DOUBLE NAUGHT 7 DIGEST

Talking 'Walking Dead' With Artist Tony Moore, aka 'Count Dorkula'

2010-10-25T19:23:00.000-07:00

When you see the name Tony Moore roll by in the credits for "The Walking Dead" on AMC this Sunday night (and you know you want to watch zombies on Halloween!), that below-ground rumbling you'll hear is his granddaddy - my father - doing handstands in the grave. Tony, a kick-butt artist, co-created "The Walking Dead" with writer Robert Kirkman when they were in their early 20s and just a few years and much blood and guts later, the zombies they brought to the pages of comics is a big old cable show directed by Frank Darabon t("The Shawshank Redemption") and co-produced by Gale Hurd of "Terminator" fame. Yeah, deal with it, I'm bragging 'cause that's what childless-by-choice aunts do to bore everyone who ever tortured them with pictures of their kids playing T-ball or princess.

Some background now that you're mired in this edition of Britt's Kentucky Roots: Tony, who lives in Aurora, Ind. (near Cincinnati, Ohio), with his wife and baby, is the oldest son of my older sister, Linda. He was born in Lexington, Ky., and raised in Cynthiana, Ky. - for fans of the original "Walking Dead" story, that's where Rick Grimes, the show's lead character, was a police officer before zombies ensued. Anyhoo, Cynthiana didn't make it into the AMC show - Rick's now from a small town outside Atlanta. But while I'm sorry about that because I wrote a book about Cynthiana last year and the shameless self-promoter in me wanted "Dead" fans to be so enamored of the place they'd pay $20 to read a book that has nothing to do with the undead, I'm thrilled for my nephew, who was sculpting inch-high clay Draculas when other kids were drawing crap even their parents wouldn't hang on a frig.

Speaking of parents: Pipe down, Daddy. We get it.

Still with me? I talked with Tony just before he flew to L.A. for the premiere of "The Walking Dead." Dig it:

You've seen the first couple of episodes. How true are they to your original vision for the comic - anything you particularly loved, hated or could have done without?
It's pretty uncanny how true to the comics the first couple of episodes are, especially visually. There are a few new characters and a couple of deeper explorations of situations that veer off the comics' path a bit, but overall, it's really close. Fans who are intimately familiar with the book are going to find all the things they loved and were looking for, but there will be enough new things twisting and turning in the mix that they'll still be thoroughly engaged. There were a few exchanges and musical bits I wasn't in love with, but overall, I thought it was really, really strong. A worthy addition to the other great programs on AMC, to say the least. The zombie effects are by Greg Nicotero and KNB EFX, who are the name of the game when it comes to this stuff. On that front, it's got some top-notch movie quality stuff going on, and doesn't shy away from anything ... and I mean anything.

Along those lines, what about the casting? Good stuff?
Yeah, I was really surprised. Both visually and acting-wise, these guys do a great job bringing the characters to life. A few of the guys look like they walked right off my drafting table. It's really pretty surreal.

You and Robert Kirkman teamed up as friends in junior high. Tell us a little about your early projects together, how "The Walking Dead" came to life and what you expected from it.
Yeah, Kirkman and I met in seventh-grade history class, and being the biggest two comics nerds and budding artists in our class, we hit it off pretty quickly. Fast forward to my freshman year of college, and we were collaborating on our first self-published venture, "Battle Pope," which we put out through our own company, Funk-O-Tron. From there, we climbed on board with Image to do a book called "Brit," which we followed with "The Walking Dead." Honestly, after years of flying under the radar, I expected more of the same. At the time, horror was a genre pretty much proven to be commercially nonviable. A few books were starting to pry that door open, and Hollywood was about to burst with a deluge of zombie flicks. We were really lucky, in the right place at the right time. I couldn't believe how it caught like wildfire. Probably couldn't do it again if we tried ... which we both have.

So this is what came from it: a show on AMC, with your name in the credits. Damn. Has to feel good.
Oh, you better believe it. I got goosebumps seeing it.

Are these characters still important to you?
The ones from the first few issues of the books, I am definitely still partial to. Any time you bring a character to life on a page for the first time, they kind of become your babies, even the marginal ones.

What the heck is it about zombies? Why do people care so much about those flesh-feastin', noggin-noshin' creatures?
I don't know, exactly, but I think part of it is because they're so completely unromantic. You can't really "sex up" a zombie. I mean Trash from "Return of the Living Dead," and Julie from "Return of the Living Dead III" managed to be pretty crush-worthy, but overall, when you turn, you don't get mystical powers or anything like werewolves or vampires, you just become a shambling, mindless, rotting, eating machine. And even if you survive their attacks and die from old age, you'll still get up and join their ranks when you go. And like birds, they're not so scary one at a time, but in a swarm, they can be pretty terrifying. The movies tend to showcase some great themes, too, most notably, Survivalism, Man's Inhumanity Toward Man, and Runaway Consumerism. You can couch a really poignant story in these horrible and gory situations, which is doubly fun.

Are you familiar with the song "Timothy," the first pop hit about cannibals? Joe and the singer ate Timothy, right?
I don't know that song. I'll have to look it up. Do you know why cannibals hate clowns? Because they taste funny.

Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull is the father-in-law of Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick Grimes, and was on the "Walking Dead" set. "Bungle in the Jungle" is on my Top 10 list of Worst Songs Ever. Just thought I'd throw that in, in case you're ever hanging with Mr. Anderson and need an ice-breaker.
It is a real stinker, for sure. On my Top 10 Worst as well. That'd make a fine how-do-you-do, wouldn't it? Then he'd unsheath his flute and kabong me like Quick Draw McGraw.

Your favorite all-time zombie stories, in literature and film?
I haven't read much zombie stuff outside of comics, so I couldn't say. I love those old EC Comics spurned lover/crossed business partner stories. They always involve a murder and a haunting return of the victim to exact their revenge. There's a comfort in the formula, and the EC art stable was always filled with top notch guys. Modern comics, I enjoy the lighthearted stuff Eric Powell does in "The Goon," and Bob Fingerman's been doing some great stuff, from "Zombie World: Winter's Dregs" to "Recess Pieces."

As for movies, there are a lot of gems, but I'd say my favorites are Romero's original dead trilogy ("Night of the Living Dead," " Dawn of the Dead," and "Day of the Dead") and Lucio Fulci's "Zombie." Nowadays, I think the bar has been set by "Shaun of the Dead." It seems every new flick since claims it's the next "Shaun," but in my opinion, they've all fallen shy of the mark. It's a perfectly well-informed spoof but somehow also manages to be a really great zombie movie in the process.

Did you love Halloween as a kid? What was your favorite costume?
I live for Halloween. I always have. I was really partial to my Dracula getup as a kid. I think I must've done that one for at least five years in a row. I thought I was a regular Bela Lugosi. Looking back, my white high-tops made me look more like Count Dorkula, especially when I was running around wearing a Dracula cape in the middle of spring.

Would you let your little girl hang out with little boys who were like you were at, say, 12?
Sure! I was a good kid! Now when she gets to like 13 or 14, I'm going to lock her in her room like Rapunzel. Our life will become that song, "Wolverton Mountain."

If you'll be watching "The Walking Dead" live, pun intended, on Halloween this year, what will you be wearing?
My wife and I will be Seigfried and Roy, and the baby will be in a white tiger costume. I, of course, will be the mangled Roy.

