Cabbage Patch Dad

The Rev. J. Tracy Holladay has led his organization, the Cabbage Patch Settlement House in the Old Louisville neighborhood, for 30 years. But its history goes back to a time long before his arrival, and the place promises to live on long after he leaves it. Its core mission – providing opportunities for at-risk children to succeed – is stronger and more necessary than any one person. Even a popular toy can’t get in the way of what they’re doing down there on 6th Street.

The first thing the normal Jane or John on that street needs to know is that, no, there is no connection between the Cabbage Patch Settlement House – a nonprofit instilling values, education and creativity in over one thousand children annually – and the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. “We think the Cabbage Patch Kids are cute, but we share no connection,” they clarify on their website’s FAQ page.

The Cabbage Patch Settlement House was founded in 1910 by Louise Marshall, who stayed until she was in her early 90s, 70 years after creating it. The name came from the neighborhood, as many residents had cabbages in their gardens, and a book, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch by Alice Hegan Rice, that was set there. It’s known as a settlement house from the 19th Century term used to indicate a place where new settlers to a community, especially an inner-city area, could find resources they needed.

Rev. Holladay took over shortly thereafter, having taken a circuitous route to get there from his native Florida. Born in 1951, the son of a military man, he says his childhood, spent mostly in Gainesville, wasn’t quite like “The Andy Griffith Show,” but allows that it was pretty close. It was “a very churched family, Baptist by tradition.” Church activities kept him busy throughout his childhood. In high school, he got involved with an organization called Young Life, an outreach ministry for students that Holladay says aims to make religion more fun for them. He later served as a director for the Louisville chapter during his time in the seminary, and a member of both boards suggested Holladay apply for the newly available executive director job.

Holladay decided to join the Naval Reserve during the Vietnam War. He took time getting through college (“I sometimes say ‘I squeezed those four years into 10’”), also working jobs throughout those years: a hospital corpsman in the Navy, the manager of a rental car agency (an outgrowth of teenage gas station work), selling real estate, selling advertising…

Between the many jobs and the religious training, Holladay was prepared to take the lead at the Cabbage Patch by his early 30s. “I’m still selling. I’m just selling at-risk kids these days!” he laughs.

“I didn’t come to seminary necessarily thinking I was going to do regular church stuff,” he continues. “I had been involved with some social ministry stuff through the church I grew up in, and had – as you can tell from those jobs – a business orientation. I was always pretty good with numbers.”

That skill comes in extra handy at the private Cabbage Patch, which prides itself on surviving without government funding. “Even when we were an even smaller entity – and this goes back to Ms. Marshall’s words – I think we were gutsy,” says Holladay. “And a little different. She decided, early on, to stay out of the traditional funding streams that most organizations like this (utilize).” In 1910, such funds, and places like the United Way, had yet to assert themselves as agents of such funds. As they did, the Cabbage Patch continued raising money without their assistance. “So I believe that meant she had to be fairly creative in fundraising. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she came from a well-to-do, prominent family and knew a lot of well-to-do people!”

Shortly after Holladay took over, a board member offered the idea of an amateur basketball event. Their “Street Ball Showdown” went on to raise a lot of money over almost two decades, helping to provide educational and recreational programs for their kids. Even during the recent recession, the organization’s financial savvy kept the lights on.

Rev. Holladay doesn’t get to spend much time working with the kids, but the organization includes perhaps one thousand volunteers, as well, who do everything from coaching to tutoring on a regular basis, or helping families during the holidays. But the mission has always come first for him. About the kids, he says, “I want them to believe that they can do more and accomplish more than perhaps they think they can. I think there’s a lot of untapped potential in … probably every person, but certainly children are this little gold mine of untapped potential.”

He says “it’s almost deprogramming” to take disadvantaged children and show them other ways of seeing the world. “Certainly, not every kid we serve is coming out of that environment, but there is something that’s different between – it’s clearly impactful, whether a kid feels loved or appreciated or has someone believe in them.”

