Wednesday

 

Kids say the darndest things

“After lunch, if that’s what you call a large meal of meat that you finish just before 9 A.M., I had a chat about Snow’s origins with its management team. We talked near the pits, so Miss Tootsie could pull off sausage links now and then. ‘I felt like with her name and barbecue and my personality with people we could make it work,’ Bexley told me. He’s a short, outgoing man whose résumé includes—in addition to rodeo clown—prison guard, auctioneer, real-estate agent, and shopkeeper. He already had the location—a place where he’d run a farm and ranch store in 1992. The name came from a nickname he’d had since before he was born. According to the family story, his brother, then four years old, was asked whether he was hoping for the new baby to be a boy or a girl, and he replied, not unreasonably, that he would prefer a snowman. Kerry (Snowman) Bexley and Miss Tootsie opened Snow’s in March of 2003—Bexley had built the pits—and it did well from the start. ‘For the most part, we cooked two to three hundred pounds of meat,’ Bexley told me. ‘We sold out by noon.’”
Calvin Trillin, “By Meat AloneThe New Yorker, 11/24/08 (emphasis supplied)

On another New Yorker related matter, (and if you count the McPhee post below there have been a number of those lately), whatever else is true of Malcolm Gladwell, whoever runs his publicity is very good. His new book came out this week, and suddenly he is everywhere.

Though to be honest, that was just a, quick, gut reaction. I was just saying the first thing I thought, and not really deliberating. I'm not sure whether the evidence really supports my hypothesis.

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