Sept. 11 and Deborah Tourloukis -- then and now

This is a three-part post. The first part is a new piece that I'm posting online now and will be in the paper Tuesday morning. The two parts that follow are my original stories on Deborah Tourloukis from 2001 and '02.

Deborah Tourloukis was about to go to bed when the news came on TV. Osama bin Laden had been killed. She couldn’t watch. And she didn’t sleep.

She couldn’t watch because she knew they’d show footage of the World Trade Center collapsing on Sept. 11. And she didn’t sleep because she was in the north tower when the first plane hit.

“Last night I just sat there and cried,” she said Monday. “It was tears of joy. It was tears of sorrow. It was a real mixed bag.”

In 2001, Deborah was working in accounting for First Union Bank in Charlotte. She was in New York to train other bank employees. She was on the 47th floor of the north tower when she felt the impact and the building swayed. She called her daughter and said I love you over and over into the phone. She thought it would be her last chance.

Deborah and a co-worker went down all those stairs together, passing firemen going up. They had just made it out of the building when the south tower crumbled. They huddled as huge chunks of debris barely missed them. They staggered to their feet and kept walking. They were two blocks away when the north tower fell.

(That co-worker’s name is Dzavid Kahari. He’s Muslim.)

I wrote about Deborah back then, and again a year later. I checked in with her Monday to see what she thought about bin Laden’s death, and to see how she’s doing now.

The great thing, after all these years, is to hear her laughter. She didn’t laugh about bin Laden, although she’s entitled. She laughs because so many things in her life are going well.

Long divorced, she’s engaged again at age 51 – she and her fiancé, Gene Rash, plan to get married in 2012. Or maybe 2013. There’s no hurry. It’ll be her second marriage and his third. He calls her Trip. She calls him Sequel.

Her daughter, Demetria, had Deborah’s first grandchild – a girl named Persephonie – on April 21. Her son, Brian, took a job in her honor. He’s been working for the New York City Fire Department since 2005.

She still lives in Mount Holly. She still works for the bank, although First Union morphed over the years into Wells Fargo. She’s in the auditing department. Her co-workers know about her and Sept. 11. They came to her desk Monday morning to check on her. She was fine.

Mostly.

Two things still give her problems. One is fire alarms. When Wells Fargo runs a fire drill, she has a buddy to help her get up and out.

The other thing is sudden storms. She was in St. Louis on Good Friday when weather sirens went off all over town. Deborah had what she called “a post-traumatic stress moment.” She called her hotel’s front desk in a panic.

“Are we being attacked?”

“What?” the clerk said. “No, it’s a tornado.”

Deborah might have been the only person in St. Louis relieved that it was just a tornado.

Back in 2002, she was scratching herself raw in her sleep. She doesn’t do that now. Back then she thought or dreamed about Sept. 11 every day. Now it just crosses her mind once in a while. She goes to New York three or four times a year to see friends – she grew up in Brooklyn – but she hasn’t visited Ground Zero in five or six years.

Every Sept. 11, she goes to a memorial service early in the morning, by herself. A few years ago she decided to buy herself a little something on that day, to mark another year of survival. Most years it’s something cheap. But last year she needed a car, so she bought a Honda CR-V.

She did spend a little time in her sleepless Sunday night finding out how bin Laden died. She noticed that U.S. officials carried out his funeral according to Islamic traditions.

“The U.S. still respected the Muslim beliefs and customs that he claimed to live by,” she said. “And yet he showed no compassion for others’ lives or beliefs.”

She used to speak to churches and social groups. Getting up in front of those people and telling her story helped her heal. Talking to a therapist helped her heal in different ways. She doesn’t feel the need to talk about Sept. 11 all the time anymore. But she doesn’t mind when people ask her about it.

“It will always be a part of my life,” she said. “I respect that. I don’t want anyone to forget.”

Story #1 from the archives:

OUT OF THE DARK ON A HERO'S ARM
Published 9/21/01

Deborah Tourloukis is afraid of the dark.

Ten days ago she kneeled on the floor under a co-worker's coat as the World Trade Center crumbled around her, turning the whole world into a blackness she can't describe.

Now she's back home in Charlotte, uninjured, alive. But four of her co-workers at First Union are missing. Two of them were just ahead of her. Another was right behind.

She sleeps with the light on.

And when she is awake, every so often something trembles at her core.

"It's almost like my brain is defrosting, " she says, "like it's remembering the things I can't remember yet. My hands start to shake. I cry and can't stop.

"I've only had one bad episode today. I allow myself one a day."

Deborah does accounting for First Union - she checks stock and bond accounts to make sure what customers spend matches what they trade for.

She went to First Union's New York office last week to train employees. She flew up Sunday, a day early, to see family - she grew up in Brooklyn, and her son lives in New York.

Anyone visiting the World Trade Center on business had to have a temporary ID card made. Deborah still has hers from Sept. 11. In a way, her story is frozen on that card:

Her picture.

The designation 1WTC, for Building 1, the north tower.

The number 47, for the 47th floor.

That's where she was at 8:48 a.m., when the first jet hit the other side of her building. The impact made the tower sway. She looked up, out the window, and saw the strangest things in the air above her. Blankets. Briefcases. A notebook, fluttering.

She thought it was an earthquake.

She called her boss in Charlotte. He told her a plane had hit the tower. She called her daughter, Demetria, a student at Belmont Abbey.

Deborah could think of only one thing to say. I love you. I love you. I love you.

One stairway was already jammed with people. Somebody found another. The stairs were only wide enough for two people at a time.

Soon they had to go single-file - the firemen were coming up.

Deborah and the others moved aside as the firemen brought down the injured, the burned, a blind man.

Somewhere around the 17th floor, one of Deborah's co-workers stopped. She said she needed a fireman. Deborah doesn't know what was wrong. That was the last they saw of her.

Finally they came through a doorway where a fireman stood. "Make sure you have a buddy!" he shouted. Deborah grabbed onto a co-worker: Dzavid, pronounced like David.

She remembers going through a turnstile and a revolving door, then turning left and walking down a shopping corridor between the two towers.

That's when the south tower collapsed.

"We looked back, and there's no other way I can say this - the debris chased us, " she says. "The smoke came in and rolled over us. All the lights went out."

Steel, stone, glass crashed around them. So many pieces big enough to kill.

Deborah slipped and fell. Dzavid huddled beside her and held his coat over both of their heads.

A plate glass window from the Gap store in the corridor shook loose and fell on top of them. Somehow, it didn't break.

Before they left the 47th floor, they had wet some paper towels and stuffed them in their pockets. Now they put the towels over their mouths. Deborah didn't want to move. She thought she'd fall in a hole. But Dzavid made her get up and walk.

Out of nowhere, someone appeared with a flashlight. They went down another level, everyone linking hands, until Deborah smelled fresh air.

They had made it two blocks down the street when the north tower fell.

Deborah says two co-workers were just up ahead when the first tower collapsed. A third was just behind.

All three are missing, along with the woman who stayed on the 17th floor.

Another nearby co-worker, Tom Canavan, dug his way out. A photo of him, his head covered in blood, appeared in People magazine.

Deborah got home Saturday night. She wants people to know that not all her heroes are in New York.

