Michelle Hiskey

While battling Vietnam scars, memoirist receives nearly $5,000 in city water fight

Date: May 21st, 2012, 11:00 am

While Christal Presley was uncovering her and her father’s scars from his service in Vietnam, she also ended up unearthing subterranean trouble familiar to other city of Atlanta homeowners:

Water meter problems.

Despite minimal water each month, and even in a city beset by the highest combined water and sewage bills in the country, Presley’s bills were about double her neighbors’.

To write her book and solve her water problems, she had to probe what for too long had seemed normal.

Answers came from questioning authorities – first her own father, and then the city of Atlanta. Continue reading →

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For Mother’s Day, honoring the singular toughness of Rochelle Bozman

Date: May 7th, 2012, 8:36 pm

(Michelle is on vacation, so this column is a hold-over from last week)

Rochelle Bozman wasn’t a traditional mom, or traditional single mom. But she knew she didn’t need to be.

Ten years ago, Bozman sought to adopt a kid who was hard to place. She prepared a room for an African-American boy aged 7 to 10. But a social worker called one day asking if she could come to Grady Memorial Hospital right away to pick up a newborn.

Before she lost her struggle with ovarian cancer, Bozman raised her son with a singular toughness, and in the end arranged a new family for him.
Continue reading →

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Limelight’s notorious hustle returns in new Buckhead mural, book

Date: April 30th, 2012, 8:00 am

The disco era took a lot of secrets with it, because no cell phones or pocket cameras were around to record the evidence of today. Today, Atlanta’s most infamous disco is back after 25 years – resurrected through a bright mural in Buckhead and a new book of 1980s photos that weren’t too risqué to publish.

Documented in “Limelight … in a sixtieth of a second,” are the nearly naked patrons of the club’s “Bare as You Dare Night… the skimpy loincloths of Jungle Night … the live female mannequins stretched out on a buffet table, covered with whipped cream.
“Indulgence. Excessive. Flamboyant,” said mural artist Dax, when asked to describe the disco era through his palette of neon colors.

“It was a very artistic, creative time,” club photographer Guy D’Alema said. “It’s interesting that art is now paying tribute back to the club. It’s come full circle.”
Continue reading →

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For Decatur’s Intown Hardware, family and creativity will survive Wal-Mart

Date: April 23rd, 2012, 7:15 pm

When big-box Wal-Mart announced plans to move into indie-minded Decatur, neighbors mobilized protests.

A legal campaign began. Anti-Wal-Mart yard signs popped up. Across the road from the planned development, Tony Powers keeps the keen eye and taste that has made his family business – Intown Ace Hardware – survive and succeed.

As the world gets more homogeneous, his answer is a more diverse identity. His store’s evolving eclecticism mirrors the funky flowering of Decatur itself.
Continue reading →

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Gary Edwards challenges stereotypes of accountants – and stereotyping in general

Date: April 16th, 2012, 4:36 pm

It’s that season of certainty – tax season, representing one element of life we can all truly count on. And those who do the counting for us—accountants—are similarly bound by stereotypes: suits and numbers, professionally bound to never deviate from a norm.

Then there’s Gary Edwards, who naturally draws attention with his South African accent. His charisma builds as he tells stories from his world travels and shares insight about building friendships an increasingly global industry.

But he’s more than a stereotype buster. He’s also had his own assumptions shattered. Continue reading →

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Away from Facebook’s social circle, a connection to sacred circles

Date: April 9th, 2012, 9:30 am

This is the last week for “Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism” at Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum. Through May 6, “The Sacred Round: Mandalas by the Patients of Carl Jung” is on exhibit at the Oglethorpe University Museum of Art.

These kaleidoscopic circles offer a way to greater mindfulness that is so easy to lose – and thus so much more valuable — in today’s swirl of information, networks and distractions. In the age of technology, a mandala is a simple tool for staying focused. Continue reading →

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Common ground with the homeless raised as Easter approaches

Date: April 2nd, 2012, 7:00 am

Regardless of religion, we all are equaled through humbling moments.

The Palm Sunday service at the Church of the Common Ground in Woodruff Park repeatedly chipped at the gap between the homeless worshippers and those who were much better .

Staring into a street person’s face to see the face of Christ is a stark discovery of one’s own neediness – for status, approval and fleeting comforts.
Continue reading →

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Through writing and golf, Furman Bisher taught about life and death

Date: March 25th, 2012, 8:00 am

When Furman Bisher came into my life in 1986, I was fresh out of college, a whippersnapper sportswriter in awe of the legendary Atlanta Journal columnist. Aged 68, he seemed positively ancient.

Over the next quarter century, I studied the way he worked and wrote, and we became friends through our shared interest in golf – a sport that connects people of diverse ages and abilities.

When “the Bish” died a week ago, to me he was a young 93, because he changed my view of what it meant to grow old.

He did this by example — by living and writing the way he played golf.
Continue reading →

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Andrew Crawford’s metal gates are passages of his own creative risks

Date: March 19th, 2012, 6:53 pm

A garden gate by Andrew T. Crawford is a frame of beauty and a joy of metal.

It’s also a sign of the artist’s mid-career transformation.
Eleven of Andrew T. Crawford’s organically inspired gates frame the daffodils, tulips and hyacinths in the current exhibit, “Atlanta Blooms: 300,000 Watts of Flower Power” at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, through April. “I learned that you can change how you do something without changing what you do,” said the successful blacksmith who switched gears into more sculpture art at age 40. “Because of that freedom, I’ve done more honest work and met with more success.”
Continue reading →

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Coyotes: Wily, hungry and attracted to Atlanta’s buffet of outdoor cats

Date: March 12th, 2012, 12:16 pm

For those who link the ki-yotes’ plaintive howl to the romance of an old Western — the distant soundtrack as the cowpokes tell stories around the campfire – forget all that.

Coyotes’ story in urban Atlanta is about pests, pets and prevention.

Last week, Dr. Chris Mowry, a biologist from north Georgia who has studied coyotes, described their gritty survival skills to a crowd gathered at Fernbank Science Center for a forum titled, “How can humans and coyotes co-exist?” Continue reading →

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