They boast alumni including “an NFL Super Bowl Coach, a former city alderman, community leaders, teachers, coaches, firefighters, police officers, Cabbage Patch Program Directors, and leading executives.” A few current employees began going there as children.

“I think you have to let them try a lot of different things,” says Holladay. “The kid that comes and just hangs out in the gym all the time thinks he’s going to be the next Michael Jordan or whatever – we’ll be suggesting, ‘Hey, we’ve got this class on art. And we’ve got this leadership program. We’ve got camping. We’re taking a big bike trip somewhere.’ All kinds of stuff they might not have the chance to be exposed to otherwise.”

“And guess what? That might be the next great teacher, or performer, as opposed to the next great athlete. Ultimately, we want them to be successful, productive, well-adjusted adults that are contributing to the society as a whole. And have moral-slash-spiritual values, as well.”

c. 2014 Kentucky Monthly

Sisterhood of the Dazzling Stance

Novice Sister Fluffy has big breasts and a full beard.

It’s a Sunday night at Play, the club in Louisville’s Butchertown neighborhood that is home to some of Kentucky’s finest drag queens. But Fluffy is not a drag queen – the military vet also known as Kirk Murphy is an aspirant member of the Derby City Sisters, a group that bills themselves as “an order of radical fun-loving nuns dedicated to spreading joy and banishing stigmatic guilt.”

If the name hasn’t already given it away, Fluffy isn’t an actual nun, either. He’s part of the new Louisville mission house connected to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, whose network includes dozens of other houses internationally. The group began in San Francisco in 1979, quickly finding their calling as educators and activists as the AIDS epidemic began wreaking havoc.

The founding Sisters “went out into the streets to challenge the world,” according to their “Sistory”. The Derby City Sisters live in a somewhat more progressive world, where marriage equality continues to evolve. But many obstacles and prejudices remain.

“Ours is a ministry of presence,” says Ryan Phillips, 28 and the local founder also known as novice Sister Velveeta VonTease. “Just being there for someone when they need someone to talk to, to celebrate you for who you are.”

Phillips says the chalky clown white makeup the Sisters apply goes a long way towards putting those people at ease, especially after they’ve had a few drinks. People tell the Sisters all kinds of secrets, he says, things they won’t tell their families or even their partners.

This trust pays off when it comes to one of the core elements of the modern Sisters’ mission: sex education, still, including offering HIV/AIDS testing. “Unlike the church, we won’t tell you not to have sex – quite the opposite,” Phillips says. “We’ll tell you to have sex as often as possible, but just play safe … Our work is to spread joy and abolish guilt. Throw some glitter on you and throw that guilt away.”

The group was only a vague notion a year ago. Phillips had first discovered the concept as a teen, and after recent encounters on a “Drag Stars at Sea Cruise,” he sat down with some members and discussed how the organization worked. Phillips made a resolution at 12:01 a.m. on New Year’s Day this year to make it happen in Kentucky. “I felt that there was an incredible pulse happening in the city of Louisville, and that if something like this were to happen, for it to be successful, it had to happen right then and there.”

He invited a few friends. “I had no idea who would be involved, who would be interested,” Phillips says. 48 people came to the first meeting; six of them are still involved. Four nuns from Nashville and one from Portland came to help. “People in the bars instantly gravitated towards us. It was one of those moments when I was, like, ‘Yesss!,’” he laughs.



Soon, they were 15, then 25; now, they count 33 members. Some locals are aware of the group but confused about their mission. The simplest explanation is that they promote love. Also: acceptance, compassion, joy and other ideas that don’t come first to mind when one contemplates nuns (clowns, maybe, but also unlikely). Their members are Atheists, Buddhists, Catholics – a veritable alphabet soup united by the idea of destroying labels and divisiveness. That, and the greatest, safest sex you can find.

Sister Fluffy serves as “The Mistress of Pleasure,” putting together 1,500 “pleasure packs” of condoms, lube and breath mints each month. Tonight, he’s calling numbers for the monthly “Sister Bingo” night at Play. Kirk is somewhat shy in his everyday “boy” life, but Fluffy is more in your face. “I may have the biggest boobies in the order,” he laughs.