First Union got her and other survivors everything they needed. Friends keep her on the phone eight hours a day.

She hasn't felt like going out, but Thursday morning she went and had her nails done. A tiny flag ribbon is painted on each ring finger.

She'll try to go back to work Monday. She's a little nervous about it. But she has so many people to talk to, so many people to thank.

First on the list is the co-worker who covered her with his coat and led her out of the darkness.

Deborah says he saved her life. And she wants people to know who he is.

Dzavid.

Dzavid Kahari.

He's Muslim.

Story #2 from the archives:

SHE ESCAPED TERROR, FOUND NEW COURAGE

MOUNT HOLLY WOMAN SHARES LIFE-CHANGING EVENT TO HELP OTHERS COME TO TERMS WITH ATTACKS

Published 9/11/02

Some mornings, Deborah Tourloukis still wakes up rubbed raw.

She dreams about the World Trade Center and she scratches herself. Always the same spots. The inside of her right knee. The back of her calf. She doesn't know why she scrapes those spots. But they stay sore and bruised.

In her dream, it is dark and she is stuck and she is clawing to get out. In her sleep she reopens the old wounds.

At 8:46 a.m., exactly one year ago, the first plane hit the World Trade Center. To this day it's still not clear how many people were inside the twin towers. Some recent studies estimate as few as 10,000 - plus the firefighters, police and rescue workers who went in the buildings to help.

Roughly 2,800 died.

The rest are in a club whose enrollment will never grow.

The survivors club.

Deborah Tourloukis of Mount Holly still has her membership card. It is a day pass to the World Trade Center's north tower, marked Sept. 11, 2001.

She was on one of her regular trips to train employees at First Union Corp.'s office. At a farmers market outside the building, she bought a ham-and-cheese quiche and a loaf of banana bread to share with her co-workers.

She joked with the security guard, took the elevator to the 47th floor.

And then history happened.

In the months since, she has told her story to a line of strangers on the front porch of her childhood home.

She has told her story to a flight attendant who started to weep when he discovered who she was.

She has told her story in an empty bar because the owner wanted to hear, because he lost a son in the terror she survived.

She's 42, divorced with three grown kids. She still works her same job in accounting, although First Union has now merged with Wachovia. She never imagined a life where so many people would want to hear her story.

But with each telling she feels the story's power. The power to help others feel what it was like. The power to heal her raw places.

This morning, Wachovia will hold a Sept. 11 memorial service. Deborah put it together. She has worked extra hours, gone in on her days off, to make it right.

At one point, she thought the service might give her closure. But there is too much blocking the door.

So, instead, she has swung it open.

She tells her story.

*

Glad for the darkness

"I've got two props - my water and my tissue, " she says. "I just may cry."

She is talking to the Gaston County Extension and Community Association, which used to be a homemakers group but now discusses all sorts of issues, usually over coffee and brownies.

Deborah wears a dark suit and a Mickey Mouse American-flag pin. On the table next to her is a display case with a shard of glass and a hunk of stone. Her brother, a New York City firefighter, got the glass and stone from ground zero.

Deborah is new to public speaking. She doesn't build to dramatic pauses. She doesn't pull her words into a theme. It just spills out.

"I called my boss in Charlotte and told her I thought there was an earthquake. She said, 'Get out; a plane has hit your building.' I made a call to my daughter Demetria. She was ironing her clothing. I said, 'Demetria, a plane has hit. I don't know if I'm gonna come home.' "

But she did. She went down 46 flights of stairs and then under the building. She passed burned bodies, exhausted people who decided to stop, firefighters heading up.

The rescue workers told her to buddy up with someone. She found a co-worker, Dzavid Kahari, a Muslim.

When the south tower fell, they huddled on the floor and Dzavid covered her with his coat. A plate-glass window fell on them. Somehow, it didn't break.

They made it outside.

Two blocks from the north tower, a photographer was trying to fit the awful scene into her camera. She snapped a picture of Deborah and Dzavid as they walked by. Deborah's hair is thick with dust. Her eyes are cast in shock.

Minutes later, the north tower perished.

Five of her co-workers died. Two had been just ahead of her. One had been not far behind.

Deborah thanks God for all the smoke that day.

"The darkness was a gift, " she says. "It was hard enough to hear it as we came through the building, but it's a gift that we didn't have to see. It made it hard to breathe at the time. But I believe it made it easier for us to live today."

The women in the crowd are dabbing their eyes with paper napkins. Deborah has already had to stop three times. But she doesn't want to leave everybody sad.

"I'm from Brooklyn, and most of my family is still up in New York, " she says. "But I've been down here eight years and it's been a wonderful thing for me. Thank you so much for listening. Sharing it with other people makes it lighter."

She likes to share inspirational quotes, like this one from Mary Gardiner Brainard: I would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light.

She believes in it.

She also carries a flashlight in her pocketbook. And another in her car.

*

A story told over and over

Word got around the old neighborhood. Debbie's here. The one who was in the tower.

Deborah sat on the front porch of her childhood home on East 34th Street in Brooklyn. Her sister Denise owns the house now. Deborah had come to see family. Now she saw half the neighborhood, lining up down the street.

"Just about everybody there had lost someone, or knew somebody in the neighborhood that did, " she says. "It always started off with, 'How are you doing? How's North Carolina?' And then they would come in with the other questions. The ones about 9/11."

Every so often, something like that happens. Denise called after visiting a Sept. 11 exhibit at a museum on the USS Intrepid. She was looking at a strip of photos when one stopped her cold. It was the picture of Deborah and Dzavid. No one had known the picture even existed.

And so in January, Deborah found herself looking at an exhibit where she was one of the featured characters. A stranger, a visitor from France, stood next to her. "That's me, " Deborah said. And she told her story again.

She went back to New York to look for a place for her daughter's bridal shower. She stopped at a bar they had thought about. The owner's son had died at the World Trade Center. "I was there, " Deborah said. "Are you sure you want to hear this?" He was. And they cried as she told her story again.

Once in a while, someone is rude or creepy, wanting to know if she saw any severed heads. Deborah just cuts the conversation off.

But most of the questions are simple. Most of them aren't even questions. They're pleas. Tell us where you were. Tell us who you saw. Tell us what it was like.

The more she tells the story, the more she remembers. The quiche and banana bread came back to her just the other day.

It's like vacation pictures, she says. You can show them to people all you want. But it's not the same as having been there.

Not the same at all.

*

Making gradual progress

For the first couple of weeks afterward, she slept in a spare room with the TV on for company. She turned it to Nickelodeon because she knew it wouldn't show any horror movies.

She took Ambien to help her sleep, saw a doctor about the nightmares. As she talked to him, she scratched her left shoulder without even knowing it.

She can look at photos from Sept. 11, but not TV footage. She can't take the sound.

She has been back to ground zero four times - most recently, last week for a Wachovia ceremony. When she gets near, she smells the smell from that day. An acid smell. None of her friends can smell it.

And still, every day, she gets better.

She has decided not to put up with people who make her unhappy. This has led to a couple of hard conversations, one with a family member, one with a co-worker. But she came away refreshed.

She calls and tries to cheer up Dzavid, who has a hard time talking about that day. She goes home from work at a decent hour.

