people allowed her to be a better advocate.

“As opposed to saying, ‘Today we have 80 million people who have been forced to flee.’

That number is so daunting to us. You have to think about individual families. Individual people. I never met a refugee mother who didn’t want the same things for her children that I want for mine.” *** Geographical distance aside, there’s a direct line for Hendricks between refugee advocacy and life in Jim Crow-era Arkansas. “For all intents and purposes,” Hendricks said, “I was born a refugee in my own country — born without the same protection under the law that the Constitution afforded every white girl born that day.”

In the spring of 1994, Hendricks found herself at a Catholic mass in the Soweto township of Johannesburg, South Africa. She was in Africa for the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela, attending as an ambassador for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the French ambassador had suggested they attend the mass directly from the airport. When the choir began to sing, Hendricks was stunned.

“I did not know the music,” she said, “but recognized immediately the way of singing and harmonizing that I’d heard so many times

in my father’s rural churches.” At the priest’s behest, she sang two spirituals — “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and “Glory Hallelujah” — and whenever she’d sing in her higher register, the congregation would answer her with “high-pitched sounds that resembled birdcalls.” In those cries, Hendricks said, she “was able to make a trip that spanned two centuries and crisscrossed an ocean from Africa to back again.” *** Hendricks is 72 now. She lives in Norrtälje, Sweden, north of Stockholm, with her second husband, Ulf Englund, a guitarist and lighting designer whose work ranges from the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm to collaborations with Hendricks in Paris and Barcelona and beyond. The two met in production meetings for a 1994 Christmas program tour through Europe, shortly after Hendricks’ divorce from Engstrom.

Both fresh out of relationships and not anxious to get into another one, Hendricks’ and Englunds’ bond was an unexpected one. Just as unexpectedly, Englund proposed to Hendricks on a scenic observation deck overlooking Stockholm after buying her an ice cream cone.

Hendricks still gives concerts, albeit at a less breakneck pace. She has a vegetable garden with a greenhouse Ulf built to accommodate the short Swedish growing season, and she took up growing flowers last year after her longtime local florist retired. She gets up early and meditates and does yoga or a workout — “adjusted for my age,” she added. Her now-adult children give her flack for ironing the dish towels after they’re laundered, exclaiming, “They’re gonna be wet in five minutes!”

She steers clear of social media, but keeps up with the news. On Jan. 6, when insurrectionists raided the nation’s Capitol, she and Ulf watched in horror. “I still believe in the idea of that Constitution, which didn’t include me,” she told me, “and didn’t include women, period, and that was written by men who were flawed.

But there was still something that touched me.”

She and Ulf watched Biden’s inauguration, too.

When Lady Gaga sang “and the flag was still there,” Hendricks remembered, she got choked up. “Because it’s even bigger than the country,” she said. “Bigger than the politicians. As a child, I felt unprotected by it, but the idea of everyone being created equal and that we’re all in it together is something that is the foundation of my work and why I do the work I do. There is some meaning that I was born in Stephens, Arkansas, to the parents I was born to.”

“Between these toes, there is still the dirt of Arkansas, and it will always be there. That’s where I’m grounded. That is who I am. That little girl makes me the woman that I am.”

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JULY 2021 27

Inward, Tammy Harrington

Arkansas Society of Printmakers: New Kids on the Print Block The Arkansas Society of Printmakers is a community of artists, art collectors, and supporters of the art of printmaking dedicated to the mission of generating greater excitement and appreciation for printmaking as a unique art form in Arkansas.

Night Waffles, Gregory Moore

Gregory Moore: Biota In this exhibition of paintings on found objects, a secret world of plants and animals comes alive on decaying scraps from the human realm.

Local author Jennifer O’Brien The Hospice Doctor’s Widow

Join CALS for 2nd Friday Art Night | July 9, 5-8 p.m.

The Galleries & Bookstore at Library Square 401 President Clinton Ave. | cals.org

Quality Care Rooted in Arkansas

hope Is The Foundation. recovery Is The Journey.

In response to the growing needs of our community, The BridgeWay has expanded its continuum of care for substance use disorders. The acute rehabilitation program will provide hope and recovery for adults struggling with substance use disorders. Led by Dr. Schay, and a Board Certified Psychiatrist and Addictionologist, the Substance Use Disorder Rehabilitation Program is for adults at risk of relapse. Rehabilitation requires the supportive structure of a 24-hour therapeutic environment.

To learn more about our continuum of care for substance use disorders, call us at 1-800-245-0011.

Physicians are on the medical staff of The BridgeWay Hospital but, with limited exceptions, are independent practitioners who are not employees or agents of The BridgeWay Hospital.

The facility shall not be liable for actions or treatments provided by physicians.

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Dr. Schay

Medical Director Of Substance Use Disorders & Patriot Support Program

THEIR PRIORITIES CLARIFIED BY THE PANDEMIC, WORKING ARKANSANS REALIZE THEIR WORTH

L

BY AUSTIN BAILEY AND LINDSEY MILLAR PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON

I

t’s dizzying trying to make sense of the U.S. economy these days. Are we roaring back to full employment? Or will labor shortages derail our recovery?

Did government stimulus spark inflation and indolence? Or did federal relief checks simply allow workers to hold out for a job that’s a better fit than their pre-pandemic gig?

Be skeptical of anyone who answers these questions with confidence, because no one really knows. That includes Governor Hutchinson, who announced in May that Arkansas would turn back federal pandemic unemployment payments. The federal program is slated to end in September; in Arkansas it stopped June 26. Hutchinson framed the move as a way to help employers flesh out their payrolls. “We don’t need to pay people to stay at home when employers are begging for workers,” he told NPR in May. Implicit in his comments is an idea, popular on the right, that government safety nets make people lazy, that labor should bow to the market.

To get a sense of what’s actually going on in the Arkansas labor market, the Arkansas Times spoke with workers about how the pandemic changed their career trajectories. Most of those we interviewed were women — by design.

Whether they got chucked out against their will or bailed on their own terms, women were far more likely than men to be out of work during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, 5.4 million women lost jobs, compared to 4.32 million men. And those numbers don’t even include the women who ducked out of the workforce on their own volition to take care of children when schools and daycares shut down.

Rhett Brinkley also takes an in-depth look at what’s happening in the restaurant industry, where labor shortages have been particularly acute, a problem some workers blame on low wages and burnout.

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SELF-STYLED: Working mom Maygie Stallings couldn’t find the perfect job, so she built one for herself.

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MAYGIE STALLINGS, hair stylist turned salon owner With more free time to think on it, Maygie Stallings might have admitted before the pandemic that while her job was fine, it didn’t offer some of the perks she really needed. As a stylist in someone else’s shop, she could hammer out her own schedule for the most part. But when she needed to work and watch her children at the same time, an inconvenience that inevitably befalls all working moms, Stallings had zero options. No matter how well-behaved they are, kids provisioned with their inevitable clutter of craft supplies and video games clash with the hushed and sleek aesthetic of a salon where adults go partly to escape that sort of thing.

When the salon where she was working closed abruptly in March 2020, along with pretty much every other business in town, Stallings suddenly found herself removed enough from her daily grind that she could consider it with a critical eye. It came up wanting. The work of a stylist renting a stall in a salon owned by someone else brought in enough money to pay the bills, but not enough to put much away for retirement. Finances were a concern before COVID-19, but with the sudden and unexpected loss of income, longsimmering economic anxiety boiled to the surface.

“Salons were shut down for eight weeks, but when they reopened they announced it on a Friday that we could reopen the next Monday. I wasn’t ready, it just didn’t seem OK for us to just jump right back in when we had no idea what being behind the chair would look like during a pandemic,” Stallings said. “So I waited another two weeks. So I was off for a total of 10 weeks.”

And, like so many others, Stallings couldn’t tap into the unemployment system that was supposed to be helping people like her who could no longer work through no fault of their own. “We were eligible for unemployment, but the state’s system wasn’t able to process our claims. So

there was a period after the shutdown that hair stylists and other workers were receiving no income. It was pretty hard,” she said.

Once she went back, a staggered schedule the stylists arranged to minimize risk of exposure chopped her workweek from six days to three.

And when her firefighter husband, Matthew Stallings, worked a 24-hour shift, she had to forgo a workday to take care of her children at home.

With the entire world in ongoing disarray, leaping into a risky entrepreneurial endeavor made as much sense as anything else. Her husband and parents embraced the vision along with her, giving her the courage to teeter out beyond her comfort zone. And by owning her own business, Stallings could arrange both her schedule and her workplace. Flexibility for working families is literally built in at Bloom, the Hillcrest salon Stallings opened in March of 2021.

“Opening my own spot, I knew I would need a space for the kids to hang out if I need to work while my husband is on a 24, so we have a little lounge downstairs with a couch and TV. Oh, and snacks, they love the snacks. But I also knew we needed to have that space because other stylists would also have situations where they might need it. Child care situations happen.”

REBECCA GRAHAM, full-time employee turned full-time student Pre-pandemic, single mom ReBecca Graham had a solid long-term plan in place, with her job as kitchen manager and security guard at a women’s prison in Fayetteville anchoring it all. The predictable hours with the Arkansas Division of Community Correction made scheduling child care for her 11-year-old son and online classes toward her political science degree easy. After eight years on the job, Graham felt confident she was next in line for a promotion.

“I was doing school part time, all online, a little at a time,” she said.

