The First Ozarkiana State Fair and Barbed Beecue Competition

Short Fiction Inspired by & Review of Demeter Fragrance Library Mesquite

The First Ozarkiana State Fair and Barbed Beecue Competition was the hot topic of colony discussion for weeks. When first proposed by The Founders Council, the idea seemed absurd. None of the settlers had ever actually been to a State Fair; none of them had even been born on Earth.

After a month of debate, though, most Ozarks were swayed by the members of the Council who spoke with passion and longing for a return to the traditions of their Earth-born forepeoples, who had died on transportation ships over one hundred years earlier, but whose stories had been passed down to the first Ozark settlers through their letters and journals. “This is why they were required to keep journals,” Mr. Poincey said, shaking a weathered elctro-tablet in his hand. “So that we might know what it meant to be citizens of Earth and carry on their traditions in the new world.”

So much had been lost in the efforts to resettle Earth’s population in the face of increasing geothermic instability that little remained of Earthian history. The settlement ships had been packed with essentials for survival. Other than the recollections recorded by that first generation of travelers and the digitized archives of music, art, and literature, not much of original Earthian culture survived.

Complicating things for the descendants who ultimately settled on Ozarkiana was the fact that much of their library and museum records had been lost in entirely when the Alexandria mainframe of their ship was damaged in an asteroid storm, destroying the storage drives intended to provide the surviving humans, now scattered far and wide among the stars and with limited ability to communicate with one another, with a blueprint for human culture.

The Ozarks, as citizens of the newly christened Ozarkiana had come to call themselves, were forced instead to rely on the journals kept by various individuals who made up the first generation on the settlement ship along with stories told and retold as they were passed down through the successive children and grandchildren who spent their entire lives on the ship during the trip, dying before the colonists reached a planet suitable for settlement.

Like the most massive game of telephone in humanity’s history, the stories had been altered and misremembered down through the generations. No one had any certainty the State Fair planned for Ozarkiana would be anything like those of Earth, but they didn’t seem to care. Other than Settlement Day, an annual day of thanksgiving for finally locating a habitable planet, it was the first time the Founders Council agreed on a settlement-wide holiday, to the great relief of Ozarks everywhere.

Plans were made for entertainment and games and other distractions, including consumption-related competitions. Transition off the ships and into settlement had been challenging, but few aspects had tried the patience of Ozarks everywhere as much as efforts to feed themselves. Traditional planet-bound methods of food preparation were lost during the settlers’ travels, everyone subsisting largely on the algae-based nurtino packs grown in large crates on the ship at zero gravity. The algae packs had little variation in consistency or appearance, and a bland taste that was tolerable if nondescript in its lack of discernible flavor. The settlers had come to call the algae packs chexin, which they understood to be the name of an Earth-based food that could be cooked a variety of ways and made to taste like almost anything based on its consistency and lack of individual flavor. Before making its final descent into the planet’s atmosphere, the Council implemented plans to store enough chexin to get the settlement through its first two years if the Ozarks ate only enough to survive. Beyond that, they would have to relearn how to cultivate their own food and hunt the animals native to the planet.

Once the settlers made it onto the surface and secured their needs for basic shelter and safety, cultivating local food stuffs had been the first order of business. Much of the energy of the settlers was poured into determining which native plants and animals could be eaten without detrimental effect, and these explorations were furthered by the seemingly endless search for rediscovering methods of food preparation and the cultivation of what Earthians had called speeces, which were used to flavor and preserve food stuffs. More than one Ozark had fallen into a fitful sleep filled with gastronomical discomfort after second sundown to dream fondly of the days when a belly full of chexin was a foregone conclusion.

The primary focus of the Fair, as everyone understood it, was eating the fair itself. There had been some heated debate on whether that meant all the decorations and structures were required to be edible, but ultimately this was deemed too difficult and time-consuming an Earthian concept to attempt the first year. Instead they turned to one of the things every descendant of Earth, no matter how far flung or temporarily removed, knew to be true of their forepeoples – they loved a competition.

So it was that Mrs. Norlina De’Lanta watched as her husband, Tallenassie, pulled on his finest jumper and headgear in preparation to leave for the Fair. Mr. De’Lanta was a prominent member of the Founders Council and had been selected as one of the judges of the premier consumables competition, which was understood by Ozarks to be known as a “Barbed Beecue.” This Earth tradition seemed to involve capturing and killing a small bird known as a bee, which was then hung on a barbed hook and cooked over a fire made of the large square black seeds of flowering cue plants.

