Sugar Tit or Bust

Today in my inbox the Smithsonian, a magazine of knowledgeable and intellectual pursuits, offered me a once in a lifetime opportunity to win a Kentucky Cultural Getaway.

I might be speaking out of turn, but to me a Kentucky Cultural Getaway is about the same as taking a luxury tour down to the 7-11 store in Sugar Tit, which isn’t too far from here but a good ways from Punkintown and has various cultural sights of its own including a brand spanking new left turn lane and a harvested hay field. Once a buffalo got loose and strolled down the highway past the red light there, but that’s extracurricular stuff that you can’t count on as a regular enough occurrence to list in a travel brochure. You don’t want to disappoint tourists that show up looking for livestock during a non-migratory period.

I realize I might be biased about cultural events. I come from South Carolina, the land where classical music means anything you can dance the shag to. Relationships here aren’t considered consummated until the couple has shagged together in public on at least one occasion with a minimum of two sober witnesses, neither of which are related to either party by blood or prison record. It’s not always as easy as it sounds.

Culturally speaking, this is an area where the orchestra string section is a man named Skeeter who wears unbuttoned overalls, a Charlie Daniels Band T-Shirt, and a Nascar cap, and who will die with less teeth than he was born with, having lost several a la carte sets climbing into tree stands on pre-dawn hunting expeditions or on across the county line liquor excursions. Skeeter is perched on a ladderback chair leaned back on two legs in the corner of the local hardware store, playing the banjo like Michelangelo paints ceilings.

Although we have our own Steeple Chase race right up the road and offer advanced degrees in tailgating at the local community college, I don’t often get a chance to visit parts of the country where your place in society is determined by the size hat you wear to a horse race, so I checked out the information on this Kentucky Cultural Extravaganza. And since I never turn down a chance to improve my quality of life, I’m willing to take one for the team and check out the Jim Beam factory.

However I have to draw the line at the expedition to the National Quilt Museum that is included in the package. That handmade stuff can get pricey and I don’t want to have to auction off my collection of glow-in-the-dark velvet Elvis paintings on eBay to raise money for this trip.