What are you working on now when you're not being adored by the zombie-loving undead masses?
Well, I just finished a fun run on "Punisher," where we turned the vigilante into a stitched-up monster we titled FrankenCastle, which is a play on his name, Frank Castle. We got to romp around through Marvel's rich monster history, from Jack Kirby's pre-Marvel creations, to the gonzo horror of the '70s by guys like Steve Gerber and Marv Wolfman. Also, I'm working on the final bits of the sci-fi series "Fear Agent," which I co-created several years ago with my frequent partner in crime, Rick Remender. It's a genre-bending space opera about an alcoholic ex-hero, playing off the great campy aesthetics of '50s sci-fi from EC Comics and stuff like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. We really focus on ridiculous alien adventure over hard science hows and whys, which is a lot of fun for us. I'll be sad to see it go.

What's the first thing you want to buy with your "The Walking Dead" money?
Mmmm, maybe an AR-15 to play with, or a hot tub for the house? I'm assuming you mean purely celebratory purchases, because nobody wants to hear about mortgage payments, baby clothes, and back taxes. In actuality, it'll probably be an old beater of a pickup truck. We need a good utility vehicle/ second car around here.

Is Britt Kennerly just about the best aunt a creepy little artist boy ever had?
She's all right, I guess. I definitely could do worse.

NEWS FLASH: 'Timothy' Still Missing, but Chilean Miner Confirms No Cannibalism In His Neck of the Woods!

2010-10-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

Now that those buried miners are all safely out of that hole in Chile and their "pact of silence" is starting to crack and I feel froggy enough to poke fun at them because Miner No. 2 brought up cannibalism first in an interview with the Daily Mail, let's jump into the Wayback Machine and dig into "that" song ... you know ... 1971's "Timothy," by the Buoys, the only catchy song - perhaps the ONLY song - about cannibalism that ever charted.

It was written by Rupert Holmes, who had previously co-written and sang a ditty called "Jennifer Tomkins," about a you-know-what-outta-luck girl who was born on a Sunday and her daddy left on Monday and her mother died when Jenny was 7 and Jenny went to work at 11. Later, Holmes penned and warbled "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)," a dirty-dog deed for which he should have been shredded by marauding piranhas.

ANYhoo, I remember sitting in my bedroom on my purple velvet bedspread as an angst-addled teen, this tune about three trapped miners blaring through a poorly wired earphone as I scrawled lyrics in my notebook - yes, decades before I could just Google "Timothy, lyrics." Later, I shouted to my befuddled grandmother:

" ... Hungry as hell no food to eat
And Joe said that he would sell his soul
For just a piece of meat
Water enough to drink for two
And Joe said to me, "I'll take a swig
And then there's some for you."

Then, or at least the way I heard it and sang it just to see the fear on my grandma's face, Joe started looking at Timothy like he was the last Lit'l Smokie at a frat party.

And though we're never given a clue as to whether this tasty trio was down in that mine for two days or six months, everything went all downhill and Donner Party in a hurry from there. I don't want to give the story away if you've never heard or don't remember "Timothy," but the grammatically challenged singer, who woke up with a full stomach shouting, "God, why don't I know?" while nobody ever got around to finding Timothy, was lying through his muscle-masticatin', Timothy-tendon-tearin', flossin'-with-femurs teeth.

Jennifer Tomkins, if you care, grew up to be quite a lady, but then she met Tony, whose background was shady. As for the "Pina Colada" guy, he pissed me off from the start by comparing his boredom with his "lady" to "a worn-out recording of a favorite song" and then taking out a personal ad, only to get stuck with that lady again and finding out they didn't know a damn thing about each other before, but now, over pina coladas, it's all gonna be OK.

Yeah. Bet that's what Joe told Timothy, too.

Shootin' the breeze

2010-09-24T11:14:00.001-07:00

Air conditioning was invented in 1911 by a very hot man named Willis Carrier. My parents didn't tell us kids about that invention as we grew up, probably because they knew we'd demand a piece of Mr. Carrier's action.

And they continued to let us think air came only from windows when they built a new house in 1966, 55 years after Mr. Carrier decided enough was enough and by all that was good and holy, he would sweat no longer.

It was a four-bedroom house, inhabited by six sweaty people who, by the end of a sultry Kentucky summer, could not speak to each other without screaming, at the end of most every sentence, "I'm SORRY! But I'm so HOT!"

We didn't perspire. That's what rich people do, right before they take off for cooler climes, "climes" being a word I didn't learn until my teens because I was busy trying to make friends whose parents would pop for air conditioning. Perspire? That's what quasi-athletic people do, the kind of people who pay money to go to saunas and come out saying, "Wow. I really worked up a sweat."

No, on White Oak Pike we leaked like sieves. We poured. Sweat rolled off us by the bucketload in that house of heat-induced horrors, pooling in our undies as we sat around the TV or played Scrabble, swilling 16-ounce Cokes from glass bottles.

The only relief was in the basement, where one could breathe, if one didn't mind sleeping on a couch that mildewed years before Willis Carrier invented cold air and his siblings all became hookers in hotels where one could pay to be fanned.

We children didn't know about such high-falutin' stuff as the heat index. We just knew we were stinkin' hot, and that when you sit on a vinyl chair when you're that hot, the backs of your sweaty little legs make great, rude sounds.

At bedtime, it got worse. It got ugly. It got me to thinking, when I was about 11, that my parents couldn't possibly be my parents because no one who gave birth to a such a good little girl could sit back and sing "Cry Me a River" while that little girl's head melted.

Anyhoo, because they owned the joint, I guess, my mom and dad got the best breeze in the house, from an appliance fan which blasted out frigid air. My grandma and brother got mildly effective box fans for their rooms. My sister and I got a rattly, rusty-bladed old fan attached to a shaky pole, one I'm pretty sure Willis Carrier used to impale his parents when they tossed him a funeral-home fan and told him to get over it.

"I'm dying in here," I'd call out, night after night. "Seriously. This time I mean it. I'm a goner. Goodbye."

"Don't die until morning," shouted my mother, who in my head was eating truffles and wearing flannel jammies because it was 47 degrees in her room. "And make up the bed first."

"If she's dead, I want her fan," my brother yelled.

"ZZZZZZ," my father answered from beneath his ice-encrusted blankets. "ZZZZZZ."

My grandmother, too, snoozed on. She was born before Willis Carrier invented air conditioning. What did that old woman care?

Since leaving my old Kentucky home faster than you can say "Arrid Extra Dry for me, please," I have lived in several houses, most of which had air conditioning. I live in Florida now, enjoying ocean breezes and eating hot food, without crying, in the comfort of my dining room. I also lived for several years in Phoenix, where we were hot, but where the humidity is low and even dog houses have air conditioning.

Once, I called a real estate agent about an interesting ad.

"Does it have air conditioning?" I asked.

"No, it doesn't," she said. "But it has lots of windows."

"Will I have to share the fan with my sister?" I asked.

Years after we kids moved out of the family home and my parents weren't saddled with comic book and dentist and new-shoe bills, the folks had central air installed.

And 40 years after I threw my sister across the room for hogging the best dusty gusts from our fan, my mother is still trying to make up to us for our scorching childhood.

When I visit, if it's warmer than 70 degrees, she turns the air down to arctic.

The house isn't quite the same, without the sound of rattling fans and my father's ZZZZZs and my brother's rude-leg noises on vinyl chairs.

Yet, it's comforting to go home.

And, like always, my mother can't sleep without calling out from her room.

"Are you cold enough?" she asks. "Are you OK?"

"I can't feel my face," I answer, fumbling for a blanket and wondering what it will be like in the great and cool beyond, where I plan to kiss Mr. Willis Carrier full on the lips.

"I can't feel my legs. I'm a goner. Goodbye."

Family, Yamily

2010-06-19T21:11:00.000-07:00

I don't like yams. Never did. To my way of thinking, if you have to cover something with marshmallows to get people to ooh and aah over them once a year, something other than the pork isn't kosher. But come Thanksgiving, you gotta drag out those orange mutants, daub brown sugar on them and choke 'em down.

