March 7, 2008
A few years back, we found a rental car company that didn’t charge extra for mileage and proceeded to make them rethink that policy by striking out on an impromptu 1300 mile trip from Toronto to New Orleans with a couple of buddies. En route, we took in the best of what the southern US has to offer: happily clogging arteries with their delicious early-grave food, spending more than one late night boozing it up on Nashville’s main strip, and also doing the tourist guidebook stuff that involved sites near and dear to our hearts like the Jack Daniels distillery and Johnny Cash’s house in Hendersonville Tennessee.
We were disappointed to see that the latter was closed to the public upon our arrival, but heartened when we saw a sign across the street for something called “Trinity Music City, USA”. Alas, this enthusiasm was premature. “Trinity Music City, USA” is what Conway Twitty’s Xanadu-like compound “Twitty City” was renamed when the Christian Trinity Broadcasting Company overtook it following the death of the great man – known for southern Lolita favorites like “I can tell you’ve never been this far before” – on a tour bus in 1993.
The resulting renovations to the compound are the stuff that nightmares are made of with Christian movies like “The Omega Code” (”Not just a movie, a miracle”) playing on a continual loop, giant statues of winged angels throughout and souvenirs available at a place called the “Gold, Frankincense & Myrrh Bible Book Store”. (We confess to having purchased multiple “Bible Bars”, chocolate-bar shaped concoctions with the dubious claim of having been based on a recipe from the bible). Conway Twitty’s legacy is not lost here; cardboard cutouts of him and the missus smiling at intervals throughout his mansion are sure to give you the creeps long after you’ve sped out of the parking lot.
Leaving there and with the Dollywood Pigeon Forge city limits too far away, we decided to further indulge our appetites for all things garish and unsettling east of Las Vegas with a stop at Graceland, where on the back-end of a 2600 mile sojourn we found the idea of coughing up an extra $20 to see Elvis’s collection of cars anticlimactic to say the least after having literally breathed in the 1970s thanks to the shag carpet dust from the walls of his “Jungle Room”. The conclusion to the tour, with a stop at the King’s grave, was worth the price of admission though; giving us as it did the chance to quote from “This is Spinal Tap” by humming a few bars of “Heartbreak Hotel” and saying that this “Puts it all into perspective… Too much f*cking perspective!”
Alas, the King’s legend lives on in places outside of Graceland with his impersonators keeping the dream alive around the world. Just across the border in Kentucky, a 64-year-old Elvis impersonator, sadly not the one pictured here, was recently in court on pretrial motions regarding misdemeanor charges of stalking and violating a protective order (Editor’s Note: One hopes the judge keeps in mind the sheer creep-out factor of being stalked by an Elvis impersonator when deciding on this one).
“Elvis” showed up in court drunk wearing sunglasses and decked out in a rhinestone-studded shirt and scarf, the kind of fashion decision that should be grounds for arrest regardless of the circumstance, but which the judge found particularly unacceptable given the circumstances. The judge had the man tested for alcohol, and the result was nearly twice the .08 level at which a person is considered legally drunk in Kentucky, which should be twice that given the state’s predilection for high-powered whiskey. This pretender to the throne’s excuse that he had a few drinks the night before didn’t fly with the suspiciously-minded judge who sent him to the clink for three days.
