The home filled with an acrid and nauseating odor. I asked my father why it was so smoky. He looked like Robert Duvall walking around a bombed out landscape in Vietnam relishing the smell of turkey in the morning.

The fact is, big personalities win in an environment of mass media. Think Clinton, JFK, Trump, Eminem, Kanye, Oprah, SpongeBob.
Gandhi, Jesus, James Joyce and Pablo Neruda would never make it in today’s America. They would be marketed as the names of cheap perfume remaindered at TJ Maxx.

We love Sarasota a lot more than we love politicians. The three will be known as the trio who forever screwed up the Lido Beach Pavilion. They will be the three who devalued the gorgeous strand of calm beach and handed it off on the cheap. The only good that we will be able to salvage from the mess is after the very next election we will be able to call the trio “former” Commissioners.

From the mid-rise Klauber ran the operation like a benevolent dictator with his Sperry Topsiders, snug white shorts and shirts that even a Fauvist on LSD could not envision.

We are right now the land of two divine spectacles: The Town Commission election and the approval of the St. Regis Hotel and Residences. This past week was especially exciting since at long last a new vision was approved to replace the morbid and moribund Colony Beach & Tennis Resort.

We never seem to replace the little Commission nametags in Town Hall — we just store them in a closet, dust them off and bring them out every couple years.

Why should residents today want to approve a Charter change that effectively votes the voter out of future decisions, especially when those decisions will lead to indebtedness?

Without an epidural and with numerous suitors claiming ownership rights to the offspring, Unicorp President Chuck Whittall, his attorneys and the members of the Longboat Key Planning and Zoning Board came together this past week and consummated the first signs of new life at the decrepit 17.6-acre site.