Flying back down South for a weekend wedding… The invitation reads:
Five o’clock at Brierfield Farm
Little River Road
Brierfield, Alabama
Meander to the barn afterward for the reception
Dinner the previous night is at the Birmingham Country Club. Sunday is a polo match. This all feels very horsey, like I’m going to run across Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles and Wills of Wales somewhere in the church pews. I take back what I said about the South being a bastardized version of 18th century Gallic society. Maybe we Southerners are just trying to capture a little piece of England, the Mother Country, that place we originally came from. No wonder I try to create a little piece of Alabama up here in the Big Apple. It’s a survival skill of some sort; I convince myself that I’m back home, but the best version of “home”—a home with tolerance, poetry readings, Barney’s, diversity, the Film Forum, chaos, Cipriani’s, skyscrapers, roof-top gardens, symphony in the Park, a chance to reinvent myself.
Of course, what I really want, is to share this new home of mine with someone I love. Southern Boy, where are you?
I am a Southerner in the City, an aging debutante, a small town girl cursed with big city aspirations. My grandfather says that I’m at the cusp of feminine failure—I’m as old as a bottle of prime Tennessee whiskey (aged 25 years) and still single. I need to “get on home” and find a nice Southern boy—a doctor, maybe an insurance salesman. At this, I dig in my heels and set out to date every inappropriate man in Manhattan…
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