Alltel's Revenge

Officially, the Alltel wizard and Chaaaad are fifty thousand times less annoying than the newish Verizon commercial with the dude asking his secretary what's on his schedule and she lists all the stupid texting whatnot and moves his real meeting. It sucks so bad it's not even on the internet.

Trav gets the last laugh.


(Boozie just says, "They made me wear this shirt. I'm really a Carolina fan at my deepest level, see?")

Who would suspect a bunch of ding-a-ling dames?

In honor of Cloris Leachman finally getting kicked off Dancing With the Stars, please enjoy this clip from her finest performance: Phantom Fox in The North Avenue Irregulars, one of our favorite Disney films when we were kids. This scene is amidst the zaniest of antics this fine film offers: it's the demolition derby at the end.

Cam & Rebecca are MFEO

My fabulous cousin Cameron and lovely, lovely Rebecca got married in Sacramento this weekend and it might as well have been shot for Martha Stewart. Their invitation was the greatest thing you ever saw, and the whole day was perfectly lovely. Thanks to California for the killer weather.

Sacramento Temple.

The bride is wearing burgundy shoes which she didn't remove the whole day, bless her feet. Also, she made her dress. She is that kind of cool.

That's love jam. Peach.

Local apple pie (still warm) and also local juice, donated by the juicers for a wedding present. The pomegranate-berry juice had crack in it.

Their fun band o'hippies did not play the chicken dance. That's Rebecca's brother singing a song he wrote.

My aunt Kathie sewed all that bunting out of vintage fabrics. Totally fabulous.

Rebecca collected vintage dishes & silverware for dinner and chose gorgeous fall flowers.

If I had a boat

Eudora Welty, by Curt Richter

If I could be reborn and exist wholly immersed in a different place, it would be Eudora Welty's Mississippi. Excluding the racism, the world from which she came and the one she put on paper have surpassed for me, suddenly, even the beloved world of Flannery O'Connor's creation. Mississippi has a bad rap these days, accused of backwardness and redneckness and other dismissive terms of the outsider's perspective. I haven't spent much time there, other than driving through, so I can't defend it properly, but I suspect the Mississippi of Delta Wedding didn't get a whole lot of respect either, not that you'd know it once you become immersed in it.

Once you arrive in the Delta with the Fairchilds' outsider cousin from the Yellow Dog train, on the day of Miss Dab's wedding, you are tasked with staying put until the end of the wedding, at the very least, and certainly until you've popped in and out of the heads of the various children and adults making up this plantation legacy family and the servants who bake cakes and tend to their whims. I've read Delta Wedding three times, and I'm still not sure I totally understand it, but such is the wonder of Eudora Welty.

In both this novel and her short stories, two of which were read recently on the Selected Shorts podcast, she possesses two gifts which make a story vibrant and exactly as I like them to be. First, she is a master of presenting place, but it is revealed slowly, in bits and pieces in between a usually omniscient narrator's character mind-reading and casual physical description. It is almost always summer, hot, and the characters move at a languid pace, even when they're hurrying. They talk to one another with equal parts of fondness and exasperation, and always proper decorum and manners. People are just this side of surreal, and it lends to the writing a significantly slowed pace, which leaves the narrator free to give copious commentary of the smallest things whenever she sees fit. (I am assuming - she usually feels like a woman; though it’s not how I was taught, I have a hard time picturing anyone other than Welty herself. That face is so regal and lived in and captures what I am describing in her prose.)

Second, she writes wonderful and complex women - or, more precisely, Southern women, which are a class unto themselves and a class I adore. I am sure Southerners tire of incessant analysis of their lifestyles and mannerisms from outsiders, especially if they are done without sympathy. I hope that I can say this without reproach, because I long to be Mrs. Fairchild for a week, or Robbie, the shadowy and judged Fairchild (by marriage only), married to the most beloved Uncle George. Each woman fulfills expected 1923 Delta woman roles, obeys tradition, is loving and nurturing in her own way. But what I like about trips inside their mind is that we don’t find subversion there, but a deepening of the psychology of this kind of woman, and revealed in language that takes its time to get to the heart of it, and then steps back quickly so you’re left with a little more than before but also a little more wonder. It’s writing to the tune and speed of “April the 14th, Part 1” or “I Dream a Highway” by Gillian Welch. You might never get there, and then suddenly you do. It’s exactly what I look for in fiction.

I’ve been accused of being too esoteric when I talk about this kind of thing, but I feel discontented these days (maybe because my house is such a mess) and I want to time travel to become one of these women, managing the men around her without them knowing, keeping them anxiously intrigued, sipping lemonade in a white lace dress and a straw hat on the wraparound porch in intense Delta humidity with only a slow fan to cool me down, no BlackBerry, DVR, car, plane, or email to answer in sight.

