it's that time of year when, as the pink buds from the trees impossibly bright, and we've left behind that first harbinger of spring in the dark wet bark on an early march morning, i find myself missing the deck at 5084 pinehurst and its daily-rainrinsed white chairs that stick to your skin from the heat and my french press and fresh from the ice box lemon pound cake and nana's audible tirades falling out of the breakfast room window to me and my book, sitting in the sun, snowy ending in the drive, the black snake below, and the lizards hanging out by feet.
this is when it's important to pick up celia rivenbark, author of one of my favorite books ("we're just like you only prettier") and the newer "bless your heart, tramp."
it, plus an email from rosemary that just said (no lie) "i know this great teahouse just off 280" - yeah, we're going out to tea, off the highway. at least i'ts not the interstate. could always be worse. plus, 280 is my idea of home.
this just about sums up everything i know to be true in this world (thank you mama, libby, jimdaddy, nana, and aunt linda, our favorite second-southerner):
liddy dole doesn't snort - celia rivenbark
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 thta, on behalf of all southern chickhood, i believe that the reporter who asked that question should have his mouth washed out with camay. [if you don't know what camay is, you might as well stop reading here. david corey will remember countless trips to brunos and publix to buy it
en masse every single time we drove back down south. and the time in knoxville we had to try three different markets to find it, the only soap worth using. this was, of course, no silly romp through the highway that made my soap loyalities seem suspect if not a bit supercilious, but rather a life-affirming absolute. there is no other way to clean. period. and it works on everything. just ask mama.]
it's notthe cocaine part that bothers me, rather it's the notion that a southern woman would be cpaable 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 lines of cocaine off a tattered copy of who's next while her pre-bob boyfriend strummed a sitar in the corner. nope. elisabeth 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 m ortally offended that a 'southeren' woman of mrs. dole's obviuos 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 foolwishness 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, elisabeth dole has surely 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 do soie pumps. why, she'd sooner snort.
through all her years of living in washington, elizabeth dole has mained 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 fuschia st. john's knit running a cabinet meeting, finding this, in the words of orrin hatch, 'hot!hot!hot!'
now, i do confess that whlie 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 hasan't used drugs in twenty-five years, or roughly the average of 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 told you, you don't know where those hands have been.
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