It’s lunchtime at Treadwell Elementary and the school’s new optional program coordinator, Darlene May, is heading to the cafeteria. Along the way, she’s met by a dozen students shouting, “Hola!” through beaming smiles.

A shopping center in the heart of East Memphis will soon undergo a renovation.

With her “glamtique” Ashley Dean-Parson has flipped the concept of boutique on its head. “A lot of times, being a full-figured woman, we would go into a store that we would really, really love and they wouldn’t have a plus-size section or if they did, it was really, really small,” she said. “So, I took that same concept and did it here and did the reverse.”

Pete & Sam’s celebrates its 70th anniversary this year in a spiffed up restaurant, thanks to the Bomarito brothers taking on local investor partners and a late 2017 fire that caused the place to close for almost five months for cleaning and updating.