the 941

On a recent Friday night, I finished work around 9 p.m. and drove to Publix to grab a sandwich and some coffee for the morning. I picked out my few groceries and got in line to pay.

The man in front of me was all smiles: simply, but neatly, dressed in flip-flops, shorts and a T-shirt. The cashier rang the man’s single item up. He swiped his card to pay. It was denied.

A second try. The cashier reassuring: “This happens all the time.” A third try — nothing. The man grew increasingly embarrassed. I opened my wallet to pay for his purchase at the same time the cashier said she’d get it herself. The man protested. “No, let’s just forget it,” he said.

I said, “Look, it’s no problem. Let me.” The man demurred at first, then looked at me again, then back at the cashier, and said, “OK, thank you both,” and took his bag with the single item in it and left. The cashier, who had been digging into her own pocket for money, said to me, as she scooped up the money I’d already placed on the counter, “OK, I’ll let this be your good deed for today.”

“We all know what it’s like,” I said. But she shook her head. “I’ve never been that down,” she said.

I have.

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The topic of cougarsome cuties chasing cuddly cradle-dwellers is about as tasty an intellectual morsel as dining at the Olive Garden is a gastronomic one. Whether or not women d’un certain âge have sex with younger men is a topic as culturally passé as older men using little blue pills to make it through the night. It’s done; it happens. Why all this talk today about something so yesterday?

Look, I’m not suggesting we all spout Descartes and save-the-whales mantras every time we open our mouths, but we have more to debate than this only-in-America obsession of whether or not an older woman can — or should — hit it with a younger man.

But readers have spoken. I’ve received blog postings, emails and face-to-face queries all asking the same thing, “Yo, MC — when are you going to weigh in on Sarasota’s newfound fame as Cougar Town?” So, since it appears the gods are trying to punish me for my snobby comments about olives and gardens, here’s what I think — for what that’s worth — about the brouhaha.

Sarasota as Cougar Town? Only in its dreams. While it’s obvious that a red-heeled Louboutin could barely be thrown in this town without hitting an attractive, 37-plus, highly groomed woman seated at a barstool of some downtown hotspot, the fact remains that a lot of those women, like a lot of women all over the world, are not even remotely lusting after rock-hard body parts and malleable brains — they’re lusting after bank accounts. And while those women might look twice — they’d never think twice about wasting their big-bucks high-gloss finish on a kid who can’t even afford the going rate on a night out at Tovero. The only package that makes hard-nosed, hyper-manicured man-chasers of any age really purr is the very fat wallet of a usually much older man.

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Ed. note: This piece, by MC Coolidge, will appear in next week’s issue of Creative Loafing.

I don’t pretend to know the business side of running a bookstore/café like Sarasota News & Books, but I do claim to know the emotional side of being one of its patrons.

When I moved back to Sarasota five years ago after living in Boston for years, Sarasota News & Books saved my sanity. Not being a barfly or club-goer, it was at this bookstore that I became a regular, staving off crazy-lonely feelings in the company of books and book-lovers. It was there that I scribbled out the beginnings of an essay titled “Café Chess – Très Sexy” that would later launch my (so-called) career as a writer in Sarasota, a column that celebrated the cerebrally sexy chess players sitting at the café’s outdoor tables.

But Sarasota News & Books served a far greater role in our community than to simply feed the emotional needs of lonely-heart, would-be writers and lovers of café society and books. It became, almost by default, but considerably by design — thanks to the owners and the smart and charming managers and bookselling staff — a whole lot more. It became, quite simply, one of the last bastions for casual, nearly free, public intellectualism in Sarasota.

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Ed. note: This piece, by MC Coolidge, will appear in next week’s issue of Creative Loafing.

In cop land, cops make a huge deal about having someone’s back. “I’ve got your back” means “I’m with you; I’m not going anywhere; you can count on me,” and cops use it everywhere — on a sweat-drenched basketball court on their day off or in a busted-up alley chasing down a jacked-up and possibly armed suspect in the middle of the night. Having the back of your best friend who’s going through a divorce, or having the back of a fellow cop who’s busting through the front door of a crack house, yeah, that’s giving good back.

