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    Bless Your Heart, Tramp: And Other Southern Endearments
    Bless Your Heart, Tramp: And Other Southern Endearments
    Bless Your Heart, Tramp: And Other Southern Endearments
    Ebook199 pages3 hours

    Bless Your Heart, Tramp: And Other Southern Endearments

    By Celia Rivenbark

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    From the wickedly hilarious pen of Southern humorist Celia Rivenbark comes a collection of essays that brings to mind Dave Barry (in high heels) or Jeff Foxworthy (in a prom dress).

    Step into the wacky world of "womanless wedding" fund-raisers, in which Bubbas wear boas. Meet two sisters who fight rural boredom by washing Budweiser cans and cutting them into pieces to make clothing. Learn why the word snow sends any right-thinking Southerner careening to the Food Lion for extra loaves of bread and little else.

    Humor columnist and slightly crazed belle-by-birth Celia Rivenbark tackles these and other lard-laden subjects in Bless Your Heart, Tramp, a hilarious look at Southern---and just plain human---foibles, up-close and personal.
    So pour yourself a glass of sweet tea and curl up on the pie-azza with Bless Your Heart, Tramp.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMay 30, 2006
    ISBN9781466801103
    Bless Your Heart, Tramp: And Other Southern Endearments
    Author

    Celia Rivenbark

    Celia Rivenbark is the author of the award-winning bestsellers Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank; Bless Your Heart, Tramp; Belle Weather; and You Can’t Drink All Day If You Don’t Start in the Morning. We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier won a Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Book Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the James Thurber Prize for American Humor. Born and raised in Duplin County, North Carolina, Rivenbark grew up in a small house “with a red barn out back that was populated by a couple of dozen lanky and unvaccinated cats.” She started out writing for her hometown paper. She writes a weekly, nationally syndicated humor column for the Myrtle Beach Sun News. She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

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    Reviews for Bless Your Heart, Tramp

    4/5

    79 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Fun book written with the Southern woman's point of view. The first section is devoted to motherhood and all of the things she said she would never do. Giving her child soda pop or French fries. The horror of not getting the proper toy in the happy meal. Then there's a section devoted to south. She talks about how a number of things that were supposed to be bad actually aren't, eggs and butter come to mind. How she helps out a redneck woman who's having car trouble only to be led on a wild goose chase for the woman's ex-boyfriend. Then the last section is everywhere else. this part is kind of all over, from cold and flu medicine to buying a greeting card to Subarus. Funny quick read.
    • 4/5
      This was a really funny book. I learned about measurements - a tad, smidgen, passel mite, a right smart, a mess, a whole heap, etc. A quote on endearments: "A Southerner can get away with the most awful insult as long as it is prefaced with the words "Bless her/his heart". And what about "I swanee" vs "I swear"? And I could really relate to the essay on Southerner vs Snow. Ms. Rivenbark has several other interesting sounding books that I must read.
    • 4/5
      I wasn't sure what to expect with this book. At first glance, I thought it was going to be a collection of essays about why Southerns are the way we are (history lesson, maybe?). However, the book is actually a collection of funny "slice-of-life" moments from columnist Celia Rivenbark's adventures as wife, mother and Southerner. The book is broken into three sections: At Home, The South, And Everywhere Else. Of the three sections, I enjoyed At Home, where she mainly writes about her husband and daughter, the best. I loved Celia's wit and sarcasm. Her humor reminded me of novelist Meg Cabot. I'm planning to read more Celia Rivenbark books in the future.
    • 2/5
      It is a well known fact that, if you live in the South, you can say as many bad or downright nasty things you want about a person...as long as those comments are preceeded or followed by the words "Bless his/her heart...."Well....bless the author's heart ...I expected to find all sorts of wonderfully Southern catty remarks. I was very disappointed. This book just doesn't cut it. I hoped to say, "That sounds just like Aunt Bonnie, bless her heart." or "Bless her heart, ain't it just the truth!" Unfortunately, I couldn't do that. What could be hysterically funny (Cat Toothbrushing or Meow!) barely made me smile.
    • 5/5
      Like the rest of her books I've read this was just too funny! I think because it is all just too true makes it just that much funnier! Love these books!
    • 4/5
      Bless Your Heart Tramp: And Other Southern Endearments by Celia Rivenbark is a quick, fun read that will have you laughing out loud. It isn’t really a novel; it’s a collection of 3 and 4 page humorous observations about life, told from the female perspective. At first, I thought you’d have to have some familiarity with the Deep South to understand it, but quickly discovered I was wrong. (There are some passages that may be lost on non-Southerners, though.) I found myself laughing out loud and reading passages to other people as I read this book. This will give you an idea of what the book’s like: "Men, for instance, will never understand Basic Women’s Economics. I cannot tell you how often I have tried to explain to my husband how it possible to actually SAVE money by spending it. Instead of seeing that I spent $200 on $300 worth of clothes that were on sale and applauding my shopping savvy, my husband thinks we’re still out $200. He’s so crazy."I must explain that the title of this book comes from the Southern practice of tempering even the mildest insult with “Bless his/her heart.” Bless her heart sounds so sweet, but it really signifies disapproval. I have to confess that I am guilty of peppering my every day speech with this term, so when I saw this book, I knew it was for me. I really enjoyed it and recommend it to anyone who needs a light, funny read.
    • 3/5
      Not as good as We're Just Like You, Only Prettier