My dad could cook them just right -- boil them till the skin sorta slid off, then dress 'em up with brown sugar uand Kraft mini-mallows and slap them on the table. Thanksgiving of 1994, he gave me his yam secrets over the phone from Kentucky.

"Can't cook yams? What the hell's wrong with you?" he asked, before 10 minutes of tater talk. I boiled those babies and served them to my mother-in-law, a yam-snarfer from way back. That night, my dad called me in Arizona and said, "We do, too," when I said, "I love you." He asked about the yams. I told him I still hated those suckers.

A week before Christmas that year, he passed away. God, my daddy would never have died just before a holiday if he could have helped it. What the hell do I do when the brown sugar burns? Why the hell did I cry as I searched three stores for mini-marshmallows? Was my father a star in the sky above the interstate in Phoenix that night, shining on my Tercel and howling over my kitchen incompetence? Daddy, yams, racks full of big, jet-puffed pillows -- so many questions. Never, it turned out, enough time to ask all of them.

In The Sweet By and By, Bring Squirting Sunflowers

2010-05-30T15:46:00.000-07:00

In a family, if we're lucky, everyone has at least one special role for which they're appreciated. I am my family's trivia master and clown, the one who points out the dark and light humor in most every situation and knows classic TV families' histories as well she knows her own. My younger brother, Mike, does free brake jobs on family members' cars and, now that our dad's dead, provides punishable-by-law, tasteless jokes at family functions.

My older sister, Linda, gave our parents their first grandchildren, saving me scads of money and, perhaps, a long stint in a padded room. And years ago, Linda took on the job of helping our mother place floral tributes in our family's cemetery plots on Decoration Day – funny, since it turns out she's the sibling most freaked about dying. It's not because she's oldest and likely to go first, I tell her, but because she's worried that once she's pushing up daisies, I'll place huge plastic sunflowers that squirt Pinot Grigio on her grave and shame her in front of generations of Harney teetotalers. I like the God's-gonna-get-ya look on her face when I tell her that, and the no-cremation speech I get when I tell her she'll have to find my poor little ashes before she can fling flowers at them.

Anyhoo, decorating 30 graves – those of her husband, our cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and our father – is not a job Linda takes lightly, though, unlike our maternal grandma, she does not start worrying about tributes for the deceased members of our family around Valentine's Day.

“Helen, do we have all the flowers yet?” Grandma asked our mother several times a week in the days leading up to Decoration Day. “Yes,” my mother replied, running from the room before Grandma, whose caterwauling version of “In the Sweet By and By” was neither sweet nor gone bye-bye soon enough, started “singing” and whipping out her list of whose grave needed what. I cannot imagine that happening to my sister, because she does not sing and as far as I can tell, has never made a list in her life.

But today, as Linda and our mother traveled from one country cemetery to another, it hit me: My sister fills one of the most important roles in any family - that of the person who walks the walk when it comes to a sense of family responsibility. No matter where she is a week before Decoration Day, Linda always finds her way to those dusty back roads and easily overlooked cemeteries to make sure those who've “gone home” are not forgotten, calling me from the truck to tell me where she is and how everything looks.

While I make jokes about how only our father would want a flying fish on his tombstone, to complement our mother's praying hands, Linda's there at Daddy's side, worrying about whether she and my mom “got to everyone” this year. I hope that when she and all those Harneys and Moores and assorted relatives meet on that beautiful shore – where Grandma's still screeching, I bet – they shower her with more roses than Secretariat got on Derby Day. She'll deserve that, at the very least, after my squirting-sunflower sendoff.

No, I Will Not Take $1 For That, You Dickering Dolt

2010-05-15T05:27:00.000-07:00

You were not at my yard sale last week. I watched for you, knowing you would want the things I have culled from my life, things that in some cases, I can't remember buying, needing, wanting or ever seeing. So today, I wound up carting the whole mess to a thrift store in need of donations. I am pretty sure I heard one worker snickering as one of his colleagues asked if I needed a receipt for my taxes. Right, mister. A woman in a 9-year-old Hyundai who's snatching one of the T-shirts from her donation as she hands it to you really needs a receipt for her taxes.

I am reminded of yard sales past in this piece:

I envisioned getting up early that Saturday morning, trucking my junk out to the yard and chatting with pleasant people who would scoop up my unwanted treasures and force money on me.

The way it turned out, it was Saturday. I did get up early. And except for a woman who muttered, "Whaddya got?" and dropped cigarette ashes on her chest as she pawed through freshly washed clothes, most of the people who stopped by were pleasant.

But the next time I say I want to have a yard sale, I hope someone binds me, gags me and stuffs me in a closet along with everything I didn't sell, including a perfectly good Bald-Headed Man Halloween disguise.

That's because in only four hours, I learned that many people should never go out in public, hagglers make me very tired -- and that in my case, anyway, one person's trash is often not only not a treasure, it's really and truly trash.

Sold by the yard

Planning a yard sale is fairly easy. Decide what's junk. Clean it. Place an ad, put price tags on stuff that is now not junk but eclectic collectibles and, after you can't sleep because you have to get up early, get up exhausted and drag everything outside.

Actually staging the event, and watching avid yard-salers, is a sociological hoedown, one that makes me want to lock 10 people with $4 each in a room full of used tools, furniture and mismatched dishes -- just to see what wackiness ensues.

At my sale, I had customers who offered $20 bills for 50-cent purchases. Dickerers (my daddy taught me that word. Isn't it great?) who wanted to haggle over $1 vintage platform shoes. A man, obviously a used-furniture dealer, who swooped in, tried to dicker (but I wouldn't), bought chairs and swooped out. People who live down the street and now, sadly, know way too much about my belongings and feel sorry for me.

Don't forget the looky-loos. I, for one, tend to take it personally when folks -- who, face it, are spending Saturday morning looking at other people's crap -- pull up to the curb in their cars, roll down the window, look at my things with a critical eye and drive off laughing.

And for the record, I hate everyone who showed up more than an hour before my sale was set to start and shot me dirty looks when I said, "You're out early today, aren't you?" How would you like it if you had a store in your house and I showed up two hours before opening time -- about the time you dragged your behind out of bed --and banged on your front door, yelling, "Are you almost ready?" as you put your pants on?

Stop, thief!

I was arranging things in the yard when my first time-challenged customer, a sweet-faced, elderly con artist, arrived in a late-model truck.

Granny wanted to dicker over a $3 decorative bowl. I am not ready to deal at 6:45 a.m. -- especially when I haven't finished my cappuccino and the dickerer is driving a vehicle nicer than mine. I agreed to take $2 because she was old and I am unflaggingly polite to a woman who might die on my porch, her head striking the $2 bird cage just before she expires on a moldy "Family Feud" game.

I turned my back for 10 seconds to get my money box, only to return and see the penny-pinchin' pilferer climbing into her truck, bowl in hand. I got my cash, though I felt a little guilty about shouting "HEY! DID YOU FORGET TO PAY ME?" at the top of my lungs as Clara the Klepto tried to make her getaway. Overall, the sale was a stinker. A dud. I've had better luck selling aluminum cans. But at least by the time the last gawkers turned up their noses at my eclectic pile o'junk, I had $103 in my cash box, a few less mounds of clothes in my closet -- and a message for my sticky-fingered pal:

You've got my bowl. I've got your license plate number. And next time, Granny, we're gonna rumble.

2010-05-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago, I wrote the following column for my then-67-year-old mom on Mother's Day. This morning, as most every day, we had a chat that ran the gamut from what's wrong with Republicans (we still haven't figured that one out) to why my garden won't grow to what we're reading and how big the rock she grew up under had to be to house her whole family. She loves David Letterman, Whoopi Goldberg, a good book, euchre, the outdoors, tearjerker movies and flowers. She doesn’t like whiners, indoor dogs, beer, the F-bomb or eye shadow. I have never called her "Helen." At 77, she tells me, it would be weird if I called her anything but "Mommy." "That's my name," she says with a smile. "Don't wear it out."

