With toys like this, it’s only a matter of time before you hear one Sunday School kid say to his buddy, “My Goliath can kick your Samson’s ass!”
Poseable Samson, at just over a foot tall, is the largest Bible action figure. Grotesquely muscular and wearing a post-Delilah modified bob, he comes with a backstory that reminds kids that he “killed a lion with his bare hands, slew thirty men in one night without weapons, and defeated an army of a thousand using only the jawbone of an ass (sold separately).”
You get the distinct feeling that the kindly cucumber “Larry” from the Bible-based “Veggie Tales” series would end up sliced thin and smeared with cream cheese on white bread if he hung around this snarling Goliath too long. Still, I award bonus points for the use of the word “slew.”
Shelf space being what it is, there’s no telling who Jesus is going to be hanging with in Walmart. Let’s hope it’s not the new Black Canary Barbie, who is clad in a suitable-for-S&M black vinyl jacket, high-heeled boots, fishnet panty hose, and nothing else.
On the other hand, Jesus was forever befriending loose women, so I guess that would be OK. Picture the inevitable action kit: angry mob (stones sold separately) would have to back away with Jesus in the house.
And it will take nothing short of divine intervention to help shelfmate Ken, long-suffering beau of Barbie.
Not long ago, Ken was given a Mattel “makeover” to try to win his woman back from Blaine, Barbie’s vacant-eyed surfer-dude boyfriend.
The makeover was meant to make Ken look more “slick and urban.” Speaking through a humanoid working at Mattel, Ken said, “My new look will be very now. It will reflect my personality and change with my mood on any given day.”
Dude. This is almost as bad as saying “Ye.” If you’re going to try to reclaim Barbie, you better act fast, am I right, JC?
And he’ll probably never have a shot at Black Canary Barbie, who’s based on the DC Comics hottie. She’s taken to hanging around with another DC superhero, Firestar, whose breasts appear to get bigger as her superpowers engage.
Isn’t that fabulous?! I’d give anything for my breasts to get bigger when I did something really well. It wouldn’t have to be something like shooting star-shaped fireballs straight out of my nipples, although that is wicked cool. But just something more age-appropriate. Like, every time I pull a particularly delicious tuna casserole from the oven, wham-o!
“Oh, these! I get them every time I truly excel at something. Please stand back. I have a praline cheesecake coming in a moment.”
Black Canary Barbie looks like the real thing, although Mattel chose to omit her most awesome feature, the “canary cry,” a high-powered sonic scream that has the ability to shatter objects and completely incapacitate those around her.
Just like Céline Dion.
Listen up, Ken. Barbie’s hot for Blaine, a guy who kills time by picking his toe jam with a coconut husk. If you really want to win her back—and with nearly five decades in the relationship, I don’t blame you for trying—you’re going to have to man-up.
Ken’s handlers say that he’s undergone some plastic surgery to resculpt his face. OK, this is so not a good way to start manning up. In fact, it may be the worst start since Michael Jackson decided to wear a military uniform.
If Ken is determined to win Barbie back, it may mean retreating back into the dream house closet, so to speak.
Ken’s going to need fewer stylists and more Russell Crowe—the bad boy Russell Crowe who throws phones at innocent hotel employees, not the doting celebrity dad who has, it’s official, had his kid surgically grafted to his shoulders. We haven’t been this sick of a parent pose since Madonna wore her adopted Malawian orphan bouncing on her hip like a Birkin bag with eyes.
Ken needs to show Barbie that he’s willing to take some risks, and I don’t mean trying pear-scented maximizing shampoo instead of the usual melon or forcing himself to stop using the word “product” in any conversation about his shaving needs.
Perhaps he could steal Barbie’s convertible and run over a few dozen paparazzi. Ken has a lot to learn about image. Angelina Jolie is twice the man he is; then again, so is Dakota Fanning.
Speaking through Mattel, a forlorn Ken has said he’ll do anything it takes to win Barbie back. Ick. I can smell the desperation from here. Or maybe that’s his Clinique Happy for Men. Either way, très unattractive!
