Alabama is the first place I've been that makes Kentucky look progressive. The culture here seems to be fully comprised of faith, fishing, and barbeque. Downtown Montgomery is a bombed-out and boarded-up place awash in grammatically flawed historical markers. (Who knew that the father of American gynecology was from Alabama?) The former shopfronts are victorian brickwork, grated over, and broken-windowed, with several failed layers of revitalization. Just down the street from Martin Luther King's church, at the site of a business formerly known as "Right On! inc.", a mural of Moses' decent from Mount Sinai has been rendered with several distinctly southern touches; Moses looks like he could bench-press the ark of the covenant and there's a star-spangled eagle, similarly buff, muscularly flapping above the wayward tribes of Israel while they worship the golden calf, Baal. (I assume that's who the banana-colored Holstein is supposed to be, anyway.) Intermingled with the mural is another hand-painted depiction of the "mote-in-the-eye" parable. In the Alabama version, a young black man appears to be putting in his contacts while several white folks stumble around with what appear to be 2x4s sticking out of their faces. Further ornamenting the collage is a hand-painted pizza advertisement with a hydrocephalic black child salivating at a piece of pizza. Based on the amount of spittle involved, it is quite possible that the child is rabid and that the pizza, Moses, and the banana-cow are all encephalitic hallucinations.
I want to state, for the record, that we had no intention of coming to Alabama, and if not for frozen biscuits, we would have never been here. When we were leaving the beach-house in Florida we were trying to clean out the fridge and realized that we had a twenty-count bag of frozen biscuits to deal with. To my recollection, I have never intentionally used a kitchen to produce a biscuit, but seeing no viable alternative, we made the whole bag and by the time we packed the van we were down to a ten-count bag of warm baked biscuits and two 5-count biscuit bellies. We accidentally drifted into Alabama while chasing some beachy sunsets. We ended up in Montgomery and upon our arrival we learned that this weekend is the opening expo game for the local baseball team, the Montgomery Biscuits. Clearly we had buttered the biscuit of fate with our accidental breakfast. Oddly enough, there was also a breast cancer awareness event planned for the weekend in Montgomery and, although we are already more aware of breast cancer than we'd like to be, seeing a 3 story baroque fountain spew pink-dyed water out it's horns and mer-critter's mouths was kind of inspiring. Trying to stay in the "pink" spirit of things, we had some chopped pork sandwiches before we hit the road and we are now off to explore the cultural riches of Birmingham.