She makes the world's best chili and blackberry jam, encourages me to speak my mind and is the only person I know whose laughter really peals.

She taught me how to tell time, tie my shoes, use right-handed scissors on my left hand and later, how to change the oil in a 1969 Falcon.

She could work all day in a factory, come home, take a bath and entertain my friends and me as if she were a cross between Donna Reed and Paul Bunyan -- all before heading to the field to farm tobacco with my father.

I am not sure when I realized my mother was a flesh-and-blood woman, who along the way maybe had a dream or two that didn't involve her kids or husband, or her mother, who lived with us for 23 years.

To hear her tell it, you see, we children, and the grandchildren, are her dreams come true.

And I believe her, when I go home, and she runs out the door to stumble over her three crazy dogs and greet me with what I call the Mommy Smile. We hug. She swears she'll get rid of all of us one day. She doesn't, because she's, well, Mommy.

Life lessons

Before she became Mommy, my mother was a varsity cheerleader and valedictorian of the Class of 1950 at Renaker High School. In her senior photo, Helen -- that was her name then -- is a stunner with wavy brown hair and cheerful eyes. She is smiling, as she always does in my mind.

Instead of going to college, she married my father and had three children, with yours truly in the middle.

When I was 4, my brother was a blob in a bassinet, and my sister, five years my senior, was at school five days a week. So my mother, then 28, and I exercised to Jack LaLanne's TV show, read stories and had tea parties. And every day, not long after my sister got on the bus, I'd demand to play school.

Every hour or so, I'd ask my mom what Linda would be doing at that moment, and we'd do the same: Math. Spelling. Recess. "She's having a snack," my mom would say once a day.

I would carefully divide my candy into two pieces and ask my mother to put Linda's share in the refrigerator. She told me not to expect Linda to save half of her candy for me.

I am sitting here right now with a frosted honey bun. I am not saving any of it for anyone. My mother taught me well.

Friends forever

I'm not sure when my mother became my friend, because I can't remember when she wasn't.

Perhaps it was when we were baking cookies, and, so the story goes, I looked up and said, "You're a good mommy."

Perhaps it was when I was a 17-year-old senior, and she dropped me off on her way to work each day so that I could be on a school TV program. On special days, we stopped at a grocery store for breakfast and shared warm baked goods in the front seat of her station wagon, laughing at each other as we wiped cinnamon sugar off our chins and envisioned what might happen in the future. Perhaps it's then that we forged a bond that didn't shatter on the rare occasions that my actions broke her heart and my words cut it to ribbons.

Or, maybe it was when I watched her care for her mother as Grandma was dying.

Perhaps it doesn't matter, because when we do our best, it's not necessary, Mommy always tells me, to worry about things we cannot change.

And I believe her, when she comes running out of the house, smiling that Mommy Smile and swearing she'll get rid of everything and move to Florida.

Because we have no regrets.

And no time to worry about such nonsense anyway.

We Become Whole When Forgiveness Replaces Rage

2010-04-20T15:27:00.000-07:00

I covered the Timothy McVeigh execution from the yard of the penitentiary the night before and morning of his execution. On April 19, the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, I listened to coverage of his crimes -- the aftermath of the tragedy for victims' families and friends and for a city plunged into grief on that spring day. I cried for victims and their parents, some of whom I've interviewed. I cried for victims of senseless murders, senseless wars and their families around the world. I wrote this piece a couple of months after Tim McVeigh's execution, back in 2001. And, yes. I still cry every time I think of Bill McVeigh, a decent man who, wherever we stand on the death penalty, lost his son, too.

It was hard to think about Bill McVeigh on the day his son was executed.

It was excruciating to think about the Oklahoma City bomber's father over Father's Day weekend.

I hope he chose, as he did the day of his son's execution, to make it a quiet day with friends or family, perhaps working in the garden he reportedly takes pride in, away from the glare of media and an unforgiving world.

And I hope at some point he can begin to understand those who supported his son's death and those who didn't, those who lined up to hawk memorabilia carrying his son's name and those who claim they have no feelings one way or another on capital punishment.

A sign carried by a man across the road from the penitentiary the day before McVeigh died read, "Pray for Tim's dad on Father's Day. God forgive all of us."

God, I hope Bill McVeigh can do the same.

It must have been something in McVeigh's upbringing that caused him to snap, some said, those who had not met the older or younger McVeigh but are quick to spout junior-grade psychobabble.

Dirty for dirty, some said. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life and if we just tortured prisoners, as one pro-death penalty supporter proclaimed in Terre Haute, everything would be better.

But for all the inhumanity that surfaced from outsiders in the months and weeks and hours and moments before the first federal execution since 1963, glimmers of hope shone through, from those who have every right to rage at the world.

Bill McVeigh, father of perhaps the most-hated man on American soil, and Bud Welch, whose only daughter, Julie, died in the April 1995 blast orchestrated by Bill McVeigh's only son, continue to stay in touch, brought together by the most ungodly circumstances.

At their initial meeting, at Bill McVeigh's home, Bud Welch commented on how nice-looking Timothy McVeigh was in a photo displayed by the elder McVeigh.

Grace, in the midst of heartbreak. Forgiveness, in the face of unspeakable tragedy. Two fathers bound forever by the tragic intersection of their children's lives and now, even tighter by their children's deaths.

Or consider the story of Douglas Sloan, whom I met in the wee hours of Timothy McVeigh's execution day.

The Terre Haute man's son, Chad, was murdered on Jan. 22, 1997. Chad's hands were bound, and then he suffered 26 knife slashes and stab wounds, including seven stab wounds in the heart.

His murderers, Frank Dennis and Curtis Holsinger, are incarcerated at Michigan City -- both for life, without parole.

As he considers the fate some would have chosen for his son's murderers, Douglas Sloan's stooped posture stands in stark contrast to his soaring spirit.

"Would I be speaking today were it not for the murder of Chad? Where could I go and who would listen if I could not say that my son was murdered?" he asked death penalty foes gathered in Terre Haute.

"Without his death, all I would ever hear is, ‘If it happened to you, you would feel different.' It has happened to me, and I do not feel different -- the death penalty is wrong."

Almost three years after his son's death, Sloan's heart was giving out, and he had a pacemaker implanted in a body wracked by emotional damage. The terror, the helplessness, the grief? He did not let them win, he said.

"Imagine the damage I would have done to myself if I had harbored the hate and vengeance, rage and retribution necessary to advocate two executions," he said.

"The murderer does not have to die -- the hate and vengeance, rage and retribution have to die for the grief to subside and the healing to begin."

God forgive all of us. We can't seem to handle it ourselves.

I Do, I Do, I Do. Now Leave Me Alone!

2009-12-16T14:40:00.001-08:00

Menopause is really kind of cool, if you disregard the raging hissy, red-faced parts and concentrate on the depth of the emotions you can plumb in, oh, four minutes or less.

Marriage is really kind of cool, too, if you disregard the raging hissy, red-faced parts and concentrate on the depth of the emotions you can plumb in, oh, four minutes or less.

The parallels between these two poignant and panic-inducing stages of life came to me, along with a bad case of the “Oh craps,” as I helped my nephew, Tony, and his then-fiancée, Kara, write their wedding ceremony.

I don’t know if they asked me to pen their vows because I have been with Doug since Boy George was cool, or because I’m sappy but not sickeningly so, or because I’m a writer who’s a) cheap and b) can quote the hell out of a slew of dead great thinkers. I choose to believe they picked me because they know I love being married, that I like the person I am after more than two dozen years with this smart, kind, hot guy beside me, and because I know, since I have lived other lives, that anyone who says their marriage is perfect lies like a dog.

