Summer madness is in full swing in downtown Nashville, Tenn. Sidewalks are packed along Broadway. Bumper-to-bumper traffic is the norm. Bourbon Street in New Orleans has nothing on this place.
Construction cranes are everywhere, reminding me of downtown Austin, where I had been a couple of months earlier for my son's law school graduation. On the local television news, the lead story is about efforts by Nashville officials to crack down on so-called party vehicles that have become ubiquitous downtown.
"As Nashville has cemented its reputation as a destination for getaways and bachelorette trips, party vehicles have proliferated, promising a rollicking good time and quite a stage to see and be seen while exploring the city," Rick Rojas wrote last fall in The New York Times. "But there's a growing sense--among residents, local officials, even some in the so-called transportainment industry--that it has all gotten out of hand.
"The menagerie on Nashville streets includes--but is by no means limited to--a truck with a hot tub, a bus packed with electric massage chairs, a Ford pickup retrofitted into a 'party barge' with waves painted on the side and 'Ship Faced' stamped on the tailgate, retired military vehicles, a purple bus with drag performers, an old school bus adorned with horns named Bev, and yet another old bus with horns named Bertha."
Journalist Steve Haruch, editor of the book "Greetings From New Nashville," told the newspaper: "We made the monster, and now we can't control the monster. It's the plot of every monster movie."
The heat is almost unbearable along the concrete corridors downtown, but it doesn't seem to affect people releasing pent-up energy from two previous summers with little or no travel due to the pandemic. I enjoy watching the human circus, but it's not the reason I'm in Tennessee's capital city. I'm here at the invitation of my neighbors back in Little Rock, Mike and Billie Lax.
Here's how the email I received from Mike in April began: "While we have been neighbors for many years, I do not think we have shared a journey our oldest daughter, Lauren Lax, has been on for many years."
Thus I find myself several blocks away from the madness of Broadway at a facility known as City Winery. The event being held here benefits an organization known as Renewed, formerly the Eating Disorders Coalition of Tennessee. It's the state's leading provider of support for those seeking recovery from eating disorders and body image concerns. It provides educational training for health-care professionals along with personalized treatment references and support for those impacted.
The honorees are Lauren Lax and nine men and women now known as the Nashville Angels: Susie Bateman, L'Tanya Bell, Andy Clough, Frank Grant, Louise Grant, Judith Hill, Bob Johnson, Johnny Phipps and Fields Stringfellow. This is their story.
All nine worked out on a regular basis at the Green Hills YMCA in Nashville. They saw a young lady who was obviously in trouble. Even though they didn't know her name, they decided to take action.
Here's how Tom Wilemon later described the event in The Tennessean: "She was withering away before their eyes. They watched her slog through marathon workouts every weekday morning at the Green Hills YMCA, her emaciated body leaning on the rails of the Stairmaster. 'That girl was there,' Frank Grant told his wife one Sunday afternoon, confirming the couple's suspicion that she was working out multiple times a day. They didn't know her name, but she was young enough to be their daughter.
"Other gym-goers at the YMCA also were watching her decline and wondering what to do. Was she really anorexic? Was it some other medical condition? They contemplated the potential awkwardness of making a wrong assumption, the rudeness of violating someone's privacy and the danger of doing nothing. Then nine of them staged an intervention.
"If they had waited any longer, Lauren Lax would have died. When they took her to a hospital on an August morning in 2011, doctors thought they might have to implant a pacemaker. Anorexia nervosa had weakened Lax to the point that her heart was struggling to beat."
"I didn't know these people," Lauren says. "I had seen them more as acquaintances."
On this night at City Winery, Lauren tells her story. A person she describes as "the popular girl" at her elementary school in Arkansas asked everybody one day how much they weighed. Lauren was 10 years old and taller than the others. Though she only weighed 5 to 10 pounds more than others in the group, she suddenly felt fat. Within months, she was obsessed with her weight.
"Her parents noticed the weight loss, the dark circles under her eyes and her frigid hands," Wilemon wrote. "They took her to a doctor but did not want to believe the diagnosis. She was so young, too young for a teenage illness. They sought a second opinion from the Mayo Clinic. The diagnosis did not change. By the time she was a seventh-grader, she was admitted to an inpatient treatment facility for the first time. When she was a freshman at the University of Texas in Austin, she had to go again.
"She still struggled with her disease throughout her time there and after her graduation while working as a news producer for a Little Rock television station. She decided to switch careers, applying for the occupational therapy program at Belmont University in Nashville. Her parents opted against paying for graduate school because of her illness. But she obtained student loans and went anyway."
Bell, one of the Nashville Angels, had traced Lauren, who was 23 at the time, back to Little Rock. Bell found a telephone number for her parents. Mike and Billie were told in advance of the intervention and headed to Nashville early that morning.
"We couldn't help her," Mike says. "We were so close to it for so long. We had just been in Nashville three weeks before the intervention. We came to Nashville the last week of July and really got in the car and cried on the way home. We didn't know if she was going to make it."
It was before sunrise when Lauren got out of her car. Eight of the Nashville Angels surrounded her before she realized what was going on. The other one used a vehicle to block the exit.
They argued with her for almost 15 minutes. Lauren finally gave in and was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center. By the time Mike and Billie arrived, the doctor told them she might not make it through the night. She was in the intensive care unit for three days and spent another three weeks on a cardiac care floor. The next 11 months were spent in rehabilitation at the Oliver-Pyatt Centers in Miami.
Lauren went on to finish school. She's now Dr. Lax, an occupational therapist. And we're in Nashville to celebrate the Angels, nine people who decided to do something even though they didn't know the person whose life they saved.
I came here thinking I would get a decent story and spend some time with friends from Arkansas. I leave town 36 hours later with my soul renewed.
At a time when political infighting and the actions of fringe characters dominate the news, it's easy to conclude that Americans are becoming meaner and dumber by the day. Events like this one remind us that those on the ideological fringes are simply the ones making all of the noise. Thankfully, they're not the American majority.
The vast majority of Americans don't spend hours each night glued to cable news networks. They don't send partisan political tweets. They're thinking instead about keeping their businesses going. They're raising their kids and volunteering. These people don't often make the news. I'm glad the Nashville Angels did.
There are still a lot of good people out there.
The Lax story serves as a helpful reminder for me. There are angels among us. We just have to look.
Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.