RIVER CITY JOURNAL: LIFE IS FULL OF CHOICES, AND IT'S TIME FOR CAPE TO MAKE ONE

The city can expand its reputation for monster trucks and pro wrestling, or it can do Something Really Big.

As campaigns go, my efforts to get a golf course in downtown Cape Girardeau is what you might call low-key.

You haven't seen me at any official government meetings grandstanding for the golf course. You haven't seen me at any chamber of commerce meetings trying to convince savvy retailers and industrialists that a golf course along the banks of the mighty Mississippi would be good for the economy. You haven't seen me applying for any grants.

A lot of you don't even take my idea seriously. I can tell. You make funny little comments about putting a golf course in the park around the common pleas courthouse. And then you laugh. Real loud.

As an early birthday present to my wife, the two of us spent last Sunday in a town that has golf courses AND a zoo in a park. I'm not saying putting a zoo on the dry side of the Cape Girardeau's floodwall is a bad idea, but the time isn't right.

My wife and I were in St. Louis. The big deal about this trip was Luciano Pavarotti. The aging tenor was giving a concert. I got tickets last fall. Since we were there anyway, we decided to hit some of the other St. Louis attractions.

We started out at the art museum in Forest Park. My wife could go there every weekend and find something to see. I like some of the things they have, but the museum doesn't have what you might call a high turnover in its regular exhibits. What I like to see are the people who go to an art museum.

A lot of art-museum visitors are arty people, if you know what I mean. We didn't ever see hair that color when I was growing up on Kelo Valley. And we wouldn't have pierced livestock the way some art-museum regulars impale themselves.

It was worth the trip, though, to see a couple of small girls, obviously sisters, dressed in bright red coats and berets -- very appropriate for the special Max Beckmann exhibit. The girls knew they were the center of attention. I think there were more people watching them than were looking at the art.

From the art museum, we went to the botanical garden, where the annual orchid show was in full swing. It's hard to understand God, but you get a glimpse of his capacity for creation when you look at all those orchids.

Then we headed for Kiel Center, where some 20,000 Pavarotti fans were about to gather. We walked through Union Station just to see what's going on there. It's a tourist trap, but a mighty good one.

At the concert, we listened to Pavarotti, who is getting old and is losing his voice. But we come away satisfied that we saw and heard him. We agreed that God hasn't made another one of him. Yet.

And then we drove back to Cape Girardeau ...

the town with no downtown golf course ...

no zoo ...

no botanical garden ...

no science center ...

no Union Station ...

no (fill in the blank).

In recent years, I've been hearing talk now and then about doing Something Really Big to put Cape Girardeau on the map. The monster trucks are a good draw, but we need something even snappier.

One idea that I latched on to right away was a museum to celebrate that big old river we can't see unless you stand at the top of the steps next to the downtown courthouse, and then you're too far away to spit into it.

There have been any number of variations on this idea. What I envision is not picking one or two of these ideas.

Let's do them all.

Let's turn Cape Girardeau into the capital of the entire Mississippi River.

Let's do things next to the river and on it and up and down it.

I like this idea for a lot of reasons. One is that it is a better idea than Gregory Freeman of the Post-Dispatch has for downtown St. Louis. Greg is always writing in his column about his push to get city approval for street vendors downtown. And jugglers. He swears that would make people come downtown and walk around and spend money and live in loft apartments.

He may be right.

But I think Cape Girardeau can do better than jugglers.

I think we can be THE river city of America. We really can.

And, if the wisdom of the idea happens to include a downtown golf course, then I'd go along with that too.

It's a pretty easy choice, really:

Jugglers ... or River City USA.

What do you think?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.