Paula Deen has outdone herself

Spotted on Tastespotting: The Lady's Brunch Burger. (Yeah, those are Krispy Kremes. Hot Now, I would hope). I'm not saying I wouldn't eat it, but I wouldn't feel good about myself.

There are bags and there are bags

Margey and I looked at a lot of bags recently, and I am ready for a change. I have had my eye on the hobo shape of this Coach bag for awhile, but I hate logo fabric and also: $398. So . . . no.

In the meantime, though, I found this bag on etsy and I'm about to die to buy it. The only reason I haven't yet is b/c I'm not sure I want a red or black bag, and I'm holding out for gunmetal gray.

Also, I've been known to drop up to $80 on a lark, but $121 feels like a real choice, considering that what I want the most right now is a new couch.

Which one? This one. Not sure on the color yet, but maybe the Walnut (chocolate brown) velvet-like microfiber.

This concerns you if you've been a guest of mine recently and were forced to sleep on the chiropractic nightmare that is my current sofa bed. Because: new bed with no bars in the spine.

Well, sure

Now that I've invested all this coin into buying 2 million smaller and smaller containers that can be wedged, puzzle-like, into a freezer bag, the TSA is thinking that bombs aren't likely in your foundation after all. Or at least, they'll be able to tell a little better. Wonder what this will do to sales of nasty-topped VASA water in the airport? I bet that old woman in a wheelchair we saw recently at JFK would have appreciated it being 2009 already. She was clearly a novice flyer, and when they opened her ratty bag, they pulled out 4 brand-new bottles of liquor. Guess she didn't get the memo.

On an unrelated note, I really, really, really, really hate landscaping machines. The pitch of their motors is absolutely unbearable, like to the point where I spend most of those 3 days per week that they're outside with their blowers, mowers, and edgers feeling like I'm descending into madness. I sorta wish I lived in a desert where there would be nothing to blow but sand. And who would do that anyway?

Hi, I'm Boozie

I'm storing nuts in my cheeks for the winter.

I'm a businessman. I love money, I love power, I love capitalism.

And I love movies about assistants. Or, more accurately, I have a soft spot for movies about assistants, even if they don't turn out to be that good, movie-wise, like "The Devil Wears Prada" and "Twenty-seven Dresses."

Tonight, I was watching "Annie" on TCM, which I've seen a million times, but not since being a grown-up with this particular career, and aside from so many things suddenly making sense (Miss Hannigan's gin-filled bathtub, when Daddy Warbucks says, "Everything's urgent to a Democrat") now that I have a touch more historical and contextual awareness than I did when I was 10, I also discovered that Grace Farrell is the greatest assistant ever.

She's probably called a secretary, but nonetheless she's totally glamorous and competent and a great dancer and has fabulous suits with swinging skirts and hats. She's totally present and attentive and unselfish, and beautiful and sympathetic. She knows when to push Daddy Warbucks into, you know, adopting Annie, and when to sit back and watch him be his blustery self instead of intervening, like in my personal favorite scene of the film: The Iodent Hour. She interviews all the fake parents and bows out of the FDR visit, probably knowing full well that sending Daddy Warbucks with Annie to Washington would shake the Republican out of him. I think we're supposed to embrace The New Deal optimism and all the millions, which is kind of a beautiful simplistic perspective.

Now that we're in the midst of our own modern-day New Deal (if you will) I'm pretty sure America just needs a Grace Farrell to take care of business in kicky heels.

Fall Festival

Those are sweet pickles purchased this morning from the Orange Chapel Methodist Church Fall Festival, which is a lovely morning of kind neighbors, really good country breakfast including biscuits and spicy gravy, grits, country ham, and Diet Pepsi, baked goods, and gospel music sung on the back of a flatbed trailer. It always falls the same weekend as General Conference, and it's all together a very life-affirming and uplifting series of days. If Pops was still here, I'd share those pickles.

If I had an extra $1200

I would immediately buy this chair from Anthropologie. Holy cow.

Shuffle Junkie

View of Utah Lake from Squaw Peak

The trouble with being a shuffle junkie is that sometimes songs you've forgotten about can pop up and what happens depends on whether it's a busy day and it produces just a little twinge, but if it's a sultry fall night just after a rain storm and the windows are down, that's when it smacks you in the gut with a little more oomph. And I remember that one fall Saturday night in 1995 when we went up Provo Canyon for a little wholesome campfire and guitar-playing under the clear, Western sky.

