The Steel Magnolia

One of my favorite movies is “Steel Magnolias.” Watching that movie is like peeking inside a “collective home” of my childhood. The characters and events evoke the “atmosphere” of my life as a child growing up in Central Florida. I have relatives like those people, some better and some worse, and the scenery and “family life” is most definitely familiar, especially the role of the women.

The women in my family were Steel Magnolias and it seems that I carry on the tradition as do my four daughters.

The environment in which I grew up is long gone, replaced now with what some are calling “quiet Fascism” - indicating it is not so “in your face” as the Nazi Reich - and it breaks my heart. But a Steel Magnolia doesn’t just sit there and tolerate rudeness and injustice, she does something about it even if her options as an ordinary woman are limited.

What are my options?

Well, I have no position, no power, no money to speak of. I do have eyes that see and a mind that thinks and with the internet, I can also have a voice. I want to speak to all the other Steel Magnolias, daughters, sisters, wives, mothers - all of us, daughters of the South that resisted the Corporatism of the Yankees almost a hundred and fifty years ago, only to be betrayed and taken over by that damnyankee Bush family that has come in like a spider, pretending to our faith, our mores, our manners and our higher values. What a Trojan Horse, and how many of our sisters who are weighted down with the cares of family and home are taken in by this snake oil sales job!

George W. Bush is no more a Christian than a polecat.

So, that is the reason for this blog. Of course, I think I might share some of my favorite recipes and stories about my own growing up years. You just never know. That’s what’s nice about being a Steel Magnolia: once you realize you are one, you aren’t an ordinary woman anymore and the options expand according to your creativity and cleverness, not to mention your woman’s perogative to be spontaneous.

So, dont’ expect anything of one sort or another: what I write will depend on my mood and where my thoughts have traveled on any given day.