American Thighs, The Sweet Potato Queen's Guide to Perserving Your Assets

by Jill Conner Browne

I love the Sweet Potato Queens, and my goal is to become one! Their motto: Every woman wants a tiara and hot pink majorette boots hits home with me!

Quotes I liked:

"Life pretty much peaks in the 7th grade."

"I am 14 and therefore infinitely wise-and supremely confident in that wisdom. This wisdom renders me totally without patience where any Mere Ordinary Mortals (moms) might be concerned. Whose every communication with me is met with heaving sighs and rolling eyeballs. I cannot-and really have no desire to-comprehend that any MOM may have, in fact, had an Actual Life before I and my contemporaries arrived on the scene. I cannot call up any vision of them, say, dancing with abandon, trying out the latest fashions, laughing over cocktails with girlfriends,m and just forget about anything with boyfriends.
No in my 14 year old mind's eye, the MOM have always done what my own personal MOM unit is doing right now- washing the dishes from the supper they just cooked for and served to me. The MOM have always been here, serving me, in an endless cycle of cooking, cleaning, toting, and fetching- all centered, in my mind, deservedly, around me. They did not exist before Me- because there was no Reason for them to do so. I AM- and therefore, So are They! It is, and ever will be, all about me! Suddenly, the Mom at the kitchen sink speaks, no doubt in response to some insufferable teenage remark I have made in her direction. What she says will echo in my mind for decades, I will be reminded of what a complete and total asshole I was as a teenager and I will also become less and less confident that I have improved much in that time. What the MOM says is this: 'I don't really FEEL any different inside today- then I did when I was YOUR age.' If she had picked up a pair of giant cymbals and crashed them together with my pinhead in between them, I don't think I could have been any more stupefied than I was by those words."

"Thinking about watermelon" was my daddy's recommendation for surviving any Unpleasantness, social, spiritual, physical or medical-ridiculous, but surprisingly effective."

"Today, I'm not so much interested in going to a nude beach- I would love to find a BLIND one, though."

"Baseball and all of its culture was only one small and comparatively unimportant entry on the very long list of shit we didn't know diddly about. But we have never been accused of allowing our state of being uniformed on a particular subject to interfere with our enthusiasm for it."

"Her father, whose enthusiasm at times is rivaled only by that of Eeyore, was inexplicably berating Me for some behavior he imagined She was engaging in, ...."

"the thoughts my daughter shared with me, during the course of which I have no doubt many salient points were glossed over, somehow omitted, or out and out lied about- but what was freely admitted to shocked me to my shoes..."

"They have twisted it around in their irritating little minds to interpret it in a way that anybody with even the smallest fraction of a brain should be able to tell that it says nothing of the kind and they Could discern this fact if they weren't so afflicted with cranio-rectal inversion syndrome (heads up their own asses)."

"...it was a heady experience and my inner hooker was unchained. From that day forward, I wanted to get as nearly naked as the law allowed and run up and down the road all the time. The law at the time did not allow for nearly enough nekkidity to suit me. I was not alone in the felicitous discovery that I actually possessed an inner hooker. Around 1965, everybody under the age of 30 seemed to have a similar startling revelation about themselves."

"Here's a fashion tip, when I am so fat the sheets feel tight, I don't wear lycra!"

"I have never been accused of being a clotheshorse...I'm much more of a clothes roadkill."

"Matter is never lose in the entire Universe. This is why it is impossible for there to be an overall net weight loss among the human race. If one of us loses a pound, another one of us finds it, and so the weight just gets passed around unto infinity."

"...in response to a newspaper reporter who asked about her justification for willful poisonous snake brandishment at a law enforcement officer was this, "I just wasn't in the right frame of mind that night." Now, there is a good answer, I'm saying, I am so loving this woman!"

"If embarrassment at the thought or sight of you their mom engaging in full cavort mode while wearing all manner of sparkly, glittery, spangly, and feathery garb and also demonstrating your unswerving intent to carry on with this outlandish behavior in public...yeah, regarding them...bwahahahahaha, serves em right. Is it not one of the Fondest Dreams of any Parent of a Teenager that they will be blessed to just live long enough to one day Be an embarrassment to that teenager?" (THE fondest dream is, of course, to be blessed to live Long enough to see that kid with his or her own teenager-but causing them embarrassment is one of the top dreams for sure!"

"Grandkids are the definite upside of Geezerdom. They are precious beyond words when they're Little,- and it brings to mind the good old days when your own kids were babies- and then when they turn into Teenage Mutant Hounds from Hell- you can just laugh and laugh from the soothing sanctuary of your own home, far, far away. Vengeance may indeed be His, according to the Lord, but ain't is swell when He shares just a little bit of it?"

"We both got our mama's thighs, and if you were to take a photo of the three of us standing together in swimsuits-well, for starters you'd need a wide-angle lens, not to mention a stun gun, to capture the vision since we wouldn't be volunteering to pose for this..."

"Ok, for all of us who just basically want to be rescued from whatever life situation we've gotten ourselves into-and who doesn't?- that would be sooooo great...but so NOT available. ....as a diversion instead, Ms. Alexyss K Tylor and her mamna have a teevee show that airs on public access...and she said a Word for You today my sistah....we are goddesses and we have, right there bewixt our very own legs, the power, as in THE power...the most powerful power on This planet...that's right Vagina power trumps all!"

"Live life in such a way that every morning when your feet hit the floor, the Devil says, ' Oh Shit, she's up!"