“I was fine and happy with that. We had a system, it was a good state job

with steady income and good benefits and that was my plan until I finished school.”

When schools closed in the spring of 2020, Graham stayed the course, enlisting her parents to watch her son when she was at work. Then a few things happened that opened up cracks in her long-term plans.

COVID-19 was spreading fast in some of the state’s prisons, and Graham worried the same would soon happen where she worked, especially since some of her co-workers didn’t seem to be taking any precautions to avoid COVID-19 exposure on their off hours.

With a grandmother just home from the hospital after back surgery living next door, Graham fretted about bringing the virus to her. She took to ditching her potentially contaminated clothes in the garage and showering as soon as she got home. A few times, when she learned she may have been exposed to the virus, Graham stayed alone in a hotel. Added to that stress were the overtime hours she was working to cover for sick or quarantining co-workers. She didn’t want the extra shifts, but said she didn’t feel like she could say no.

“In my job specifically, the people who were calling me in to work at 1 or 2 in the morning weren’t willing to do it themselves,” she said.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, it was time for a reckoning.

“It was just getting to where I was exhausted,” Graham said. “And it was costing me money to go to work.

I was having to find somewhere for the kid to go or find a hotel room. My schoolwork was suffering. I felt like the only choice was to leave.”

So she did. Off the table went Graham’s plan to buy a house. She needed to keep those savings in the bank while she dived into school full time. She tapped Pell Grants and scholarships, and started making and selling woodworking projects for cash.

She’s on course to finish her degree in December 2022, and doesn’t plan to go back to work until then.

“I’ve gotten into a pretty good system of living on as little as

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MODERN-DAY WOODSMAN: Axed from a marketing gig, Scott Faldon cut his own path.

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humanly possible, spending as little as humanly possible. We’re stable if we can stay that way.”

Herself immunocompromised, and the sole caregiver for her son, Graham was told she met qualifications to tap Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.

She applied and followed up with lots of phone calls to a busy line. Someone at Arkansas Division of Workforce Services told her she would have to first be denied for regular unemployment before she could access PUA money, but her online application was a dead end. “I never could get anything to go through. Honestly I just kind of gave up after a while.”

Months later, she got a letter from Workforce Services telling her she should reapply. At that point, though, after so many hours and phone calls already invested with no payoff, the effort didn’t seem worth it. She suspects that was the point.

“In Arkansas we really have that mentality that if we make this as hard and as bureaucratically complicated as possible, we will weed out people who are trying to abuse the system,” she said. But that approach also weeds out people who really need help. “I definitely feel like that attitude surrounds everything, from SNAP benefits to whatever, that if we make it as hard as humanly possible, people will just give up.”

Graham thinks she can stretch to graduation day 2022 with the lights still on, and that with a degree in hand she will find work she wants to do. She points to the governor’s decision to cut off federal unemployment benefits early as one reason why other workers won’t have that kind of opportunity to work toward higher-paying careers.

“They don’t want people to have access to help,” she said. “You’ve got to work for peanuts rather than take anything from the government.”

But for her, Graham said there’s no chance she would ever go back to her old job. Her experience during the pandemic changed her trajectory completely.

“Had the pandemic not come along I would probably still be there,”

she said. “It forced me to make this decision that is very hard, but it’s working. I have a lot of sleepless nights. I have more stress and anxiety and probably depression than I’ve ever had in my life. But I was literally putting my body and my health and my sanity on the line for a job that, when it came down to it, didn’t have my back.”

SCOTT FALDON, finally off the market Scott Faldon of Fort Smith spent a decade working as a sportswriter and editor before leaving for a corporate marketing job, where he worked for 10 years until last May, when he got laid off. The company, which he declined to name, supplies retailers and when its biggest customers closed shop, his job disappeared. “It was kind of out of the blue, but I understand it from a business perspective,” Faldon said.

He got severance and, when that ran out, unemployment benefits. But he didn’t take losing his job well. “I was depressed and angry and not pleasant to be around for several weeks.

My wife and our child were very understanding and forgiving and did everything they could. It was really rough.”

He’d spend hours on LinkedIn and Indeed.com and every other online job board he could find. Not long after he was laid off, he had several interviews, but those positions weren’t ever filled as the companies rethought hiring as the coronavirus dragged on. “Each day the drip drip of news, it changed everyone’s stance on everything.”

As much as he loved Fort Smith, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to find another marketing or communications job in middle age.

“Who’s going to hire a 52-year-old to work in a marketing department at this point?” he remembered thinking.

“They’re going to want someone who knows how to run TikTok.” On a whim, he put together a Father’s Day gift guide for The Woodsman Company, a local outdoor clothing and supplies store, where he’d been a customer for 30 years. He emailed it to the general manager, letting her know

he was looking for work. The owner called not long after, and Faldon told him he was desperate to get out of the house. That landed him a part-time job that morphed into a full-time job in management. “I don’t want to say it was a blessing to get laid off, but the people at The Woodsman have been a blessing,” Faldon said. He’s had to adjust to retail hours, working, say, 1 p.m.-9 p.m. on weekdays, rather than 9-5, and working on weekends, but the owner has been flexible with him when he’s had to care for his 12-yearold daughter.

“When I talked to the owner, I told him if he just wanted me to show up and sweep the floors, I’d be glad to do it,” Faldon said. “I knew that I needed that, to get out of my own head and have a job. If he calls me tomorrow and says, ‘I just need you to come in and sweep all day tomorrow,’ I wouldn’t mind a bit.”

Going from a corporate management position to retail meant a significant pay cut. “But things could be a lot worse,” Faldon said. His wife has a good corporate gig, and he was able to get on her insurance plan. Over the years, the Faldons lived so frugally that they didn’t have to dip into their healthy savings after Scott got laid off.

The unemployment checks went into savings for their daughter’s college fund.

Faldon is so happy at The Woodsman, which is expanding to include a bike shop, that he told them several months ago that he wasn’t going to look for other jobs. “I enjoy going to work,” he said.

MARY WEST, thrown to the wolves Ahead of last school year, Mary West hoped the Central Arkansas high school where she taught would go all virtual. Or at least allow teachers like herself with underlying health conditions to teach virtually. Or, short of that, that her school would make significant improvements to its ventilation system. When none of that happened, she quit rather than risk exposure to the coronavirus. She already lived with an adult daughter

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KEPT ON COOKING: Server and baker Kim Bratton went into overdrive on her involuntary work hiatus.

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whose corporate job allowed her to work remotely. She also had savings.

Without that safety net, “I’d have been in a hell of a mess,” she said.

West, 53, started selling secondhand clothes and books on eBay to supplement her savings. But she had to significantly cut down on her spending as well. She and her daughter cook instead of eating food from restaurants, and they buy generic items from the grocery store. She doesn’t go to Starbucks anymore. She hasn’t bought new clothes in years, “but that’s no big deal.” Veterinarian bills have been a particular worry. West and her daughter have five dogs and four cats. In the hope of saving money, she’s been researching homeopathic remedies for the animals. She’ll have to find at least a part-time job before too long to cover bills and debt, but she’s unsure she wants to return to the classroom after “teachers were thrown to the wolves” this school year.

The notion that generous unemployment benefits, which West didn’t apply for, kept people from working is “bullshit,” she said.

“I think people want to work.

People want to make a living. I don’t like not having money. I don’t like not working. I want to feel like I’m safe in the workplace. I want to feel like my concerns are valued, not just pushed aside. I think that’s how a lot of people feel who haven’t gone back to work. They can’t just say, ‘We’re going to starve you guys into going back to work.’ No, you’re probably not. You’re going to make it difficult for people.

You’re going to make a lot of people get on food stamps. You’re going to make them move in with family members.

But you’re not going to force someone who feels unsafe in the workplace to go back to work.”

AMY GILLESPIE, substitute teacher turned temporary stay-at-home mom Ducking out of the workforce, at least temporarily, felt like the only choice for substitute teacher and mom of two Amy Gillespie. Before

the pandemic, Gillespie worked at the Arkansas Arts Academy in Rogers as often as they called her in, and always at least three days a week.

When schools closed in March 2020, cutting out any need for substitutes, she assumed the work of managing her children’s online schooling while her husband, whose job in the food supply chain made him an essential worker, continued logging full-time hours.

When it came time to decide what to do when schools opened back up, Gillespie made plans that took into account the well-being of not just her own children, but their classmates, too.

Gillespie opted to keep her own children home to quell their anxiety and avoid possible COVID-19 exposure. Plus, Gillespie said she felt good about freeing up more social distancing space for students whose working parents didn’t have the option to keep them home.

“We can do it, and that will create a safer environment for people who can’t,” Gillespie explained.

The family finances took a hit. But since her children were home from school and she wasn’t substitute teaching, Gillespie saved lots of gas money by skipping out on the daily drive from their home in Bella Vista to the Rogers school campus.

Marking Lunchables and other convenient but pricey foods off the grocery list helped, too.

Gillespie will head back to the classroom in August, a job she prefers to the unpaid role she’s been playing.

“I find it easier to teach a classroom of kids as a substitute than to manage my own kids’ daily lessons,” she said.

“They just don’t want to learn from mom.”

While Gillespie said she was glad to be in the financial position to be able to take a year off teaching, managing her children’s schoolwork on top of their worries and uncertainty was a harder job. “Women have really carried the weight of families during this time,” she said.

