Tom Taylor, the manager of The 17th Street Market on 17th Street and Park Avenue, has been involved in the grocery business for most of his life, having done practically every job imaginable in a grocery store. After managing a number of supermarkets of numerous chains, he has found himself at the 17th Street Market. He has found himself a place where the atmosphere and fellow employees fit his personality, with the owners of the store agreeing to let him use his own managing style to help the business grow. The market has several separate departments, including produce, fish, house wares, and music. The music department, however, is the most intricate, including a band and a professional-grade recording studio.

Meet Tom Taylor in this multimedia slideshow by UA School of Journalism student Michael Palazzolo.

And you thought the idiocy in Prescott about lightening up a mural featuring Hispanic kids on the side of a school was bad. Yuma Mayor Al Krieger refers to gay soldiers as "a bunch of lacy-drawered, limp-wristed people." The Arizona Legislature will probably swing into special session to issue a memorial celebrating Krieger.

Friends of Gerry Glombecki will be gathering tomorrow, Sunday. June 13, at Club Congress to remember the musician, poet and all-around good guy, who died on May 25.

Wolf Forrest, a friend of the Weekly, offered this about Gerry:

I came into Gerry’s sphere of influence in early 1981—not through the musician’s band of brothers, but through the world of independent filmmaking. A student project coordinated by the long-dead Southwestern Film Consortium had been shot partly at Old Tucson—called “Morning of the Hanging,” it was done cheaply on black-and-white 16-millimeter film without sync sound, only voice-over narration added in post-production. The plot involved a sheriff who was canvassing the town, looking for volunteers to act as executioner, since the guy with the day job was unavailable. One character the sheriff approached was the real Maverick himself—James Garner was shooting his TV series at the time, and agreed to a cameo as an unwilling participant in this grisly exercise. Gerry was the condemned man (as, in a larger sense, we all are), and the film had a neat twist (pun intended) that Twilight Zone fans would appreciate. I met him after the premiere at the old Gallagher Theatre on the UA campus, and as I became involved in other student workshops and media events involving visiting artists, Gerry would often compose short pieces for these productions. I was also working closely with his then-girlfriend, Annie Koerner, and the three of us spent a lot of off-hours together talking about film, music, food, drugs, comedy, surrealism, and other darkly humorous aspects of life.

We also knew a lot of contacts at the Newsreel, the bastard father of the current Tucson Weekly—people like Royce Davenport, who helped me start my freelance career. I later wound up helping Gerry in his cottage industry—when he wasn’t on the road performing gigs or writing music, he was making bottleneck slides to sell to other blues guitarists—I created the design for the packaging—a salty turtle sitting on his ramshackle porch on the Mississippi Delta (or was it the Naw’lins bayou?) banging away at his Robert Johnson Deluxe, and the character eventually wound up on his first CD (never mind that I maliciously appropriated the turtle from a childhood book about animal friends and made it my own). He followed up the Delta Slider (yes, it’s a type of terrapin as well as a musical tool), with a mike caddy—an ingenious device that never reached the level of sales that he hoped for.

I saw him play regularly at various venues around town, and ran into him yearly at the Tucson Folk Festival (which, along with the Kitchen Musicians Association, he helped to found).

I never met his longtime collaborator, Travis Edmonson (who preceded Gerry in death by just about a year), but he spoke of him with great respect, and drew inspiration from him, as well as writer Edward Abbey (in whose honor he wrote “The Ballad of George Hayduke”), and 60’s underground cartoonist Skip Williamson. I listened to his frustrations working on the theme music for “The Family Circus,” and we both went through myriad stalled collaborative film projects, both live-action and animation, that for whatever reasons, never found a home in this Universe. He was a guy who looked enough like Kris Kristofferson and played enough like Don McLean to fool a drunk or uninitiated fan—and now I’m wondering just what Gerry would’ve done with McLean’s underrated song “Superman’s Ghost”. We always spoke right around Christmas—the later years just didn’t find us in the same space at the same time with great frequency.

To say he’ll be missed is trite, and an understatement. Almost 30 years later, and we barely scratched the surface.

Just enough time tonight to talk about the Clean Elections decision and the downtown hotel proposal.

U.S. Senate candidate Rodney Glassman stops by Arizona Illustrated's Friday Roundtable.

We told you in The Skinny this week that William Wallace, a Democrat seeing a House seat in Legislative District 26, was likely to face a challenge to his nominating petitions. Sure enough, he's among the candidates fighting to stay on the ballot.

Also, Republican Tom Gordon has dropped out of the governor's race after a challenge from Buz Mills. It's too early to speculate on where his 1 percent of the vote will go.

Perennial congressional candidate Joe Sweeney is facing a challenge, too.

If you haven't yet seen the Republicans in Congressional District 8 throw down in a debate, your next chance is Monday, June 14. Three of them—Jonathan Paton, Jesse Kelly and Brian Miller—will be at Green Valley's West Social Center, 1111 S Via Arcoiris, for a Green Valley/Sahuarita Tea Party-sponsored debate from 2 to 4 p.m. Andy Goss has to travel for his job, while Jay Quick says he's not interested in participating.

With two open House seats—Rep. Olivia Cajero Bedford is running for the state Senate, while Rep. Phil Lopes is retiring that ol' bow tie—the Democratic primary in Legislative District 27 is a crowded affair. Eight candidates have lined up to be the next state Representatives and Skinny 2010 would like to introduce you to Dustin Cox, a Democrat running his first campaign for public office.

Cox, a former executive director of nonprofits Anytown Arizona and Anytown America, wasn’t old enough to be a state representative the day he filed his papers to run for the office.

But by the time the job starts, he will be 25 years old and have experience under his belt working for big campaigns, such as Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard's 2006 reelection effort, and managing big budgets.

He describes himself as a “budget wonk” and says he helped turn Anytown America from a failing nonprofit into a success.

“At a point where I took over (Anytown) we were packed up in boxes-my office was packed up in boxes-and we were facing shutting down,” he says.

The people up at jaxKitchen are really onto something with their recently launched blog that follows the progress of their new chef's garden in Barrio Viejo.

It takes the whole farm-to-table concept to another level: Knowing your food is grown locally means the food is usually fresher and of a higher quality. Watching the tomatoes and cucumbers you'll someday dine on as they ripen on the vine—which the blog makes possible through vivid pictures and regular posts—makes the whole experience special and somewhat intimate.

The veggies will be featured on special tasting menus expected to debut sometime this summer.

CiCi's Pizza is opening three new locations in Tucson as part of an expansion that is expected to result in as many as 25 locations across the state, according to a press release.

CiCi's Pizza currently has one location at 2912 W. Ina Road, and it has already closed and reopened since coming on the scene early last year. They serve all-you-can-eat pizza, salad and desserts for around $5.

We're not sure where the new locations will be opening, but we have a call into CiCi's headquarters to find out. We'll keep you posted.