She will speak at the Wachovia service this morning. But there also will be a choir, and people reading poetry, and a slide show, and a toll of a bell for those who died.

All over this country, in places all over the world, people will stop for a few minutes to remember that Sept. 11 belongs to all of us, that all the stories of pain and fear and hope blend into one big story.

Everyone's story.

And tonight Deborah Tourloukis will go home, and maybe she will scratch herself raw in her sleep, and she will get up tomorrow morning and put on some skin cream and start a new day.

Her story.

Waiting bin Laden out

Late last night, as we stayed up late soaking up the details of the death of Osama bin Laden, I started thinking about the value of waiting.

One thing I've learned in my job is that the key to understanding someone isn't fancy writing or clever questions. It's watching and waiting. Most people aren't real when they first talk to a reporter -- they want to please, or they want to put up a front of some kind. But if you hang around long enough, eventually the mask drops. At some point people go back to being themselves.

I'm sure the people who lead our military and intelligence operations have a much more profound understanding of that. They are used to waiting.

Osama bin Laden was born into a billionaire family that owned the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia. He transformed himself into an Islamic radical and terrorist, but his roots were among the elite. By age 15 he had his own stable of horses. He grew up living in mansions, not caves.

A cave is where most of us figured we'd find him someday, maybe already dead -- there had been reports for years that he was suffering from kidney disease. But it has been nine and a half years since the 9/11 bombings he was responsible for. Think about running for nine and a half years. Think about knowing that the most powerful country on Earth would never stop trying to catch you.

So bin Laden ended up back in a mansion, this time in a wealthy section of a Pakistani city. Based on the pictures this morning, it wasn't an especially elegant home. It's also a place that was bound to draw attention -- the compound is several times bigger than any other homestead in the area, and it's surrounded by a high wall and barbed wire. It's almost like a sign: SOMEBODY BAD LIVES HERE.

But it's the kind of place you might live if you're used to being the richest man in town.

We had to wait nine and a half years. But Osama bin Laden finally came out of the cave. He had to go back to being himself. And that's when we killed him.

A reader makes a good point

Yeah, that Obama birth-certificate column this morning touched a nerve... 595 comments and counting, not to mention a few dozen emails and phone calls. The debate in the comments has actually been fairly civil -- a lot of disagreement, and some anger, but more like a boxing match than a back-alley brawl.

One of the emailers, a reader named David, said this:

Out of curiosity were you asleep during the Bush years when it was advanced by “the left” that Bush knew and was somehow involved in 9/11? Did you just miss that a poll in 2007 found that fully 35% of Democrats believed Bush had advance knowledge that 9/11 was going to occur?... I mean, after all, isn’t believing that a sitting President had advance knowledge that the slaughter of thousands of innocent Americans was going to take place just a touch more disgusting than thinking another wasn’t born in the U.S. or is a socialist?

I vaguely remembered some polls along those lines, but asked David to send me a couple of links, which he did. You can find the details here and here.

Now... I'm not sure we're talking apples and apples here. What I remember, from when these came out, is that some people interpreted those questions based on the briefing a month before 9/11 that said Osama bin Laden was determined to attack the United States. Some people might have considered that "advance knowledge" -- not of a specific attack, but that something was about to happen.

One other thing: I don't remember any major voice on the left -- certainly no one who was contemplating a run for president -- pushing that idea. There wasn't a Donald Trump out there in front of the cameras.

On the whole, though, I think David makes a fair point. I should've done that column back then. Politics can make us all crazy from time to time. I hope this current brand of crazy fades fast.

What's in a (Southern) name?

My uncle Ottis died last week. I put his obit on Facebook. A friend who grew up in Ohio read it and said “Man, I love those names.”

Mr. Yarbrough was born in Odum, Georgia, a son of the late Elmer Emerson and Fannie Pearl Tripp Yarbrough…

Most names fade over generations. It might not seem like it now, but one day parents will stop naming their boys Brandon and their girls Caitlin or Katelyn or Qateleyne or however the mom demands to spell it before the epidural. Someday those names will sound as odd to our ears as Ezra and Myrtice do now.

My mama, Virginia, is one of seven: her, Junior, Hazel, Ernest, Ada Mae, Ottis and Buddy. My mom and Aunt Mae are the only ones left.

My daddy was officially L.M., for Leonard Milton, even though everybody called him Tommy. (To a few members of my family, I’m still Little Tommy. I know.)

His sisters were Estelle and Lizzie Mae.

There are lots of people named Otis, one T, from Otis Redding to Otis the drunk on "The Andy Griffith Show." But an Ottis, two T’s, is rare.

I’ve met just two: Uncle Ottis and his son, Ottis Jr. The only other one I’ve heard of is the former NFL running back Ottis Anderson. My uncle pronounced it AH-tis. His son and the running back say it OH-tis.

There’s a great Web toy called the NameVoyager. Type in a name and it shows you how popular it’s been over time. Ottis was never popular. It peaked in the 1910s. Since the 1950s, it hasn’t appeared enough to measure. Uncle Ottis was born in 1940.

Both sides of my family were country people. My mom and dad picked cotton from the time they were little.

When my grandmother got sick, my mom ended up in charge of the household chores. She was 12. She made two pans of biscuits every single morning for years. She made them once in a while for my dad as a treat. After he died, that was it for the biscuits. She’s never made another one.

They all had hard lives, but Ottis might have had the hardest. His wife left him while he was in Vietnam. He raised his boy as a single dad and took care of my grandmother in her later years. Then he had a stroke and spent his last few years in assisted living. He liked tangerines because he could peel them with his one good hand.

Most of my mom’s people settled around Florence, S.C., and when my grandmother was alive we’d drive up there every year. I remember Uncle Ottis chain-smoking Chesterfields and falling asleep on the couch, his little black-and-white TV playing “The Twilight Zone.”

They have a national military cemetery in Florence – it’s a smaller version of the one in Arlington. All those rows of white headstones. A dozen of us came to Uncle Ottis’ service. A recording played taps. Two men in uniform folded the flag on his casket and gave it to his son.

Some people long for the good old days. But for a lot of people who grew up like my parents, the days weren’t so good. They’re grateful for air conditioning and washing machines and something other than biscuits every day of the week.

But with every gain comes some loss. A fine old Southern name. A good man who had a tough life.

We stop and pay attention for a moment, so we can remember. Things pass.

A Loomis Fargo heist movie? Please make it so

The latest issue of GQ magazine has an interview with the great Danny McBride, star of locally-made cult classic "The Foot Fist Way" and HBO's "Eastbound and Down," co-star of the new movie "Your Highness," and graduate of the N.C. School of the Arts.

The interview's not online far as I can tell, but one quote near the end made me really happy. The interviewer asked McBride what he might do next:

"He mentions a movie he and (writing partner) Jody Hill wrote a year after 'The Foot Fist Way,' based on a 1997 robbery of a bank in Charlotte, North Carolina. 'These rednecks robbed Loomis Fargo for over $17 million,' McBride says. 'And they would have gotten away with it, except they stayed in the town they were living in. They literally moved from trailers into the richest neighborhoods in town, lived like kings, bought their wives t-- jobs. Jody wants to make it like a southern 'Godfather.'"