KIM BRATTON, baked through it all A mother of two and a server at Doe’s Eat Place, Kim Bratton was surprised to find herself without a job to go to when the restaurant shut down because of the coronavirus.

“I was one of the millions of people who started collecting unemployment, which was weird for me. I had never been on any kind of unemployment, or even food stamps,” she said.

Bratton used that time to work on her already established side hustle, selling homemade cakes and cookies under her BatchLife brand, replete with cleverly named specialties. “Basic batch” is her version of chocolate chip cookies, and “salty batch” is a salted caramel and white chocolate. Bratton amped production and tried out a sales pitch over Facebook Live. It went better than expected, egging her on toward her goal of taking BatchLife out of her kitchen and on the road as a food truck. The three months she was home gave her time to fine-tune her business plan.

When she got a call that Doe’s was going to reopen, she gladly headed back to the restaurant to help with a two-week-long deep clean and repainting project to prepare to welcome customers back.

“I had thought about not going back, but at the same time, I like to work,” she said. “I can’t stay home and just do nothing. It was driving me crazy. I had to go back to work.”

But because so many customers were staying home, the tips that accounted for almost all of her income didn’t materialize. “I was probably making about a third of what I was pre-COVID. It was less than what I was getting from unemployment.”

Business has since picked up, and Bratton plans to stick there for a while, largely because of owner Katherine Eldridge. Service work is infamous for bad hours and poor working conditions. But that’s not the case at Doe’s, Bratton said.

“Katherine spoils us there, so we are very loyal to her. I really am planning for Doe’s to be my last job before I take on my own food truck.”

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NIGHT SHIFT: Elementary school teacher Kelly Simon had to evacuate her classroom to protect her family’s health. She found work teaching English to students overseas, a job that came with a 2 a.m. wake up time.

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KELLY SIMON, teacher by day turned teacher by night She never balked at an early morning before, but 3 a.m. is a preposterous start time for even the most dogged morning person. Still, that’s when Kelly Simon starts her workday teaching virtual English lessons to students in China.

The veteran elementary school teacher didn’t seek out such unorthodox hours. She needed a teaching gig she could do from home, though, and Zooming with pupils on the other side of the planet met the requirement.

Simon was teaching first grade at the Little Rock School District’s Williams Magnet Elementary when COVID-19 first shut down Arkansas schools. She worked from home for the remainder of the 2019-20 school year, and hoped to be able to do the same for 2020-21.

She knew some teachers were going back to the classroom with their students, but going back to work in person while the pandemic was still raging simply wasn’t an option. Her husband, Charles Zook, is immunocompromised, and his doctor was clear that exposure to COVID-19 would be very serious for him. Her mom was having health challenges, too. So when school started again in August and Simon was expected to show up in person, she took sick leave in the hope that district policy might change so she could keep teaching remotely. She hoped there would be more demand for virtual teachers, or that other teachers would rebel against the inperson mandate. She hoped the people making the decisions about in-person learning would err on the side of caution. It didn’t happen.

“I never expected to have to make that decision. I really expected things to play out differently,” she said. So once her sick leave ran out and she couldn’t stall any longer, Simon resigned. “Which is crappy,” she said. “As a teacher, you hate to do that.” But there were simply no good choices available to her, she said. “It was lose, lose, lose, lose, lose.”

The financial repercussions were substantial.

Simon resigned, so she wasn’t eligible for unemployment. The school district had covered the thousands it cost for her to get National Board certification, but that benefit was contingent on her remaining as a teacher in the district. So she paid the district back.

“I had figured out how much in retirement I could take out. I looked up the Blue Book on my car in case I needed to sell it,” she said.

Family members sent some money to help out. “We weren’t gonna be evicted but there was a lot of uncertainty,” she said.

The job teaching English is not ideal, she said, but at least she’s still teaching. She said it was tough watching Arkansas teachers working so hard in trying circumstances.

“Expecting teachers to teach both in person and online was lunacy. It just didn’t serve the learners. The kids who were in the building suffered, the kids who were remote suffered.”

Simon recently landed a job back with LRSD for the upcoming school year, as a kindergarten teacher in the new Ignite Digital Academy, set up to cater specifically to stayat-home students.

SERVING UP CONFUSION IN THE TIME OF THE CORONAVIRUS.

BY RHETT BRINKLEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON

A

little over a year into the pandemic, with many restaurants opened up to capacity and about a third of the state fully vaccinated against COVID-19, “help wanted” signs in restaurant windows are replacing the “curbside only” and “mask required” notices that became customary over the last year. Help wanted signs are posted in windows all over the country; some have gone viral by stating the sweeping assertion that “no one wants to work anymore.”

And while that narrative seems tidy, it doesn’t account for people who were forced to find other jobs during the pandemic, or had no choice but to stay home to care for their children, or were cut off from unemployment months ago, or for the first time felt empowered to call it quits on an essential industry that pays low wages with no benefits.

Minimum wage for tipped employees in Arkansas is $2.63 an hour. Tips can certainly add up to more than minimum wage, but in a pandemic year with limited dine-in capacity, servers who still had jobs were turning fewer tables, which typically meant less money. Many back-of-house employees, the

people cooking and washing dishes, aren’t making much more than the state’s minimum wage of $11 an hour.

We’ve all seen reports about business owners needing workers, but is it really true that the workers they so desperately need are just sitting around more than a year later, still getting unemployment checks and choosing not to work? The answer, of course, is no.

KARA BIBB: Customers, Bread, Resentment Kara Bibb worked for Boulevard Bread Co. for 14 years. When the pandemic started last March, she was managing the company’s Main Street location in SoMa. The part of the job she loved best was connecting with customers, making them feel welcome. “During the pandemic, all that joy was gone,” she said.

“The first several weeks I had one person there with me, but I was pretty much by myself that entire time. So I was having conversations with everyone — people that were there because they wanted my coffee and because they fully supported Boulevard ARKANSASTIMES.COM

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MAKING IT WORK: Former barista Kara Bibb runs an Airbnb out of her home and is studying for a real estate license in property management (left), and restaurateur Daniel Bryant (right) has started offering higher wages to his back-of house employees. or small businesses in general. That was easy.

I feel like I’m a very transparent food service worker. There’s not a customer service voice, I’m just being myself. So in that transparency, when we were going through this — back then it felt like it was together — the customer and the front line workers as we were called, it was just open dialogue. We were talking about our fears.”

That feeling of unity started to fade when she asked customers to wear masks, and some refused.

“The first person who refused to wear a mask was one of my older customers [who] came in twice a day, every day, 30 minutes after we opened and 30 minutes before we closed.

The first time he came in, he yelled at me and stormed out and said he [was] never going to wear a mask. … I cried. [I] texted my boss and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ ” That day, Bibb put in her first of three notices, but it didn’t take.

The hard part wasn’t going through the motions of being in the service industry during the pandemic, Bibb said. It was the anticipation 38 JULY 2021

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of customers “not wanting to wear the mask, not respecting the universal uncomfortableness that was happening. Every day I was so on edge waiting for them to come in. I’d go home and I would think about it. … I felt prepared to address it, but it didn’t make it easier.”

But Bibb wanted to work. And she knew that she wasn’t alone in the anxiety she was feeling.

She started seeing a therapist over Zoom and was put on medication for anxiety, which “86’d [restaurant lingo for being out of something] the anxiety but also any motivation to do anything outside of just being still and not being stressed,” she said. “Talk therapy was great but it didn’t help; my therapist [wasn’t] with me at work.”

Bibb said her breaking point was when dinein service started up again.

“It’s so crazy that I broke, because I was so lucky,” she said. “My employer was 100% making choices for the [benefit of] the employees. They were making good choices for the customers too, but it was to benefit us first.”

Like some other restaurant workers we spoke to during the reopenings, Bibb questioned why

people wanted to dine in at all and began to resent those who did.

“We have an entire system created that really could be contactless except for me handing it to you through your window. Even customers I loved, I just [thought], ‘Why are you in here?’ ” Before the pandemic, Bibb supplemented her income by hosting trivia and running an Airbnb out of the bottom floor level of her home. She was unable to do either once the pandemic began. Her hours at Boulevard were cut. She put in her notice more than two months before her last day at Boulevard on Feb. 26, incidentally the same day the governor lifted the capacity directives on restaurants. “I was so relieved for myself, but mostly I was worried about my fellow service industry workers,” Bibb said.

Bibb did not apply for unemployment benefits. She’s back to running the Airbnb out of her home and studying for a real estate license in property management. She doesn’t plan to work in a restaurant again, though one day she could see herself operating a food truck or running a bed and breakfast.

Bibb said she was drawn to Boulevard, in

part, because of her love for food, baking and technique. “One thing that happened in the pandemic and since I’ve been unemployed is I realized I can create culinary experiences any time I want. … I don’t have to work in a restaurant to do that,” she said.

When asked about the narrative that no one wants to work anymore, Bibb started out with a simple one word answer: “Bullshit … Didn’t we show up to all of our shifts beforehand hungover, no sleep, or you weren’t even supposed to work but somehow you got talked into working. ...

The idea that food service people don’t want to work, that’s stupid,” she said.

CODY MAYFIELD: Cook turned craftsman Cody Mayfield worked in restaurant kitchens for 13 years and spent the last three as a sous chef at South on Main in SoMa. “I wouldn’t say I liked it,” he said. “It was just kind of what I did, you know. You make the best of it. Before the pandemic, you didn’t really see an out.”

