Knoxify

Fred­erico Fellini was an idio­syn­cratic Ital­ian film direc­tor renowned for blend­ing fan­tasy and baroque images into his work. A cin­e­matic pio­neer, Fellini cre­ated what critic Robert Richard­son referred to as an “aes­thetic of dis­par­ity” in his films, aban­don­ing tra­di­tional plot and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment in favor of a “dis­parate suc­ces­sion of sequences” to cre­ate a “cumu­la­tive impres­sion.” Fellini left a fas­ci­nat­ing legacy, includ­ing the term “paparazzi” derived from Paparazzo, the pho­tog­ra­pher friend of jour­nal­ist Mar­cello Rubini, played by Mar­cello Mas­troianni in La Dolce Vita, Fellini’s iconic flick. Fellini, who once worked as a clown, died on Hal­loween in 1993.

Speak­ing of La Dolce Vita, I recently vis­ited the Kroger on North Broad­way, affec­tion­ately known as the “Fellini Kroger.” A reg­u­lar patron of the more mun­dane Kroger at Knox Plaza in Bear­den, I’d heard urban leg­ends of mythic pro­por­tions about this infa­mous gro­cery store on the other side of town. I was expect­ing to encounter bizarre under­world char­ac­ters, as did Mar­cello, whom Richard­son referred to as a kind of “Dan­tesque pil­grim” in La Dolce Vita. I wasn’t disappointed.

Upon pulling into the park­ing lot, I was imme­di­ately greeted by a float­ing face that man­i­fested just out­side my car win­dow. This macabre vis­age mouthed the cryp­tic mes­sage “money for Burger King” so close to the win­dow that the words fogged up the glass. I got the def­i­nite impres­sion that the woman who wore this ghost-like coun­te­nance was inter­ested in ingest­ing some­thing more hard-core than BK Burger Shots.

I entered the store, expect­ing to see Woody Har­rel­son play­ing “Duel­ing Ban­jos” at the end of the snack-food aisle – a siren’s song to zom­bies in Hollywood’s lat­est “zom­edy,” Zom­bieland. Instead, I saw a fraz­zled but friendly check-out clerk, with the weight of the world on her shoul­ders. A tiny elfin woman, jaun­tily wear­ing a Greek fisherman’s cap, was perched nearby on an elder-mobile.  

Savan­nah is 84 years old and hails from Chicago, although she’s lived in Knoxville for years. Her voice sounds like she’s just taken a hit of helium, a lost mem­ber of the Lol­lipop Guild from Oz. She rides her scooter-thingy four miles from her son’s home every day to hang out at the Fellini Kroger, where she directs traf­fic, bosses around the employ­ees and keeps a sharp eye out for thieves. Her claim to fame is help­ing to appre­hend a man with $102 of rib­eye steaks stuffed down his pants.

Cindy is a check-out clerk who works the grave­yard shift from 10:00 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. After her hus­band com­mit­ted sui­cide, she missed four months of work and lost her senior­ity. Upon her return, she was sum­mar­ily demoted and trans­ferred to the Fellini Kroger. Her doc­tor has since pre­scribed Vit­a­min D, because Cindy sleeps all day and gets very lit­tle sunlight.

Cindy and Savan­nah are far from the strung-out zom­bies I expected to meet late on a Fri­day night at the Fellini Kroger. They both told me their sto­ries with lit­tle prompt­ing, as if they’d been wait­ing for me to come and lis­ten. Savan­nah, eccen­tric and feisty, finds pur­pose, if not joy, in life by mak­ing her­self use­ful at the neigh­bor­hood gro­cery store. Cindy, although beaten down, has not given up. She has that steel back­bone, char­ac­ter­is­tic of strong South­ern women, who find a way to per­se­vere like side­walk dandelions.

I wan­dered around the store and bought a few things: rub­ber gloves and orange juice. The other shop­pers were wary of me, keep­ing to them­selves, not want­ing to engage. Not one of them had heard the term “Fellini Kroger,” didn’t know what it meant and didn’t care. An off-duty police­man refused to have his pic­ture taken as he put a few ran­dom items in his bas­ket at the end of his shift.

A lot has been writ­ten about this Knoxville insti­tu­tion, some of it by our own blog­ger extra­or­di­naire, Katie Granju. There’s even a “Friends of the Fellini Kroger” Face­book page. But my take­away on this par­tic­u­lar Fri­day night was that the leg­end looms larger than life. My field trip was more real than sur­real. I did meet a chatty trans­ves­tite named Lisa, shop­ping with her mother. Lisa attended Rule High School and has lived in North Knoxville all her life. Although she bemoaned not hav­ing on her lip­stick, she gamely posed for a few head shots. Her mother declined to be pho­tographed. When I turned to go, Lisa cheer­fully returned to her late-night shop­ping, “Momma, we need some bananas.”

The truth is, I felt as much of a con­nec­tion with these “char­ac­ters” as I do with peo­ple I encounter in my reg­u­lar day-to-day life, maybe even more. We’re all lost souls, strug­gling to find mean­ing in the mad­ness. There’s a sense of alien­ation and a long­ing for con­nec­tion that are uni­ver­sal to the human con­di­tion, no mat­ter what masks (or wigs) we wear – or where we buy our groceries. 

As I hugged Savan­nah and Cindy good­bye, I was over­come by what Richard­son described as the “sense of the dis­par­ity between what life has been or could be, and what it actu­ally is.” Maybe “Felliniesque” embod­ies our shared exis­tence, and the Fellini Kroger on North Broad­way is not just a place, it’s a state of mind.