If he really wants to win back the vapid vixen, and I have to admit that sometimes I can’t imagine why, Ken will need to play hard to get, stop groveling and, trust me, torch those silver lamé chaps he fancies when he’s pretending to be Nutcracker Ken.
You think Blaine would wear silver chaps?
Let’s ask him.
Oops, too late. It’s nine A.M. and he’s already passed out in the sand after smokin’ his third bowl.
I know what the crew back on the toy shelf is thinking and I hear you: Where’s the jawbone of an ass when you really need one? This guy needs slewing.
3
Let’s Go See “Gobbler” Up at the Funeral Home
Southern children are just naturally tougher. And if you don’t believe me, consider the way my friend Sara used to get to school in the morning. Her grandmother, Miss Edna-Earle, drove a big old Pontiac whose rear passenger-side door would swing open every time she’d make a hard right turn.
Every morning, Sara assumed the position, gathered her books and, as Miss Edna-Earle made her sweeping right turn into the school yard, the back door would fly open and Sara would fall out, landing neatly at the front door. She’d pick herself up, dust off her books, and holler, “Bye, Grandmaw!”
Miss Edna-Earle would then turn a hard left out of the school driveway, the door would slam shut, and she’d toot the horn three times for I Love You.
Southern kids are used to that sort of eccentricity.
Quirky drivers thrive in the South. Growing up in a very small Southern town, we knew that of all the grown-ups we knew, Miss Lou was the most dangerous driver.
She drove a big black Cadillac and was notorious for knocking the doors off cars at the precise moment that you’d be settled behind the steering wheel and reaching for the door handle to shut it.
Truth was, if you were fool enough to park in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot in Wallace, North Carolina, circa 1975, there was a roughly 85 percent chance that your car door would be knocked right off its hinges by Miss Lou before you could shut it and be on your way. She came out of nowhere sometimes, reminding us of that truck in Duel that tortured Dennis Weaver or, worse, Stephen King’s maniacal Christine.
People in Wallace would just nod understandingly as we drove along, our legs and bodies exposed to the elements until we could get the door put back on at the body shop on the outskirts of town.
The police always gave Miss Lou a ticket, of course, but she was unrepentant, for the most part. That door had gotten in her way. People really ought to be more careful. One time, a Yankee moved to town and, after losing his first car door to Miss Lou, he petitioned the police chief to take her license.
“Well, I can’t do that,” the chief said. “How would she get around town? She’s ’bout six ax handles across so it’s highly unlikely that she’s going to just walk anywhere she wants to go, now isn’t it?”
This is the small-town Southern lawman at his best. If you want to hear about him at his worst, consider the time the deputy encountered a freshly escaped convicted bank robber on the streets.
“Man, you look just like that bank robber that just escaped from the state penitentiary,” said the lawman. “Yep. That’s the damndest thing. You got the, uhhhh, same eyes. Same hair. Same, let’s see here, yep, same skull and crossbones tattoo on your left earlobe. Yep! I’d say you’re a humdinger-dead-ringer for that convict.”
As the story goes, the escapee’s jaw dropped and he waited for the handcuffs and gun to come out in a blur. No point running now.
Instead, the lawman tipped his deputy’s hat, said, “Yep, th
at’s quite a co-inky-dinky. Nice day, now,” and headed on to his daily lunch of pinto beans and cracklin’ cornbread.
When the Yankee was told that Miss Lou needed her license more than he needed his car door, he gave up and eventually moved back up North where, according to him anyway, no one had ever lost a single car door to the same crazy old woman.
What a glorious and strange land that must be!
Many’s the time that I’ve had to explain to someone not from around here why we’re such awful drivers in the South.
My theory is that we’re so damned tired of being sweet the rest of the time that we save up all our hatefulness for the relative anonymity of our cars. Southerners are all, “After you, no you, no you first!” until we get behind the wheel.