Mayfield said being laid off in mid-March opened a whole new window of opportunities.

“I had the time to think, ‘Is this really what I want to do?’ and then also, ‘If everything can just get shut down like this, what kind of job security is that?’ I liked having the free time at home to be able to just refocus my life … and just kind of expand on what else I could do outside of the kitchen.”

Mayfield drew unemployment and said the extra federal benefits were significant.

“Not having to worry about money so much was a big thing, especially restaurant people, most of us [are] living paycheck to paycheck, so having that little cushion was definitely a game changer.”

South on Main reopened in June 2020 during the Phase 2 reopening of the economy, which allowed restaurants to open at 66% capacity.

When Mayfield returned to South on Main, he said the job wasn’t the same. The restaurant was understaffed, he worked long hours and “we were just begging for people to come in the door every day,” he said.

Mayfield left South on Main in October. He recently purchased a wood lathe and has been making wooden bowls. “Hoping to have a venue to sell those in the future,” he said. He and his artist girlfriend own a camper van and have been touring the country with the Oddities & Curiosities Expo, a traveling market of weird crafts and collectibles.

Mayfield said he doesn’t see himself returning to the restaurant industry, and he understands why people would be avoiding it right now.

“I completely understand why no one wants to go back and deal with nobody showing up and people not wanting to work and just having to pick up extra shifts, I get it.

And then customers coming in and bitching about this and that … I hope through all this the customers can get the takeaway [to] respect the people that do this for you. They were here this whole time working while you were sitting at home watching Netflix for two months, you know, ordering your shit on Grubhub. People were still having to come in and deal with all these shortcomings and staff shortages and still put out what you want.”

DANIEL BRYANT: restaurateur for the people Daniel Bryant owns several restaurants in Central Arkansas including Gus’s Fried Chicken, Big Whiskey’s, Hillcrest Artisan Meats and Hill Station. In June 2021, HAM closed for a week to move the staff over to Hill Station, which has been understaffed for months, Bryant said.

The last full staff meeting at Hill Station was on April 9, and Bryant and management decided they would staff up to be open for Monday nights and Thursday lunches. Two months later and they haven’t been able to hit that goal. Bryant said 75% of his recent hires are in high school.

“It’s just young people everywhere, and you know what, they’re killing it. … All these people have to go back to school in the fall. But you know what, we’ll worry about that in the fall.”

Bryant said kitchen positions are tougher to fill right now.

he said in an interview with The New York Times that he still believes tipping leads to inequitable pay and wage instability.

Trying to figure out how to close the gap is a struggle, Bryant said.

“Restaurants just can’t necessarily afford to pay everyone $15 to $20 an hour, so that’s a challenge,” he said. “But I do believe that, overall, [kitchen workers] are underpaid, and this is causing people to revisit back-of-house pay. It’s a hard job, and people need to make more money. I think that’s a good thing that’s going to come out of this for those people.”

Bryant said now that people are getting vaccinated he hopes they return to work if they can.

“But I also believe that it’s time for people on my side of things, employers, to pay people fairly, and if this causes us to kind of wake up and pinch pennies in other areas and get that

“I THINK THAT THE DISPARITY BETWEEN THE BACK OF THE HOUSE AND THE FRONT OF THE HOUSE NEEDS TO BE CLOSED, AND THAT’S NOT A NEW POSITION.” “I think people are tipping well, and the front of the house people are making good money.

The back of the house has not quite caught up with the new inflationary market … You’re competing with unemployment insurance, and I’m not going to argue with that; I do think that’s a component,” he said.

Some restaurant owners advertised bonuses for new hires. Bryant said he started offering higher wages to back of house employees.

“I think that the disparity between the back of the house and the front of the house needs to be closed, and that’s not a new position,” he said.

Bryant mentioned well-known restaurateur Danny Meyer, who eliminated tips from his New York restaurants in 2015. He reversed his position in the summer of 2020 when his restaurants opened for outdoor dining, though

money to employees, I’m OK with that,” he said.

“DAVE”: drink-slinging dad Dave, a longtime Little Rock bartender who asked that we use a pseudonym for fear that his candor would hurt his career, said he was initially unsure if he wanted to seek unemployment when his bar closed down in March 2020.

“Honestly, I wasn’t sure how long this would last,” he said.

Dave waited about a month before he applied and received back pay from the work days he missed. In addition to the $600 weekly federal unemployment benefits, he received the state’s minimum unemployment of $81 a week.

“Before tax,” he said. “Really it was just $73.

So even with the extra $600, I was making only ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2021 39

about what I used to make a week.”

Staying home was beneficial for Dave because child care centers were closed and he and his partner have a 2-year-old.

When the federal pandemic unemployment compensation dropped from $600 weekly to $300 in August, Dave was no longer eligible.

“I didn’t pursue that anyway,” he said. “I knew I could make a little more by getting a job.”

With his son back in day care, he took a job at a pizza place as a stopgap. “First-ever restaurant job,” he said.

Dave’s 2-year-old contracted COVID-19 in October, likely from his day care. Dave’s partner was able to work from home and quarantine with their son, who thankfully never showed any symptoms. But Dave needed to work, so he wore a mask at home, slept upstairs and “had five or six tests in one week from different places around town,” he said.

Dave is leaving the restaurant to go back to his old bartending job soon. He doesn’t agree that his peers in the industry don’t want to work.

“Obviously, in this industry, folks had no idea when it would be back and running, so people moved on, looked for a different field, went back to school ... Also customers (even as early as the start of this year) weren’t going to restaurants because they didn’t feel comfortable yet. These places, though I know they’re struggling, have to pay employees better. It’s not fair for cooks busting their asses for $11-$12 an hour or servers making $2 and praying for tips.”

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ARKANSAS TIMES

JASMINE DOMINGUE: former server, sold on sales Jasmine Domingue received unemployment benefits after Maddie’s Place closed in March of last year.

Domingue couldn’t remember exactly what she received from the state, “either $112 or $120” per week, in addition to the $600 federal unemployment assistance.

At the end of May 2020, Domingue’s father, who lived in Louisiana, died unexpectedly, so she and her boyfriend packed up and moved to Louisiana to be closer to family.

In late June or early July, she received a letter saying that her unemployment had run out and that she was unable to apply again until March of 2021.

“I had just moved to Louisiana, and I was really happy that I hadn’t spent any of it. With the $600 a week, I’d saved about seven grand.

So I lived off that for like a month, and then I started painting houses,” she said.

Domingue’s now working in sales and said she doesn’t see herself back in the service industry, especially not in this current version of it.

“Everyone is so short-handed, and everywhere I go, everything is so fucked up and doesn’t look like a place that I want to be, you know. Especially with COVID, and I don’t believe that it’s over ... not necessarily even COVID but something else, you know? It just doesn’t seem like a reliable source of income at this point.”

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‘KIDS FEEL LIKE THEY’RE BEING

ERASED’

INSIDE THE CLINIC TARGETED BY ARKANSAS’S NEW ANTI-TRANS LAW.

BY REBEKAH HALL SCOTT ARKANSAS NONPROFIT NEWS NETWORK

A

new state law puts Arkansas doctors who work with transgender youth in a difficult bind: They must either stop providing what they consider to be lifesaving medication to their young patients or risk losing their medical license.

House Bill 1570, now Act 626, the “Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act,” prohibits physicians and other professionals from providing gender-affirming health care to patients under the age of 18. Sponsored by state Rep. Robin Lundstrom (R-Elm Springs), it passed the House on March 10 and the Senate on March 29, both by large majorities. Governor Hutchinson vetoed the bill on April 5, calling it a “vast government overreach,” but the legislature overrode his veto the next day. It could go into effect as soon as July 28.

The law, which is the first of its kind in the country, will ban Arkansas health care providers from prescribing cross-sex hormones for trans people under 18, including estrogen for patients transitioning from male to female and testosterone for patients transitioning from female to male. The law prohibits doctors from prescribing puberty-blocking drugs as part of a gender-affirming regimen. And, it prevents doctors from referring patients to other providers, though doctors say it is unclear whether that ban would include referrals for counseling and mental health care related to gender dysphoria. (The bill also bans gender reassignment surgeries for minors, but doctors who work with trans youth say such operations aren’t performed on patients under 18 anywhere in Arkansas.)

On May 25, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to block the measure from taking effect. Holly Dickson, the executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas, said in a press release that the bill would be “devastating to transgender youth and their families, forcing many to uproot their lives and leave the state to access the gender-affirming care they need.”

One provider in particular is in the crosshairs of the new ban: The Gender Spectrum Clinic 42 JULY 2021

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at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Dr. Michele Hutchison, a pediatric endocrinologist who helped found the clinic in 2018 and is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the “vast majority” of trans children in Arkansas receiving medical care to help affirm their gender identities are doing so at the Gender Spectrum Clinic. After years of building a health care practice that caters to the unique needs of Arkansas’s trans youth, much of Hutchison’s work may soon be deemed illegal.

The clinic’s fate is unclear if the court declines to block the new law, and Arkansas Children’s Hospital has avoided commenting on its future.

“While Arkansas Children’s is not party to this litigation, our patients and families continue to seek care and we will continue to provide allowable services,” said Brent Thompson, executive vice president and chief legal officer for the hospital, in an emailed statement.

Hutchison said that if the law goes into effect, some clinic employees could lose their jobs.

Hutchison herself would still be employed, she said, because she also works at the Endocrine Clinic and the Diabetes Clinic at Children’s. But, she said, it would be a devastating blow.

