Chasing Southern Charm: Day One of Birdie's Southern Book Tour!

Guys! I did it! I’m currently at my first stop on “Birdie’s Southern Book Tour” (this name may change. If you have any ideas, please email me!” 

I left Bucks County Pa, to start my Southern Spirit (Southern Soul? Southern Romance (like, I’m in love with the Southern culture – I think I’m in love with the culture – the slower way of life, the manners, the food, the stories. But maybe, once I’ve been immersed in it, maybe I will find I fell under the influence of books like “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “South of Broad.” And Michael Lee West (wherever you are, I hope you are ok).)

But I feel like I’m going to love it. 

As soon as I left Pennsylvania, the traffic thinned out. There were a few stretches of road where I was the only car! As someone that loathes traffic (I mean, we all do, right?) this was thrilling. Some people might be thrilled going to a Morgan Wallen concert; I’m thrilled when all drivers keep at least three car lengths away from each other!

I almost backed out. Four a.m. this morning, I woke up, the house was still. It was that time of morning when all inside and all outside the house are quiet. It was the hour where questions of sanity push all confidence aside. The mean girl voice: WHAT IF YOU DIE. WHAT IF YOU GET KIDNAPPED? WHAT IF YOU GET LOST AND CANT FIND YOUR WAY BACK. 

I texted my daughter who was working. She texted back: You’re going. And that’s that!

And so I said, “Yes, that’s that. I’m going.” 

Also, I spent two days packing, unpacking (Chanel’s advice – but traveling wise: pack what you think you’ll need, then, subtract a few things.) and the thought of unpacking it all, trying to reschedule this bucket list/life is short/book tour was more dreadful then heading into the bad weather that the radar was taunting me with. 

I’m here in Harrisonburg. It’s just a quick stop. So no bookstores today. 

But I did stop at a Hardees in Virgina! I grew up with Hardees, and there hasn’t been one in our area for at least 15 years. 

I started out around 7:45 – hit some rain, some fog, some traffic, and then the sky turned blue and I had the windows down because the air just feels…more energetic, more…pure? 

As soon as I arrived at the cutest Airbnb- a big clap of thunder shook the sky. 

Which reminds me, the trip started off on a rocky note. My cooler tipped over and leaked all over everything. I had to pull off the road and ended up throwing the whole thing out because the water had collected in the fabric holder of the cooler. Note to self: only hard coolers while traveling! 

The second incident: I got off an exit for gas. Only, the exit I got off at was under construction and I went at least 8 miles in a slow moving narrow cattle shoot. I will admit to not being a Southern Lady at all with the foul language that was captured on my car camera. (Which has since been erased!). 

All the streets were closed off, and Google kept saying “rerouting” “rerouting” “rerouting” and then Apple wanted me to keep driving for 21 miles (21 miles! Are you HIGH right now Apple?)

So, I used common sense (which I doubt all the time when it comes to travel because my sense of direction is like a five year old chasing fireflies) and made the first left I could, then I reckoned I should stop for gas since it was right there, and the kind gray haired man with the racing t-shirt told me how to get back to 81 South. And then, he did the sweetest thing, he waited for me to top of my car, and I followed him out. When the split came to get onto 81 South, he stuck his arm out the window and pointed to the right, to make sure I found my way. I really appreciated this. And, this is exactly what I mean about the South and manners and a kinder way of life!

Anyway, I’m going to be stopping into bookstores and libraries along the way, as well as doing some touristy things! 

Day 1 is in the books. 

See you tomorrow! 

The Easter Parade, the Cigarette, and the Oldest Con Still Running

 

The Easter Parade, the Cigarette, and the Oldest Con Still Running

Okay so I need to tell you about Easter Sunday 1929, and I need you to really stay with me here because this story is going to make you feel like you've been living inside a magic trick your whole life and someone just showed you where the rabbit actually came from and honestly I have not fully recovered and it's been 11 years!

1929 and we’re in New York City. Fifth Avenue. Wealthy, elegant women, in their pastel Easter dresses are tip tapping their heels on the street as they saunter IN the parade. Their chins up, eyes blazing, and they are smoking cigarettes. Publicly! Defiantly! Cigarettes held aloft like tiny torches of freedom! Liberation! Men can smoke, and doctors advise smoking for anxiety, and weight loss, so why shouldn’t women smoke!  And the press is there, cameras ready, notebooks open, because apparently, miraculously,  word got out that something spontaneous and remarkable and deeply newsworthy was about to happen on Fifth Avenue at Easter and wasn't that convenient. The headlines wrote themselves: Women Light Torches of Freedom! Suffragettes Claim the Right to Smoke! The public watched and thought, well, if it's in the papers it must be real, it must be a movement, it must be the authentic voice of women rising up and claiming their bodily autonomy one cigarette at a time!