I used to read anniversary notices and wonder how one person could stay married to another person – hell, how anyone could do anything other than breathe and eat Reese Cups – for 25 or 40 or 50 years. Then I married Doug, the man who cooks for me, rides herd on our pets, sings to me and calls me baby (and it doesn't sound creepy). We swear we stay married so as not to screw up two other people's lives. Maybe that’s part of it. Maybe more than that, we’re still a team because it’s real and it’s raw and damn, we’re good together even in the throes of my assorted hissy histrionics.

If, for example, Doug misses one of my calls during the day, I have planned an elaborate, Viking-style funeral before he has time to retrieve my voice mail. In my head, my Dougster is sprawled at the bottom of the basement stairs a la murder-scene chalk-outline, looking like a cross between Jeri Blank’s frozen-faced dad in “Strangers with Candy” and a broken marionette. In less time than it takes to type “I Am An Ignorant Ass,” because that’s what my dad called people who borrowed trouble for themselves, I envision myself draped over my sweet baboo’s tube-entwined body in the hospital, stroking his face and swearing I’ll meet him at Rainbow Bridge, the place where dead pet friends wait for their owners.

Thirty seconds later, I’m on the phone with Doug, reminding him that I need to lose 17 pounds in the next three weeks and that he’s not helping by buying me truffles. And then I cry, because I want to curl up on Doug’s lap, press my head against his hair and smell the warm spot below his left ear and thank him for the chocolate. And then I cry some more, because I remember when we were both so cute it was silly.

So, called upon to write a wedding ceremony for cute people who don’t want any mention of blessed unions, something not pagan enough to make their grandmas faint dead away but spiritual enough to embrace their joy, I spring into estrogen-challenged action.

“It’s really as simple as this,” I tell the kids between sobs and a quick stop at “The Young and The Restless,” where I am going to live with Jack Abbott if Doug doesn’t make it.

“The two of you found each other, love each other and now, cannot imagine life without your best friend. You believe in marriage and its immortal possibilities.”

And I do, I do, I do believe. I really and truly, down to the tips of my come-you-know-what-me shoes I still love wearing, do. At its best, I’ve learned, marriage can, in one afternoon, be wilder and more exciting than living through Mr. Toad's Ride, a Category 5 hurricane and a Spielberg movie in one afternoon. At the worst, those who enter this oh-so-demanding venture with little concept of commitment or unselfishness are most often disillusioned and disappointed.

But Doug and I did it. We persevered. Somewhere between the breathless “I love you’s” and the words that wounded us to the core, between moving in together and my ruptured spleen that left us $20,000 in debt? That’s where we discovered the everyday miracles that sustain and enrich a relationship, the keen and abiding oneness that only two people whose lives intersect from the pillow to the kitchen to the grave can envision.

And in that very special place is where Doug and I figured out what our marriage means, and where we’ve defined and redefined our expectations. That’s where we’ve celebrated individual and shared successes, found pet names and inside jokes -- and the courage to say “I can” when saying “I can’t” would be perfectly understandable, too.

So I write about all that, my popsicle dripping onto the comforter in the dark: "You will find yourself thinking, whether you're walking the dog or spotting each other in the airport after days away from each other: "This is the person I believe in. This is my best friend. I do not live just for you, but I would die for you." Doug said that to me one time after we'd been married several years and I swear to God, my heart almost stopped.

But I tell them, too, that to think they will complete each other through marriage would be selling them, and the infinite possibilities of their marriage, very short indeed. That would imply they would not continue to grow, or that they were not strong, wonderful people before they shared these vows. And of course they were those people, and of course they will blossom, as will the strength of the promises they make in front of their weepy moms and one slightly tipsy aunt.

"That’s because the marriage of the spirit will take you to places you cannot imagine, and most of all, will always bring you home to each other," I write, watching Doug fall asleep and wondering if he knows that he looks like the love child of Bea Arthur and Eric Clapton.

"Everything will change, and grow, from here on out, and so will Kara and Tony Moore. Not because you say “I do” – but because for now and forever, the two of you can say with the assurance that loving marriages bring: “We want to. We choose to. We will.”

And then, because I need to suck down another pint of sorbet and find the painkiller I hid from myself one day when I wanted 27 of them, I call it a night. I have nothing else to tell these two, I mutter to myself, except that it’s not nice to call the other person an ignorant ass. And for God’s sake, who’ll feed the pets when Doug is taking a dirt nap?

Oral Fixation

2009-12-15T14:16:00.001-08:00

So I see Oral Roberts is dead at 91, only 23 years after he claimed that unless he received $4.5 million for scholarships at his med school by a certain date, God would "take him home in one year.” The P.T. Barnum fan in me giggled over Roberts' claim that God wasn't going to cure cancer until each & everyone out there sent him $240, even as I was angered at a man of "faith" who would use cancer as a fundraiser and threaten his own death - at the hands of his supposed Maker, no less - in the name of righteousness. And I was fascinated by the idea of a 900-foot vision of Jesus who allegedly told Roberts in '77 that the City of Faith Medical and Research Center should be built -- 27 years before a 62-foot-tall "Touchdown Jesus" stepped into the waters of the Solid Rock Church off I-75 north of Cincinnati. By the way, Oral's hospital went belly-up faster than an overfed goldfish in 1987, just a few months after Immoral Oral announced that he had raised more than God had told him to dig up. Talk about the Lord working in mysterious ways! This mystery was downright stupefying: Who on God's green Earth sent this man money to keep him from dying? And why, oh why, did they bother?

Not familiar with Oral's particular brand of religious madness and homophobia? Check out this old video, where Oral talks about "oriFICES" -- don't miss the long "I" --and organs and waste matter and the like. You'll never look at your mouth, nose or ear quite the same way again. And keep in mind, as Oral shared, "Everybody knows when sexual arousal reaches a certain point, the person goes insane." Crazy, man, crazy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61_rPgitFmc

Next Stop: Bologna Land, USA

2009-12-13T12:27:00.000-08:00

If he's willing to fix the bologna sandwiches and hang out with me when we reach retirement age, I think I have found the perfect golden-years job for my brother.

I'm confident Mike would make a dandy curator for my as-yet-unnamed Roadside Attraction, the one I plan to start at our childhood home unless our mother refuses to be ticket-taker.

The possibilities for something like a Genuine Kentucky Brick House came to me years ago when I saw an American Heritage magazine story listing memorable roadside attractions in the United States.

The writer's choices included Trees of Mystery in Klamath, Calif., Parrot Jungle in Miami and the Paper House near Boston, a house whose walls are made from 215 layers of newspaper and which is featured on roadsideamerica.com, a Web site full of strange stops across America.

Along with Rock City in Chattanooga, one of the few entries I had seen up close was Wall Drug in Wall, S.D., a huge store whose treasures include a fiberglass jackalope, a 6-foot-high rabbit on wheels and a mini Mount Rushmore with a sign stating, "Please Do Not Climb On Faces."

I'm sure if we were to market our childhood home well, Mike and I could add a stop in Central Kentucky to the peculiar lineup, given his ability to create something from nothing and my ability to talk to strangers for hours if cash is involved.

We've got a 2,000-square-foot home and a full basement stuffed with memorabilia, from my dead aunt's salt and pepper shakers to my grandmother's journals from the early 1900s, a six-pack of Billy Beer, tools of the trade from a 40-year-defunct shoe repair shop and more armless dolls than you can shake a stick at, provided YOU have arms.

And if that's not enough, our attraction-to-be is just 30 miles from a big, now-empty metal teepee near Williamstown, Ky., something odd enough for a mention on roadsideamerica.com, too.