The Loomis Fargo heist is the craziest story I've ever covered, and the one that felt the most like a movie. If you're not familiar with it, this Wikipedia article has the basics, although as always with Wikipedia, buyer beware on some of the facts. If that tweaks your interest, my former colleague Jeff Diamant wrote a great book about the whole thing.

The memory that stands out the most for me came when the suspects were first hauled into court. One of them was the man who was supposedly hired to kill David Ghantt, the Loomis Fargo employee who actually stole the money. When the guy walked by me I noticed something strange about him, but I couldn't quite believe my eyes. At a break I went up to one of the marshals.

"Um, could you check something for me?" I said.

"What is it?"

"I think that tall guy had a tattoo on his neck of a Klansman riding a horse."

"Aw, come on."

He went into the holding area to check. He came back out with both eyebrows as high as they could go.

"You're right," he said. "God almighty."

That would be some amazing movie.

March Madness picks

Somehow I forgot to take today off -- an unforgivable mistake on my part. But we do have TVs around the newsroom. And driving around uptown this morning, I saw a couple of fans in Michigan gear wandering around. They're in the right place.

By the way, there's a post from a couple days back on how we'll know when your team is in town... still time to drop in a comment.

After all that, I have to subject you to my picks. If you want to see them in bracket form, they're in the Observer's bracket contest (my username is "tomlinson"). But here's a list, by region, with a few comments. Asterisks = upsets.


EAST
Ohio St. over San Antonio
George Mason over Villanova
West Va. over Clemson
Kentucky over Princeton
Marquette over Xavier*
Syracuse over Indiana St.
UGA over Washington* -- Look, I went to UGA. You have to ride with your guys at least one round.
UNC over Long Island

Ohio St. over George Mason
Kentucky over West Va.
Syracuse over Marquette
UNC over UGA -- a rematch of the 1983 regional final, which UGA won after Sam Perkins admitted he didn't know which conference the Dawgs were in. I doubt that'll happen this time. And if it does, it won't matter.

Ohio St. over Kentucky
Syracuse over UNC -- this was the hardest pick in the tournament. Carolina has come so far, and on talent alone they're Final Four-ready. But sometimes they fall into a mass coma on court... they were down double digits in every ACC tournament game, and never got close to coming back against Duke. Three straight big wins seems too much for them at this point.

Ohio St. over Syracuse and into the Final Four.

WEST
Duke over Hampton
Tennessee over Michigan*
Arizona over Memphis
Texas over Oakland
Missouri over Cincinnati*
UConn over Bucknell
Temple over Penn St.
San Diego St. over N. Colorado

Duke over UT
Arizona over Texas*
UConn over Missouri
San Diego St. over Temple

Duke over Arizona
San Diego St. over UConn

San Diego St. over Duke and on to the Final Four* -- They're not much fun to watch, but San Diego State is REALLY good. They lost just twice all year, both times to BYU, and then they killed the Cougars in the Mountain West final. They can grind even a good team into dust. Duke is a good team, and with Kyrie Irving they might be great. If he's at full strength, Duke could easily win the whole thing. But I think it ends for the Blue Devils here.

SOUTHWEST
Kansas over Boston U.
Illinois over UNLV*
Vandy over Richmond
Louisville over Morehead St.
Georgetown over VCU
Purdue over St. Peter's
FSU over Texas A&M*
Notre Dame over Akron -- the Gerry Faust bowl!

Kansas over Illinois
Louisville over Vandy
Purdue over Georgetown
Notre Dame over FSU

Louisville over Kansas* -- Kansas always breaks my brackets. Might as well get rid of them now.
Purdue over Notre Dame*

Purdue over Louisville and on to the Final Four.
SOUTHEAST
Pitt over UNC-Asheville
Old Dominion over Butler*
Utah St. over Kansas St.*
Belmont over Wisconsin* -- yeah, going a little crazy on the upsets here. But Belmont lost just four times this year -- twice to Tennessee, once to Vandy and once to Lipscomb. And Lipscomb doesn't really count. There is a Lipscomb in all our lives, just waiting to trip us up.
St. John's over Gonzaga
BYU over Wofford -- although if Wofford wins, alum Jerry Richardson might be giddy enough to broker a deal between NFL players and owners. Yeah, probably not.
Michigan St. over UCLA*
Florida over UC-Santa Barbara

Pitt over ODU
Utah St. over Belmont
St. John's over BYU*
Florida over Michigan St.

Pitt over Utah St.
St. John's over Florida*

Pitt over St. John's and on to the Final Four.

FINAL FOUR
Ohio St. over San Diego St.
Pitt over Purdue

Ohio St. over Pitt, 71-67, for the title.

So that's 16 upsets overall, but just one real sleeper in the Sweet 16 (Utah State). Two #1 seeds, a #2 and a #3 in the Final Four. Not as risky as I'd like. And surely not as wise as your picks. Tell me where I went wrong.

How do we know your team's in town?

Long Island University is the Blackbirds. I had no idea. Hampton's the Pirates, and if you follow March Madness, you might remember their big upset over Iowa State back in 2001, which led to the wonderful image of their coach impersonating a dead bug. But other than that, I don't know much.

So here's the question, for fans of the eight schools playing here in the NCAA regionals this weekend: How will we know your team's in town?

Here are the teams coming to Charlotte, by the way -- I'm going to put them in alphabetical order to eliminate any bias: Georgia, Duke, Hampton, Long Island, Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee, Washington.

OK, see, I'm biased already.

Georgia is my team. I went to school there. I left several million brain cells scattered around campus. I still daydream about going back and becoming a perpetual grad student. These are my people.

Here's how you know Dawg fans are in town:

-- ABC stores suddenly low on Jim Beam; CVS stores suddenly low on BC powders.

-- Hotel-lobby debates about whether Herschel Walker could play college basketball (yes), and how many points he would score (164 a game).

-- Lots of body-painting going on... but not as erotic as it sounds.

Now then... both Duke and North Carolina are also headed this way. I could say that you know Duke fans are in town when the parking lot is full of Jersey plates. I could say that you know Carolina fans are in town when you see people counting the Jersey plates in the parking lot. But I would never say such things, because I know you Blue Devil and Tar Heel fans will step up.

(Of course, it's possible that you might actually say something about the other team, rather than your own. There's no way we can stop that. But of course none of you would do such a thing. Hint. Hint.)

But we're looking to hear from all of you. Michigan, Tennessee, Washington, Hampton: What should we look for from y'all? And you Long Island Blackbirds... is anybody coming? Because we need to talk. Clearly, the Long Island Expressway would be a much cooler name.

Have at it in the comments...

It just so happens that MY team is in town, so I'll go first.

Last call for Queens workshop

Just a reminder, y'all, that my workshop "A Writer's Life: Building a Career as a Professional Writer" begins Saturday at Queens University. It's a two-part class -- half on Saturday and the other half March 12.

We'll be talking about the essentials of turning pro, how to figure out what to write about, how to sharpen your writing, how to get noticed, and 25 ways (at least!) to make a living with words.

If all that sounds good to you, here's where you can sign up.

Here's one last video that Queens produced for the workshop... this was in front of one of those green screens where you can project anything as a backdrop, and it looks like they went with the '70s talk-show motif. Next time I'm going to ask for flying dragons.

