Bless Your Heart, Tramp

by Celia Rivenbark

  This practice of random, indiscriminate sassing should be dealt with in the words of beloved TV deputy Barney Fife: “Just nip it! Nip it in the bud!”

  (Interestingly, this show, so marvelously authentic in most things Southern, did seriously stray by allowing Opie to call adults by first names. Never, in the mid-sixties would an eight-year-old Southern child address the elderly town barber simply as “Floyd” or his aunt’s kerosene-pickle-making friend as “Clara.” This would necessitate a stern talking-to from “Paw,” and immediate reparations to the offended adults in the form of a head-hanging apology and perhaps an offer to mow the grown-up’s yard on the following Saturday.)

  Alas, as I hear my two-year-old daughter call my women friends by their first names, I can only wince for now and repeat, “You mean ‘MISS’ so-and-so.” But it is a losing battle I am fighting, for the play group moms are mostly non-natives.

  “Oh, she can just call me by my first name!” one chided me recently. “You know there ARE worse things.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Next thing you know she’ll be bereft of all her Southernisms and she’ll be saying “ring bearer” instead of “ring berrier” and “mural” instead of “murial” and then where will we all be?”

  Like Louisiana said, there ought to be a law.

  Southerners vs. Snow

  Huh-oh. It’s snowing outside right now and I’m already bracing for flurries of jokes from my northern-born friends. Unfortunately, most of what they say is true. We Southerners really don’t know how to act when it snows. There’s less than an inch on the ground, not even enough to hide the yard onions, and I can hear the shrill morning TV announcerette screaming, “If you don’t have to be on the roads right now, for heaven’s sake, STAY HOME!”

  She then follows with what amounts to a prayer for the “safe return” of the TV crew to the station after having risked everything to secure videotape of this horrible storm that is blanketing our town with two, maybe three, flakes per minute.

  I turned off the TV before she could start telling her family that she loved them.

  Look. Hurricanes are the devil we know. No one does them better than us. At the first warning, we’ve got water stocked up for two weeks, batteries checked, flashlights for every member of the family, canned tuna and Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls aplenty, not to mention several gas cans filled for the ubiquitous generator.

  During a hurricane warning, we calmly and competently shift into our storm plan, boarding windows with precut plywood that has been neatly labeled, and moving our cars away from the big trees to the church parking lot down the street.

  But snow? I’ll be the first to admit that we Southerners, frankly, lose it.

  Northerners hee-haw at how we cancel school at the first flake, and factories, offices, and daycares are quick to follow.

  They love to say stuff like, “Geez, back home it’d snow fifteen, eighteen inches and nothing shuts down.”

  Well, that’s because y’all got the road equipment to handle regular snowstorms. All we got is Bubba and Junior’s four-wheel-drive pick-em-up trucks to help us out of the driveway and on our way.

  And the truth is, they’re probably not budging either because there’s a good chance they’ve gotten likkered up and have gone off to fry a turkey in somebody’s back yard.

  Hey, it’s okay for me to say stuff like that.

  Northerners like to make fun of the way we drive so slow in the snow. All I know is that if Morgan Freeman had been a Yankee, Miss Daisy would’ve been wrapped around many a telephone pole.

  Most Southerners have a snow plan: flannel dorm pants, hot chocolate and Montel.

  Northerners love to poke fun at how Southerners immediately start buying up all the bread at the grocery store at the first weather report mentioning the s-word.

  We can’t help ourselves. It is what our parents did and it is what their parents did, and their parents before them.

  To a Southerner, the threat of snow is profoundly unsettling and our minds turn only to bread and lots of it.

  When the 11 P.M. weather report predicted snow last night, my husband rolled over in bed to face me, a slight tremble in his voice. “You got the bread, didn’t you?”

  What does he take me for?

  Southern Measurements: A Dab or a Teense?

  A transplanted Northerner wrote me recently for help in “translating some of the quaint local terms used to describe units of measure into some usable equivalent.”