    Book preview

    Bless Your Heart, Tramp - Celia Rivenbark

    Preface

    Every now and again, a non-native will ask me what’s so special about being a Southerner.

    Well, just everything is all.

    We’re a colorful lot. Southerners don’t just eat a biscuit, they eat a cathead biscuit and loudly remind you that when they were growing up they were so poor their mama would hold up a ham and tell them to sop the shadow.

    Southerners are obsessed with large reptiles, quality pine straw, and oddly shaped vegetables.

    When I worked at my hometown newspaper in my twenties, I became an expert at photographing bell peppers shaped like Mickey Mouse and, one memorable time, a tomato shaped like male genny-talia according to the old farmer who brought it in. These, and photos of four-foot-long rattlesnakes always made the front page. It beat the heck out of a picture of the publisher posing in his Shriner’s fez. Again.

    Southern men believe that if you shoot something, anything, you must strop it to the hood of the car and parade it around town. You call that disgusting, we call it supper.

    Southern women live by a simple set of rules that keeps the chaos at bay:

    Never wear sweatpants in public—or private.

    Always keep a funeral casserole in the freezer.

    Always say The Kmart out of respect.

    Never use a toothpick in the K&W parking lot because, sure as you do, somebody’s going to remember you were the yam queen back in ’75 and they’ll talk about how you’ve just let yourself go.

    Always make sure to have a burial plot in the good section of the cemetery or have the good sense to lie about it and say you do.

    Always wear big har for important, life-changing events such as attending ACC Tournament games or when the Southern Living cooking school comes to town.

    Avoid using party as a verb unless cousins from South Carolina are visiting, in which case it’s okay to say par-tay.

    Southerners may move away from their homeland, but a Southern man will always call his father deddy, no matter if he’s a big-shot Co-cola executive who has given up grits for polenta and shad roe for sushi.

    I don’t care how much a transplanted Southerner thinks he’s left that foot-washing, fire-baptized, collard-eating world behind, if Sweet Home Alabama comes on the radio, he will growl turn it up and wonder out loud for the umpteenth time why Free Bird isn’t the national anthem.

    Which, now that I think about it, is a mighty good question.

    Over the past few years, I’ve grown to appreciate what it means to be a Southerner. We’re proud and quirky and stubborn and funny. We don’t just say we like collard greens, we say that we’ve eaten so many we have to wear kerosene rags on our ankles just to keep the cutworms off.

    We don’t just say we’ve caught a big fish, we say it was so big we had to use a hoe to clean it and then we sold the scales for dinner plates at the flea market.

    We are most fond of saying that if we had two homes—one in the North and the other in hell—we’d rent out the one up North and live in hell.

    We never turn the TV off, unless a body is lying in state in our living room—a more frequent occurrence than you might think—and we understand that y’all is nature’s most perfect—and versatile—contraction. As in: Do y’all want to keep y’alls’ forks for y’allses’ peach cobbler?

    We’re proud to be from the land of kudzu and honeysuckle and lightnin’ bugs and tent revivals and Junior Cotillions and sugar-shocked iced tea.