You blink your turn signal for us to let you into traffic and we just pretend not to see you. Hey, your ass should’ve left home earlier. You wanna know what your problem is? Poor planning, that’s what.
On the road, the average Southern driver takes on a “wouldn’t give you air if’n you were trapped in a jug” mentality.
Turn signals? For years, I’ve told Yankees we don’t use them because we know where we’re going and it’s nobody else’s damn business.
We also believe that when it comes to traffic signals, red is the new yellow. Also: the green arrow requires at least a seven-second delayed response ’cause we love to see that little vein pop out on your forehead as you sit and stew behind us.
In the South, at a four-way stop, the rule is simple: The truck with the biggest tires always has the right of way. In the event that there is no truck, just cars, then the right of way always belongs to me. I’m serious.
One more thing: We know we drive too slow in the left lane on the interstate. What can I tell you? That popping vein thing just never gets old. Crazy, I know.
Small Southern towns embrace their crazies, which is something that a lot of “outsiders” can’t understand.
My friend Mindi routinely deals with that plague of the South, the water bug, by shooting at them with a BB gun in her own house.
“It took me seven shots but I got the bastard,” she said. “I’d had me a tension headache all day but I want you to know that when I saw his guts splattered across the ceiling, well, bless God, my headache just melted away like butter on a biscuit and I felt like I’d really accomplished something.”
To truly appreciate this story, you should understand that Mindi is a college graduate, a professional woman who belongs to the local country club. A lousy aim, though. I’m sure as shit that I could’ve killed that water bug with three shots, tops.
It speaks volumes that a Southern woman can consider it normal, even commendable, to shoot bugs off her ceiling in broad daylight.
My friend Nina channels the wisdom of her Southern ancestors when her young’uns throw a tantrum. She politely goes to the refrigerator, removes the gallon Tupperware jug of ice water that she keeps handy at all times and pours it on ’em, midtantrum, then tosses them a towel and tells them to clean up their mess.
Everybody’s just a half bubble off plumb in the South. Even our crackheads have more personality than most.
Take Skipper and Poo, a local couple who were trying, despite an unfortunate addiction to crack, to have a Norman Rockwellian Thanksgiving dinner with their food-stamp turkey.
At least Poo was. She had just pulled the turkey out of the oven when, like a flash, Skipper snagged the golden-brown bird, tossed it into the basket of his bicycle, and rode two miles to Old Bethel Road to trade it for crack. Witnesses said that Skipper was equal parts afraid of Poo’s wrath—she chased him down the road on her own bicycle—and the pack of wild dogs that followed a trail of fragrant, turkey-scented steam wafting on the wind during that unseasonably warm November day.
Redneck Southern women can be fiercely creative when push comes to shove, as it so often does in the rural South.
Flo applied for a job at the bacon plant. She failed the drug test but she had a good reason. The state investigator asked her what she meant by that and she politely and thoroughly explained that a neighbor, whom she didn’t really get along with, had recently been arrested for growing marijuana. And, see, her husband, being an avid hunter and having hunting privileges on the property where said marijuana was being cultivated, had killed a deer who, unbeknownst to them as they feasted on venison that evening, must have grazed on the patch of marijuana.
Therefore, Flo had accidentally ingested “pot-meat” and had tested positive. Anyone could see that was perfectly logical.
Then again, this was the same woman who, having failed a drug test the year before, claimed it was because her husband was “a very casual cocaine user” and they had had sex the night before the drug test and obviously he had transmitted the cocaine residue to her through “his bodily fluids infecting me during lovemaking.”
If Southern women are just a little bit crazy, it’s probably the fault of the men in their lives.
My friend Sarah, who lives in Louisiana, said her first date with her fiancé was memorable because he arrived to pick her up in a red pickup with full camouflage interior and then drove her deep into the woods where he pointed, with tears in his eyes, to a nondescript patch of dirt and said, “That’s where I shot my first deer.” The gravity of the moment wasn’t lost on Sarah who, having older brothers, understood that you wouldn’t share such a special moment with a woman unless you were planning to marry her.
