BONUS NUMBER 2: A SNAKE IN THE COLLARDS
or, How I Came Out to My Bible Belt Mother by Greg Jackson
N.B. Greg Jackson wrote a number of articles for our magazines, many of them so funny that I sometimes asked him, “Did it literally happen like that?” When I re-read this piece not long ago, I called him in Boston, where he has lived since the 1970s. “Is it really true that the coroner in your county was blind?
“Yes,” he said. “I never have to gild the lily.” In fact, he’s at work on a book about the grotesqueries of his Southern Gothic childhood. He might even post it on Substack.
That story was hilarious and I could relate to almost every anecdote in it. Not that I experienced them myself, but none of it really surprised me as my family and some of the people that I've known my entire life could fit right into some of the characters portrayed.