Two cops, two lives, two endings

Charlie Walker’s 30 years on the job ended at a visitation. He met up with some buddies. They all waited in line two-and-a-half hours at First Baptist Church. Then he was at the front of the line, standing across from Fred Thornton’s widow.

This is Charlie Walker, somebody told her. This is his last day.

He dreaded what those words might do to her.

Two cops, two careers. One ended just the way you’d want it to. The other ended the way you hope it never does.

A couple of Sundays ago, I wrote a story about Charlie. He spent the last 15 years of his career as a police officer at The Square, one of the last in town who still walked the beat. He got to know millionaire bankers and barefooted homeless women. He treated people with respect. On his last day at The Square, dozens of friends showed up to send him off.

Last Friday, Thornton died when a flash-bang grenade – part of his gear as a member of the SWAT team – exploded in his garage. Police say it was an accident. Thornton was due to retire this summer. He injured his knee last year, and instead of running out the clock at his desk, he rehabbed so he could go back to SWAT. At his funeral Tuesday, hundreds of officers mourned.

Walker remembers working with Thornton once, years ago. Police had spotted a robbery suspect. Thornton arrived from one direction, Walker from the other. They caught the guy and found the loot.

Besides that, all Walker knew about Thornton was his good reputation. But he has spent the last few days thinking about Thornton a lot.

“I felt guilty that I made it,” Walker says. “It’s not always your training or everything like that. It’s a crapshoot sometimes… Forget all the times over 30 years that I know about, when I knew I might be in danger. How many occasions were there that I didn’t know about? How many times was it close to being bad and I never saw it coming?”

Online, the stories about Walker and Thornton had some grumbling in the comments. A few folks griped about Walker drawing a pension even though he retired at 52. Others said Thornton’s service cost too much money. In these times, the complaints are understandable. People worry over every dollar.

But police work is different. Every day might bring a simple traffic stop that goes south, or a domestic dispute that blows up, or a career criminal who decides he doesn’t want to go to jail anymore. Now multiply that by thousands of days.

Cops aren’t gods. Former Charlotte officer Marcus Jackson pleaded guilty back in December to sexually assaulting women while on duty. And even good cops make mistakes that get magnified when you carry handcuffs and a gun.

The goal is to do a good job and make it to 30 years. Charlie Walker made it. Fred Thornton got so close.

Walker’s last day on the street was Feb. 11, but he had a couple weeks of desk work. Monday was his official last day. He finished his shift and went to the visitation. And he ended up in front of Thornton’s wife, Linda.

He thought she might break down.

She looked at him.

Thank you for all your years of service, she said.

And the long procession moved on.

How R.E.M. changed my life

I'm not sure that writing 1,500 words about R.E.M. is in my official job description... then again, they recorded their first two full-length albums at Reflection Studios in Charlotte, so there's a bit of a local angle. But the main reason is, this just started coming out, so here it is.


I did not come from a land of musical adventure.

At home my mom and dad listened to country. It was the best kind of country -- Hank, George Jones, Loretta Lynn -- but back then that's what the country stations played. At some point I drifted over to the pop station, and for a while I taped Casey Kasem's Top 40 every week and wrote down the charts in a notebook. By high school my tastes had broadened a little -- I liked the Molly Hatchet the potheads played at the ball park across from my house, and the R&B I heard at dances and parties. There was one party, at a condo complex with a pond, where ducks came waddling through the living room while "Let It Whip" thumped on the stereo. I'll always associate "Let It Whip" with ducks.

But all that music was in the middle of the mainstream -- even if kids didn't like all of it, they knew about all of it. I went to a summer program before my senior year of high school; at a dance the first night, they played "Rock Lobster." All the kids from Atlanta knew it by heart. I'd never heard it, or anything like it.

The day I arrived at the University of Georgia, in 1982, somebody was blasting Atlanta Rhythm Section from speakers in a dorm window. There was a guy everybody called The Nuge because he worshiped Ted Nugent. Most days you could hear somebody playing Rick James or the Police or Ronnie Milsap -- the same stuff I heard back home.

But then I started seeing fliers on telephone poles for bands with names like Love Tractor. I'd never heard of ANY of these bands. I wondered if the posters were some kind of prank -- we'd get there for the show, and the seniors would come out and laugh at us. "Love Tractor?" they'd say. "You thought that was a REAL band?"

I made some friends right away, and we went to football games and stayed up late drinking beer and eating popcorn. But I didn't feel comfortable on that big campus. Not handsome enough, not smart enough, most definitely not cool enough.

I had a bizarre roommate, a junior named Matt. The legend was that he had never changed his bedsheet in three years on campus. You could see the outline of his body on the sheet. We called it the Shroud of Matt. He would have loud fights with his girlfriend, and louder makeup sex. I stayed out of my dorm room as much as possible.

But one day when I was there, he put a record on the turntable. It had been out only a couple of weeks. He said "Listen to this," and handed me the sleeve.


This is what I heard:



It sounded even weirder than "Rock Lobster." The recording felt homemade. The guitar line careened like a wagon about to run into the ditch. And that singer... I couldn't make out the words, but it didn't matter. There were five songs on the album, all dark and murky and incomprehensible. Which was perfect, because my life felt dark and murky and incomprehensible. This band I had never heard of was saying what I never knew I needed to hear.

They were a local band. Back home, "local band" meant some guys who played at the talent show once they learned "Free Bird." But these four guys wrote their own stuff. They were right there in Athens among us. We saw Michael Stipe, the singer, at the Gyro Wrap downtown. We saw Bill Berry, the drummer, and Mike Mills, the bass player, in a guitar shop. I took a leak next to Pete Buck, the guitarist, at a Jason and the Scorchers show.

They played a free concert on campus and a couple of thousand people showed up. But when I went home for Christmas, no one had heard of them. They were still listening to Molly Hatchet and "Let It Whip."

For the first time in my life, I was on the front edge of something cool. R.E.M. was playing clubs all over the country by that point, and picking up fans a roomful at a time, but they were still this little musical cult. And I belonged.

That spring, they put out their first full-length album, "Murmur." Rolling Stone reviewed it -- Rolling Stone? Reviewing our guys? -- and gave it four out of five stars. A re-recording of their first single, "Radio Free Europe," made the Billboard pop chart. And driving home on break, a couple of months later, I flipped to a Savannah rock station -- the kind of station that played Skynyrd and Styx -- and they were playing R.E.M. on the radio.

That summer, staying up late one night, I saw the video on MTV.

It was the most bittersweet feeling. I was thrilled for my guys. But I knew they weren't really mine anymore.

I can track those years by R.E.M. records. My sophomore year, clearer and happier -- that was "Reckoning." A lost summer in Jacksonville -- "Fables of the Reconstruction." A road trip, the tape deck cranked up as loud as it would go -- that's "Lifes Rich Pageant."

But by then we didn't see them around town as much. They still lived in Athens, and sometimes they'd play there under a fake name -- one gig I remember, they were Hornets Attack Victor Mature. But word spreads fast in a college town, and Hornets Attack Victor Mature packed the club.