Murphy and his husband are both vets from Oklahoma. Getting involved with the Sisters has made them more outgoing, more open and more liberal. Husband Parker Coe Murphy acts as one of the guards for the Sisters when they are out doing their “bar missionary” work. Members begin as aspirants – those who are checking it out. Postulancy follows, as they begin applying their new faces and erasing their regular identity. They are more demure, silent as they observe the process. Novices go out in full dress, doing their work, including mandatory service projects. Then, and only then, can these men in dresses become a fully professed Sister.

It’s a year-long process, and it’s a lot of work. Phillips spends six to eight hours a day working on the group: organizing, promoting, networking and more. It takes an average of two hours for members to transform themselves into character. But even if they never help anyone else, they’ve helped each other. “I chose these people. I didn’t get to choose my own family. I spend more time with these folks than I do with my own family,” Sister Fluffy says. Their new names go toward spreading joy – it’s hard to get mad at anything named “Fluffy” – but also give them a chance to start over, with their new identity separate from those who might have been unkind to them in the past.

“More and more, Fluffy is coming out. I can’t take a picture now without putting my hand on my hip,” Murphy laughs.

Phillips says it’s a priority for the group to also work with groups outside of the LGBTQIA world – animal shelters and the homeless, for example – along with groups like the Louisville Youth Group, which provides support for LGBTQIA teens. Oh, and actual nuns? Nuns love the Sisters.

Louisville’s just the first stop, Phillips says, adding that they hope to expand to Lexington as soon as possible. Beyond that, he’s thinking about Cincinnati and Indianapolis. “There’s so many opportunities for this magic and this type of energy to have a presence in any city … We’re everywhere. They never thought they would see one in Louisville.”

c. 2014 Story Magazine

Dishes, Drinkers and Dreams: Vines, Barrels and Kegs Have a Master Plan

Daniel Huff and Brandon Schaefer are a classic team: dreamers, brothers from another mother, one part Mutt and Jeff and one part the Black Keys; well, at least if they work hard at it and get some things very right. These guys love beer, wine and bourbon, like lots of people. The difference is that they want to take their passion and turn it into a business, a business that will get them out of their bartending careers and transform Louisville’s food and drinks scene forever.

Inspired by the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, Huff started Vines, Barrels and Kegs as a TV program to showcase people who make those three products. But then Huff “decided against going to network TV with the concept because – I mean, we had 700 views for our first show on YouTube. Which is more than a lot of people get from Hollywood on theirs. So we decided to start a website.”

They decided to make the site a social media hub, now based around alcohol, food and music. They want it to become a place to find anything you would want to know about these topics. Instead of Googling, or using Yelp or Beer Advocate, they want you to go to VBK instead. What’s so different and special about their site? Well, they say, theirs has videos.

“We’ve combined the use of YouTube, Facebook and Craigslist,” Huff says. All video, and very few words: “More people are more apt to open a link on other social media, or a text or an email … some people like to read, some people do video. More people look at a video than the constant barrage …”

“I mean, it hasn’t been done yet,” Schaefer interjects. “You can see your personality better if you’re on a video, obviously … Do you want to watch a movie or do you want to read a book, you know?” he laughs.

Schaefer says he recently used a video of Dan Aykroyd promoting the star’s vodka line to sell a pair of $9 shots to his customers at Diamond Pub & Billiards, instead of the cheaper well shots they would have otherwise purchased.

Members can set up their own pages where they follow their favorite chefs, liquor companies, and also add friends – like Facebook, but it’s not Facebook, it’s VBK. You can even sign up for VBK Mail. “You can have interactions on the website, so you don’t even have to go to your email,” Huff explains further.

As for the Craigslist approach, Huff says that comes in because of the video recipe- book section. If you’re making drinks at a party, he wants you to go to his site to see recipes being demonstrated.

The music portion hasn’t been fleshed out yet, but the founders say a big crossover audience goes to see bands play in bars. Music in their TV pilot was provided by their friends the Villebillies. “I’ve heard from several people that the music scene is almost like when Nirvana was in Seattle,” Huff says. He dreams of live-streaming events like a Garth Brooks concert or even the Country Music Awards on Vines, Barrels & Kegs.

