I have now survived a full weekend of a barbecue festival, bringing together competitive teams from across the Southeast. Not everything related directly to that tasty, tasty dish -- for example, I have now interviewed the Chief Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, and we only talked some about barbecue, and my National Park ranger friend has now introduced me to "Drunk History."
In this segment of the HBO comedy show "Funny or Die," comedians would become extremely drunk and narrate a moment of American history, and famous comedy actors would then act out this narration. I told her my favorite moments included Crispin Glover as an evil Thomas Edison electrocuting animals with alternating current and an angry, belligerent George Washington and his fleeing slave Oney Judge both developing hiccups to match their narration. My favorite bit, however, involves Will Ferrell as Abraham Lincoln, Don Cheadle as Frederick Douglass and Zooey Deschanel as a far too skinny Mary Todd Lincoln trying to sort out the racial issues of the Civil War. She was pleased I liked it.
To return to the barbecue festival: I attended a hot dog eating contest for the first time, where the winner was, as it has been in past years, Dale "Mouth of the South" Boone. This Atlanta-based man has won international competitive eating championships, and I anticipated a gruesome spectacle. He did not oblige.
He announced just before the start of the noontime 10-minute contest that he would eat only one more than the person in second, and he kept his word on this count. I learned afterward he was leaving to participate in another hot dog-eating competition in Sumter in the evening, so truly he was not competing with himself but rather eating just enough to win. In his eating strategy, he crushed the buns down around two hot dogs, dunked them in a cup of water each and then placed both in his mouth at once. His confidence allowed him to merely watch the other competitors for the first minute, and only begin eating without any hurry on minute two.
I'm never going to be an activist against it, nor am I ever going to criticize anyone for their participation in it, but I would never participate in the bizarre activity of competitive eating myself. I am always irked if I believe I am wasting a valuable resource -- electricity, gasoline and especially food. I carefully monitor the consumption of half-gallon bottles of milk in my refrigerator to ensure I drink it before it goes bad, a common occurrence among those living by themselves.
The barbecue itself was delicious, and proved very popular even among my friends and colleagues from elsewhere in the nation. Southerners are very serious about their barbecue, even if many do not know its correct spelling. Growing up, we would always have it for Christmas dinner. Sure, we also had a Christmas ham as we broke out the fine china, silver and crystal, but the barbecue was there too. Cain's Bar-B-Q in Florence always moves tremendous numbers of takeout orders on Dec. 23.
I have introduced many of the non-Southerners to "The BBQ Song," an instructional musical performance, found on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ubTQfr_tyY, and sponsored, appropriately enough, by Alka-Seltzer. Distinctions of barbecue regions remains important for us. An examination of this barbecue map of S.C., http://triathletechronicles.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/sc-bbq-map.jpg, reveals my family emerges entirely from the vinegar-based region. Once while in college, I suggested to my father we could try some mustard-based, because I deemed its taste worthwhile. "Well, you can drive to Columbia and pick some up for yourself," he shot back.
