When a Southern Woman Rambles... by L. Avery Brown (great reads TXT) 📕

Now that your visual center has been properly stimulated, let's get back to Billy Bob and Patty Sue…      

They do a little yard work, pulling out weeds and whatnot. And ol’ Billy Bob decides he’s hotter than a pig on a spit, so he decides to take off his T-shirt and tosses it aside. Patty Sue scolds him and says ‘You’re gonna burn, sure as shoot, you’re gonna burn.’ Only Billy Bob doesn’t want to hear her nag at him again about the whole sunburn issue even though every single time he mows shirtless he gets burnt. So, to avoid her further scolding him, he decides he’ll just go mow the lawn because there’s no need in arguing with Patricia Sue, as she always seems to win those logical arguments.  

But first, he decides to grab a beer to sip on while he mows. (Did you know in most places, it's illegal to operate any motorized vehicle (car, boat, golf cart, etc...) with an open container of alcohol? Last time I checked, riding lawn mowers are motorized! Now, I know it's a picky technicality, since all lawn mowers can be dangerous when operated. Especially when operated by morons if those same morons have been drinking alcohol, the danger level increases dramatically.) After taking a few chugs from his chilled drink of fermented hops and barley, he heads to his mighty riding lawn-mowing machine!

He backs out of the garage so he can give 'his girl' a quick mechanical once over. And once he is assured that she's ready to tame the wild frontier, Billy Bob then puts on his ultra-chic, oversized Ray Ban aviator sunglasses like Tom Cruise wore in Top Gun back in '86 (my, that was a good year for Billy Bob) and shifts the mower into drive to have at it. He goes up and down the yard, beer clutched in one hand while the other stays on the steering wheel. And as he cruises his lawn, Billy Bob’s man-boobs and beer belly bounce up and down with each dip in his yard.

This is when it happens. Yes, I'm going along merrily with my life...perhaps I'm making my way home from the grocery store, minding my own business, when I pull into my development doing the posted 30 MPH speed limit and I see him. *Look away!*  But lo, I cannot!  

It’s like I’m a moth and he’s a giant skin covered beacon. *No! Don’t stare! Shield your eyes!* The light reflecting off his bare white skin (and there is quite a lot of it, too) is so bright I begin to blink furiously. *Noooo!* I fumble around my console for my sunglasses only to realize I don't have them! *Must—get—home.* Then I see them...his man-boobs bouncing furiously and coming closer to the road...closer to me! AAAHHH! *My eyes. My eyes! It burns! Lord Jesus, it burns! Make it go away!!*

It seems like hours before I am able to look away though, in truth, it’s only about 3 seconds but it matters not because it’s too late…the image of Billy Bob, his nekked man-boobs, and his beer belly jiggling like Jell-O on that lawn mower is now indelibly impressed on my poor brain. I somehow make my way home. And my head is still reeling from what I’ve seen. After drinking a tall glass of sweet iced tea and reading my Southern Living magazine I start to feeli better. But in the back of my mind I know this won’t be the last time I’ll see this sort of thing. Nope. Because summer has arrived and the grass is growing ever so quickly!

The moral of this particular tale of tragic beauty:

Some parts of the human body are better left to the imagination!

You didn't think I was going to subject your delicate eyes to 'REAL' nekked man boobs, did you?  

Gracious Lord in Heaven, I might be a sassy Southern Belle, but I'm not a Sadist!  

***Warning***

The following is riddled with references to the 1980s. It is intended for (slightly) mature readers who don’t mind looking in the mirror and laughing at the all the little wrinkles they’ve earned over the past 30 or so years. In some cases this particular story even been shown to cause spontaneous outbreaks of smiles and laughs.

If you experience any of the following symptoms:

*Nostalgic tugs at the heart;

*Flashes of days gone by; or,

*An intense desire to sit in your car singing along badly to music that would make your kids cringe with your radio cranked up to 11 (which is so much better than 10...)

There's no need to contact your physician. These are not symptoms which point to a dangerous underlying condition. It just means you lived during one hellacious, totally bitchin’ time!

And for those of you reading this who might not consider the 80s as the era that defines you...I’m sure if you were to change the names of the songs, the movies, and events mentioned in it to things from your defining time, it would ring just as true. Maybe.

And now, without further ado...

