Gossip, Gossip, Gossip and Hamlet

South Tampa Council of Trent gathers at the Garden Club to gossip.

Gentle reader: I got this email below from a current South Tampa resident as analysis of the Crosby Few--Tom Gallagher hand-off of the schools' attorney job. This situation gets curiouser and curiouser.

My baby daughter came to visit her parents (she has a home in Beach Park South Tampa close to our old home, where our children grew up and went to Coleman and Plant.)

Our baby came to teach me how to use my new digital camera and how to use my bonus points on my Suncoast credit card. I have enough points to fly to and from LA next year for my tenth Wagner Ring Cycle and also to go to NY in a few weeks or months to see the new Hamlet with Jude Law on Broadway. I have attended all the Broadway Hamlets and don't intend to miss this one.

Jude is now performing the play at the probable site of Elsinore on the coast between Denmark and Norway. My husband and I toured the castle when we traveled the Scandinavian countries in our globe-trotting years.

Jude Law gets raves from London reviewers for his Hamlet. London reviewers are tough. Law used to be a stage actor before he became a Hollywood star. He has three children by his divorced wife and has fathered another one on a one-night stand recently. It seems that even he if looks at a woman, she becomes pregnant. He should get his tubes tied if he can't control his erotic urges. He may be a great Hamlet, but he is not a great father. The latter is the more important role. Too few men star in it, and their children suffer all their lives from a sense of abandonment.

My daughter told me that everybody in South Tampa has known about Candy Olson's husband's coming-out for ages, so my news on the event via my reader to y'all was stale. It is strange how the small community of South Tampa is so intertwined and how people know what other South Tampans are doing down to what they eat for dinner. It's like the small hometown in Georgia in which I was born.

Gossip suffices because there are no intellectuals in South Tampa. Their obsessions concern less elevated areas. Gossip: yes. Drunks: plenty. Aristocratic wannabes: wall to wall. Yet Plant and Coleman administrators and teachers bow low to these South Tampa flawed denizens. Plant parents treat the school administration like servants who don't dare defy them. Ms. Elia falls into this gutless category. A gutsy administrator would tell them, "Kiss my ass. I am trying to educate your neglected children."

I spotted what I thought was the current Plant principal at a recent board meeting and had a lobby conference with him. It seems he is no longer a Plant principal but the director of the two-and-a-half-million-dollar grant to the schools from I-don't-know-whom.

Plant has a new principal.

I asked the former principal if the counseling department could assign a mentor to my grandson for his guidance when he arrives in Plant next year who will check in with my grandson every couple of weeks if his mother requests that service. I said super-smart children were not necessarily super smart emotionally and needed attention. My grandson is super smart like his dear granny. Genes, genes! Girls in the South when I was growing up got punished for being smart; so we learned to play dumb.

People always know that children who struggle with a variety of problems because of low IQs and miserable social status need counseling attention; what they don't consider is that super-smart children need attention too. Nobody is smart emotionally.

I passed on this information to my baby daughter, the mother of my brilliant grandson, while she was cleaning her father's bathroom because he has broken his ribs. I make it a point of honor not to clean anyone's bathroom but my own, broken ribs be damned. She said, "Mother, you are out of the time loop. These measures [of smart-kid counseling] are not needed now." To the which I responded, "Well, don't get Plant counseling attention for Christophe, and then you will have him when he is 30 blaming you for neglecting his psyche during his formative years." Her response: the usual, "Oh, mom."

If Ms. Elia were smart, and I don't vouch for that status, she would pick up on this situation and appoint smart-kids' counseling partners in every school. But I doubt that Ms. Elia is smart enough to act on this insight. Her mind runs in the well-worn groves of tradition, many of which are unethical and some criminal.

This baby daughter is an insurance-assistant VP and makes two and a half times what her mother made as a full college professor. Like any fond mother, I am so proud that she does, although I regret teachers' low financial worth in our society while C-level administrators walk away with tax-paid bundles with no one's murmuring a demur.

When our youngest child left after cleaning her father's bathroom, my spouse and I say to each other after we bid her goodbye at the elevator door,

"We couldn't have asked for a better daughter."

Raising children to avoid incarcerations in federal institutions is the supreme test of parental character. So if you are a parent, know that one former mother's and now grandmother's heart is with you and that if you manage to keep them out of federal institutions until they go out in the world to seek their fortune that you too will have an insurance executive VP come clean your bathroom when you break your ribs in your dotage. lee