There’s a lot of lesbian truck drivers out there, from what I’ve seen in many, many cross-country drives.
There are just some groups I don’t envision as being truck drivers. Gays, excepting maybe the burliest of bears, for one. Don’t see many black truckers, and Jewish truckers seem nonexistent outside of Israel.
I’m not exactly sure as I don’t know the area. I can find out. I’m not sure if it’s in MidTown as he biked five miles from his apartment on (whatever road it is- it’s across from the shopping center where Chapter 11 and Publix is which in turn is behind the one where Brush Strokes and Oscars are) up Piedmont, down the road where Heretic is and onward for about five miles from his place. He described it as a small automotive junkyard.
Alright, it cannot be a coincidence that, just as I was re-reading this thread, I heard that StoryCorps is in Tuscaloosa. Sampiro, get yourself over there and record them some stories.
Thanks. I missed the five-mile part. For someone who doesn’t know the area well, you know the area well. The road is Monroe Dr., I know the apartments you’re talking about, across the street from Ansley Mall (where the Publix and Chapter 11, as well as the most FABULOUS! Starbucks in Atlanta is). When my wife and I were dating she lived across Piedmont from him. Anyway, now I feel like the dude at a Star Trek convention that asks Bill Shatner why Kirk liked lemonade in one episdode but said he was alergic to citrus in another… Please forgive my obsesive need to picture this in my head.
And don’t forget the Kroger store! At one pont in my banking career part of my job was to cover for branch managers who were out on vacation, sick, etc. The branch in the Ansley Kroger was in my region and I always looked forward to my stints there. To say the clientele was ecclectic would be an understatement. Quite a few of our regular customers were transvestites. Some of them were absolutely gorgeous. A running gag was that any new male employee would be flirted with mercilessly by the trannies, while the other employees pretended not to notice. Once he was hooked, the customer would present his driver’s license as ID. The look on the employee’s face the first time he saw a male face on a female’s DL was always priceless - ranging from absolute shock to “remain professional, remain professional!”. Each subsequent time the poor guy didn’t know what to do - “Am I being pranked again? Is it really a woman this time?” The trannies would keep up the game, with our full consent and cooperation, until the new guy knew them all by both personas. Yep, good times at the Ansley Kroger.
Major thanks for this recommendation. I did and it was a blast.
I actually reserved a time slot for the “Story Corps” wagon (which I learned about from your post) in the hopes that my mother would go with me and let me interview her about her wrestling days, her experiences in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and as a public school teacher during integration, the really weird and wonderful stories from her childhood, etc., but she wasn’t that interested to begin with (especially on the wrestling part, which though it’s the thing people are most interested in is also the thing she’s still inexplicably embarassed by [I’ve told her “Janet Reno’s mother wrestled alligators professionally and her daughter became the most powerful woman in the country, it is *nothing* to be embarassed by”, but nope, it’s a hermetically sealed part of her past]) and then she caught a bad cold which completely did away with her coming up for any of the rest, so instead I read a story about my family (a more refined and edited version of Spinning in the Sunlight) and then talked to the (extremely cute in a twinkish sort of way) interviewer. I was supposed to be allotted 40 minutes but I came in late due to a traffic jam, and I ended up talking to him for an hour and a half. (I was the last interview of the day and he kept asking questions [especially about the committment of my great-aunt and my grandfather’s sexually explicit deathbed confessions [that’s a story I didn’t think anybody would care about and it’s one of the most popular by far] and the general isolation and haunted feelings of the place where I grew up, etc.]). It was a blast (and I got the CD of the “interview”, cool!). Of course he really really wants to interview my mother, so I’ll tell her about it and maybe the promise of major interested attention from strangers will get to her.
Many thanks for the recommendation- I owe you one.