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Stanley Demos, former owner of The Coach House, was in town this week visiting family, and he dropped by the location on South Broadway to see what was happening at the restaurant he turned into a landmark.

The building, empty for months, is on its way to becoming the grand Coach House again. Karen and Nasser Zamareh expect to have the restaurant open in a week or so.

Karen, who spent her teen years living around Cynthiana, remembers going to The Coach House for dinner. She and her husband were living in Texas when she began to yearn for home. ”I was looking on the Internet and saw the Coach House building and explained the history to my husband,“ she said. ”He decided we could do this, and we half-made a deal over the telephone, sight unseen.“

Nasser is a trained chef, and the ­Zamarehs also have hired Cameron Irvin as chef. The Coach House will be open for lunch, dinner and Sunday brunch. The bar will feature specialty appetizers. Call (859) 288-7570.

The copper bean pot-looking lamp with the mica shade that sat in her son's bedroom for years wasn't really to Jane Harcourt's taste.

But the Louisville woman thinks a lot more highly of it now — now that she knows it's an early Dirk Van Erp lamp worth $40,000 to $50,000, and maybe more.

Shirah Grant of Jessamine County was happy to learn that her little drypoint engraving titled Le Chapeau Épinglé, or The Pinned Hat, is an authentic Renoir and worth $4,000 to $6,000 — far more than the approximately $500 she and her husband, Shawn Grant, paid for it.

On the other hand, she was disappointed to learn that a handful of sketches that came with certificates of authenticity when she and her husband bought them a couple of years ago for about $2,000 are inexpensive reproductions.

Back in the late 1970s, Barry Benton started flying small teams of dentists and doctors on mission trips to Haiti, hoping to fulfill God's will by helping to improve medical care for needy residents of the impoverished Caribbean nation.

The first trips were tough. Benton, then a Lexington attorney, would take three or four volunteers at a time in his little single-engine plane, making grueling 12-hour flights from Lexington with multiple refueling stops along the way, ending with a six- or eight-mile hike to the small town of Ranquitte in Haiti's northern mountains.

Nevertheless, they soon had a little medical clinic and a small school in Ranquitte (pronounced ron-keet), supported by a organization back in Lexington that they called Christian Flights International. CFI, now a non-profit corporation based in Richmond, celebrated its 30th anniversary last year.

”The little elementary school we started had 12 students, and I think they have about 1,000 students now,“ Benton said last week. ”They have a computer lab, can you believe that? They have solar panels to recharge their lights. They have lots of other programs going. It's amazing how far things have come.“

We hope that it's not true that art imitates life, at least when it comes to prom.

With prom season hard upon us, let's avoid the telekentic blood spurting of Carrie or the über-evil antics of the ”plastics“ in Mean Girls. Still, with all that's weird and wonderful about high school wrapped in one candle-lit, bedazzled package, prom provides a perfect venue for lots of drama and comedy. For proof, look at last weekend's release of the slasher flick Prom Night, which opened No. 1 with $22.70.8 million in ticket sales.

But Prom Night is just the latest cinematic effort to portray that uniquely American institution. Here are some of the highs, and lows, during the past few decades.