In the South, we have more critters than elsewhere and we mingle with them fairly easily.
Most Southern children can recite at least one story involving the witnessing of a frog being swallowed whole by a passing water snake. And if they can’t, their ancestry is questioned and possibly ridiculed.
When a Southern child grows up and ventures out into the world, he or she may be puzzled to learn that, in other parts of the country, people usually just have one name and, what’s more, might not even have a proper nickname!
Reading an obit the other day in a Mississippi newspaper, I was impressed at how every male family member had a nickname listed. The deceased was “Gobbler”; and his brothers and assorted kin were “Spike,” “Hun,” “Doots,” and “Tiny.”
Speaking of obituaries, some newcomers to the South don’t understand that when we say we’re going to go see so-and-so “up at the funeral home” it means that so-and-so is, well, dead.
My friend Natalie, who is as Southern as hoppin’ John with Texas Pete sprinkled all over it, was mortified to realize that she didn’t understand that for the longest time.
“Granddaddy would say, ‘Well, I’m going to go see Bobby. He’s up at the funeral home.’ ”
It took her years to understand that Bobby, or whomever, was in a pine box up at the funeral home and respects were being paid.
OK, one more thing that all Southern children know, and this may be the single most important advice I can ever give a non-Southern male marrying into a Southern family: Never, ever wash your wife’s cast-iron skillet.
Perhaps the saddest note that I have received over the years came from Julie Ann, who married a Yankee man a few years ago.
“On Mother’s Day, I got to sleep late, which meant about ten ’til eight,” she wrote. “While I was sleeping, just my Mother’s Day luck, my husband, who never does any domestic chores whatsoever, decided to get all aim-high and decided to clean the cast-iron skillet I’d left on top of the stove.”
Hons, when I read those words, I had to sit down. Because I knew what was coming.
“This was the cast-iron skillet that I got from my great-aunt Connie Jo for my wedding shower ten years ago. It has been lovingly seasoned over the past ten years, having fried enough bacon to clog the arteries of the entire state of Texas. It has made hundreds of servings of fried okra, cornbread for countless holiday meals, gravies too numerous to mention, and our daughter and I made her very first blackberry cobbler together in this pan. It was seasoned to perfection, a gleaming bla
ck bottom that I could see my reflection in.”
I poured myself a glass of wine to steady my nerves as I continued reading.
“Do you know what my boneheaded Yankee husband did? He came to me, all proud, saying he ‘got my old skillet clean, you know, the one with all the crap on it.’ ”
Julie Ann said she got a little dizzy at this point.
“You mean my cast-iron skillet? The one I got for our shower? That one?”
Her duh-hubby just grinned, stupid and proud. “That’s the one! It took more than an hour, but I got it clean!”
He had assaulted her skillet with a Chore Boy scrubbing pad, stripping off nearly ten years of perfect seasoning.
Julie Ann began to cry, the great heaving sobs of a Southern woman who has married an ignoramus. He brightened and offered to buy her a new skillet.
And that sums up how Southerners view life and love, y’all. New is not better. Shiny is overrated. These are truths we hold dear in the South, where we embrace imperfection for the gift that it is. Y’all can say “amen” now.
Here’s a recipe that I’ve made in my own lovingly seasoned cast-iron skillet, which I keep in the oven 365 days a year, where Duh will never find it.
Sure, you could catch your own crabs down at the dock with some string and a chicken neck or two, but it’s OK to cheat and buy it at the fish house. Serve this with shredded slaw and hush puppies. The recipe comes from actor Robert Duvall, who bragged about them on Oprah one day many years ago, and I’ve been making them ever since. When he came to film Rambling Rose in our town, I got to interview him for the newspaper. Nice guy, fabulous crabcakes . . .
ROBERT DUVALL’S MAMA’S CRABCAKES
1 pound backfin crabmeat
1 tablespoon mayonnaise (Duke’s, if possible)
2 eggs, lightly beaten
½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning Page 2
