Month: August 2013

The Mississippi Crafts Center is almost a required stop in Jackson (actually Ridgeland) for us — there’s everything from Stephanie Dwyer bottle trees:

pottery, baskets, glass:

and my porch needs this galvanized chandelier:

—
Lots of fun places to shop in Jackson, and another is Old House Depot.  Ooooh look at the coke crates they have!!  I wish I had seen the Barq’s, Grapico, red RC, and Orange Crush crates on our last visit (though I have a bunch and use them, I was lucky and got ours at an estate sale for about $3/ea!):

At Parlor Market in downtown Jackson, I had the *delicious* fried catfish tacos with comeback slaw.  They had a promotion with Foursquare for checking in: a free house cocktail, which happens to be their ‘front porch’:

…which the server explained was their in-house sweet tea vodka (I just figured they were going to use Firefly, but this is perfect) with lemon/mint served in a mason jar.  Terrific.  And why are we not making our own sweet tea vodka at home, I’m now wondering…totally going to figure that out: steep cold-water tea bags in vodka, or make some ratio of sweet tea to vodka and let it marry for a few days?  Delicious experimentation awaits.

—
Parlor Market features some of the farms they work with on their website.  One is Two Run Farm in Vaughn, Mississippi.  They seem to cater mostly to established restaurants here and in New Orleans, but they also make their items available to the public via Good Eggs, which operates in the Bay Area and New Orleans.  Good Eggs picks purveyors based on a set of principles, and people who wish to buy make an account and either pick up or have their choices delivered to their home.  You shop with the farmers on the website, so there are no surprises.

Wow at these producers you can do business with directly.  Yes, yes, yes.

Earlier this summer when we were going through Kosciusko, we just happened to see this sign:

I admire the goods things she’s done but never particularly been a fan of her shows — but since it was right there, we decided to go up and see.  Her church, Buffalo United Methodist, is in this building:

…and this is the original building where she first performed — that’s the sign outside, ‘Oprah Faced First Audience Here’:

Her home is long gone.  The sign reads:
“On January 29, 1954, Oprah Winfrey was born in a wood frame house located on this site.  She resided here as a child before moving to Milwaukee at age six.  Within walking distance is the church where she made her first appearance in an Easter recitation. 

She grew in the information/entertainment industry to become the world’s foremost TV talk show host with a daily audience in the millions.  At the same time she never forgot or overlooked her heritage and has been a regular supporter of folks back home as well as a model to much of America.”

While driving, I was thinking: ‘wow, if I were Oprah, I would buy some land and invite an organization like Rural Studio to make some sort of example of sustainable, affordable housing on the road that’s named in my honor’ and ‘I would totally buy some lots and develop some sort of community school’ and worlds of other ideas — I could go on forever — to make some mecca of goodness and happiness and improvement and togetherness (I’m a Myers-Briggs iNFj and this sooo explains me).  Not taking away all the worlds of other wonderful things she does…

(above: a neighbor’s bottle tree, on Oprah Winfrey Road)

One idea: because people around the world are drawn to her, why not take a page from Tupelo and arrange an Oprah Winfrey birthplace/museum attraction?  Elvis lived in Tupelo until the age of 13, and the city has embraced their connection with a museum, chapel, his homeplace, church, fountain, statue, a driving tour, and more.  With all the people worldwide who admire Oprah and her work, this could really be huge.  Kosy, you can do this.

(above: ‘Snake Charmers’ by Fred Webster)

Last year, I was contacted by a reality show production company who wanted my help because they were working on a show about serpent handlers.  I’m going to be careful here because I actually don’t know if they are still developing the show (I think the way a lot of these things go is that companies make shows and then sell them to the networks, and once the networks pick them up, it’s off to the races…and the bank I guess…some of the shows/ideas I’m sure die on the vine) so I don’t want to give up too much of the premise other than they promised me that the series would take on a very-very positive, non-judgmental tone.

National Geographic has announced that they will be airing a new series called ‘Snake Salvation‘ on September 10 featuring Andrew Hamblin of Tabernacle Church of G-d in LaFollette, Tenn., and Jamie Coots of Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name church of Middlesboro, Ky.  It will be interesting to see what that faith community thinks of the show — and how scripted or documentary-style it will be.  Since this is a NatGeo production, I’m hoping for the best…and if you’re thinking that to be more true to the adherents of that faith, they should have called it ‘Serpent Salvation’…agreed.

—
Highly recommend if you’re interested in reading more about this topic: Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington, who used to live in B’ham and went up the mountain to research for his NYT assignment…  Others: They Shall Take Up Serpents, and Them That Believe: the Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent-Handling Tradition.

Even Tell Me by NYT best-selling author Lisa Jackson — published this summer — has serpent handling characters.  Wonder how that goes…

In Natchez:

If you don’t text or email, then:

In rural Mississippi, between Utica and Jackson