    I hope y’all like these tales, true and imagined, from a Southern woman’s point of view.

    Shine, yes, I do.

    Part One

    At Home

    A Mom Looks at Forty

    Having a baby at age forty, or any age for that matter, is a whopping life-changer. We went from impetuous, What? A new martini and cigar lounge opens tonight? We are there! kinda folks to the couple who spends Saturday night at K&W begging our twenty-month-old to please stop spitting creamed corn on our sweatpants.

    You go from buying pricey bags of mesclun greens to eating iceberg because it’s thirty-nine cents a head this week with your VIC card. Fish sticks find their way into your freezer although nobody, including the kid, can stand them.

    I spent twenty-two years writing for newspapers, but my palms never got soggy and my heart never beat too fast when I was interviewing folks like Jay Leno, Nick Nolte, or Jimmy Carter. You don’t know nervous until you’re sitting in a pediatrician’s office wondering why you have to wait your stupid turn behind the football physicals when your toddler’s fever is so high she’s speaking in tongues and thinks everybody else in the room is Franklin the turtle.

    You go from wearing little chocolate-colored business suits to wearing chocolate. You now wear your Regulation Issue Mommy Uniform, the one they hand you in the delivery room: leggings that are pilly on the inner thighs and whichever of your husband’s T-shirts just came out of the dryer and—hooray!—is still long enough to cover your ass.

    You trade in your briefcase for a diaper bag, but because you’re what my obstetrician once called a geriatric mom (notice he only said that once), you do manage to take back the ten or so you got at the shower with lambs and dancing lollipops on them, and you use the cash to buy a nice, understated one from L.L. Bean. It has your monogram on it, but the letters don’t look right because, for now and maybe always, the only thing you’ll be known as is M.O.M.

    And that is just fine.

    You feel stupid times infinity for all the things you used to tell your friends who had children. I’d NEVER let my children eat french fries or drink soda! Right. That little rule got broken after the first screaming-so-loud-they’re-going-to-call-Child-Protective-Services hissy fit at Target.

    Hons, I was cramming Mr. Pibb and Pringles into that baby faster than you could say redneck mom with Sun Drop in the bottle on Aisle 7.

    And of course there was the laughably naive statement I made to a new mom friend of mine a few years ago: I’d NEVER let my baby sleep in the bed with my husband and me.

    Technically, that still holds true around here. She doesn’t sleep in the bed with us because, by four A.M., having grown tired of being kicked in the McNuggets for hours, my husband is usually snoozing peacefully in the spare bedroom.

    I used to think that nothing could beat the adrenaline rush that comes with beating the competition on a big news story.

    Wrong again. A fireside chat with Saddam or Fidel couldn’t top being the first mommy in the play group to announce successful potty training.

    The fresh-faced mom at the playground (who wore the Mommy Uniform favored by the twentysomethings—Gap khakis and a white T-shirt topped with an oversized Banana Republic sweater) told me that her son, Ian or Liam or Ethan, I forget which, was potty-trained at eighteen months!

    I threw her perky little body to the ground and planted my knee in her chest ’til she cried for mercy.

    Okay, so that only happened in one of my Ally McEat-something fantasies, but it could happen. Anything could happen. That’s the point. There aren’t any headlines or scoops anymore, and happy hour is the one when Dad comes through that front door and I can finally pee, but this is the best assignment I’ve ever had.

    Honest.

    Happy-Meal Hostage

    I realized things had gone too far the other day when I yelled at the woman at the Burger King drive-thru. She is working for royalty, after all.

    I’d spent too long screeching into a tinny speaker while rain poured into my car about how I didn’t want the Rugrats kids’ meal. I wanted the Teletubby kids’ meal and if they didn’t have Tinky Winky, well, Lord have mercy, what’s the point of living anyway?

    I thought we had the whole thing straight so I drove up as instructed. (At least I think that’s what she said. Actually it sounded like That will be five dollars and sixty-nine cents. Muffaluffa moongoo.)

    I drove up, paid her, looked in the bag, and (arrrghhh!) discovered a horrid Rugrat staring back at me.

    Now being a savvy veteran of the Drive-Thru Screw-Up, I know better than to leave the window before checking the bag. I check because of something no one warns new parents about in those books: the dreaded Toddler Happy-Meal Extortion

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