Atlanta: Scene

You Rang?

At 29 Spa, a multitasking luxury customer can order a pair of Manolo Blahniks from Neiman Marcus from a hotline in the nail salon, then have them delivered by a butler before the pedicure dries. Opened in May, 29 Spa is in the new Mansion on Peachtree, a Rosewood Hotel & Residence. Created by Atlanta native Lydia Mondavi, wife of winemaker Robert Mondavi Jr., the spa is named for Highway 29, running through Napa Valley. Not surprisingly, the new 29 Collection of skin care, launching this fall and carried exclusively at Neiman’s, has antioxidant-rich grape seed extracts. Mondavi, a designer and consultant to the spa industry, said Napa Valley’s natural beauty inspires the look and feel of 29 Spa, but the merchandising and marketing ideas came straight from her childhood hero — Stanley Marcus. “My grandfather had an autographed copy of his book, ‘Minding the Store,’ that I used to pretend to play store with as a child,” she said. “Now, I consider it my operations manual.”

Grit and Bear It

Many Atlanta restaurants offer Deep South cuisine, but newly opened Dogwood in Midtown may be the only one with an entire bar devoted to grits. Diners can feast on creamy, yellow, stone-ground grits with a choice of Low Country shrimp, fried oysters with spicy hollandaise or ham and pimento cheese. Chef Shane Touhy balances classic “soul food” with modernity. Entrées $13 to $34. For dessert, try grilled lemon pound cake with sweet cream ice cream, $6.

Revisiting an Era

“Road to Freedom,” a 130-piece photo exhibit at the High Museum of Art in Midtown’s Woodruff Arts Center, displays poignant civil rights images by journalists, activists and onlookers in the Sixties. Featuring photos by names like Morton Broffman, Bob Adelman and Danny Lyon, the show includes powerful shots from the Selma-Montgomery March in 1965, the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the Birmingham, Ala., hosings in 1963. There are historical documents never released: Rosa Parks’ fingerprint paperwork from her arrest and a blueprint of the bus on which she protested. The scene stealer: 33 photos by Broffman, who, besides being campaign photographer for Sen. Eugene McCarthy, snapped some of the most stirring images to emerge from the civil rights era. The collection includes shots of Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, James Baldwin, Joan Baez and Ralph Abernathy.