“On an emotional level, it would just take the gas right out of me,” she said. “I don’t know how I could keep running. I’d still have a job, I’d still have a paycheck, but I’d be pretty miserable.”

Hutchison emphasized that she was speaking as a private citizen and concerned physician, not as a representative of Children’s.

Andrew Bostad, 15, is one patient of the Gender Spectrum Clinic who could lose access to treatment should the law stand. He said the legislation sends a dangerous message to him and his peers.

“Trans teens are [at] very high risk for suicide, so this legislation is just basically telling people like me that they don’t want them to exist,” he said. “They’re not helping anyone with these bills. They’re killing kids.”

Hutchison said that in the three years the Gender Spectrum Clinic has been open, before passage of the bill, two or three patients had attempted suicide. Since early April, she said,

staff have been alerted to seven attempted suicides, four by patients of the clinic. (The other three were trans children who were not patients but were treated at the emergency room at Children’s.) Dr. Stephanie Ho, a family medicine physician and a Fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health at Vector Health and Wellness Clinic in Fayetteville, is one of the few other providers in Arkansas to administer cross-sex hormones to patients under 18. She said one of her patients has also attempted suicide.

Andrew’s mother, Brandi Evans, said Andrew came out as trans when he was 12 years old.

She learned about the clinic through a support group for parents of trans children, then got a referral from her son’s primary care provider.

Andrew started going to the clinic shortly after he came out and began taking testosterone injections at age 14.

Evans said that when she found out about HB 1570, “to say I was livid would be an understatement.”

“Not only are they taking these kids’ right to have affirming health care away from them, which is detrimental in and of itself, but they’re telling me as a parent that I no longer have control over my child’s medical care,” Evans said.

Willow Breshears, 18, began transitioning when she was 13 years old. She works as a community organizer and founded the Young Transwomen’s Project, which provides resources for Arkansas trans women and girls between the ages of 16 and 28. She said the new law will have a profoundly detrimental impact on trans children.

“Just imagine if you got something that you wanted so bad — something that was so lifechanging for you — and then all of a sudden that was taken away,” Breshears said. “How would you feel?”

EXPECTATION MANAGEMENT AND FAMILY-CONSCIOUS CARE Though debate around health care for trans youth has focused on hormone therapy and

MATT WHITE

‘THEY’RE KILLING KIDS’: Andrew Bostad, 15, is one patient of the Gender Spectrum Clinic who could lose access to treatment should the new state law stand.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2021 43

“ALL THESE KIDS WANT IS TO BE SEEN AS WHO THEY ARE. AND THEY HAVE TO LIVE THAT EVERY SINGLE DAY.”

DOCTOR AND PLAINTIFF: Much of Dr. Michele Hutchison’s work at the Gender Spectrum Clinic could be banned under the new law.

puberty-blocking drugs, Hutchison said the Gender Spectrum Clinic does far more than simply provide medications. The clinic is “holistic,” she said, “in the sense that we can’t work with just the child: It has to involve the entire family.

“A lot of what we do is expectation management, both for the parents and for the kids. A lot of these teenagers come hoping that they’re going to get their cross-sex hormones on the very first visit, and that’s not going to happen.”

Before a patient visits the Gender Spectrum Clinic for the first time, the clinic’s social worker will interview the patient by phone, Hutchison said, primarily to gauge whether the child is “actively suicidal” and needs to be connected with appropriate mental health resources. The interview also helps the clinic better understand the child’s family environment.

“For example, maybe mom is accepting and 44 JULY 2021

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affirming, but dad is not. Well, we need to know that ahead of time,” Hutchison said. “Is this child living with their grandmother, but mom has custodial rights?”

Hutchison said part of the clinic’s role is to help families with the often difficult task of adjusting to a child’s transition.

“The best way that I’ve tried to reach out to some parents who are struggling … is to say, ‘Imagine if you woke up in someone else’s body. … And nobody saw you. Nobody recognized you. Your wife doesn’t recognize you, your boss doesn’t recognize you, people on the street don’t recognize you, or they see you as somebody else. How terrifying would that be?’” she said.

“All these kids want is to be seen as who they are. And they have to live that every single day.”

Brandi Evans said Hutchison is a “very handson” doctor who wants her patients and their families to “understand the entire process.”

“She wants everyone involved to know what her expectations are [and] what our

expectations should be,” Evans said. “We shouldn’t have these grandiose expectations of, ‘He’s gonna take one [testosterone] shot, his voice is going to drop and he’s going to grow a full beard.’ ” In addition to the social worker, the team at the clinic includes nurses, a gynecologist and other doctors, a psychologist, a chaplain and an attorney. Hutchison said the attorney may help with a variety of legal matters, from name changes to parental custody issues to situations in which a child’s school refuses to let them use the appropriate bathroom.

Other medical providers say the expert guidance provided by the Gender Spectrum Clinic is a vital resource. Dr. Natalie Burr, a pediatrician with the Little Rock Pediatric Clinic, said she refers her transgender patients to Hutchison and her team, rather than prescribing them medication herself. Being prohibited from doing so, she said, “really ties my hands.”

“To me, this is just in opposition to the Hippocratic Oath that I take,” she said. “I really and truly never imagined that it would be illegal for me to refer a patient to care that is evidence-based.”

In her four years of practice at the Little Rock Pediatric Clinic, Burr said, she has learned that trans children “are still kids [who] need to be supported just like any other kid.” “[Trans children] still might get strep throat like a lot of the other kids do. They have those common childhood concerns that you see, just as they have their unique concerns,” Burr said. “Acceptance and respect for who they are as people goes a long way. I may not be the one prescribing gender-affirming medications, but just using a correct pronoun or name means so much to them.”

‘LIKE SWITCHING ON A LIGHT’ Proponents of the new law claim it is intended to protect kids. When presenting the bill on the floor of the state House of Representatives in March, Rep. Lundstrum said minors shouldn’t be able to receive hormone treatment, even with parental consent.

“Some of them may choose to be transgender when they’re older,” Lundstrum said. “That’s OK, that’s their choice. But when they’re under 18, they need to grow up first. That’s a big decision. There’s no going back.” (Lundstrum did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.)

But the Gender Spectrum Clinic extensively vets patients before beginning medication, Hutchison said. The clinic requires patients to be 14 years old before they begin crosssex hormones. Hutchison said the clinic also requires that a patient see a therapist for at least six months before they’re considered for hormones.

According to Hutchison, around 50 patients at the Gender Spectrum Clinic are taking crosssex hormones and would be forced to stop (or go out of state for care) if the new law goes into effect. She said 40 more patients are “in the pipeline” to begin hormones within the next year, and around 30 patients are waiting to be seen at the clinic.

The clinic also sees a number of patients who are too young to begin cross-sex hormones, as well as patients with mental or emotional issues that must be addressed before starting treatment. For example, Hutchison said she recently learned that a patient who was preparing to begin hormones has an eating disorder, so the clinic will work on helping the patient address that problem before starting

FOR A CHILD WITH GENDER DYSPHORIA, PUBERTY CAN BE A JARRING EXPERIENCE, AS THEIR BODY CHANGES IN WAYS THAT DON’T ALIGN WITH THEIR GENDER IDENTITY.

AT HOME IN BAUXITE: Brandi Evans and Andrew.

hormones.

Patients’ mental and emotional health often improve further once hormone treatments begin. After Andrew began puberty and before he started taking testosterone injections, Evans said, her son was a “closed-off, very angry, depressed child.”

“His brain this whole time is saying, ‘I’m a boy, I’m a boy,’ but he’s getting this flood of estrogen that makes him [feel] ‘no, this isn’t right, I don’t like it,’ so it just really shut him down,” Evans said. “He just wanted to stay in his room. He didn’t want to talk to anybody; he was just mad at the world.”

Evans said that Andrew would literally faint every time he started his menstrual cycle. She took him to see neurologists and gynecologists to determine why he was losing consciousness every time he got his period. But once Andrew came out as trans, she said, “the passing out made sense, because this wasn’t supposed to be happening.”

Andrew has now been taking testosterone for almost two years. Evans said that a couple of months after he began treatment, “I started to see [my] happy-go-lucky kid come back.”

“He was talking to us, he wanted to go out and do things, he wanted to hang out with ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2021 45

BRIAN CHILSON

IN MARCH: Andrew Bostad (left) joined protestors rallying against HB 1570 at the state Capitol.

friends again,” Evans said. “All of the things [that make you say], ‘Right there, that’s the kid I remember.’ ” Andrew said his testosterone injections have helped him “pass,” or be perceived as his affirmed gender.

“Changes really started a couple months in,” he said. “My voice started to drop, my skin got oilier, [I got] body hair everywhere. I used to not pass at all, previously to starting testosterone, and now I pass all of the time. It’s pretty liberating.”

Andrew said the new friendships he’s made during his transition have been an important part of the process.

“I’m not friends with the same people I was friends with when I first started testosterone,” he said. “But meeting new people who are more supportive and more like me is probably the best thing that has happened.”

Ho, the Fayetteville doctor, said she sees about a dozen minor trans patients, nine of 46 JULY 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

whom are taking cross-sex hormones.

The change in behavior and emotional wellbeing for trans youth after beginning cross-sex hormones can be profound, she said. “It’s like switching on a light,” Ho said.

