Ripped from The Decatur Minute…

Black Friday
• Boogaloos After Thanksgiving Day Sale. 30 percent off all full price merchandise from 9am-1pm and 15 percent off all full price merchandise after 1pm through Sunday, Nov. 25.
• At Decatur CD, Black Friday means independent-record-store-only releases. Click here for a full list.
• Boutique Karma’s Black Friday Sale lasts through Nov. 25, 25 percent off the entire store.

Small Business Saturday
11am-5pm on the Square
Do your holiday shopping in Decatur and bring your local purchases to the Decatur tent on the square to get them wrapped for free! There will be holiday music, five minute massages, Keep It Indie-Catur gift basket raffles, free college football face tattoos, candy, and live musical performances around town.

1-4pm Harmony Park, Oakhurst
Bring your dog with you to Harmony Park in Oakhurst from 1-4pm to get a holiday pet portrait made.

Remember to save your receipts! Spend $200 at city of Decatur shops in the month of November, then bring them to the square on Small Business Saturday or to the second floor of City Hall during the week and get a $20 gift card from a Decatur restaurant while supplies last.

Are you another Decatur-area businesses offering deals after Thanksgiving?  Though we don’t usually allow advertising in the comments section, as a late November gift to Decatur’s business community, feel free to tell us all about your offerings and specials this weekend in the comments section below!

Photo courtesy of Jo

Disclosure: The City of Decatur is a DM sponsor

As a special Thanksgiving gift, December’s Vanity Fair provides us with a previously unpublished Truman Capote piece that is thought was intended for inclusion in his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers. The chapter, titled “Yachts and Things”, can be found here. It’s not great, but it is fun and it was only a draft and I’ll read anything by Capote. There is an article that accompanies this detailing the evolution of Answered Prayers from teasers published by Esquire magazine to Truman’s ostracism by the New York elite.

Six years ago Vanity Fair published “Remembering Willa Cather,” an unfinished manuscript that Capote was working on at the Hollywood home of Joanne Carson (former wife of Johnny) when and where Truman died in 1984. It reads as though it is kind of contrived, but I’ve long had a thing for Willa Cather, with whom I have a six degrees of separation relationship.

Enjoy, and have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Jack points to this AP interview with U.S. Poet Laureate and Decatur resident Natasha Trethewey featured on the AJC’s Access Atlanta site.  Here’s a blurb to get you started…

Natasha Trethewey smashes stereotypes about poets. She’s not stuffy. Or shy. Or aloof.

As U.S. poet laureate, the 46-year-old describes herself as a “cheerleader” for the written word. She chooses the label deliberately, not only because she was head cheerleader at the University of Georgia in the late 1980s (Big hair! Big smile!), but also because, as a younger laureate, she wants to bring a sense of energy to the position.

“I want to ask ordinary people if poetry can mean something to them,” Trethewey told The Associated Press during an interview at Delta State University in Cleveland, Miss.