Cactus Needles

While Scottsdale residents and their leaders debate ad nauseam the yippee-eye-ohness of downtown buildings, a city commission has recommended protection for one of Scottsdale’s truly historic structures: the Kerr Cultural Center.

As Wednesday’s Scottsdale Tribune reported, since the late 1940s, Louise Lincoln Kerr’s former home and studio has been home to intimate concert performances, but progress has left it surrounded by a resort and high-end retail.

Scottsdale’s Historic Preservation Commission has recommended that the City Council add the Arizona State University-owned center to the city’s Historic Registry.

Louise Kerr and her studio embody Scottsdale history in a way no faux Old West architecture ever could. Let’s hope the council acts quickly to give the center this deserved honor.

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Anyone who has run a small business can sympathize with Karen Lamb. Wednesday’s Tribune reported her unsuccessful attempt to be excused from jury duty because, she argued, her being gone from her Mesa sign shop for even one day would pose a great financial hardship to her and her employees.

And yet the Maricopa County Superior Court is correct to set a rather high bar for granting excuses on such a basis.

For anyone who requests to be excused because they are one of an entire class of people — in this case, small-business owners — is de facto agreeing that it is good public policy that jury pools should therefore have few such people in them.

Of course, it is not.

If small-business owners such as Lamb ever found themselves to be defendants, they would be not only expected to want their juries to be able to contain small-business owners — their “peers,” as expressed in law — it would be their right.

So while Lamb and many others will find it hard to make time for jury duty, to exempt as few of us as possible is the only way that our justice system can empanel juries who most accurately reflect our community as the sum of all of its parts.

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The Higley Unified School District board backs Terra Kissane, the district’s director of visual and performing arts, in the wake of her halting a voluntary student field trip performance of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” at Higley Center for Performing Arts, due to what she found to be offensive content. What we still don’t understand is how someone who is charged with imparting wisdom about one of Western civilization’s greatest playwrights and poets could not be aware of the bawdiness that pervades his work.