NEXT STOP: BOLOGNA LAND

According to Wade Gutman at Grant County Chamber of Commerce, the teepee was the building the gas station attendant worked out of at Hillside Truck Stop, on Kentucky Highway 25 south of Covington.

The teepee, Gutman said, was constructed in the 1950s or earlier, probably to snare the interest and business of travelers like my dad, a man hard-pressed to pass up a place with luncheon meat, bread, a clean bathroom AND a teepee.

Until about 1967, my bologna-loving dad refused to take Interstate 75 from our house to Covington, shouting, as Mike and I turned green on the winding state road, "There's nothing to see on the interstate, for cryin' out loud! We're almost to the teepee!"

Given that background, I figured the one and only road trip I took with my family as an adult, through Florida, should include a stop in St. Augustine, at the Tragedy in U.S. History Museum.

The museum, now closed, featured the car in which actress Jayne Mansfield was supposedly riding when she died in a car crash -- a Buick, though crash photos show she died in a Cadillac -- Lee Harvey Oswald's bedroom furniture, and a photocopy of Elvis Presley's last will and testament.

Instead of treating everyone to roadside weirdness, however, my parents insisted on an afternoon at a historic fort.

On the plus side, Daddy drove on the interstate from Kentucky to Florida and back home, too.

And no one made me eat "lunch meat," which I have hated since 1962.

I didn't want to push my luck and demand to see the car in which Jayne Mansfield might, or might not, have eaten her last bologna sandwich.

HOMESPUN RICHES

A while back, I visited my mom, who hopes to stay in our family home until she leaves for the Big Roadside Attraction in the Sky.

We got up around 5:30 a.m., stepping outside to take in the misty morning air and the sounds of chirping birds.

"I love it here," she said.

I love it, too.

Throw in a replica of an almost-authentic death car, a couple of rocks shaped like scary jackalopes and Teddy Roosevelt's bespectacled mug, and we'll all come out winners.

And don't forget Mike, calling out: "For those of you who remember the days when a pound of bologna was less than a buck, the trolley to the old teepee leaves in 45 minutes. Just don't get any ideas about riding on the interstate. There's nothing to see on the interstate, folks! NOTHING!

"And for cryin' out loud! I beg you! Please do NOT climb on the faces!"

Who Is That? Where Were We? Aw, Snap!

2009-12-12T13:34:00.000-08:00

The upcoming onslaught of holiday photo-taking reminded me of a piece I penned after finding yet another box of undated photos. Ever find one of those boxes and swear you'll ID all the photos in your computer and bins and albums? Sure. You'll do it! Right after you get back from that boat cruise to the Isles of Langerhans.

Everyone who has ever said, "Oh, I wish I could go back and live the simple lives my ancestors enjoyed," please do me a favor.

Look at photos of your ancestors, especially pictures taken near the turn of the 20th century.

And then, as you wonder why people in those days looked as though they'd all been told Little Johnny had "the epizooty" or consumption or some other fatal illness, get back to me if you aren't glad you're here now, with your digital camera, scanner and super-digitalized-auto-non-pixilated everything.

I say this because I've recently been involved in an exhaustive effort to identify and catalog pictures I've taken over the years, and those handed down to me by relatives who didn't care to ID our scary, sullen-looking forefathers and foremothers.

I've seen the expressions on the faces of my husband's and my relatives, staring ahead morosely as if to say, "You'd look this dejected, too, if you were wearing a corset, having your photo taken took all day AND you knew that your life expectancy was up … oops! Tomorrow!"

And looking at their grim mugs, I know one thing for sure: Had I been born before 1900, I probably would have taken one peek at family photos and killed myself in hopes reincarnation worked.

FACES FROM THE GRAVE

For example, take -- I mean literally. Take them, please -- the pictures of my husband's great-great-grandparents, Eliza and W.W. Steed.

W.W., which stands, I think, for Weed-like Whiskers, appears to have indigestion from eating too much hoecake before enjoying a rousing after-dinner game of "Let's Forge a Trail to Somewhere."

And plump Eliza, who reminds me of a dark-haired, unhappy Quaker Oats man, looks like she's just been told that her new corset, with twice the power of the old one, has arrived by Pony Express.

I can't tell you how old the Steeds were in these shots, because apparently, before 1900, people who were 25 looked like someone who's 65 these days and people who were 50 weren't in pictures, because they were dead, or at least wished they were.

In the most morbidly fascinating entry in my collection, my maternal grandmother, great-grandmother, great-uncle and great-great grandmother are dressed in their finest in front of the old homestead, Little Ugly House in the Woods.

The Perkinses stand, arms hanging stiffly at their sides, about three feet away from each other, all sporting that "Little Johnny's 'bout dead" look.

My grandmother and great-uncle do not look like carefree children, to put it mildly. I think it's because they're afraid that once the photo shoot is done, they will have to kiss their grandma, Mary, who in the photo is dressed from her shawl-covered head to her toes in black and is seated sidesaddle on a horse.

Granny Mary, I've learned, didn't believe people of color had souls. That probably explains why she looks ready to gallop off to the strains of the bike-riding music in "Wizard of Oz," or to meet the Headless Horseman for a batch of whatever a man without a head and a woman without a heart eat.

I look at her pinched, angry face. And shudder. And thank my lucky ancestral stars I was born several generations after the original Wicked Witch.

JUST SHOOT ME

In reality, I realize folks in photos way back when had good reasons to look so tired, bored and old, things like hard lives, poor health habits, long trips to the outhouse and no cable TV.

And probably, because it took forever to set up a picture in the era when cameras were as big as a dinner table and "flash" meant smoky magnesium, people got surly as they waited to be photographed.

So relive "the good old days?" Look like THAT in photos? Uh -- not in this lifetime, thank you.

I just hope that before I meet Granny Mary and the gang, I can track down and destroy any unattractive photos of myself, including the Halloween shot where I'm wearing a black dress, black hat, black hose and a too-many-beers grin.

I'd hate to see myself, for eternity, propped up on a shelf next to Granny Mary, as some poor kid who got stuck with the family photos wonders aloud:

"Whoa! What was HER problem? And doesn't she remind you just a little of that old bat on the horse?"

No, I Did Not Run Away With Vanilla Ice

2009-12-12T08:22:00.001-08:00

I'm back - you really thought I'd started a blog and then gone the way of Vanilla Ice, didn't ya? After a career-imposed hiatus which threw my work off track (translation: The company I was interviewing with has a strict no-blogging-by-employees-policy but I turned them down). I have cleared the way for blogging every day and interviewed for a couple of gigs where my off-site writing is not only tolerated but encouraged! Beginning Dec. 12, 2009, check out Double Naught 7 Digest every day after 5 p.m. for updates on everything you never needed to know but surprisingly, care about anyway; celebrity news & views; and slices of life from the Tristate and beyond. My book, "Cynthiana," will be released by Arcadia Publishing on Monday, Dec. 14, and I'll be interviewed on ... drum roll ... WCYN radio in Cynthiana, Ky., that morning. On Saturday, Dec. 19, I'll host a book signing from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Cynthiana-Harrison County Museum.

Hope you'll check me out. This time, I'm here for the duration.

You Do Not Scare Me ... Much!!

2009-10-31T20:39:00.000-07:00

If you have ever lived in a city where I have resided, and your kiddies have gone trick-or-treating, perhaps we've met over a bucket of Kit Kats.

Yup, I'm the Elvira wannabe who shows up at the door in full-tilt Halloween regalia, a character I like to think of as the black-fishnetted love child of Morticia Addams and Billy Bob Thornton.

I'm the green one, or the one with plastic scars bulging from my face, the bloody-lipped wonder who once made a wee one cry, "Are those scars real? Take them OFFFFFFFF!"

