Last Call: Imagining The Foul Stench Of The Confederate States Of America
A few months ago I drove to Gettysburg to get some hot dogs—explicitly for the fact that they call their regional style "hot wieners"—and caught a bit of the Civil War history bug while I was there. I'm by no means an expert on the subject and don't intend to become one, but I've been enjoying Ken Burns' authoritative documentary on the war almost every night as I fall asleep. As I write this, I've now made it through almost 48 minutes while in a conscious state, and have also had quite an alarming number of terrifying dreams.
This past weekend was 80th anniversary of The Senator Theater, a independently owned art deco movie house in beautiful, sunny Baltimore, Maryland. To celebrate the occasion, they were screening a movie that is also marking it's 80th anniversary, a movie quite relevant to my newfound interests that I somehow had never seen: Gone With the Wind. I'm not very good at scheduling "me time," but tickets were only twenty five cents and man oh man do I just love a bargain. After digging some spare nickels out of the couch, I was off to finally see the fields of Tara the way they were meant to be experienced: projected up on the big screen in all its Technicolor glory.
A sophisticated viewer might have left the theater wanting to discuss Gone With the Wind's impact on the last 80 years of cinema, or perhaps examine the issues of race in fictional depictions of the antebellum south. I, however, a woman whose brain compartmentalizes all Civil War content with steaming hot wieners and my subconscious erotic adventures of General William Tecumseh Sherman, could only think about confederate underpants.
Personally, I am ready to get butt naked the instant that summertime humidity breaches 90%, and I've never even ventured as far down as Georgia. If your society has chosen to establish itself in a land where the weather in perpetually hot and gross, why are the men wearing multiple layers of clothing? How are the women walking with full length bloomers and corsets under their hoop skirts? Why isn't everyone passing out or complaining loudly? How can anyone romanticize the Old South when all of society smelled like a sack of decapitated butts? None of this makes any sense to me. Are any of you kind folks out there Civil War buffs who could have some insight? Or perhaps we can just talk about my General Sherman sex dreams, which are just as gross as you're imagining.