Give Me Some Sham-on
w/a little Glam Rock & a Mullet, too.

One day, back in 2010, as my daughter and I sat eating our breakfast and watching the morning news, there came a point in the broadcast after the ‘serious’ news and just before the ‘touching human interest’ story, where the hosts sat around a table with two guests and discussed the revamped re-release of the 1985 megahit We Are The World written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, produced by Quincy Jones, and performed by a veritable Who’s Who of the music world under the umbrella name USA for Africa (United Support of Artists for Africa). This gathering of artists who were either already members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or they eventually became members included folks like: Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Diana Ross, Ray Charles, and Smokey Robinson just to name a few.

But as I said, that was 1985.

Flash forward to 2010... The crux of the conversation was whether or not the revamped 2010 version of the same song, with popular singers from the current music world including performers representing a wide array of music genres, like P!nk (R&B/Pop), Joel & Benji Madden (Rock Alternative), Miley Cyrus (Bubblegum Pop), Kanye West (Rap), and Enrique Iglesias (Latin Pop), is a cheapened version of the song that became an instant classic and helped to define the social awakening of an entire generation. The light-hearted argument went back and forth for several minutes as the hosts chuckled every now and again while they reminisced about life when they were younger.

Even though the banter was polite, I would swear that I heard a few moments tinged with a wee bit of anger when the TV personalities argued, for lack of a better term, over whether or not it should be considered musical sacrilege to touch such an iconic song or if it was alright to offer up a revamped version to a whole new generation of ears who would hear We Are The World 2.0 sung by voices (most of which belong to singers who were either small children or not even born when the song originally came out). But upon further reflection, I don't think the 'argument' had anything to do with the notion of muddying up a classic song.  

Rather, I believe the heart of issue had more to do with the thought that 'modernizing' a song which essentially put an exclamation point on the statement that was -- The 80s! -- our decade and the time of our mutual coming of age, made it all seem trivial and archaic. And if that was the case...what did it mean in regards to those of us who lived through the decade when The Wall came down? 

The 80s was our time. We were the Madonna wanna-bes; the Duran-Duran screamers; the Bon Jovi air guitarists; and, the two-toned leather jacket Michael Jackson ‘sham-on’ers.

As I wrote that last bit, I chuckled because with each nod to my youth, I can recall such wonderful times spent with my friends back when the world was bigger, fresher, and ours for the taking. In my mind’s eye I can still see myself dancing around with my friends on Friday nights and singing like we were the end-all and be-all. Back then, we didn’t have the Internet to refer to when we stumbled over words that were hard to understand in a song because, more often than not, the lyrics were not included with our vinyl LPs and cassette tapes. So, we’d sit quietly listening to little sections over and over again trying to figure out what sort of lyrical gem was being offered to us. Eventually, we’d settle on a phrase even though we were often wrong.

But it didn’t matter because we shared a common bond through the music we listened to and enjoyed. 

Then we’d whip out our Tiger Beat magazines so we could carefully cut out the images of the people we idolized and fawned over. We memorized every single factoid, whether or not if it was true, about them. To this day, I can still hear the voices of my friends as they rattled off a laundry list of utterly ridiculous trivia when we really ought to have been studying for our history or math tests. And now that I have my own teenage daughter I can understand the goofy smile my parents used to wear when they’d listen to my friends and me talking faster and louder than necessary to one another because I know they were recalling all the good moments from their own teen and young adult years.

Of course, there were some bad things from the 80s, too...

John Lennon was killed in 1980. And the NASA space shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986 at 11:39 AM. It was a day that was etched into my memory. I was 15 and sitting in Mrs. Hammond’s World History class...right in front of the TV because I was one of the shortest kids in the room...watching what was supposed to have been a glorious, historic moment in time, only to turn out to be one of the most tragic events ever captured on film. For 72 seconds we were all there with those brave astronauts hurtling towards the majesty of the stars and then, in one split-second, it all came to a mind-numbing, explosive end.

I’ll never forget the sense of loss I felt for people I didn’t even know. It was the first time I’d ever really been slapped by the invisible hand of Fate. It was one of those ‘I’ll never forget where I was when it happened’ moments that every generation must deal with and ranks right up there with the Kennedy assassination in ’63, the breaking of the Watergate Scandal in ’73, the tragic death of Princess