And if your Smartie-snarfers came home with more and better candy than you expected, OK, that was me, too: I don't want to be thought of as the neighborhood bad-candy lady. My husband, who thinks generic candy lines the streets of hell, taught me that it's better to err on the side of sick as a dog and fill those sacks, pillowcases and little hands with premium goodies.

For several years, especially just after the Tylenol-tainting incident of the early 1980s and the anthrax scare of the early '00s, the thought of letting their kids paw through candy given by strangers scared some parents. I hate nuts who start that kind of crap, by the way.

But contrary to the notion that everything was perfectly perfect in the 1950s -- an era that spawned communist witch-hunts and Sen. Joe McCarthy and what's scarier than THAT -- and the 1960s, we had candy-tampering tales when I was a kid, too.

I'd bring home an apple and my mother, armed with the ability to peer straight through people and non-lead-based objects, would launch into action. She would cut the apple into 4,000 or so small pieces. Then, she'd hand the bowl of apple goo to my dad, who ate things like hog brains anyway, and let him have at it. I wasn't scared of anything or anybody after watching my father eat hog brains.

OK, anybody except Mr. George.

In my head, the Incredibly Scary Mr. George has become this hovering, smoky presence, sort of like the big, giant noggin of Oz in "The Wizard of Oz."

Remember the scene where Dorothy and the gang ran running from Oz's castle because Big Smoky Oz Head yelled at them? I spent a good part of my childhood running down Stone Avenue, away from Mr. George, who hated children, even those dressed as princesses, frogs, pirates or ghosts.

Mr. George, who lived next door to us, was the type who would grab a kickball that landed in his yard, hoist it over his head and shout something that sounded like "MuHAHAHAHAHA!" as he ran into the house and, we think, put the ball in a closet full of busted sports gear and mutilated Christmas elves.

On Halloween, I would sneak across the driveway to Mr. George's house and peek in the window, to see if he was killing his wife or letting the air out of our balls or involved in some other sick and wrong ritual.

If things appeared normal, I'd get my little brother, Mike, by the hand and lead him up to the front door, where Ma, Mr. George's wife, would give us candy and tell us how cute we were. Behind her, Mr. George stared us down from his chair, plotting how to knock us off our bikes and defile our toys.

I had to be brave for Mike, but to this day, every Oct. 31, I check over my shoulder periodically to make sure Mr. George's head isn't perched in the chair behind me, eyeing my stuff.

Halloween, it turns out, has lessons for us all.

Nothing is much more gross than watching a man eating food that once was in a hog's head.

Nothing with a raisin in it should be handed out as candy, because raisins are, and I can't stress this enough, NOT CANDY.

And for most kids, at least those with a healthy attitude and a great costume, a little dose of Halloween is not only not harmful, it offers a chance to dream. To dress up, chow down and, once in a while, run down the sidewalk, screaming and/or throwing up, past fairy princesses and Cookie Monsters and Tin Men and gangsters.

Or at least a scarry-cheeked Elvira, with the best candy on the block and a great ghost story about an old man who died, his wispy head missing, in a house full of basketballs and screaming elves.

MuHAHAHAHAHA. MuHA!

Holding Court at Fall Festivals

2009-10-18T14:29:00.000-07:00

For anyone who's been to Court Day in Mount Sterling, Ky., hope you can relate to this piece I penned a while back -- thought of it today as I tooled down U.S. 27 between Lexington and Cincinnati. For those who haven't been to this yearly festival, you're missing a sociological field day. For once and for all, I still hate sorghum.

Even though my life is pretty much a nonstop party, every fall I get the unshakable urge to hop in my car and go to some, any, kind of festival.

I need that annual fix, to watch people and ceramic geese wearing bonnets, to paw through genuine, collectible whatevers, a pesky clump of caramel off an apple stuck to my chin and my eye on a portable toilet parked far too close, for my taste, to things I might touch.

After a humid summer, I crave a big dose of autumn air, the kind one gets while watching a genuine imitation pioneer cane a chair, make apple butter or trade a good beagle for a side of beef.

But though Indiana tries its best, wherever I've traveled over the past 30 years, no festival has ever lived up to Court Day, which sounds like something people have to go to when they steal apple butter but is actually a fine event in Mount Sterling, Ky.

My family drove 40 miles to Court Day every year when I was a kid, mostly to look at hound dogs and glassware, ask people how much things cost and try to find the cheapest sorghum, a nasty, syrupy concoction made from grain that should have not wasted its time being sorghum but turned itself into beer instead.

A 200-plus-year-old festival held only on Monday years ago but so much darned fun that they stretched it into three days a few years back, Court Day rolls around the third weekend each October.

Because fun in my hometown has long centered largely on following fire trucks, my family usually started planning our trip to Court Day around July.

If you were good, you might get to buy a cool T-shirt or toy at Court Day. If you were bad, you might not get to go to Court Day. If you had wandered away from the family at Court Day last year, or whined in the car, you were threatened with being traded for sorghum at this year's Court Day.

The first order of operation at every Court Day was finding a parking spot, something which took most families 10 minutes but mine, several hours and a couple of vague threats about "never taking you anywhere again as long as you live."

If he had to march us 14 miles to avoid paying some poor slob $1 for a parking spot close to the action, my father would do it. I always assumed it was because he was too cheap to cough up the dollar. Now, I know it was because $1 went a long way toward a bucket o' sorghum (for those not brought up in the country, sorghum is darker and thicker than honey and, if you ask me, not fit for a $2 dog).

According to my relatives who use words like sopped, bread sopped (soaked) in sorghum is better than just about anything except University of Kentucky basketball and Democrats, and much better than former Kentucky Gov. Louie Nunn, who was stumping for office at the 1966 Court Day.

Nunn announced, as I tried to wiggle through the crowd and get away from him, that he was going to "lower taxes for your daddy, little girl." A budding diplomat, I told him my father did not like him.

Nunn looked at me as if he'd just swallowed a snootful of sorghum and laughed. My dad looked at me as if he'd just paid $10 to park and turned several shades of purple.

Turns out, if you make fun of Louie Nunn, you still get to go to Court Day, but you get a talking-to about "being nice, even if he is a Republican."

A few years ago, when I got a little uppity and decided searching for sorghum deals wasn't my cuppa, I stopped going to Court Day with my family.

Still, when fall leaves blow across my yard and it's cold enough for a sweater but not a coat, I remember what it felt like to be 10, with a dollar in my pocket and the world -- or at least, Mount Sterling -- spread out like a crazy quilt in front of me.

And I smile and jump in the car.

I called my sister just a few minutes ago, by the way, to ask whether she'd been to Court Day lately.

"You're writing about sorghum?" Linda said. "Man, that stuff is good with bread and butter."

Somehow, I knew she'd turn out to be the sopper of our generation. I just wonder if she's still up to a 14-mile hike for a free parking spot.

'Gratitude is the heart's memory' - French proverb

2009-09-29T14:15:00.000-07:00

My earliest recollection of Godfrey rolls silently in my head, a black-and-white film short with confetti and clown cars and a ridiculously happy ending I probably embellished years ago but swear to anyway.

I am 3 and he is 29 and we have been to the circus in Lexington, sharing ice cream and waving to horses straight out of a Seurat painting. It begins to rain as we dash to the car. Godfrey scoops me up and tucks me inside his coat, my head beneath his chin and his arms around me. I am warm and safe, and he is the best uncle in the world.

Godfrey, I think, would want me to tell that story while I still remember it – and to share how dementia is, memory by memory, erasing the joy from the heart and mind of a decent, loving man.