Hutchison said the new law makes inaccurate claims about the risks of puberty blockers. HB 1570 states that doctors are prescribing puberty blockers “despite the lack of any long-term longitudinal studies evaluating the risks and benefits of using these drugs,” but Hutchison said such medications have been routinely used in pediatric practices for the last 40 years.

Puberty blockers are regularly prescribed to children who are not trans but are experiencing early puberty, she said, and the effects are “completely reversible.”

For example, a pediatrician may prescribe a puberty-blocking drug to a young girl who has begun to go into puberty and is poised to start menstruation at the age of 5, Hutchison said.

She said that within one week at the Endocrine

Clinic at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, she saw four children taking puberty blockers and diagnosed a fifth patient with early puberty, who will soon start taking the drugs. She added that the Endocrine Clinic follows between 150 to 200 patients with early puberty.

For trans youth, puberty blockers serve a different purpose. For a child with gender dysphoria, puberty can be a jarring experience, as their body changes in ways that don’t feel aligned with their gender identity. Taking puberty blockers can, according to Burr, provide a young trans patient with “time to work through their gender identity.”

If a patient stops taking a puberty blocker and does not start taking a cross-sex hormone afterwards, that patient will go through puberty in accordance with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Hutchison said the Gender Spectrum Clinic currently has only two or three patients taking puberty blockers. Most patients are already

well into puberty by the time they’re seen at the clinic, she said. Hutchison also said puberty blockers are “prohibitively expensive” — costing around $20,000 per year out of pocket — and the use of such medication for gender-affirming purposes is usually not covered by insurance.

Even when a young child in the Endocrine Clinic is prescribed puberty blockers, “we really have to prove that the child is in early puberty for the insurance to pay for it,” Hutchison added.

(Ho said she does not prescribe puberty blockers for her trans patients and refers families who are interested in the medication to the Gender Spectrum Clinic.)

“In terms of numbers, epidemiologically, the [puberty blockers] prohibition doesn’t affect a large number of children,” Hutchison said.

“But, it has a dramatic effect on those individual children.”

The new law also prohibits “genital and nongenital” gender reassignment surgery for minors, but Hutchison said genital gender reassignment surgery is not performed on any patients under the age of 18 in the state of Arkansas. Hutchison said she would support legislation that prohibited genital reassignment surgery on minors.

Should HB 1570 go into effect, Hutchison predicted the prohibition on doctors referring young people to other providers for genderaffirming care would cause a great deal of confusion. Though the law would not prohibit psychological counseling for minor trans patients, Hutchison said pediatricians have been left confused about whether referring a minor patient to a therapist might be considered a “gender transition procedure.”

“What’s the difference between a referral versus just giving somebody information?

That’s one of the things that I have asked for some guidance on,” Hutchison said.

According to Burr and Hutchison, trans youth experience high rates of anxiety and depression because of the cultural stigma associated with being gender nonconforming and the emotional pain of experiencing gender dysphoria. Evans said the new law will further this stigma and have devastating consequences.

“This isn’t just costing health care providers.

This isn’t just costing affirming care. This is costing lives,” Evans said. “These kids are losing hope.”

AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE The ACLU lawsuit argues the new Arkansas law abridges the constitutional rights of doctors, patients and their parents in several ways.

The plaintiffs contend the law discriminates against transgender people, violating the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The plaintiffs also claim it violates the rights of parents to make decisions concerning the care of their children, as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment’s due process clause. And, the plaintiffs contend the new law violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech by prohibiting doctors from making referrals and preventing patients and their families from hearing those recommendations.

Even if the court declines to block the law, much remains uncertain about how it will be implemented. For example, the law

HUTCHISON SAID THE FAMILIES OF AT LEAST 20 OF HER PATIENTS HAVE CALLED TO ASK WHICH STATE THEY SHOULD MOVE TO IN ORDER TO ACCESS CARE, AND TWO FAMILIES HAVE ALREADY MOVED. says any health care provider who refers a minor trans patient for “gender transition procedures” would be “subject to discipline by the appropriate licensing entity or disciplinary review board.” But Hutchison said she and other doctors are unclear as to how they would be sanctioned if they violated the law.

The Arkansas Medical Practices Act states that physicians who are found guilty of “unprofessional conduct” — the definition of which ranges from conviction of a felony to committing an “ethical violation” as determined by the Arkansas State Medical Board — may have their medical license revoked or suspended, be issued a reprimand, be placed on probation, or have to pay a fine of up to $1,000 per violation.

The medical board, which is responsible for licensing and disciplining physicians, may need to establish rules to enforce the law and flesh out its details. Meg Mirivel, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health, said the medical board is still determining whether and how they would craft new rules to implement the legislation.

Regardless of what the courts decide, advocates for transgender youth said they will continue to speak out against the ban on gender-affirming care. “[Arkansas legislators] are politicians.

They’re not medical doctors,” Ho said. “There have been medical doctors all over the state and all over this country who have adamantly opposed [this] ban.

“It’s incredibly rewarding to take care of these kids, and I can’t imagine why anybody would want to take away their care or to bully them.”

Should the law take effect, Hutchison suspects some patients will find their medications on the black market and take them without the oversight of a physician.

That could be dangerous, she warned. The Gender Spectrum Clinic conducts a blood test before any patient begins cross-sex hormones to check liver function, cholesterol levels, blood counts and other metrics. Hutchison

then monitors her patients’ body functions throughout their hormone therapy.

“The fear is that if a child were to have an unexpected event and nobody was there to catch it, you could then go on to develop liver disease or a stroke,” Hutchison said. “The [other] concern is that if you have a child who’s taking a higher dose than they should … that’s going to give them problems, and nobody is there to regulate it or give advice.”

Nonetheless, she said, “it would be very naive to think that these incredibly resourceful and intelligent children are simply going to stop taking their medication because the legislature tells them to.

“Keep in mind that this is not kids sneaking around to buy illicit drugs. These are kids whose parents have already agreed with the therapy and support it, so this is a situation where the parents are going to go find a way for them to get their testosterone or estrogen.”

Evans said she’s spoken with other parents of trans children about what their options will be if the law goes into effect. They’ve discussed going across state lines to access gender-affirming care, or even reaching out internationally, as telehealth options have expanded during the pandemic. They would also have to find an out-of-state pharmacy to mail them any medications, as in-state pharmacies would be prohibited from filling the prescriptions.

“There would be the expense of traveling, the expense of prescription costs out of state, and we would have to pay the doctors’ offices out-of-pocket because his in-state insurance won’t pay for it,” Evans said. “It just would be a tremendous financial burden on everybody that is in this position.”

Other families may leave Arkansas altogether.

Hutchison said the families of at least 20 of her patients have called to ask which state they should move to in order to access care, and two families have already moved. “[Parents are] saying they’re leaving because they don’t want to live somewhere where their child is not accepted,” Hutchison said. “It’s a lot more basic than just getting medication: It’s this feeling of, ‘I’m not wanted here, my child’s not wanted here, so we’re going to go somewhere where my child can feel wanted, accepted and loved.’ “[These] kids feel like they’re being erased; that’s a word that keeps coming up. The patients feel as if society is trying to erase them, trying to make it as if they don’t even exist. As an adult, I think that would be a tragic situation to have to encounter … So imagine being a teenager and feeling that way.”

Evans said she wants to emphasize that Andrew, who is a sophomore at Bauxite High School, is, above all else, a typical teenage boy.

“While he is a trans person, that is just a label or a box they want to put my child in,” Evans said. “He has friends, he plays in the band, he does theater, he makes good grades.

Outside of being transgender, [he] is a typical teenage boy who just wants to live his life.”

This story is courtesy of the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network, an independent, nonpartisan news project dedicated to producing journalism that matters to Arkansans.

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JULY 2021 47

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DRINK PAIRING: Pairs best with Black Apple Cherry Limeade Cider 54 JULY 2021

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THE ARKANSAS TIMES MEDICAL CANNABIS WELLNESS EXPO Curious about the benefits of medical marijuana and the options available?

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FOOD& DRINK

‘I WANT THE TACOS FOR DIPPING’

QUESABIRRIA VIA LA CASA DE MI ABUELITA MAW MAW’S HOUSE.

BY RHETT BRINKLEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON

AT MAW MAW’S: Instagram-worthy quesabirria tacos with consommé.

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Y

ou may never have heard of a quesabirria taco, but if your social media feed is peppered with food selfies, chances are you’ve probably seen one. In fact, that’s kind of how the tacos — made with birria meat (birria is a traditional Mexican meat stew, often made with goat, but typically beef in Central Arkansas) and a generous amount of gooey melted cheese, served with a cup of birria consommé (beef broth) for dipping — became a phenomenon on the West Coast in recent years.

Images from quesabirria taco pop-ups of greasy, cheesy tacos being dipped in consommé started showing up on Los Angeles-area Instagram feeds and the lines started forming. If you’ve seen one of these taco selfies, you understand the hype.

I first learned about the tacos from a picture my brother showed me after he’d visited LA. I wanted the taco that instant. I spent part of my downtime the next six weeks looking at flights to LA and checking Facebook to see if the trend had made its way to Little Rock.

A local foodie-in-the-know friend of mine who was aware of my preoccupation with quesabirria texted me when he found one.

