Dancing Jimmy:
Stag, Streetlights, and Midtown After Dark

I can’t stop laughing every time I look at this Dancing Jimmy design. It takes me straight back to living above my mom’s antique store on the corner of Madison and Belvedere in Midtown Memphis.

I got hired to mow the little triangular corner park right there across the street in 1985 and 1986. I was just a kid, and I only charged $35 for the whole gig—strictly because thirty-five bucks was the exact price of a Libertyland season pass back then. In my mind, mowing that patch of dirt was my golden ticket to ride the Zippin Pippin until my teeth rattled.

The first week on the job, though, I learned what I had actually signed up for.

If you lived in Midtown in the mid-eighties, you knew Jimmy. He wasn’t a nuisance; he was an institution. He’d shuffle down Madison in the twilight under the flickering halogen streetlights, dancing to a rhythm that only played in his own skull, clutching brown paper sacks and shouting greetings at passing Buicks.

Nobody called the police. Nobody tried to "sanitize" Midtown back then. You just watched out for your neighbors, even when your neighbor was asleep face-down in a bed of liriope. You gave him a glass of tap water, pointed the garden hose, cleaned him off, and let him dance his way toward the Antenna Club.

That Memphis is mostly gone now. The corner park got manicured, Libertyland got bulldozed into a gravel lot, and the antique shops gave way to modern condos and drive-thru banks. But the spirit of people who survived with nothing but swagger, cheap beer, and an unstoppable dance step? That never dies.

I drew this piece as a permanent monument to Dancing Jimmy, the Stag bottles, and the raw Midtown summer of 1985. It’s not just a graphic—it’s an artifact of a city that didn't apologize for being alive.