Savannopoly

By the time we reached Savannah from Lake Worth, the skies had darkened and the temperature had dropped nearly 30 degrees, curtailing any immediate impulse to sightsee.

 

We overate high cholesterol food downtown at Lady & Sons where Thom surreptitiously shot this underdressed patron, who was 70 if she was a day. A family of African Americans at a nearby table made me feel less guilty about our restaurant choice.

Loretto, the super-chic director of alumni relations at a convent school, was a character more to our liking.  Without much prompting she told us that her friend John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil, brought her a stone from a witch doctor, which she held on their way to the beach.  "I had a 100 warts on my legs," she confided.  "When I removed my cover up, they were all gone.  All of them."  

Here's Thom in front of the home where the murder in Midnight takes place.

Savannah's architecture definitely charms.  Two views of the Armstrong Kessler Mansion, just off Forsyth Park where we easily found two-hour parking.

The fountain there never fails to enchant.

The producers of The Underground Railroad used the Telfair Museum of Arts & Sciences as location for an episode based in South Carolina.

We peeked  inside the St. John the Baptist Cathedral, too.

Savannah

Pulling off the bumper of Christine's Acura in the hotel parking lot marred our arrival in Savannah.  We took an Uber to a Rancho Alegre, an excellent Cuban restaurant with a beautifully lit bar.

A line out the door discouraged us from getting ice cream at Leopold's.  The Savannah College of Art & Design had programmed an interesting movie next door.  Encountering David Bowie in the Deep South was odd.  His turn playing an inscrutable alien probably won't draw the same crowds.

A local body shop demonstrated Southern hospitality the next morning by reattaching the bumper and belly pan free of charge.  We did some sightseeing in the River District and downtown, including the African American Families Monument with its sobering and controversial Maya Angelou inscription. 

 

 

An Uber driver told us not to miss the fountain in Forsyth Park.  Meh.

Like many before us, Bonaventure Cemetery was our final stop in Savannah.  It's segregated by religion, although wreaths decorated both entrances.

We wanted to see the Bird Girl, pictured on the book jacket of Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil, a bestselling nonfiction account of a local male prostitute's murder published in the early 90s ("it's like Gone with the Wind on mescaline" claimed author John Berendt when he first pitched the story to New York magazine).  Lady Chablis, a drag queen, played herself in the movie adaptation, directed by Clint Eastwood.  She died of pneumonia last September at 59.  Bird Girl had been moved to a museum but the Spanish moss provided the Southern gothic atmosphere we sought.

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