By the time I left school and got my first newspaper job, everybody knew about R.E.M. "The One I Love" was a hit single, "Losing My Religion" was an even bigger hit, Rolling Stone called them the best band in the world, they went from clubs to theaters to arenas. They made lots of money. Bill Berry had a brain aneurysm onstage and later retired. The other three played on.

I don't buy the new R.E.M. record the first day it comes out anymore. The last couple I've only listened to a little. They've changed and I've changed. In one sense, music is just a business transaction -- play me something I like, I'll drop some money in the hat. But if you really love a certain band you know it's more than that. Every new song feels like a letter from a friend. If the song doesn't move you, you wonder if you should keep trying, or just move on. But you keep hoping -- at least I keep hoping -- for that moment that reminds you why you reached out in the first place.

R.E.M. has a new album coming out next week. You can hear it streamed on NPR Tuesday. I like what I've heard. I'm going to buy it, let it roll around in my head awhile. I don't expect it to hit me the way that first record hit me almost 30 years ago. But one thing R.E.M. taught me is to keep reaching out, hoping for that connection, because you can't predict where it'll come from.

I'm still not cool. But every so often, mostly because of this incredible job, I'll end up knowing about a great band or a moving film or a gifted young writer before most other people find out. There's no longer that bittersweet feeling, though. I want them all to find the right kind of fame, to make a good living and then some, because when you get to do the work that makes you happy, it adds beauty to the world.

Now I live right down the road from the studio where R.E.M. recorded "Murmur" and "Reckoning." Lately I've started to feel dark and murky and incomprehensible again, and so I've been listening to a lot of that early R.E.M., and remembering how that murkiness can bring forth something cool and beautiful. That's part of the power of music. Another part is that a great record can sell millions, but it can still feel like a secret among you and your friends. Or between you and your bizarre roommate. Or just between you and the music.

Have photo, need story: The Mounted Bear

I found this at Caribou Coffee in Matthews. Why is this bear mounted? Isn't being mounted AND stuffed sort of unfair? What's the story here? You tell me. Come up with a story (cap it at a couple hundred words) and leave it in the comments. Life is such a mystery sometimes.

Gerald Wallace and the Bobcats' special need

I'm not an expert on the NBA. You probably know by now that I'm not an expert on ANYTHING -- the old line goes, journalists don't know anything, they just know how to find out.

If you want expertise on the Gerald Wallace trade you should to go to Rick Bonnell or Tom Sorensen or Scott Fowler, or pretty much anybody else. I'm just a casual Bobcats fan -- I watch on TV every once in a while and go to one or two games a year. So understand that going in.

Here are a few things about the Bobcats that seem obvious to me.

1. They weren't going anywhere this year. Even with Wallace they were 25-32, a game and a half out of the playoffs. Even if they did make the playoffs they'd get killed by Boston or Miami or Orlando.

2. Not many people were coming to the games anyway. Against Toronto the other night, scads of seats in the lower bowl were empty. People who want to come see the Lakers or Celtics are going to come regardless of the Bobcats' roster. I'm not sure how many people bought tickets because Gerald Wallace played here.

(I should stop here and say that Wallace was my favorite Bobcat -- he was good at a dozen different little things and always hustled. I'm just talking about him as a ticket draw.)

3. The Bobcats need stars -- not just to draw fans, but to win titles. My buddy Joe talked about this the other day in the context of Carmelo Anthony going to the Knicks. It's been more than 30 years since a team won an NBA title without one or two of the top players in the league. Wallace was one of our two best players. Stephen Jackson is the other. I'm not sure either one would start for any of the six or seven best teams in the league. It's not 100% clear that Wallace is even going to start for Portland, which is 32-25 and seventh in the West.

4. No top free agents are going to come here. This might be the hardest to swallow for the diehard Bobcats fan, who dreams of seeing Dwight Howard or Chris Paul in the home team's uniform. But the Bobcats play in one of the smallest markets in the NBA, with one of the quietest home crowds, and no history of winning. Even a maximum contract wouldn't lure a truly great player here.

Those four points naturally lead to a fifth: The only chance the Bobcats have is to build through the draft. That's why the Wallace deal makes sense -- it brings two first-round picks in return. No question the Bobcats will be worse in the short term. But the absolute ceiling of the current team -- even with Wallace -- was winning a game or two in the first round of the playoffs.
That team wasn't worth saving.

But I think there's more to it than just taking the best players in the draft. The Bobcats have to be looking for a certain kind of player -- someone with the talent to be a star, but the personality to be happy in Charlotte.

Their role model should be the Utah Jazz. The Jazz have been a relevant NBA team for the last 25 years because of two draft picks: John Stockton and Karl Malone. Neither was a high pick -- Stockton went 16th in 1984, Malone went 13th in '85. But together they created one of the greatest two-man combos in NBA history.

They became stars who commanded huge salaries and could have played anywhere they wanted. But at the core, both were small-town guys -- Malone played college ball at Louisiana Tech, Stockton at Gonzaga. They knew they had a good thing in Salt Lake City. The Jazz kept their core, and filled in around them with role players. That Jazz team never won a title -- thank the Bobcats' owner for that -- but they went to the Finals twice, and Utah has kept winning even after Stockton and Malone retired.

San Antonio took Tim Duncan -- from Wake Forest, via the Virgin Islands -- with the first pick in 1997. He was immediately a star and could have gone anywhere. He stayed and the Spurs have won four titles.

That's why the worst moment in Bobcats history was taking Adam Morrison with the third pick in 2006. He was the right kind of guy, I think -- a quiet kid from Gonzaga (Stockton's old school). Only problem was, he couldn't play. A team like the Bobcats can't afford for any first-round pick to flame out.

The team has drafted better recently -- D.J. Augustin is a solid NBA starter, and with Wallace gone, we're about to find out if Gerald Henderson is, too. Michael Jordan, as owner of the Bobcats, has so far been all about saving money -- the Nazr Mohammed deal shows that. But it makes sense for now. Who's he going to spend it on? A couple more players who will get the Bobcats from average to decent? The big free agents who don't stay home are going to Miami or Boston or L.A. -- places with warm weather or free-spending owners or lots of history.

But you can still win in the NBA from the bottom up. The Bobcats' only chance is to keep adding picks, and keep drafting the right kind of guys, and hope. It seems like a mess right now. But there's a pony in there somewhere. And the Bobcats have to find it.

Time running out for Queens workshop

So I'm teaching this workshop at Queens University on how to be a professional writer, and it turns out the seats are filling up fast. The workshop is March 5 and 12 (that's all one workshop -- we do half the first Saturday and the other half the next Saturday). If you're interested, go sign up now.

I've been doing workshops at Queens for a while now, and they're designed to be low-pressure -- I'm not grading papers or giving exams or anything. (Although there might be some homework.) I'm still learning this teaching stuff, but I think you'll come out of it having learned something too.

Here's a video clip from an earlier class, about submitting your work for publication. We'll be talking about this in a lot more detail in the upcoming workshop.



Come hang out with us. It'll be fun.

Tonight -- storytelling WITHOUT A NET

You can't possibly come up with a better deal than this... tonight from 7 to 9, at Central Coffee (corner of 10th and Louise), I'll be joining several other folks for a storytelling event called The Cankerworm.

Did I mention it's free?

And did I mention you get a free coffee or tea just for showing up?