I know he would support my mission to tell anyone with a dime to spare that with well-funded research, a cure for Alzheimer’s disease is not only possible but probable. The Alzheimer’s Association reports that 5.3 million Americans are living with this progressive, fatal brain disease; that direct and indirect costs of Alzheimer’s and other dementias to Medicare, Medicaid and businesses total about $148 billion a year. By 2050, it’s estimated, between 11 and 16 million Americans could have a disease that physically, emotionally and financially devastates victims and families. At some point between the cradle and the grave, almost everyone loves an “Uncle Godfrey,” a person whose memories are a vital part of a family’s framework. We owe it to them and to ourselves to believe in, reach for, walk for, demand health care reform legislation that increases awareness, boosts research funding and leads to a cure.

A retired postal worker, Godfrey no longer remembers how many miles he walked daily on his route and cannot drive his beloved 1955 International pickup. After he gave up his home and keys and moved to a nursing home, my sister and I made several trips to drive him and my mother by the “old home place” where they grew up in the 1930s. My mother cried after each outing. We could take her big brother for a ride. We could not truly bring him home.

In our old world, when I traveled back to Kentucky from life as a reporter in Arizona and Indiana and Florida, Godfrey was always the first person I called. We talked about family and the famous folks I'd met, and he puzzled over how I could interview strangers, from Jimmy Carter and movie stars to cancer and AIDS patients. We sat at a picnic table on my parents’ back porch, listening to frogs croak as we dug into bowls of vanilla ice cream mixed with freezer-burned scoops of butter pecan my mother saved for company. Godfrey stared at the horizon and guessed what the weather would be like for my trip home, and every 70 seconds, another person developed Alzheimer’s.

In our new world, Godfrey is both the stranger and the reporter, asking question after question and repeating them ten minutes later. I could swear he remembers our decades-long bond as he reaches for a bingo disc and shrugs at me as a number he doesn’t have is called. Then, for the second time, he asks why I’m there to see him. His nervous laughter and those tears plopping onto his plaid shirt tell me he isn’t sure why I matter, but maybe, just maybe, I am someone mighty special who needs a big hug.

We were losing my maternal grandmother to dementia months before she passed in 1983. The day her body left us, too, Godfrey picked me up at a bus station in Lexington. As he drove in the dark, his cheeks wet with tears I could see by the glow of other cars’ headlights, he shared his regrets, dreams and cherished memories. I had never seen him cry. I squished my face against the fogged-up passenger window and willed that godawful ride to be over, wondering what it would be like to be old and weepy and have dead parents.

Twenty-three years later, on my 50th birthday, I was at the wheel, steering us along the same road to a restaurant where family and friends were waiting. Godfrey asked, several times, “Why are the roads so wide now?”

“I imagine it’s so people can travel in opposite directions at the same time,” I said, remembering his shiny cheeks and ice-cream-chilly nights when our brains worked fine and my daddy wasn’t in a cemetery.

Later, that wide road in front of us on the way home, Godfrey said he was cold. I handed him his heavy shirt. He stared into the dark and told me, for the first time, “I don’t remember everything like I used to.”

I asked if he remembered me, and his children and grandchildren and sister. He said yes. I told him if there was anything else he needed to know, ask and we’d tell him. “That’s good,” he said in a please-have-the-answers voice I never saw coming. “I wonder what the weather will be like tomorrow.”

“You are still the best uncle in the world,” I whispered to the man who made horses dance just for me and drove the rain away.

“Are you warm enough? Yes, I can get us home from here. It is a really wide road, isn’t it?”

"Naught Naught Seven has got the world by the tail! "

2009-09-23T17:57:00.000-07:00

If my mother hadn't ripped a new palette hole in a Famous Artist Person from the Famous Artists School back in the '60s, I might be a Famous Fashion Designer instead of a journalist today.

See, after years of doodling, I applied at age 8 to what we almost-alums call FAS, only to have my mother snatch the phone from me when the call came -- the call alerting my family to the news that I had drawn a perfect dog head and had been accepted to what I'm sure would have been a challenge- and pirate-face-filled program. My mom, a "Kilroy Was Here"-style artist who was obviously jealous of my ability to sketch something other than a big nose and clubby hands hanging over a fence, relayed the bulletin that I was an 8-year-old without enough money for a box of Twinkies, much less $300 payable in 24 easy, monthly installments.

Taking a cue from Jethro Bodine of "The Beverly Hillbillies," who segued smartly from plans to be a brain surgeon to a stint as a double naught spy, I fell back on the only trick I had left in my bookbag - writing. I pulled out "Sharing and Caring," a book of poetry I wrote at 7, and spent the next few weeks honing a piece about a dapple apple that took a napple. In college, I learned a few more words and was told I'd never make it in TV, following that up with several years of writing for independent publications, many cans of soup and a too-long turn as a person who carried big trays on her arm while wearing a Holly Hobbie-style dress. In 1989, I became a newspaper reporter. Twenty years and 5,000 newspaper and magazine articles later, I know that:

Writing is a lot more fun than carrying food to strangers and watching them eat, which I did for many years before much-stranger people started paying me decent money to string nouns and verbs together.
Folks are folks are folks, and most everyone - even if they swear they don't - has a good story to tell. Everyone I write about changes my day and my life. In 1994, Waylon Jennings told me that he beat a cocaine habit, had earned his GED in his 50s and was making plans to help establish a children's hospital in Fresno, Calif. I loved spending time with that sexy, swaggering guy, but I had just as much fun with a man who collected feed sacks and was traveling the country in search of a special cloth bag from the 1800s. Maxine Hayes of Greensburg, Ind., who played music on hand saws, was every bit as fascinating as violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Seriously. C'mon. Menuhin was charming and an amazing musician, but Maxine could play "I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover" on a $70 Sandvik Stradivarius. And I got to write, "She came, she sawed, she was a hit."
I am always thrilled when people tell me I made them laugh or cry or think. I also have a huge folder full of letters from people who did not want to laugh or cry or think but wanted to tell me what I should think before I insulted motherhood and apple pie and everything they hold sacred. A reader once took me to task for writing a list of fun uses for fruitcake. A sweet chunk of her note: "Dear Mr. Macho Man (I guess I used manly adjectives): You have a lot of nerve talking about fruitcake. A lot of us treasure it. Next you'll be tearing down Santy and the children. I'm going to write to your editor. You should get a job digging ditches, because a writer, you're not." That letter hangs on my office wall, next to the one which states: "I called to cancel the paper after September since I have paid for it, but if you can get my $12.50 back to me, I will gladly cancel for the month of October as well since I do not care to support a paper with a homosexual agenda. You have a very pro-homosexual columnist in Britt Kennerly." Aw. I still go to my happy place when I think of those two letter writers hanging out together, shaking their fists at kids in their yards and calling my mother to ask what happened to her fruitcake daughter.

Double Naught 7 Digest, then, is a place for the stories I didn't have time to dig up as a full-time reporter - the countless stories I heard along back roads, in grocery stores and through a friend of a friend's ex-wife's cousin-in-law. It is a place where pop culture meets what's left of Mom and Pop stores; a place where I am likely to erect a soapbox big enough for all of us - ask my husband about my soapbox-building skills - or plan a road trip that takes me to places where news is being made, people don't agree and everyone, Santy haters included, gets a say. It's a place where I'm inspired by the legacy of Jethro Bodine, who tackled being a fry cook and a double naught spy with the same joie de vivre, wore nifty shoes that spit knives and told Uncle Jed, "Naught Naught Seven has got the world by the tail! "

I can't wait to get started. I can't wait to meet you. Daily updates and two new profiles each week are in the works. And if this doesn't pan out, no worries: I still have brain surgeon, Hollywood producer, swinging playgirl and ditch digger on my could-so-do-that career list. Fire up the spy car, Bessie. I'm outta here.

Peace!

Britt