T & I rode up in the back of Korb's Nissan Sentra, with Dave in the front, 1/2 of the four boys of the Briar Avenue basement apartment that we were collectively and individually madly in love with. (Not specifically Korb & Dave for me, and with T there would be an eventual realigning of affection, but that night Korb had a little advantage with her, and our friend Brooke would later capture Dave.) Korb put in the Hootie & the Blowfish disc and skipped it to number 3, which is "Let Her Cry," of course, and he said, "I know I have an economy car, but this stereo was the best thing I ever did." I'm sure it sounded great or whatever, but for me with that song it's more about the tragic first chord and the lonely girl by the lamp post.

We met J & Chris up the mountain, where the fire was already toasty and crackly and J already had his guitar out. There were more girls waiting, too - Kari & cute, ditsy, flirty Kiersta, who were also collectively and individually in love with the Briar boys, and lived across the hall from us. They were a little older, and Kari, anyway, possessed the hippie no-makeup, long blonde hair confidence that seemed very much the right thing to have in that group. I was really jealous of her, despite the Birkenstocks; she was at ease around these boys, who were much older than us. I was wearing a big Eddie Bauer pullover, and whatever the real story, how I felt was that unlike the rest of these girls, I was liked fine but unadored. I felt unsporty and uncool and Kari could run a room in an effortless and breezy way that was never obnoxious somehow.

So the night for me was fun in theory - it was perfect with cute boys and marshmallows and guitars, but the perfect made me crazy and insecure and I like I wanted to go deep in the dark canyon and find my way back alone with no one to see how dumb I felt. I don't hate this memory; Hootie starts singing and I have to close my eyes for a second and take a deep breath, because it's that young and hopeful combination of joy, anticipation, embarrassment, and the overwhelming crush of the moment, long since passed and been replaced for all of us by other people, other friends, other loves. But I can also pretty easily tap into that odd girl out, even if that perception is tainted.

Now that Darius Rucker is trying to start a country career, he pops up with more frequency, but nothing he does can replace the heartbreaking pathos of "Let Her Cry," those first few guitar chords, the sad girl by that lamp post. She's destined to stand there forever. I can hear her tale from high up the canyon, looking down.

B&E

Okay, so you know this commercial, right?



I hate it. It's totally alarmist and awful. But it certainly does its advertising job, because it leaves you unsettled and like you really can't afford to not have Brinks.

So last night at 2 am the downstairs alarm was tripped, and we have the same kind of deal with the calling to see if it's a false alarm or we need the cops. The speaker for the alarm is right outside my bedroom door, so it didn't take long to wake me up, but I got all discombobulated and it became part of my dream for a minute, so by the time I could figure out what was happening, the phone was ringing and I still had my teeth-grinding mouthguard in when I answered it and I had to go outside on my front porch to even hear the woman on the phone asking me for my password. And then I realized that I was outside and possibly unprotected from the possible murderer, so I asked her (um, after I took out my mouthguard) if she would stay on the phone with me while I checked things out.

Mind you, we still weren't communicating well because I actually have to go down the stairs to turn off the alarm, but I was faced with quite a conundrum: knowing that it is very most probably a false alarm, do I still risk going downstairs? What would I have done if I had met a murderer on the steps? Sure, Security Central lady would have sent the cops, but out here that recently meant 45 minutes, so I'm pretty well dead and in the Haw River by then.

With the being not awake, I didn't have the presence of mind to think too long, especially because it was SO LOUD and so I just crept down the stairs, my heart beating like nobody's business, and finally got the thing silenced. Then she told me it was an outside closet door (why it's connected to the system, I don't really know, because it doesn't actually lead to access to the house. It houses the water heater, so we're guarding against shower espionage, I guess?). This particular door doesn't have a doorknob on it, so you can imagine that a little wind can make it blow right open. If I had asked her what tripped the siren, I would have known that there was no murderer, but the truth is that I watch too much Law & Order: SVU and I'm just so suspicious.

And in point of fact, going downstairs without at least a kitchen knife was potentially pretty stupid, but is it dumber to let the Sheriff come out for a false alarm? I guess these are not questions you can ask if you're dead, so thank goodness I don't have to be in the tragic victims section of the Chatham County Record today.

Dear Summer,

Don't let the shade deceive you. It's not cool on the porch.

This is my statement: I am over summer. Over the humidity, the cicadas, the fogged up windows from a/c, over always needing a/c, walking face-first into a billion spider webs. Over the constant sweating, no real breeze, no shade that feels like shade, hazy skies, 80-degree nights.

Summer's not even that fun when you're a grownup; it's just hot. I can't discount the lovely vacation, but it's bookended by two stressful events, so it's hard to relax.

Let's be done already.

I don't get it

Do you?



It does make me want to eat a churro, though.