  ’Nother words: Even after nearly three decades of living in the South, bless his heart, he didn’t know the difference between a “tad” and a “smidgen,” much less a “passel” and a “mite.”

  First off, a smidgen is the direct opposite of “a right smart.” This should give you some context. What? You don’t know what “a right smart” is? Well, it’s “a whole heap.”

  I had to chuckle thinking how this fella would be puzzled if he heard a conversation last week between me and my collard-growing neighbor.

  He’d arrived with a brown paper sack full of the finest frostbitten collards it’s been my privilege to eat, but first asked, quite seriously, “Is it a good mess, do you think?”

  “Sure, it’s a mess,” I said. “It’s more than a mess, it’s a gracious plenty.”

  Now, pay attention, hons, especially you hons who hail from places which prefer the rudimentary “cup” and “ounce” scale of measurement.

  A mess has nothing to do with the tidiness of your kitchen. It is the exact amount of food required to feed your family at one “setting.”

  This is opposed to “a gracious plenty,” which pretty much guarantees leftovers, but not many, just a “piddlin’” amount. There’s a fine line between a piddlin’ or “teense” and the amount that should be “chucked,” the process by which everyone in the room agrees that the leftovers are so “puny” or “trifling” that you should just “chuck” ’em out the back door and get on with your life.

  The Southern kitchen overflows with colorful terms. When a pound cake fails to rise properly, it is pronounced “flat as a flitter.” When too much spice or similar irreversible disaster has occurred, the dish is “all momicked up.” (This is not to be confused with what happens when you fail to add enough liquid to a dish and it becomes “all gommed up.”) If you eat too much cake, you’re not “overweight,” you are “six ax handles across.”

  In the Southern kitchen, ingredients aren’t mixed, they’re “smished together.” If you’ve made too many deviled eggs (an impossibility, of course) you should announce that you’re “hip to haunch and cheek to jowl” with ’em.

  A friend who was invited to dinner at the home of her prospective Yankee in-laws knew she’d goofed when, at the end of the meal, she announced that she didn’t want dessert because she was already “chewing high.” The marriage, which did take place, was later annulled, and she has often said that the look on her fiancé’s face should’ve told her to run from that house like her clothes were on fire.

  A few years ago, when there was first talk of converting from cups and ounces to liters and, uh, whatever goes with them, I said that Southerners should refuse to go metric in favor of going “me-maw.” Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we did that? Sure it would. A right smart better.

  Liddy Dole Doesn’t Snort

  It should come as no surprise that Elizabeth Dole, poster princess for the conservative Steel Magnolia, has stated that she never snorted cocaine. Let me just say that, on behalf of all Southern chickhood, I believe that the reporter who asked that question should have his mouth washed out with Camay.

  It’s not the cocaine part that bothers me, rather it’s the notion that a Southern woman would be capable of “snorting” anything. Just as everyone knows that Southern women do not sweat (we glow), it is also a geographical and genetic fact that we do not “snort.” It simply isn’t done.

  You can take one look at the Lidster and know that no way, no how has this woman ever done li
nes of cocaine off a tattered copy of Who’s Next while her pre-Bob boyfriend strummed a sitar in the corner. Nope. Elizabeth Dole isn’t interested in lines of anything unless it’s Halston.

  So while all the world is wondering if and when Bush Lite did or didn’t do drugs, I’m mortally offended that a “Southeren” woman of Mrs. Dole’s obvious breeding and background would be asked such an awful question. I just hope her poor ol’ mama back in Salisbury, North Carolina, didn’t have to hear such foolishness or she most certainly would have had to be revived with Spirits of Ammonia.

  Of course, having lived in the sin-filled city of Washington, D.C., for so many years, Elizabeth Dole surely has faced the normal temptations that beset a belle in foreign lands.

  These include such go-ahead-everybody-does-it atrocities as giving money as a wedding gift or, worse, learning that Yankee wedding staple: the Chicken Dance. A true Southern belle would never, ever squat at the knees and flap her elbows out while wearing dyed-to-match peau de soie pumps. Why, she’d sooner snort.