He was at The Rail Yard, an urban food truck yard and beer garden in Little Rock’s East Village neighborhood, where the food truck La Casa De Mi Abuelita Maw Maw’s House was serving what I had been looking for. Consumed (consomméd?) with jealousy, I liked the food truck on Facebook and started following its schedule. The following week, I went to The Rail Yard and picked up two orders of quesabirria tacos with consommé — one for me and one for my girlfriend, who claimed to have not heard of quesabirria despite me babbling on about wanting to try it for weeks.

After returning home, I went to the kitchen for food selfies while my girlfriend was biting into a taco in the living room.

“Oh, my God,” I heard her say. “This is the best taco I’ve ever had in my life.”

The crispy, greasy shell, the tender stewed beef, the gooey cheese dipped in savory consommé — these tacos could save your life after a night of partying.

“You do know I’m going to want these all the

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FARM-TO-TABLE TACOS: Diamond Chef 2021 winners Geovanny and Neena Villagran (bottom right) serve their farm-raised goods at Bernice Garden (top).

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COME GET YOUR SPOT CHECK!

time now, right?” my girlfriend said.

Geovanny Villagran was born in Guadalajara, the capital city in the Mexican state of Jalisco and the state where birria is said to have originated. Villagran said he remembers eating birria as a child, both as a taco filling and on its own as a stew. “The dish has been around Mexico for centuries,” Villagran said.

Villagran’s culinary career started in Mexico.

He operated a food truck specializing in burritos in Mexico City before he moved to the U.S. seven years ago. His work in Little Rock has mostly been in fine dining at the Capital Hotel, Little Rock Marriott and DoubleTree Hotel. The latter is where he was employed when the pandemic hit last spring.

Newly unemployed due to the pandemic restaurant dining room shutdown, Villagran’s initial plan was to open a restaurant with partners, but it fell through. So Villagran and his wife, Neena Villagran, decided to go their own route.

“We wanted something that’s ours,” Neena Villagran said. So they started a farm, growing vegetables and raising pigs, cows and chickens.

“That’s why we have the sign in our food truck, ‘farm to table,’ because all the animals we’re using come from the farm,” Geovanny Villagran said. “There’s no chemicals or antibiotics or anything in our meats.”

The Villagrans spent the spring and summer of last year building out an RV into a working food truck. The name, La Casa De Mi Abuelita Maw Maw’s House, honors both Geovanny and Neena’s grandmothers and gives a nod to the look of the food truck, which resembles a little house.

“Most of my recipes that I have learned come from my grandmother,” Geovanny Villagran said. He spent a lot of time in the kitchen with her as a child, cleaning beans or helping her cook. “That’s where we got La Casa De Mi Abuelita [My grandmother’s house],” he said.

The “Maw Maw’s House,” part of the name came from Neena’s side of the family.

“That’s what I call my grandmother,” Neena Villagran said. “So we kind of entwined the two.”

They launched the truck at the end of September 2020 in Neena Villagran’s hometown of Redfield.

“It’s a super-small town,” she said. “We started out really slow, barely selling anything.”

“The beginning was hard. Really hard,” her husband said.

People started requesting that they go to Sheridan and business started to pick up. Then they started popping up at The Rail Yard in Little Rock a couple of times a week. Success.

“Now we have people coming to us from all over,” Neena Villagran said.

Quesabirria is their bestseller. Geovanny Villagran prefers to make birria with brisket or chuck meat cooked slowly (eight to nine hours) with a mix of dry peppers and Mexican spices.

The shredded meat is removed from the consommé and slightly drained before it hits the corn tortilla. It’s covered in cheese and placed on the griddle. The juice and the oil from the beef gives the tortilla the slightly fried consistency, Neena Villagran said. The consommé is the broth left over from the cooking process, flavored from the combination of the beef and the dry peppers.

“We respect the process,” Geovanny Villagran said, adding that they expect their guests to have a good, quality product when visiting the food truck.

Watching people taste their tacos for the first time is a great confidence booster, Neena Villagran said. “It’s kind of like, ‘We did that.’ ” The Villagrans are working on adding a second food truck, which will be built out from a school bus and permanently stationed in Sheridan. And, with Neena acting as his sous chef, Geovanny just recently competed in and won the 2021 Diamond Chef competition.

Although they’ve added other dishes to the menu or run specials like cochinita pibil (slowroasted pork butt cooked in banana leaves with oranges and some spices), the Villagrans said most people show up for the quesabirria, often saying, “I want the taco for dipping.”

The food truck’s schedule can change, but it’s typically 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Tuesdays at Bernice Garden at 1401 S. Main St., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

Wednesday through Friday at 710 S. Rock St. in Sheridan, and 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday at The Rail Yard at 1212 E. Sixth St. If you’re craving quesabirria and that schedule doesn’t work for you, there are other taco trucks in town serving up the trendy tacos.

Lili’s Mexican Street Food is worth seeking out (check out its Facebook page for the schedule). If you’re on the northside of the river, check Tacos El Gordo, which is now permanently stationed at 5400 JFK Boulevard in the Cupid’s parking lot 10 a.m.-8 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m.- 4:30 p.m.

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CLIMATE CHANGE

TORNADOES INCREASING IN ARKANSAS CLIMATE CHANGE TO BLAME, RESEARCHER SAYS.

BY KENNETH HEARD, ARKANSAS NONPROFIT NEWS NETWORK PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANTHONY COY, CRAIGHEAD COUNTY OFFICE OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

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HAVOC: Kathie Pace’s neighborhood in Jonesboro after the March 28, 2020, tornado.

O

n the afternoon of Saturday, March 28, 2020, Kathie Pace and her family hid in a stairwell as a tornado slashed through their northeast Jonesboro subdivision.

“I heard the windows shattering,” she said recently. “Later, we found someone’s turbine from their roof in our living room. We were picking up pieces of glass for months.”

“It only lasted three to five minutes,” Pace said. “But when we went outside … wow.” The tornado, rated an EF3 on the Fujita zero-to-five scale measuring intensity, cut a path through the heart of Jonesboro, injuring at least 22. It destroyed homes and businesses across the city and severely damaged the Turtle Creek Mall. (There were no fatalities, perhaps in part because many people were at home due to COVID-19 restrictions.)

Pace said she was lucky. Her house only received about $30,000 worth of damage, including the cost of a new roof. Other homeowners had to rebuild from the slab up. Fifteen months later, the homes in her subdivision are all rebuilt, she said, but at least three neighbors have added storm shelters.

Some research suggests such an addition may be a wise investment in Arkansas. Tornadoes appear to be on the increase in the mid-South in recent years, thanks to climate change and shifting weather patterns across the continent.

The classic “Tornado Alley” region of the U.S. is the southern Great Plains. Powerful storms ravage north Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas as cold air from the Rocky Mountains collides with the heat of the Plains.

But some scientists have noticed a recent eastern shift in that pattern, possibly placing parts of Arkansas in the bull’s-eye of more destructive storms, along with Alabama, Mississippi and western Tennessee. While tornadoes are still abundant on the Plains, meteorologists have recorded an increase in the number and intensity of twisters in an area some refer to as “Dixie Alley.”

Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University, authored a paper about the shift in 2018. Since then, he said, the trend is continuing. He credits increased drought conditions in the western U.S., which push the “dry line,” a boundary that separates moist and dry air masses and is a factor in creating severe weather.

“The southern Great Plains are drying out,” Gensini said. “Elevated air is moving the dry line.

The drought is pushing everything to the east.”

The U.S Drought Monitor, a weekly report compiled by the National Drought Mitigation

Center at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, predicts the West may see the second worst drought this year in 1,200 years. Some areas of California may see irreparable damage following winter temperatures of 5 to 15 degrees above normal and a lack of snowfall.

The dry atmospheric conditions create a dome of high pressure over the western U.S., causing the weather systems that can produce tornadoes to begin forming further east. Meanwhile, drought in the Dakotas is contributing to the jet stream dipping further south. The jet stream, an atmospheric current of frigid Arctic air, is another ingredient in forming tornado-producing supercell storms.

Many tornadoes still blast through Tornado Alley, but Gensini’s research says there has been a significant decrease in both reports of tornadoes and tornadic atmospheric conditions in portions of Texas, Oklahoma and other Plains states. The inverse is true in the Southeast, he said.

“Tornadoes are tied to underlying moisture,” Gensini said, which the Gulf of Mexico provides in abundance. “You have the drought pushing the jet stream further into the Gulf states. More moisture means [inclement weather] activity lights up. It’s creating a new trough for these storms to line up.”

Gensini blames manmade climate change for the shift. “We are clearly warming, and it’s what’s causing the movement of tornadoes,” he said.

To be clear, the South has always had its share of tornadoes. Arkansas’s only documented EF5 tornado — the highest on the intensity scale — formed south of Batesville nearly a century ago. Known as the “Sneed Tornado,” it ripped through Independence, Jackson and Lawrence counties on April 10, 1929, killing 23. (Some meteorologists believe the EF4 tornado that hit Vilonia and Mayflower on April 27, 2014, may have also increased to an EF5 at times during its 41-mile long trek.)

But Gensini says there’s been a “significant increase” in tornadic activity in Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi in recent decades. Such a measurement is not as straightforward as simply counting the number of recorded tornadoes, which vary in terms of intensity, duration and other metrics, complicating year-to-year comparisons.