Having none of these original Earthian resources, the Ozarks who made up the Fair Foods Committee had come up with as close an approximation as manageable. Entries were to be made up of the cooked flesh of the various indigenous animals, which had been either rubbed down with a dried mixture of roots or stewed in a plant paste, and cooked in small earthen containers over a fire made of the hard bark of a large native shrub Ozarks called meskit. The bush was so-named because the plant stems were coated with a thick sticky substance that stuck to every stray hair or fiber and required the use of a sterilization kit to remove the mess, but made for a long, slow-burning fire during cold nights.

For many of the dualinal days and unolunars since the announcement of the competition, the residents of Ozarkiana had been out trapping and hunting and cooking, trying to perfect their own receipts and math-oods of Barbed Beecuing. The winner would not only have bragging rights for the whole of a double sun turn, but their entry would be replicated in Aluminal Yurts across the settlement. They would become, overnight, a yurthold name.

“Are you ready to go Nor?” Tallenassie asked as he pulled the door open.

“I’m coming Tallen,” his wife said, hefting a large box over her arm. “I was making sure we didn’t forget any of the ingredients for the ply competition.”

Tallen scratched at his bread, frowning. “I still don’t understand why our ancestors would cook the bulbs of sweet plants and then spread them over flat pieces of wood.”

Norlina shrugged. “Maybe Earthian wood was edible. Either way, I aim to come home with that blue gibbon. I could use a helper monkey around here.” Tallen took the heavy box from his wife and she pulled the thatched door shut behind them.

. . . . . .

Six anxious orals later, when the second sun of Ozarkiana finally sank beyond the jagged-edged muttons of North Horned-Eyes-On, Tallenassie De’Lanta sat in front of the large audience, preparing to taste the maiden entry into the First Ozarkiana State Fair Barbed Beecue competition. Tallen shot a nervous look at Councilors Saffana Tennosey and Coalumbria Districk, his fellow judges, before gamely giving the audience a wide smile and biting into the first dish, a piece of rawlshide that had been prepared in the approved method for competition. Following Tallen’s lead, the other two judges shoveled in a bite of the entry and chewed at it vigorously.

The audience leaned forward, holding their collective breath as they waited for the judges’ pronouncement. Swallowing hard, Tallen and his fellow judges bent their heads together and whispered intently before picking up the small talk-extender to describe the item to the crowd.

“After consulting with my fellow judges, we would describe entry Number One as follows: though the texture is a bit chewy, the overall flavor is a deep smoky one that is not only pleasurable but reminds us, undoubtably…” Tallen looked toward his fellow judges, who nodded in smiling approval. “Of chexin.”

The crowd erupted with wild cheers.

On the Death of Dixie Carter, the Life of Julia Sugarbaker, and Feminist Role Models for Southern Women

I was going to post a perfume review tonight of Jo Malone Pomegranate Noir, but that's going to have to wait.

I just discovered that Dixie Carter died.

I think I am truly, deeply hurt by this.

You see, Dixie Carter, a real life woman of poise and grace and talent, is a woman I have always respected, talent-wise, though politically we never saw eye-to-eye. But if you want to trace back my feminist roots, if you want one solid, singular pop-culture icon to point to as one of the most influential figures in my young life, it would have to be Julia Sugarbaker of Designing Women.

Julia, whose verve and style were matched only by her fiery independence, oratory finesse, and incredible substance. Julia, who defended women, liberals, gays, and crazy people. Julia, who is possibly the best of all possible Southern icons, who makes me feel proud of the Southern left in me. I'm not sure I even would have thought of it unless prompted, but here's the honest truth: I didn't want to be a single woman I knew when I grew up. Not one of them was successful or independent or smart or out-spoken in the way I longed to be. But Julia Sugarbaker, that's a woman I could have written you a ten page "Who I Want to Be When I Grow Up" paper on in 5th grade. Business owner, single mother (after her husband died), social activist, feminist, charity and foundation board member, philanthropist, and dedicated friend -- my God, if I could be even a 10th of this woman, if I could be remembered half as brave or honest or truly fine as this woman, I could die happy.

