ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, October 8, 1996 TAG: 9610080023
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BETH MACY
SOURCE: BETH MACY
In the ``bubble'' of South Roanoke, the news was legion.
Telephone poles were peppered with ``$100 REWARD'' signs. Everyone at soccer practice had heard about it.
Garbage collectors were on the lookout. Policemen were notified. Store owners agreed to spread the word.
Debra Jamieson's not sure how many people she accosted on the streets of South Roanoke on Sept. 25. ``I was driving around sobbing all day, looking through Dumpsters, telling everyone I saw,'' she recalls.
The missing-in-action item? A Christmas stocking she'd been needlepointing for her 7-year-old son, Parker. With his name engraved in big purple letters and a picture of Father Christmas feeding carrots to bunnies.
The missing item wasn't hard for Jamieson to describe. Nearly everyone she knew had seen her working on it at one time or another for the past two years - in the carpool line at school, next to the soccer field, at stoplights in her car.
``I was down to the background,'' she says. ``I just had a couple hours' work left.''
Jamieson stored the stocking in a pink monogrammed bag with bright green handles - a leftover from her preppy years at Hollins College where she wore ``big skirts with bunnies and cabbages, and pink suede tennis shoes,'' she says, laughing.
The bag was kept in the back seat of her brand-new, forest-green Suburban, which also contained her husband's car phone. Which is what the looters were looking for the evening of Sept. 24, when they broke into Jamieson's Suburban, stole the phone and grabbed the pink bag - thinking it might be a purse.
``I can just hear them,'' she says. ```She's got this great car. But boy does she have bad taste in purses!'''
Meanwhile, her son Parker - in typical 7-year-old boy fashion - didn't lament the stocking as much as his mom predicted he would. ``He tells me he's sorry it's been stolen, but he wouldn't mind if he got a much bigger stocking to replace it, like his brother's."
Jamieson can laugh about all this now, thanks to Barbara Snyder, a Valley Metro bus driver, who spotted the hot-pink bag at Avenham and 26th - at 6 a.m. - thought it was a child's bookbag and screeched the bus to a halt in order to pick it up.
Snyder, who'd recently had surgery, noticed Jamieson's reward signs near the end of her route. Having missed work (and income) because of the operation, she knew the money would come in handy, but she didn't want Jamieson to think she'd broken into her car. "I didn't want her to think I was going to hold [the bag] hostage, either."
``Heaven's no,'' Jamieson says.
``You can't put a value on the love and amount of time you put into something like that. [Needle point] is therapy so I don't flip out and start breaking into people's cars!''
Jamieson says the incident will make the stocking even more precious over time. ``I know in the scheme of life, it's real insignificant. But when I'm dead and gone, Parker's gonna look back and know what made it special, aside from the fact that I spent two years making it: That it was stolen and returned.
``Hopefully that's the worst skeleton in the family closet.''
The worst to circulate in the bubble anyway.
Regular readers, news-watchers and users of soap might recall my recent column on Dianne Rhodes. The 23-year-old Roanoke sales rep was on her way to Hollywood, when last we wrote, to compete in Lever soap's national Singing In the Shower competition, held Sept. 27-28 at Universal Studios in Hollywood.
Rhodes's act was a take-off on the Peggy Lee tune ``Fever'' - only it was called ``Lever'' - and she performed it in a black bath towel and shower cap.
Rhodes was ousted in Hollywood by a man from Chapel Hill, N.C., who earned first-place honors with his country-song soap spoof - while wearing a white towel, cowboy hats and boots. But Rhodes did out-scrub 30 other performers, making the Top 10.
Second-place honors went to a trio of women who also used Peggy Lee's tune - only they wore nun's habits.
A certifiable extrovert who was voted both Most Talented and Most Concerned With Her Hair in high school, Rhodes described her foray into stardom as ``really, really fun.''
Hairdressers across the Roanoke Valley were besieged by requests for ``The Shower Lady's haircut'' after her cool-coiffed mug earned front-page Extra section play.
``Meanwhile, I've since had my hair colored and dyed - for autumn - so I don't even look like the chick in the paper,'' she says.
Rhodes hoped to scour one more public appearance from fame's remaining sliver of soap. Last week the Roanoke Rush approached her about singing the national anthem before a home game.
No word yet on her costume plans
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/Staff. Debra Jamieson was almost finishedby CNBwith her needlepoint Christmas stocking for her son, Parker, when it
was stolen from her car. color.