Big Chrissy and I spent a week visiting his parental units in the heart of this great nation. We discovered that Captain Kirk was, or rather, will be born in a town only an hour away from his mom’s, so we had to drive over and pay homage. There are serious Trekkies who live there and are anxiously awaiting his arrival. The drive through Iowa was just like in the Regionalist paintings of the 30’s—lush, rolling hills and beautiful old farmhouses, red barns. Corn everyfuckingwhere. We also spent a day in Divorce Court with BC’s sister, found a few Lustron Houses in the area to visit (post WWII prefabricated porcelain-enameled steel houses), gained about 10 pounds, stopped at the World’s Largest Truck Stop, which contained the World’s Largest People, saw a great show at the Figge in Davenport, the highlight of which was a mural that Jackson Pollock painted for Peggy Guggenheim, an amazing transition from the recognizable to the abstract, had deep-dish pizza in Chicago and visited the new addition to the Art Institute, which we both agreed was pretty sweet.
The week before I was in Alabama visiting my own parents, and old buddies from my childhood. Since I’ve been on a fairly limited diet for most of the year, I went a little crazy and consumed every fried thing that could be found. In one Meat-n-3 that I went to with my buddy James on the edge of Birmingham, we were treated to a culinary experience that was like being in an MGM musical. A baptist church had just let out, so everyone was very snazzily dressed, in zoot suits, hats… Everyone was happy, even the waitresses, who kept bringing us free things to eat. The women were like Venuses of Willendorf poured from Jell-o molds, jiggling gravity-defying masses of bodaciousness on heels, just amazing how they moved through space. I had fried okra, collard greens, fried green tomatoes, a fried pork chop, and squash casserole. If there were more fried things on the menu, I would have ordered them.
James and I went on a little Catholic kitsch outing one day and went to the Ave Maria Grotto and the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, near Cullman. Cullman is a lovely southern town, settled by Germans in the late 1800s. Dry, still. I think it’s the only city that celebrates Oktoberfest without beer. The Ave Maria Grotto is a kind of magical place, a landscaped garden with miniature reproductions of historic buildings and shrines around the world. You know, like the Castle of the Fairies, and the grave of Lazarus… These tiny structures of stone and concrete were made by Brother Joseph Zoettl, a Benedictine monk of St. Bernard Abbey, over a 40 year period beginning in the early 30s.
The Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, on the other hand, is the kind of cathedral where they don’t tell you in the parking lot which is about a quarter mile from the cathedral that exposed flesh is not welcome so they turn you around the moment you walk into the church with those shorts on all sweaty from that hot southern sun and ask you to change into pants but because you left your pants in the car then you have to walk across that huge plaza again to change your clothes in the parking lot and then walk all the way back across that plaza made out of cheapy cast stone with no shade anywhere just to see this pretty lousy reproduction of an italian basilica and develop a rash while Jesus, without pants, I might add, looks down, unhappily, from his wooden perch.