  Through all her years of living in Washington, Elizabeth Dole has maintained belle-like dignity. (“Oh, no thank you, Mr. Mayor, I couldn’t possibly join you for a, what did you call it, toot?”) Surely, she has had to resist the advances of unscrupulous Yankees who are unaccustomed to seeing a well-coifed woman in a fuchsia St. John’s knit running a cabinet meeting, finding this, in the words of Orrin Hatch, “Hot!hot!hot!”

  Now, I do confess that while I believe Elizabeth Dole should not have had to answer such a vulgar question, I am having the time of my life watching the other presidential candidates stumble all over one another to discuss their druggie pasts. (And who would want to get high with Al Gore anyway? He’s gotta be making that up.)

  Bush Lite has finally admitted (after running from the press and hiding in stalls with his feet up) that he hasn’t used drugs in twenty-five years, or roughly the average sentence for a first-time drug offender in one of his highly touted tough-on-crime Texas prisons.

  Enjoy the ride, y’all. And, Liddy, don’t forget to keep your gloves on. Like mama always told you, you don’t know where those hands have been.

  Hurricane Forecasting for Fun and Hysteria

  Well, it’s officially hurricane season now. Weather forecasters say it starts on June 1, which always makes me wonder if anyone bothered to tell the hurricanes.

  What if we just didn’t tell them one year? Let ’em just hang around off the coast of Africa playing Scattergories and hope none of them notices the date on that wall calendar with the kittens playing in the yarn basket.

  Wouldn’t matter. Thanks to the ever vigilant and more annoying than nail fungus TV weathercasters, it’s impossible to ignore hurricane season.

  Actually, they’ve been rehearsing for it for months, practicing scaring the living daylights out of us by running bottom-screen “crawls” and flashing color-coded maps in the corner of the screen that warn of “approaching T-storm activity.”

  People, please. We live in a world where, frankly, there is weather. And, hey, it changes. Do we really need “live Super Slap-Yo-Mama-Fine Doppler Radar” reports every quarter hour, no matter how minor the “weather event”?

  A couple of weeks ago, one TV station interrupted programming to report the sighting of a deadly tornado in the area. Viewers were told to “take cover immediately.” I don’t know about y’all, but I packed up that Sony pretty quick and beat feet out of the cornfield. Think about it.

  Turned out it wasn’t exactly a tornado, but rather a plane crash. So there’s still some fine-tuning needed on some of this equipment, which must have been engineered by NASA (motto: “What do you MEAN you forgot the duct tape?”).

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some kind of Luddite (literally: one who ludds), dead set against any newfangled technology. Some of this stuff is actually useful, but most is not.

  Because TV stations and others have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this equipment, we’re subjected to hysterical reports every time a cloud, many of which are reputed to contain rain, crosses a county line.

  We’re not alone, of course. A friend who lives in Colorado says weathercasters in Denver interrupt programming to report, in shrill tones, that it will snow later in the day.

  Snow? In Denver? No shit.

  Even more annoying is the way competing TV stations insist on bragging endlessly about their weather equipment. A couple of stations in my hometown have produced commercials that basically imply the competition relies on the “Uncle Ezra, when my big toe itches, it means rain’s a-comin’” school of meteorology.

  Of course, the real danger is that we’ll become numb to truly dangerous weather conditions. The weathercasters will be like the six-year-old boy who cried “Wolf!” and, after lying so many times about a wolf coming, his parents just sent him away and forced him to write scripts for Jason Alexander sitcoms.

  At this very moment, there is a huge Hurricane Awareness event underway in my hometown. There was a lot of publicity about it, so there goes our chance of the hurricanes not finding out. Hey, they read the papers.

  And they’re out there churning away, getting busier than a cat covering crap on a marble floor. It’s hurricane season, you know.