As anyone who has ever looked at an electoral map will know, liberals are hard to find in the American South today. They have been hard to find basically my whole life. So as a young girl with a big brain and an even bigger mouth, it can be hard to look around and notice the incredible lack of feminist role models. The women I grew up with all seemed sad, frustrated, angry, and/or disappointed with their lot in life, like their expectations for themselves and who they could have been and what they could have accomplished in life fell far, far short of their dreams. Their lives were limited by, and revolved around, the men they were financially dependent on, and they seemed to accept this grim fate as the natural order of the world, one that could not be opposed, dissected, fought, or defeated. In the face of such a depressing norm, they seemed to simply embrace it, and lord help the woman who might be otherwise, for their jealousy might eat them up inside and spew out in the form of a kind of venom that would kill you with its backhanded kindness. (To be fair, this description really only fits my mother and some of the local teachers and other women figures in my world, and less the women of my paternal family, who just seem to accept it with a kind of glum resignation, or worse, a crazy-eyed embrace that drives them to radical right-wing insanity.)

But Designing Women, which started when I was eight and ran back-to-back with another amazing show centered on a strong female character, Murphy Brown, showed me an entirely different world. Four women, all working -- even if they were mothers -- who were professionally successfully, financially independent, and mostly happy, even though they were on their own for a variety of reasons. Suzanne and her rotating bevy of rich and (sometimes literally) short-lived romances/husbands. Mary Jo the divorcee and J.D., her steady but not life altering boyfriend/traveling sports writer. Charlene, the only one married in the entire series really, whose husband was mostly absentee due to his military service. And of course, Julia, who managed to be a devoted wife to her deceased husband and yet still demand the most interesting, charming, successful, and intelligent (sparing) partner is Reese (Dixie's IRL 3rd husband). These women had careers. These women had adventures. These women had lives of their own, and the men who came and went were just along for the ride. Designing Women was one of my first looks at a world people with, guided by, and focused on women, and NOT as they related to men.

While I enjoyed Annie Pott's sarcasm and Delta Burke's bluntness, it was Julia I truly worshiped. People in other parts of the country, in my experience, are too polite in general, and when they are honest, they tend to forget that other people take their verbal beatdowns a lot better if the proverbial switch is covered over in spun sugar. Julia embodied this to a tee. She was somehow both bossy and refined, classy and brash, hell-on-wheels and homemade cookies, all at the same time.

This was my real role model. This was a woman who was liberal and brave and righteous and God-loving and Southern, so Southern, and yet at the same time, sublime. And to this day, every time I start to get upset because people don't like me because I am ALWAYS the one UP ON MY SOAPBOX and I am ALWAYS the one getting 'RILED UP' and yelling, and I am always, always, always stepping on people's toes and getting in trouble for it and feeling like doors slam closed on me because of it, I remember Julia, and I try to tell myself -- even if she was only fictional -- if she could do it, then so can I. If she could be proud and hold her head up, then I can to, and to hell with anyone who doesn't like me for it.

I am who I am today, in part, thanks to Julia Sugarbaker, and I think we would all be better served to be a little more like her. It seems strange that the Designing Woman who shone the brightest has left us first, even before 'crazy' Aunt Bernice. Dixie Carter will always have my gratitude for giving life to a woman I could look up to and be proud of while still being myself. May she live on forever in our memory. God bless her and keep her in the hereafter. Amen.

More favorite Julia clips below

Defending her sister, and pageant women everywhere...






On How Southern People Feel About Their Relatives...






On Football in the South...






On HIV/AIDS and Respect -- Amazing in general, but especially for 1987. The video quality is crap, but the content is definitely WORTH HEARING.






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No clip of this one, so here's the transcripts.

MAN: Allow me to introduce myself — Ray Don Simpson.
JULIA: There’s no need for introductions, Ray Don, we know who you are.
RAY DON: (smiling) You do?
JULIA: Of course. You’re the guy who is always wherever women gather or try to be alone. You want to eat with us when we’re dining in hotels, you want to know if the book we’re reading is any good, or if you can keep up company on the plane. And I want to thank you, Ray Don, on behalf of all the women in the world, for your unfailing attention and concern. But read my lips and remember, as hard as it is to believe, sometimes we like talking just to each other, and sometimes we like just being alone.