If you're ever sent to interview Chef Ernest Palmisano Jr. at Ernest's Orleans – the restaurant that he and his late mother, Marjorie, opened on Spring Street in 1988 – here's a word of advice: Don't try to interview him near the door.

“My wife showed me a picture of a farm table in a magazine and wanted one,” Hatfield remembered. “When I got around to building her one, all of her friends that came over wanted one. So, I decided, ‘Hey, let’s just see what happens.’ About two years later, we shut down the cabinet business and started building nothing but tables.

Willis-Knighton Cancer Center’s Department of Radiation Oncology became the first site in the world to introduce compact scanning beam imageguided proton therapy. Over subsequent years, renowned centers such as Mayo Clinic, St. Jude’s, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Johns Hopkins Medical Center followed suit.

On June 19, The Cross Lake Floatilla will celebrate its official 30th year starting at 11 a.m., and the headquarters this year will be the American Legion Lowe McFarlane Post at 5315 South Lakeshore Drive on the lake. According to Floatilla spokeswoman Kim French, the event is held on the Saturday before Father’s Day each year.

Let me explain. This was no ordinary English test or algebra quiz, where it took a 93 percent or better to make me happy back in high school. This was an echocardiogram. A normal result is anywhere from 50 percent to 70 percent, according to Dr. Google..

I have passed so many visible benchmarks along the way. I can see the number on the scale. I can count the notches on my belt. I know how baggy my jeans have become. All of those things pointed toward a positive test result. That wasn’t good enough, though.

Evidence of a flourishing writers’ community abounds in the literary entries for Critical Mass 9, a project of the Shreveport Regional Arts Council (SRAC) that fosters critical artistic dialogue. The variety and daring of this year’s submissions bespeak an arts council and a literary scene open to many genres, styles and forms.