So the Birmingham News has a story today celebrating the city’s most famous madam, with pictures of the whorehouse and everything. As you might guess, the house is no longer operating. The madam, of course, had a heart of gold, going into prostitution to provide for her sisters, nursing the sick during a cholera epidemic, and apparently having a fling with John Wilkes Booth (which might endear her to those who long for the good old days of the Confederacy). She even wrote her autobiography. She’ll be the subject at tomorrow’s Brown Bag Lunch Series at the downtown public library. I guess it only takes a hundred years or so to move from the crime blotter to the literary pages.