But sometimes people do things that make you realize, “Hey, I shouldn’t have this guy’s back.” Like if your coworker is stealing or your husband knocks the crap out of you. Those are no-brainers — you don’t stay loyal to people who aren’t loyal to you or the company you work for.

Sometimes (if you’re police chief, for example), you’ve got to have the backs of a lot of people. So many people, in fact, that it must be a tough job sometimes to tell whose back you should be protecting when. But that’s precisely the job of a chief of police: to know how, when and who to protect for the greater good of all.

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Ed. note: This piece, by MC Coolidge, will appear in next week’s issue of Creative Loafing.

Sarasota’s print pubs are no longer the cash cows they were in the halcyon boom days… and both writers and readers are paying the price.

Staff cutbacks and smaller page counts are the new norm; the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and Biz 941 magazine are impersonating the Thin Man, and two magazines — Sarasota Arts and Culture (previously Senses) Sarasota Downtown & Beyond have disappeared altogether.

Some publications seem to be staying afloat by cutting content even as they increase advertising. A recent issue of Sarasota Magazine devoted roughly 64 percent of its pages to advertising, much of it advertorial.

Advertorial or advertiser-friendly writing is an increasingly popular trend in print publications across the country — one that can run a murky range from only reviewing restaurants that buy advertisements in a newspaper to running a paid advertisement that is written and laid out to resemble a “real” article or editorial in a magazine.

Su Byron, a regularly published freelance writer and editor — she published Sarasota Arts and Entertainment, a monthly newspaper, for over 10 years — understands the pressure editors are under to pay for staff and printing through advertising dollars, but laments the trend toward reliance on paid advertising posing as content.

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Ed. this piece, the latest Face Reality column from MC Coolidge, will appear in next week’s issue of Creative Loafing.

Ah, New Hampshire… that bastion of backwoods, barns and covered bridges has given me yet another reason to love it: On June 3, the Granite State legalized marriage between same-sex couples.
I’ve had a major jones for New Hampshire since catching my first glimpse of that state’s motto — “Live Free or Die” — while on a family vacation when I was a teenager. Born in Florida and high-schooled in Ohio, I hadn’t exactly been exposed to a population where the concept of living freely was a subject of any conversation, much less a fiercely asserted axiom emblazoned on the backside of every passing car.

Later, when I went to college, I drove straight back to New Hampshire — a state I loved because it was, and apparently still is, a place where people mind their own business and let others mind their own as well. In Florida, people spend massively more time minding everybody else’s business, which explains why photos of décolletage and dollared-up dinner-goers still get so much ink in the society pages of local glossies while serious content shrinks to an abysmal next-to-nothing. And it explains why dumb laws, like last year’s Amendment Two, which effectively banned gay marriage, get passed here.

Six states — Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine and now New Hampshire — have come to the fair-minded and constitutionally-supported conclusion that gays should have the same unalienable rights as heterosexuals to pursue life, liberty and happiness in the form of marriage.

Florida, however, remains an intellectual backwater on the subject.

Floridians actually say things like “I don’t mind gays” or “Gays don’t bother me,” but then they qualify those barely-open-minded statements with caveats like “as long as they don’t flaunt their gayness” or “as long as they don’t come on to me.” And, those minds seem to close entirely when discussing the subjects of allowing gays to marry or adopt and raise children.

We do give gays lots of rights. Like the right to jeté across our jewel-of-the-cultural-coast ballet stages and give us plenty of “artsy” stuff to attend so we can get those all-important photos of ourselves in the papers. Heck, Floridians are so open-minded we’d probably even let a gay doctor inject us with Botox or let a gay politician govern us – as long as he or she wore safety gloves and played it straight.

But here in the Sunshine State, pretty much anyone can marry, for pretty much any reason, as long as it’s not in the name of “gay love.”

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