Wichita Story (https://wichitastory.com/2019/12/)
A time warp enveloped my life Saturday. Pizza at Angelo’s. A
Wichita Wings victory. Throw in some yogurt from TCBY and a VHS copy of The
Goonies from Popingo Video and it might have been 1985. Hartman Arena sits just off I-135, just down the street from
the old barn that was the Kansas Coliseum. It can never be 1985 again and Andy
Chapman isn’t going to lace up his cleats next weekend, but the old ghosts came
alive Saturday night.
In the family room of Passageways Living Center there sits an American flag created with a series of wooden blocks. Each block is slightly different. There are plain red blocks and plain white blocks. There are blue blocks with small stars on them; the number of stars fluctuate depending on the particular block. The blocks jut out from the “canvas” at different heights, creating a variety of shadows dependent on the light in the room.
A short while ago, The Wichita Eagle ran a column
of mine on the brouhaha
over whether the Wichita City Council ought to continue with the current limit
of two terms for city council members, or if it ought to be expanded to three. Since talking about government is what I do for a living–and since this
argument is likely to come back sometime
in the new year –let me expand on this a little. To reiterate, Wichita has a council-manager
form of government. That means that the city is divided into districts (in our
case six, meaning each council member theoretically represents the concerns and
interests of roughly 65,000 people per district), and the mayor is simply an
at-large member of the city council, with some particular procedural
responsibilities (supposedly enough to make it a full-time position, whereas
every other member of the council is nominally a part-time employee of the
city), but fundamentally no different from anyone else elected to the council
to a four-year term. Practical executive power–that is, the authority to keep
the city running on a day-to-day basis–is not vested in the mayor or the
council, but rather in a city manager, who is hired (at $228K a year, more than
twice what the mayor is paid) by the city council, and theoretically subject to
their oversight.
A promising life as a pianist is postponed as a young woman named Annie marries the handsome, charming and troubled Chris. Three kids later, she finds herself in a trailer park with little hope of the life she once dreamed of. Her ne’er-do-well trucker husband returns home from one of his many absences to wreaks havoc on the simple life she’s created for their children, leading to a violent conflict that soon spirals out of control…
Enchila…wait, chimichanga? Rice, I think. #probablymexicanfood
A wonderful melange of…food? #probablydelishidk