That's a winner before you ever hear a story, and I'm guessing there will be some good stories. The theme for the night is Trust, and each person who comes to the mike will be telling a 5-minute story based on that theme. This is not a reading -- we're going up there with no notes. Which, frankly, scares the crap out of me.

My story will touch on Ric Flair, TV antennas, the Fu Manchu mustache, family dynamics and maybe one or two other things. That's assuming I don't just go blank onstage and collapse in a puddle of flop sweat.

The Cankerworm name is a nod to The Moth, the storytelling series that started in New York and has spread around the country. Here's a Moth performance from Philly to give you a little idea of what it's like.

Byline of the century

The great Chris Jones of Esquire magazine wrote the other day about some of his favorite bylines -- not so much for the writing (although they're all fine writers), but just for the sound of the names.

Being a Tommy (it's Tommy on my birth certificate) has caused the occasional problem in print. At my first paper in Augusta, Ga., I wrote a story a reader didn't like, so she wrote a letter to the editor saying it was obvious you couldn't trust a story from a reporter with a "childish euphemism" for a name.

My nickname was Childish Euphemism around the newsroom for a while.

When I applied to the Observer back in 1989, they sent me some papers to critique, and the first thing I noticed was all the tremendous bylines. I fell in love with three right away: John Wildman, Lolo Pendergrast, and the best of them all, Tex O'Neill.

After I got hired I found out that John Wildman was a mellow guy -- he left the paper to become a mailman (I imagined a series of adventure novels: "John Wildman, Mailman.") Lolo Pendergrast turned out to be even wilder than her name. And Tex O'Neill in the flesh didn't look like a Tex or an O'Neill, but he was a brave reporter who kept a huge aquarium and collected arrowheads.

All of which leads me to this.

Last night a bunch of us from the paper went to the North Carolina Press Association awards, where we brought home some bling. As part of the ceremony, they read off the names of everyone who won an award. The contest is split into six divisions, from the smallest papers to the largest, so it adds up to hundreds of names.

Well, there's a little paper up in the mountains called the Cherokee One Feather -- I believe it covers the members of the Cherokee tribe up there. One of its staffers won an award. His name:

Scott M. Brings Plenty.

I submit that as the Greatest Byline of All Time. And I don't even want to know what the M. stands for.

From the vault: At the National Spelling Bee

A little ping of memory rang in my head this morning when I saw the results of the Observer's Regional Spelling Bee.

The third-place finisher was Tanner Winchester, a home-schooled kid from Waxhaw. I haven't seen Tanner in a few years, but I know him. His older brother is Marshall Winchester -- the best speller from these parts in recent history.

In 2004, Marshall tied for fourth at the National Spelling Bee in Washington. I've covered a bunch of competitive events -- the Panthers' Super Bowl, a few Final Fours, the ACC Tournament -- but that spelling bee was more dramatic than any of those. I was standing about 25 feet away when this happened to Akshay Buddiga, one of the other contestants:



I can't tell you how much I love that he got up and SPELLED THE WORD RIGHT.

Here's the story from Marshall's final day at the Bee that year. Some days -- most days -- I feel really lucky to have this job. This was one of those days.

A SPELLBINDING RUN
MINERAL SPRINGS BOY TIES FOR 4TH AT NATIONAL SPELLING BEE

June 4, 2004


WASHINGTON -- Marshall Winchester had planned a graceful exit.

A couple of days ago he went to his friend Nupur Lala, who won the 1999 National Spelling Bee. He asked if she would escort him offstage when he got knocked out of this year's bee.

She said: "Marshall, I don't think you're going out anytime soon."

Smart girl.

Ten million spellers entered local bees this year. Of those, 265 made it to the national bee.

And on Thursday, Marshall Winchester of Mineral Springs tied for fourth.

Marshall, who's 12 and home-schooled, won $1,625, a prime seat at tonight's banquet, and newfound celebrity.

Kids lined up for his autograph. A parent came up to him and called him a hall-of-famer: "If there was a Cooperstown for spelling, you oughta be in it."

An N.C. blogger named Mr. Sun rooted for him online, posting a picture of Mel Gibson in "Braveheart" as inspiration.

Still, the thing that made Marshall the happiest all day was the word "zarzuela."

Zarzuela is the musical theater or light opera of Spain. More important, it's a word Marshall knows, and it got him past the seventh round. He had missed in that round last year and ended up tied for 12th. Marshall's only goal this year was to finish better than that.

When the pronouncer said "zarzuela, " Marshall's reply was: "Really?"

And when he spelled it right, he screamed "YES!", threw up his arms, and ran two rows past his seat before he circled back and found it.

By then the spelling bee had turned into a miniseries, full of joy, humor, agony, and a moment you'll probably see on ESPN's "SportsCenter" for the rest of your life.

At the start of Round 6 - on live TV - Akshay Buddiga of Colorado Springs tried to tackle "alopecoid." As he stood there thinking, apparently the word caught him flush on the jaw - he reeled for a couple of steps and then fell flat on his back across the feet of the spellers behind him.

Everybody thought he was out cold. Some of the grown-ups rushed toward the stage. But after a moment he got up, wobbled to the mike - and spelled the word right.

From then on they brought a chair to the mike every time it was his turn. And somehow he lasted all the way to the end, finishing second when he missed "schwarmerei" in Round 14.

By then, his opponent - David Tidmarsh of South Bend, Ind. - could barely breathe. But he spelled "gaminerie" to clear that round, and then "autochthonous" to win the bee.

After "zarzuela" in Round 7, Marshall nailed "vendaval" (an autumnal storm on the Mexican coast) in Round 8. He raised his arms again and ran "Rocky"-style back to his chair.

By the end of that round there were five spellers left. The families of the remaining spellers had been invited to sit at the side of the stage. Marshall's dad, Eric, and mom, Grindl, squeezed close. Marshall's little brother, Tanner, scrunched down in his mom's lap. It was cold in the Grand Hyatt ballroom but Eric kept wiping sweat.

Round 9.

Two spellers got words right. One missed. Then Marshall walked to the front of the stage, grabbed the mike in his right hand, leaned so close you could hear him breathe through the speakers.

Jacques Bailly, the official pronouncer, said the word: "vimineous."

Marshall stared. "Definition, please?"

"Of or producing long, slender twigs or shoots."

Marshall usually asks lots of questions, loud and rapid-fire.

This time he just touched his forehead to the mike.

After a second he raised up, asked about the part of speech, the alternate definition, the main definition one more time.

Then he leaned in.

"V-E-M-I-N-O-U-S."

The head judge nods if you get a word right. She rings a bell if you get it wrong. Marshall watched as she reached for the bell.

The crowd applauded in respect as he went over to the side of the stage and into his mother's arms. For a few minutes he stared at the big screen that showed his word, and the way he had spelled it, and a red E beside, for error.

But soon enough he was laughing with his family. And when the bee was over it seemed like half the audience wanted to meet him.

Yes, he told everybody, he wants to come back. (He's a seventh-grader, and you can qualify through eighth grade.) Yes, he had a great time. And yes, he knew the word that David Tidmarsh spelled to win the bee.

"Maybe I can win next time, " he said. "But I don't know. Fourth is amazing."

