You know how sometimes you have a problem that just keeps bugging you and bugging you, then suddenly the answer falls out of the sky?

That’s how it’s been for me with this blog. As you know, I dreamed up iDivamemphis back in the dark ages of 2006 – two years is like 10 in blog years — and just loved what happened next. We’ve had great conversation, a few rousing arguments, but mostly discovered what we probably already knew: That talking to each other is the source of our greatest strength and inspiration. Then I started writing about our conversations in The CA.

Then last summer I became the editor of skirt!, a terrific new magazine for women in Memphis — click the button under the ad window to find out where to pick up your free copy — and life changed again. Got WAY busier. I had less and less time for blogging.

What to do? How to keep all of these balls in the air? (Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt this way.) So I did what I usually do with an intractable problem: I started whining about it to my girlfriends. Asking their advice. Trying out different ideas, and seeing what their reactions would be.

Finally, I have the answer, and she is the one in the totally great dress in the picture at the top of this post. Please meet Kalisa, local blogger, hilarious writer, and someone I think you’ll enjoy getting to know as she joins me blogging a few times a week. At the moment, she’s looking for an alias, you know, not because she doesn’t want you to know who she is (God knows anyone who blogs is WAY over that), but because, as she says, she sucks at thinking of that kind of stuff.

So, gentle readers, what should my terrific new blogging pal be called? And The Diva is already taken …

I wanted to write about the Lester Street killings yesterday, then again last night, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it until today.

Hearing about it on TV was bad enough, but yesterday morning LifeBlood called me, with a request for my particular blood type for a “recent trauma victim at LeBonheur.” Of course they couldn’t tell me if they needed my blood for one of the three kids — one is a baby — who are at the hospital, but I assumed that’s who it was, since it’s pretty unusual for me to be called for a specific incident. Of course I went and donated right away. (You would have, too, even though their lost laptops could have my personal information on them, right?)

But I can’t stop thinking about this horrible crime. Read the rest of this entry »

Now here’s a story that makes me so mad I could spit: former State Sen. John Ford, convicted last year for his (not small) role in the Tennessee Waltz bribery scandal, has stayed out of prison so far — and gets one more day — because he says he has to take care of his kids. Their mom, Tamara Mitchell-Ford, is serving a DUI sentence in Collierville, and his girlfriend, Connie Matthews, comes in only occasionally “to provide cooking services,” says Ford. Click here for the whole story.

Are you kidding me? This guy, who has publicly bragged about how many women he’s had, and whose dustup with yet another girlfriend got The CA looking at his finances several years ago, is pulling the Daddy Card? What is that judge thinking? Why does Ford get special treatment? And how many kids does he have, anyway?

I don’t usually get vengeful, but there’s a special place in hell for people who treat kids so badly. And, as the prosecutor points out, everyone else who is sentenced to jail has to figure out what to do about their kids; why does Ford get special treatment? What do you think should happen to Ford?

I hadn’t even wanted a dog.

Childhood allergies meant I’d never had one before, and I was perfectly contented with our two kitties, thanks. So when my husband came home all those years ago to tell me he’d found a puppy, and could we keep it, I was skeptical.

Of course, it wasn’t long before I saw how a 4-month-old puppy with huge brown eyes can change your life. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long time since NPR made me cry, but Tuesday night, the magnificent Anne Garrels (above) filed a report that brought me to tears in the parking lot of Target. It was a sweeping evaluation of where women in Iraq are since the U.S. invasion, and sister, the news is not good. Women being killed in Basra for wearing makeup and “Western” clothes. A reporter in Baghdad whose life was threatened, so she moved to a regional capital where she was safe, but her family couldn’t get along without her and her income. So she’s now back in Baghdad, her life still on the line. And the final story was of a woman who had no prospects for marriage, so she has remained a virtual slave to her own family. Listening to her cousin describe her pain — such a bright, curious, passionate woman, doomed to a life of lonely drudgery or worse — is what finally pushed me to tears. Try explaining that to the 8-year-old in the back seat.

Why is it that the conditions for women have gotten worse since our push for democracy in Iraq? Why is it that only reporters like Anne Garrels cover this story? What can we DO about it?