Posted on 02/14/2002 9:01:00 AM PST by sheltonmac
Thirty years ago I visited my first cousin in Virginia. While hanging out with his friend, the discussion turned to popular movies of the day. When I offered my two-cents on the authenticity and social relevance of the movie Billy Jack, one of the boys asked, in all seriousness; "Do you guys have movie theaters down there?" To which I replied, "Yep. We wear shoes too."
Just three years ago, my wife and I were attending a food and wine seminar in Aspen, Colorado. We were seated with two couples from Las Vegas. One of the Glitter Gulch gals was amused and downright rude when I described our restaurant as a fine-dining restaurant. "Mississippi doesn't have fine-dining restaurants!" she demanded and nudged her companion. I fought back the strong desire to mention that she lived in the land that invented the 99-cent breakfast buffet.
I wanted badly to defend my state and my restaurant with a 15-minute soliloquy and public relations rant that would surely change her mind. It was at that precise moment that I was hit with a blinding jolt of enlightenment, and in a moment of complete and absolute clarity it dawned on me -- my South is the best-kept secret in the country. Why would I try to win this woman over? She might move down here.
I am always amused by Hollywood's interpretation of the South. We are still, on occasion, depicted as a collective group of sweaty, stupid, backwards-minded and racist rednecks. The South of movies and TV, the Hollywood South, is not my South.
This is my South:
- My South is full of honest, hard-working people.
- My South is colorblind. In my South, we don't put a premium on pigment. No one cares whether you are black, white, red, or green with orange polka dots.
- My South is the birthplace of blues and jazz, and rock n' roll. It has banjo pickers and fiddle players, but it also has B.B. King, Muddy Waters, the Allman Brothers, Emmylou Harris, and Elvis.
- My South is hot.
- My South smells of newly mowed grass.
- My South was the South of The Partridge Family, Hawaii 5-0, and kick the can.
- My South was creek swimming, cane-pole fishing, and bird hunting.
- In my South, football is king, and the Southeastern Conference is the kingdom.
- My South is home to the most beautiful women on the planet.
- In my South, soul food and country cooking are the same thing.
- My South is full of fig preserves, cornbread, butter beans, fried chicken, grits and catfish.
- In my South we eat foie gras, caviar, and truffles.
- In my South, our transistor radios introduced us to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones at the same time they were introduced to the rest of the country.
- In my South, grandmothers cook a big lunch every Sunday.
- In my South, family matters, deeply.
- My South is boiled shrimp, blackberry cobbler, peach ice cream, banana pudding, and oatmeal cream pies.
- In my South people put peanuts in bottles of Coca Cola and hot sauce on almost everything.
- In my South the tea is iced and almost as sweet as the women.
- My South has air-conditioning.
- My South is camellias, azaleas, wisteria, and hydrangeas.
- In my South, the only person that has to sit on the back of the bus is the last person that got on the bus.
- In my South, people still say "yes, ma'am," "no ma'am," "please," and "thank you."
- In my South, we all wear shoes....most of the time.
My South is the best-kept secret in the country. Please continue to keep the secret....it keeps the idiots away.
GO COCKS!!!!!!!!!!!
The only thing worse is a Southern South -Basher.....if one is weak enough to sacrifice their own heritage on the altar of political correctness then well....they are just weak, soft....putty... pliable...don't stand for anything ....can only whine...basically what's wrong with our nation.
Regards...and an across the river from the east bump to ya.
LOL! Me too!
My favorite way to eat grits: Take a couple of over easy eggs, several strips of crumbled up bacon, butter, and a heap of grits. Mix it all together and salt and pepper to taste. Then spread the mixture on toast and enjoy. That's good eatin'!
I agree. I expect some bashing and even some good-natured ribbing from Yankees, but I am disgusted when it comes from a natural born southerner. It is disgraceful.
Bump for my Cuban hermanos!
That's pure communism.
I reckon they had movie theaters WAY back and a right good ways out in the sticks too. One of the most delightful stories I ever heard in my family was from my grandpa about a year before he died. My grandma had passed away a couple of years earlier and he was remembering her fondly as he showed me a photo of her when she was very young. He told me the story of how they got engaged. He said that one night he realized that she was the woman he wanted to marry and seeing's how she was the prettiest girl in the hills that he'd better hurry up before somebody else beat him to it. He got on his mule and rode all the way to town to the movie theater where he proposed to her right out front. Obviously she said "yes."
Oh, no! Not with garbanzo bean soup, black beans, rice & onions, Cuban bread (also useful as a baseball bat after the first day out of the oven), pompano paella, flan de leche, Cuban coffee, palomilla steak, caldo gallego, .....
Where's Luis Gonzalez? I bet he can fill this list out some more.
I discovered mayonaise on french fries in New London, Connecicut in 1961. I still like FF's that way.
Ever chop squid heads and tentacles up into little bitty pieces and fry them and serve with marinara? MMMMMMmmmmmmm maybe we should move to a MY SOUTHERN FOOD thread...
The homegrown traitors are indeed disgraceful and we would be better served without them.
I'm hardly a neo-Confederate but I have become a staunch defender of Southern heritage and culture.....right or wrong...it's ours and we don't need outsiders lecturing us anymore. Without us, this whole country would be living in an ever-declining Dem Socialist state.
LVM
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