  Lard Is Good, Lard Is Great

  Yankees have ruined our food and made it weird. Don’t believe me? Well, all I have to say to that is four little words: Jimmy Dean Sausage Bagels. It can’t get any weirder than that.

  Time was, I didn’t feel funny about ordering a Pepsi for breakfast, but now, even here in the South, if I do that I stand out like a hamhock in hummus.

  It seems like just yesterday the most exotic thing I ever ate was the clam roll special at Howard Johnson’s on family vacations.

  The menu at HoJo’s was terrific, not only because it had hot dogs grilled in real butter but also because when you were through ordering, you could punch out the little perforated lines and the menu turned into a nifty paper hat to wear the rest of the trip.

  Let me tell y’all about dinner the other night at a restaurant that used to make pretty fair grits.

  Right off the bat, the waiter started pawing around in my lap, fluffing my dinner napkin, as my great aunts in Virginia might say in hushed tones “down there.”

  In some parts of the South, this sort of behavior was traditionally accompanied by a proposal of marriage, but things are different now.

  Weird food has begat a too-cozy relationship between waiter and diner.

  “Good evening. My name is Chad and I will be your server tonight. I’d like to tell you, if I may, about our specials this evening.”

  Like there’d be any stopping him.

  “Tonight Chef Jason will be presenting a veritable fist of duck, lump crab meat, and sausage that has been smoked on the grounds all secured in a fountain of puff pastry and bathed in a chive-tomato creme fraiche.”

  My husband interrupts all this.

  “Have y’all got that bloomin’ onion?”

  Chad looks as if he might au jus all over us, shakes his head no several times quickly, and continues a recitation of appetizer choices that include “smoked mozzarella raviolis with red Thai curry served with an asiago-bacon aioli and green chile carrot oil.”

  My husband listens, then says, “Chad, can you rustle up some of those little fried mushrooms and ranch dressing? That always hits my spot.”

  Chad skitters away, and returns, a little huffily I think, to list “salad possibilities,” which include “grilled portobello mushrooms with smoked duck, cracked black pepper, parmesan curls, and an orange-fennel vinaigrette OR a tangy garlic-marinated sirloin salad with Mesclun, fried rice noodles, and dried black bean Thai sauce.”

  We decided to skip all this and get straight to the entrees, which Chad said were “individually prepared and presented with artistry and Chef Jason’s own special flair.”

  As far as Chad was concerned, my husband and I didn’t even have to be at the table. By the time he’d carried on ab
out the “griddled vegetable julienne nesting in a pool of tomato-based prosciutto horseradish sauce” and the “tender herbed saffron-scented roast of baby clams served in an unassuming parchment purse enhanced by a caramelized Vidalia-lobster creme,” he was swooning.

  I thought we’d have to pour a glass of crystal clear arcadian spring well water and delightfully hardened icelet chunks on him.

  Chad didn’t write it down when we ordered. This always just blows my mind and makes me nervous at the same time, so I usually ask, “Aren’t you going to write this down?” to which the waiter always sniffs and says, “No, I’ve got it,” and, sure enough, instead of the prime rib you ordered, you get somebody else’s grilled free-range veal (right, like it lived on the farm happily ranging around until it dropped dead in its tracks from sheer delirium).

  Of course, it’s fun to be able to bang your fist on the table and yell out, “You fool! I ordered the baby lamb loin with the smoked tomato salad and red chile bigarade with herbed chevre crostini!”

  And the waiter goes, “Oh. I thought you said ‘milkshake.’” On the way out, I couldn’t help but notice that Chad was slumped in a chair, his tuxedo bow tie all askew. He’d worked himself into a cappuccino froth reciting Pastry Chef Yvonne’s selections of pots au creme this and cocoa-centered butterscotch toffee fudge pastry that.

  I guess it was a nice enough meal. But it would’ve been perfect if they’d fixed it so you could wear the menu on your head.

  Tales of the Redneck Woman

  The other night I was headed home from work when I saw two women stranded in the middle of a busy intersection with a crying baby and a broke-down Chevy.