About that time his friend Nupur came over. It turned out that he needn't have worried her about escorting him off the stage. He stayed on all the way to the end.

"Congratulations, " she said, wrapping her arms around him, and the kid who was so cool under pressure stood there in full blush.

For the first time all week, he couldn't say a word.

*

Some Grammy thoughts

We have friends in town so I missed a few chunks of the Grammys... didn't see Lady Gaga hatch for an egg and sing Madonna's "Express Yourself," for example. (That song IS basically "Express Yourself," right?) But I did see a lot of good stuff:

-- Our local boys, the Avett Brothers, looked good in the stage time they shared with Mumford and Sons, and then Bob Dylan. Fans must have enjoyed it, too -- last night, Mumford and the Avetts were #1 and #2 on the iTunes album sales chart. (As of this morning, Justin Bieber had wedged himself in between.)

It was an interesting moment if you've followed the Avetts for a while... Mumford and Sons looked and sounded like the early Avetts, to the point where I saw some people on Twitter asking if they WERE the Avetts. Then the Avetts followed with "Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise," part of the new direction they took on their last album. Made me think a Mumford/Avetts tour would be a lot of fun.

And then Bob Dylan came out.

Yes, he's one of the most important musicians of all time. Yes, his music made it possible for guys like the Avetts to succeed. But as he started croaking his way through "Maggie's Farm," it reminded me of a bunch of kids playing pickup hoops who let Grandpa on the court to try a few set shots. Grandpa was a three-time All-American. But maybe he should just let the kids play.

-- My man Cee-Lo Green went for the full Elton John in his performance of "Forget You," which many of us know in a different (and better) version. Muppets! A Cee-Lo rocket! Gwyneth Paltrow! And it turns out Gwyneth can sing! This was fun all the way around.

(For a little more Cee-Lo, here's him doing "Crazy" with Prince at Madison Square Garden a few nights ago.)

-- Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now" won the two biggest single-song awards: Song of the Year (for songwriters) and Record of the Year (for artists/producers). I do love the song, but I can't help but wonder if Alan Parsons feels like he's finally won a couple of Grammys.

-- Good to see our own General Johnson make it into the People Who Died montage.

-- And finally, Arcade Fire, who beat out Eminem, Gaga, Lady Antebellum and Katy Perry for Album of the Year. It was a night of big production numbers -- Justin Bieber danced with ninjas, and Rihanna did a duet with Drake around a giant version of one of those backyard fire pits. Arcade Fire started out doing their part -- "Month of May" featured seizure-inducing strobe lights and kids with helmet-cams riding bikes around the stage. (I couldn't find it on YouTube.)

But then, going back out to accept the big Grammy, frontman Win Butler said: "We're gonna go play another song, because we like music." And then they played the great "Ready To Start" straight ahead, with no fancy lights or special effects. Just a fine band playing their hearts out on the biggest stage of their lives.

We're gonna go play another song, because we like music. Isn't that all you hope for, as a fan?

A storytelling event, and a new class at Queens

Some news about a couple of cool things coming up in the next few weeks:

-- I've signed up to be part of a storytelling night called The Cankerworm, Feb. 22 at Central Coffee at the corner of Central and Louise. (Click the link for details, including how to sign up if you'd like to tell a story.) Why is it The Cankerworm? It's a tribute to The Moth, the great storytelling series that started in New York and has spread across the country.

We'll be telling stories of no longer than five minutes, centered on the theme of trust. This is not a reading -- no notes, we have to go up there and wing it. I think I want to tell a story about me, my dad and professional wrestling. But you'll have to come see to find out.

-- I'm also teaching another class at Queens University on March 5 and 12. (That's one class, spread over two sessions.) It's called "A Writer's Life: Building a Career as a Professional Writer." You can sign up here. There's also a handy page Queens was nice enough to build for all my workshops.

Here's a short clip from an earlier class, "Writing in 3-D":



The reviews are in: "brilliant," "groundbreaking," "the best depiction of Mob life since the Godfather movies." Wait... these appear to be reviews of "The Sopranos." Not sure how they got in there. But these classes have been a lot of fun, definitely for me and I think for everybody else, too. Come join in.

What would Charlotte's Super Bowl ad look like?

The commercial that has the most lingering buzz from the Super Bowl seems to be this Chrysler ad featuring Eminem. The thing is, it's not an ad for Chrysler as much as it is an ad for Detroit. Everybody has this image of Detroit as a burned-out, bankrupt city, and a lot of that is justified. But there's another side, of course, and this Detroit looks pretty great.



WCNC producer Jeremy Markovich, who's on Twitter as @deftlyinane, had some interesting thoughts after seeing the ad. I'm combining a few of his tweets here:

The Chrysler ad makes me wonder, could you do a two minute spot with this much soul about Charlotte? What would it say? Who would it show? How would it make you feel? What would it sell? Is this a corporate town? Could you do a Charlotte ad that doesn't feel like a tourism video? Cause the Detroit ad sure ain't. Who would get out of this car in Charlotte? Mayor Pat? John P. Kee? Dale Jr.? Hugh McColl? K-Ci and JoJo? Steve Smith?

Good questions from Jeremy... so now I turn those questions to you. If you did a commercial for Charlotte, what would be in it?

I'm sure we'll get our fair share of sarcasm in the comments, and that's fine. But I'd like to see some of y'all take it seriously. Sometimes it seems like the only two views we hear of Charlotte are the shiny-corporate view, or the everything-sucks view. But there's a real city here, with its own story. I'm wondering how you'd tell it.

And if you've got some ideas and a video camera, go ahead and make a version of your own! We're not looking for commercial-grade here... a Flip cam and a good idea is enough. Email me the results at ttomlinson@charlotteobserver.com.

Super Bowl ads, with the Panthers' new biggest fan

This was as close as the Panthers got to the Super Bowl this year. (From this commercial.)

The best comment came from @JamesWillamor on Twitter: Alf in a Panthers jersey?! Sue Myrick and Bill James seen launching probe into this illegal alien's ties to Charlotte.

If you don't know who Alf is, count yourself lucky, but go here if you must. UPDATE: As a couple of astute readers have pointed out, Alf ATE CATS. Which adds a whole new layer of... something... to the whole thing.

Most of the Super Bowl commercials are gathered in one place on YouTube. My favorites were the Doritos resurrection ad ("Grandpa?"), the Eminem/Chrysler ad (although it would be nice if Chrysler made cars as good as the ad), and the Snickers ad with Richard Lewis and Roseanne Barr. It turns out that watching Roseanne get hit with a log never gets old.

Did anybody else notice that the NASCAR ad (I can't find it online) was all about the crashes? And didn't that feel a little off, seeing that we're coming up on the 10th anniversary of Dale Earnhardt's death at Daytona?

And poor Groupon... I'm trying to picture that meeting where they took a vote and said "OK, let's use the troubles in Tibet for a cheap joke to sell our stupid coupons." What I always think when I see an ad like that: How bad was the one they DIDN'T use?

I'd say something about the halftime show, but somebody apparently slipped LSD into my beer, because I hallucinated that the Black-Eyed Peas sang the theme from "Dirty Dancing" while a bunch of dancers acted out a scene from "Tron."

Oh, and the game was pretty good, too.