Louisville’s role as a food and drinking hub is only getting bigger, says Huff, 38, who works at Big Shots Bar & Grill in Fern Creek. “It’s possibly becoming the foodie capital of the United States,” he declares, citing Bobby Flay as an example. “There’s more places to eat here than anywhere in the United States … So why not expose it in a city where basketball, horse racing, bourbon and food are all synonymous?”

See for yourself at vinesbarrelsandkegs.com.

c. The Voice-Tribune

Miguel Zenón: An American Music Master

Alto saxophonist/composer/educator Miguel Zenón, 38, is a native of San Juan, Puerto Rico. His ninth and latest album as a leader, Identities Are Changeable, was released this week, and the handsome, serious Zenón has become increasingly known to a wider audience as the NPR crowd begins to pay more attention. The album took three years, from when the concept was first planted in his head when a New Jersey university asked for a new creation, and further inspired by writer Juan Flores’ book The Diaspora Strikes Back, about the cross-cultural exchanges between the people of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean as they journey to and from the United States.

Grammy nominee Zenón interviewed numerous other Puerto Ricans and American-bred Puerto Rican offspring about their shared heritage and turned pieces of those interviews into audio clips peppered throughout his new compositions. “Tell me your name, where you were born and raised, and where your family is from,” he’s heard asking after his sax kicks off “De Donde Vienes,” (“Where Are You From?”) that also features percussive piano and drums suggesting a hectic island life.

For his quartet’s upcoming show at the Clifton Center, the live production is augmented by video projections of the people and the places documented on the album by Zenón. The subjects discuss issues of identity familiar to anyone whose family came to the United States from somewhere else, especially fairly recently: self-definitions, language issues, assimilation, etc. Then there’s the music; Zenón says he doesn’t define himself as a Puerto Rican musician first, and notes that when someone talks about “Latin Jazz” they are using one term to discuss many different cultures, from Cuban to Brazilian to Venezuelan and Puerto Rican and on and on. Those genres are really only united by not having begun in the U.S., but that’s true of most music.

In 2004, after six years living in New York, Zenón became a founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective in San Francisco, and today is the last original member left. In 2008, he won not just a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship but also a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (better known as “The Genius Grant”). The latter award him and other recipients a half-million dollars to do with as they so desired. The idea is that it will free them from the usual challenges of having to do this or that to make money, because their art or creative skill doesn’t otherwise pay those bills, not enough. And no one’s accused jazz musicians of being rich … well, hardly ever.

Zenón first came north to study sax at prestigious the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He then followed that up at the Manhattan School of Music, and has played with the Mingus Big Band, Charlie Haden, Ray Barretto, Guillermo Klein, Kenny Werner and many more on almost 60 other albums since 1998. He’s reached a level now where a New York Times new release round-up can bear a headline such as “Albums by Neil Young, Bette Midler and Miguel Zenón,” as though anyone on the street would know who he is. Times critic Nate Chinen called Identities Are Changeable “steeply ambitious,” adding “The writing is potent and self-assured, girded with polyrhythmic cross talk — multiple meters churning in irregular union — and given to steadily mounting drama.”

The complex big band arrangements, Zenón says, were inspired by what he’s learned from Klein, the Mingus band and John Hollenbeck, as well as his SFJazz collaborators. “All those sounds put a lot of ideas into my head,” he told Downbeat magazine in his current cover feature. The album is the second released by his own label, Miel Music (after several albums released by the Marsalis Music label; the first, Oye!!! Live in Puerto Rico, was released in 2013), and Zenon also continues to leads Caravana Cultural, a program that has presented nine series of free concerts across Puerto Rico. As he told Downbeat, “I’ve been very, very lucky. It’s been a lot of work, but I love to work.”

“This young musician and composer is at once reestablishing the artistic, cultural, and social tradition of jazz while creating an entirely new jazz language for the 21st century.” – MacArthur Foundation, 2008.

