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Tuesday night’s Zumba class taught by Jeannie Owen and Paulette Harrison at the Mulberry Community Center will be a Monster Bash. The music will be Halloweenish, and those coming are invited to wear costumes if they want.

A drawing for a special prize will take place during the evening and the names of everyone there, in costume or not, will go into the pot.

Paulette reports attendance runs about 70 every week with everyone paying to play with a food contribution for the Meigs County Parish which right now is struggling to have enough for the many families who need food on an ongoing basis.

The Parish is also trying to get enough food together for the Christmas giveaway where hundreds of Meigs Countians are given bags of groceries with specific items.

Zumba has decided to help with that and each class member will be bringing specific items needed for the Christmas bags during November. The first week’s collection will be soup and crackers. Of course, others beside the exercisers, are invited to participate.

Getting enough food together for that program, as well as for the 150 or so families each month who run out of food, is quite the challenge for the Parish right now.

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We love to hear about former Meigs Countians who’ve gone away and made good but have never forgotten their roots.

In the fall issue of the Ohio State University Medical Center is a picture of Milisa Rizer, graduate of MHS, who is now the Clinical Director, Outpatient EMR at University Hospital. She not only sees patients but provides leadership for the electronic medical record implementation at the Medical Center, teaches medical students and monitors undergraduate students who want to pursue a career in medicine.

Both of her parents, Franklin and Wanda Rizer, are now deceased, but Milisa can be seen frequently puttering around the homeplace. Incidentally, she and her husband have a 14-year old daughter.

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Speaking of those who left to fulfill their dreams, Bruce Wolfe, now parade resources and projects director for the Magic Kingdom Park in Florida, flies back and forth every few weeks, not only to see his family, but to practice for a show which he will be presenting at the Ariel Theatre come June.

He’s in rehearsals for a show, “‘the Midnight Cloggers’ 25th Anniversary Silver Spectacular,” on Saturday, June 16 at 7:30 p.m. with a matinee performance on Sunday, June 17, at 3 p.m. I’m told tickets are already on sale at the Ariel’s box office and on their website,.

The clogging group organized by Wolfe many years ago has been reunited for the show to celebrate the anniversary and are already rehearsing on the Ariel stage every few months.

Incidentally, Darby Gilmore will be handling the technical aspects of the production for Bruce’s production.

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Going through some old papers the other day, I came upon a newspaper clipping with a Washington dateline and the headline, “$6.6B in cash sent to Iraq might have been stolen.”

It was about money sent by the United States to Iraq to be used in rebuilding the country after the invasion. The shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bill which went by plane from here to there was never accounted for, according to the article bylined by Paul Richter.

It also said that, after that initial planeload of cash, we sent 20 others in the following year making it the “the biggest international cash airlift of all times.”

The article went on to say that Congress shelled out $61 billion of U.S. taxpaper money for reconstruction and development programs in Iraq.

Granted, we probably owed them something because we invaded their country. But to send such large amounts and not be able to account for its use just isn’t acceptable to me as a taxpayer.