It’s the happiest time of the year, so say the Christmas carols, but many find it hard to celebrate the season in 2020. And if you’re a restaurant owner or worker, and the Governor singles your business out and says shutting you down is required to slow COVID, you might be downright Grinchy. Stacy Ross, president and CEO of the Kentucky Restaurant Association, is doing all she can to help restaurants and keep them open.
She tells me about a petition that may come into play around Dec. 14, when Gov. Beshear’s ban on indoor dining is supposed to end — if it doesn’t, the petition says many will open anyway. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, and that we get enough fair weather in the next few weeks to comfortably sit outside in the makeshift tents many operators have set up. Like the one at the Blind Squirrel in Middletown, just up the road from the Robey Real Estate Group’s eXp Realty Office, when I had lunch with my second guest, Jou Jou Papallier.
Followers of the show know Jou Jou, he’s producing his own television series, By Design, that just got a major boost he talks about on the show. I made an unusual request of Jou Jou. After seeing the movies Hillbilly Elegy and Just Mercy on back-to-back nights, I asked Jou Jou to watch them, and have a discussion with me about it.
So the show doesn’t follow the usual format, as we spend two segments giving our thoughts on the films — the first is the Ron Howard-produced movie based on J.D. Vnnce’s memoir, released four years ago, that stars Glenn Close and Amy Adams, Though critics have scorned it, audiences are raving and it’s likely to be in the Oscar discussion. Just Mercy, with Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx, tells the true story of a lawyer who works to get a death row inmate freed.
Both showcase parts of Americana that many of us may not understand — the struggles of the poor in Appalachia and the racism that still exists in the rural South, and they make for good drama.
Thanks again to my friends at the Eye Care Institute, Heuser Health and eXp Realty for making the Rusty Satellite Show the longest-running and most interesting podcast in the ‘Ville.