Friends, it was not a movement. It was business. Not any business. Big Business.  It was Edward Bernays, a publicist for Big Business and government, and he was working for the American Tobacco
Company. Bernays had his receptionist call a magazine (Vogue, because of course!) and gotten the receptionist at Vogue to share the names of society women listed as subscribers, then recruited those women to show up and smoke on cue. He promised them they were liberating women! This was there chance to Be Someone! And for the Good Of Women!!! Yes, of course, because even in 1929 girls girls existed!

Bernays had coined the phrase "torches of freedom" himself, in his own office, at his own desk, because he understood something that should genuinely alarm you: that if you hand people the right story for their existing hunger, they will tell it as if it were their own and never once ask who wrote it.

Ed Bernays was, without a doubt, one the OG Happiness Hijackers. 

Here is what makes this so spectacularly, nauseatingly brilliant, and I say that as someone who is not happy about it. He didn't manufacture a desire that wasn't there. He didn't trick women into wanting freedom — women did want freedom, urgently and legitimately, because it was 1929 and the list of things women were not allowed to do in public was frankly exhausting. What he did was take that real, genuine, completely valid hunger that makes up our human nature — the need to Be Free, to Be in Control, to Be Someone who fights for something, to Belong to a movement of women who understand — and he stapled a cigarette to it. Suddenly smoking wasn't a habit, it was a statement. It wasn't a product, it was a personality. It wasn't something the American Tobacco Company needed you to buy so their quarterly numbers looked good — perish the thought — it was your identity as a liberated woman and how dare anyone suggest you put it down. The influencers weren't called influencers yet, they were just society women with beautiful clothes and a lucky lot in life, and a willingness to show up on Fifth Avenue. But the method was identical to what happens today when someone with four hundred thousand followers posts a very candid, very ‘authentic’, very ‘spontaneously lit’ photograph of themselves using a product they were absolutely paid to hold. The only difference is that in 1929 Bernays had to get the names from a receptionist. Now the algorithm delivers them pre-sorted by engagement rate.

And this is the part where I need you to get just a little bit cynical with me, not in a way that makes you miserable at parties, but in a way that keeps you from being the woman on Fifth Avenue who thinks she's leading a revolution when she's actually working and unwittingly depositing money in a stranger's bank account!

The exact same theater is running today, continuously, on every platform. The production values have improved enormously but the script is identical: find the hunger, name it something beautiful or rebellious, attach a product, and make the whole thing look like it erupted spontaneously from the ‘authentic soul of the people’, and then stand back while the people defend it as their own idea. The women in 1929 genuinely believed they were making a statement. Some of them probably were. That's what makes it so effective: the belief is real even when the event is staged, and real belief is contagious in a way that paid advertising simply isn't.

And can we just pause for one second and ask the question nobody on Fifth Avenue apparently thought to ask, which is; did any of those women actually want to smoke? Cigarettes are a not so charming bouquet of ashtray and regret and stained teeth that arrive in a room approximately forty seconds before the rest of you. But once the story of freedom and rebellion took hold the whole disgusting thing became cool, then normal, then people became addicted and…well, we know how that went!

Jägermeister did the exact same thing to an entirely different generation — a drink that tastes like cough syrup that someone left in a car in August, that no sane person would order if presented with literally any alternative, and yet there we all were, an entire generation of us, doing shots of it at two in the morning and calling it a good time. The product is almost beside the point. It always was.

So when you see a trend that seems to have appeared everywhere at once, a cause that suddenly has a very photogenic spokesperson, a moment that the cameras somehow all caught from different angles, a grassroots movement that comes with its own merchandise — you are allowed to ask. You are supposed to ask. Who got the list from the receptionist? Who coined the phrase? Who is benefiting from me becoming addicted to this product? Who needed this particular longing redirected toward this particular thing right now, and what are they selling? This is not paranoia. This is just the minimum alertness required to walk through the modern world without accidentally starring in someone else's Easter parade!!