Gensini tracked the number of tornado reports from 1979 to 2010 for his study but also used an index called the Significant Tornado Parameter, which monitors the atmospheric ingredients favorable for the formation of ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2021 61

‘DIXIE ALLEY’: Drone footage shows damage to the Camfil APC factory near the Jonesboro Airport after the March 28, 2020, tornado.

tornadoes. (The Weather Channel created a similar measurement called the Tornado Condition Index, or TORCON, which attempts to measure the chance of a tornado forming within a 50-mile radius of a given location.)

Gensini acknowledged his research is somewhat hindered by limited data. Detailed, accurate tornado statistics that include location, strength and path only go back to the 1950s.

“Arkansas and other states have long tornado histories,” he said. “We are only seeing a portion of that.”

Justin Condry, an National Weather Service meteorologist in North Little Rock, said he’s also noticed an increase in powerful storms in the South.

“It seems we’ve been issuing more warnings than before,” he said.

The state has averaged 33 twisters a year for the past 70 years, Condry said. However, that number increases to an average of 45 per year when tallying the last 10 years alone.

Last year, Arkansas recorded 45 tornadoes.

There were 41 in 2019 and 36 in 2018. This year, as of June 4, the state has seen 16.

Condry said the National Weather Service, while not declaring climate change is the cause, does agree with Gensini’s findings that a shift is occurring.

“To some extent, I think it is global warming,” Condry said. “But it’s a controversial topic.

We don’t have weather data that goes back hundreds of years to show that this is either 62 JULY 2021

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manmade and new or if it is a cyclical, longrange weather pattern.

“There is no denying, though, that the ‘Dixie Alley’ area is looking more impressive.”

Tornadoes in the South may be more dangerous, Gensini said, partly because they are harder to see. Trees and hills impede views of the landscape, unlike on the barren Plains.

Also, tornadoes are more likely to form under cover of darkness: Because the area generally has higher temperatures during the day, the cooling shift — one of the required ingredients in producing twisters — often doesn’t occur until well into the night, when people are asleep.

The South is also more densely populated than the Great Plains. Add in that manufactured homes are more abundant, and it creates a recipe for disaster, Gensini said.

“Manufactured homes are a huge deal for casualties,” he said. “A vast majority of fatalities and injuries occur when mobile homes are hit by tornadoes. There is a succinct vulnerability in the Southeast to storms because of that.

“They are forming in the most vulnerable area. Arkansas is in the footprint of this change.”

In Jonesboro, there are still reminders of the wrath of the storm that produced the EF3 tornado last March. Debris lies scattered in a field along Old Bridger Road, and thin sheets of metal can be seen wrapped around tree branches.

“I think that tornado caught us off guard,” admitted Anthony Coy, the director of

emergency services for Craighead County. “The criteria that day did not meet the requirements to pre-activate our emergency plans.”

Just before the Jonesboro tornado touched down, the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center upgraded the area’s possibility of severe weather from “slight’ to “enhanced.”

Since then, Coy said, the Craighead County Office of Emergency Management has activated its emergency operations center five times for storm warnings in the county.

“I don’t remember having this many warnings in such a short time,” he said. “I think as a result of that Jonesboro tornado, we learned we need to be more ready for any sudden changes.”

To Kathie Pace, the Jonesboro resident who weathered the storm in her stairwell, severe weather is nothing new. She was working at a jewelry store in the old Indian Mall on Caraway Road, she said, when a May 27, 1973, tornado flattened much of the southern half of Jonesboro, including portions of the mall.

“I should be more nervous when clouds come,” Pace said. “But I already felt that we lived in ‘tornado alley.’ Growing up, it seemed like every March or April, we’d get tornadoes.

“If you live here in Arkansas long enough, you’ll probably see one.”

This story is courtesy of the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network, an independent, nonpartisan news project dedicated to producing journalism that matters to Arkansans.

This summer, a group of all-star educators are bringing the magic of the classroom straight to your home with “Rise and Shine”! Help your kids jumpstart their mornings, and prevent them from losing what they learned over the school year, with televised minilessons and a hand-picked selection of educational programming from Arkansas PBS. These engaging lessons for K-5 students will be delivered right to your television or streaming device – summer learning essentials offered at no cost to you!

Tune in weekdays beginning Tuesday, July 6, at 8 a.m. Grades K-2 will begin daily at 8 a.m. Grades 3-5 will start at 9:45 a.m. See the complete schedule and all the ways to watch at myarpbs.org/watch.

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THE OBSERVER

SUMMER SUGGESTIONS

J

udging by how stepping outside feels akin to locking yourself inside a black van stashed at airport long-term parking, another summer in Arkansas is upon us, with all the fun, joy, sorrow and flesh-on-hotcar-seat agony that implies. Never fear. It’ll be over at some point between now and late September. And besides, it sure beats Plague Summer, which is what we had last year. Any July where the breath of other people isn’t liable to kill you is OK by us.

In a normal year, The Observer turns things down a notch in the summer, moving a little slower and not getting up too much during the heat of the day. Summer in Arkansas sure ain’t no time to be working for a living. We do as little as possible of that while the heat is on. We still, however, crave entertainment in the Dog Days. Given that, we thought we’d share a few suggestions, stuff we hope will help you weather the first post-coronavirus summer in Arkansas history and get the most out of that vaccination stick. Check ’em out below, and as always: Stay cool, citizens. Now that we’ve survived both the reign of Mad King Donnie and a genuine global apocalypse, there’s no sense getting whacked out by a heat stroke if you can help it.

“The Reign of Wolf 21” by Rick McIntyre The Observer has never been out to Yellowstone National Park or had much dealings with wolves other than the one laid low by the woodcutter for identity theft in “Little Red Riding Hood.” That said, we have to recommend “The Reign of Wolf 21” by Rick McIntyre.

The second book in McIntyre’s “The Wolves of Yellowstone” trilogy, “Wolf 21” is the true story of the Alpha wolf that led Yellowstone’s powerful Druid Peak Pack for a few hard years.

While you’d think a book like that would be all about red tooth and claw, the strong running down and ripping the weak to bits for their daily elk steak, it turns out that in the vivid, endearing personality of Wolf 21, we found a model for creatures of all sorts who must walk the line between vulnerability and strength.

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Far from the Alpha Wolf fantasies embraced by emotionally constipated douchebros all over America, Wolf 21 ditched the John Wayne stereotypes by being tough when he had to be but also generous to friends and family, kind to puppies and females of his species and merciful to his enemies even though, as King Wolf, he didn’t have to be. The result is the story of a fleeting, vibrant life that will change your mind not only about wolves, but about what a leader should do to project confidence and strength when the chips are down. From the first line to the last, it’s a beauty.

Quapaw pottery at Saracen Casino down in Pine Bluff At the urging of Junior, who is finally old enough to frequent local gambling halls and drinking establishments, The Observer got down to Saracen Casino in Pine Bluff the other day.

Owned and operated by the Quapaw Nation, it’s a sizable thing with a parking lot like Disney World, haunted by masses yearning to breathe rich. Junior just wanted to go look around, never having been inside a real casino and all, so one afternoon, knowing it would be cool inside, we motored down there, lost $14 and had a good ol’ time amongst the neon. The Observer has never been one for gambling, always a bit too sure that The House Always Wins and a little too broke to find the entertainment in plugging actual currency into a machine for a chance at a dopamine hit. We did, however, find something at Saracen that is totally free and lovely: a large collection of traditional pottery

by Quapaw artist Betty Gaedtke. It’s arrayed in glass cases just as you walk in — dozens of red clay pieces depicting people and animals, many adorned with cosmic swirls or details like tiny, hand-woven baskets. Most visitors stream past those cases without a second look on their way to the slots, but Yours Truly just couldn’t stop staring. It’s all gorgeous: beautiful vessels, many in the shape of people or animals, including crayfish, bears, fish, a cougar and what appeared to be a two-headed

horse. The Observer managed to peruse the pottery so long, including snapping a few pictures of our favorite pieces (possibly against the rules given that it was a casino and all) that a security guard eventually appeared, no doubt sizing up whether we were planning an “Oceans 11” style takedown of the joint. Eventually, however, she realized The Observer was just nerding out over beautiful and heartfelt artistry.

If you get down to Saracen, be sure to take a moment to do the same.

Korean Bulgogi BBQ (317 Oak St. in Conway) The Observer didn’t get out much in the past year, so when we did, we tried to make it count.

One of our best discoveries of the pandemic was Korean Bulgogi BBQ in Conway, which we found the way we find all things these days: through a friend’s post about it on Dr. Zuckerberg’s Book o’ Face. Having been vaccinated and all, we recently ate inside their dining room for the first time ever, but we’ve been haunting their drive-thru window for a solid 10 months now, slowly eating our way through everything on the menu. It’s a family-owned joint with superfriendly service, which might be enough to keep us coming back all by itself after the year we’ve had and all the restaurants we’ve seen closed. But as an added bonus, it’s one of those places we run across from time to time where literally everything we’ve ever tried has been uniformly delicious. We’ve never had a bad dish from the place. As for what to order, our go-to appetizers are the mandu dumplings (always great) or the Kimbab mini sushi rolls.

For an entree, Spouse usually goes for their Sesame Chicken on fried rice. It’s a knockout, the chicken clearly hand-breaded and fried when you order, covered in a sticky-sweet sauce that tastes of honey. It’s crazy good. The Observer, meanwhile, always gets the steak bulgogi on fried rice: paper-thin slices of steak, with equally thin-sliced sauteed onions, carrots, broccoli, cabbage and zucchini, all tossed in a delicious sauce. When they ask if you want the fried egg on top, say yes.

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