The Miguel Zenón Quartet
Friday, Nov. 7
Clifton Center
2117 Payne St.
cliftoncenter.org
$18; 8 p.m.

c. 2014 Clifton Center

Houndmouth: A local band’s crazy week of both great and terrible adventures

Photo by Julia Rickles.

This week began badly for Houndmouth. The Louisville quartet woke up after a gig in Springfield, Mo., where they had opened for the Drive-By Truckers. A thief had smashed into their van and stole its GPS, an iPad, a Blu-ray player and personal items, including clothing.

“They took my favorite yoga pants!” keyboardist/vocalist Katie Toupin laughs with a true yogi’s lightness. For a touring band, such thefts are terrible and extremely inconvenient, she notes. It’s happened to several of their friends’ bands. “Not to point fingers, but it seems like every single one has been in Missouri,” she notes. While the band’s gear survived, presumably too heavy to take, the thief went through dirty clothes and selected favorites, leaving some behind.


Katie Toupin checks out the damage.

At least the thief had good taste in clothes. Toupin and business partner Addie Mills are behind a new store, Bermuda Highway, which will open at 811 E. Market St. on Nov. 8, coinciding with the annual NuLu Holiday Open House shopping event. Their music-themed shop will focus mostly on men and women’s clothing, new and vintage.

“I don’t like stores where you have to go in and look through 8,000 vintage things to buy one thing that’s cool. So the vintage is just unique pieces that are all cool,” Toupin explains.

Vintage band T-shirts will be a specialty of Bermuda Highway, which took its name from an early My Morning Jacket song. “It’s my favorite My Morning Jacket song. It’s obviously a tribute to my friend Jim James,” says Toupin. “He’s been a big brother to our band from the very beginning. So I really loved the whole idea of it … And the line in that song, Don’t let your silly dreams / Fall in between the crack of the bed and the wall, is incredibly fitting for doing something kind of risky,” she laughs.

So she wasn’t inspired by the previous line, Your ass, it draws me in like a Bermuda highway?

“Your ass — yeah, it’s a clothing store, so it works either way!”


Bermuda Highway takes its name from an MMJ song.

James wasn’t the only two-decade music veteran who helped inspire them. Houndmouth met Jack White and his Third Man Records crew in July at the Newport Folk Festival. “I fell in love with them as people,” Toupin says, “and I really loved the idea of just carrying their products, mainly. Also, not to compete with other local record stores. I’m doing a niche sort of thing, so everybody’s winning here.”

While the Nashville-based Third Man’s roving record truck has popped up in front of NuLu neighbor Please & Thank You, what the two shops do will be very different, as Bermuda Highway will only carry all of Third Man’s records, as well as their offbeat knickknacks.

Keeping with White’s penchant for surprises and his celebration of objects, the owners will present an artist-curated section in the store. In December, Dr. Dog guitarist/vocalist Scott McMicken is “actually making these special records, and hand-making clothing and all kinds of things, art, for his section,” says Toupin.

But each month will be something different. “It’s this open format for them to have a presence — a direct, exclusive relationship with the fans out of the store.” Some bands will also play in-store sets.

Houndmouth’s week went on to include a day spent doing tasks like fixing their van’s windows, followed by their debut at Nashville’s legendary Ryman Auditorium — “a huge thrill,” says Toupin. On Halloween, they joined the Drive-By Truckers for a show in that band’s hometown, Athens, Ga. After tonight’s Charlotte performance, they’re done for 2014.

Bermuda Highway began taking shape this summer after Toupin decided to stay in Louisville instead of moving to Nashville. It seemed like a way for her to give back to the community that has given her so much, she says.

Toupin and Mills met at General Eccentric, where Mills worked with Toupin to pick out clothes for Houndmouth tours. While Mills will run Bermuda Highway during Toupin’s tour time, Houndmouth’s three-month break means fans should be able to see plenty of the musician at the store for now. And possibly her bandmates.

“The boys in the band just talk about how they want to steal clothes from me!”

C. 2014 Insider Louisville