Free God Save the Sweet Potato Queens by Jill Conner Browne Page B

shoes.
    Okay, so we’ve gone and admitted that we need men. The problem then becomes, as related to us by many of our sisters: Where do you find them? This has just never been a problem for the Queens, as you may well imagine. Our problem is usually more along the lines of keeping the numbers manageable; therefore, we are in an excellent position to offer advice.
    “They makin’ ’em thangs ever’day,” my daddy, who was very wise indeed, always said. Now, granted, he was referring to some manufactured product, but we can certainly give it just the slightest stretch, and it easily applies to men as well, at least in our minds, where, as you know, anything can happen and often does. The fact that they makin’ ’em thangs ever’day just shows us, to our great relief, that there is no shortage. Men are in plentiful and readily available supply at all times. This is a big load off our minds, because they are so dang much trouble once you have them, that if you had to go out and hunt and scrounge around for them to begin with, well, it just might not even be cost-effective.
    So, if men are everywhere, just waiting for us to pluck them off the vine, then the next question is: Which vine? Indeed, it is our experience that there are so many of them, at every turn, it is easy to get overwhelmed or even jaded and just not even bother plucking any of them. This is not a good set of circumstances. It feels awful, and we find, upon further examination, that it is often an early symptom of a hormonal imbalance; so whenever one of the Queens expresses a disinterest in men, we all immediately gang up on her and make her assess her hormones. If it’s not her hormones, it may just be that she’s bored with the current crop and needs a change, just like your cat will be completely enthralled with that fake bird on a bungee cord with the bells and feathers and strings hanging off of it, will play with it for hours on end and then, suddenly, it’s over. The thrill, as our beloved B. B. King says so well, is gone.
    When this happens, there’s nothing for it but another trip to PetSmart to get a new cat toy. Sometimes you just got to have a new cat toy. But you know how it is, you go to PetSmart and there’s aisle after aisle of nothing but cat toys as far as the eye can see, and they all look pretty good. I mean, it’s the same basic premise with all of them—they’re on some kind of springy cord attached to a stick, they all have things that jiggle and wiggle and catch your eye. Some are bigger than others, some make more noise, some are fancier while others are more no-frills and serviceable. But you can’t really try them out in the store. Oh, I know, they encourage you to bring your pets in there and all that, and that may work fine with some dogs, but cats are just not really who you want to take to the mall, now are they? Even that most famous of Southern cats, Willie Morris’s own Spit McGee, is not a good shopper. Cats just don’t get the theory of going to the store to look at new stuff. And anyway, most of the cat toys are sealed up in wrappers, so you couldn’t try them out in the store even if you could induce your cat to go shopping with you. And would you really want to buy a floor-demo cat toy for your kitty? So it is with us, sisters.
    There’s tons of men out there, but the only way to know if you like them is to try them out for a while. Mercy, how do you settle on one or two to try? A number of folks have shared their Rules for Dating with us. From Pensacola, Susi writes that when she and her friends were in their thirties they had the ten-year rule—you couldn’t date anybody more than ten years younger or older than yourself. But Marjorie, from another Southern state, writes that, at sixty-five, she is beginning to find her fifty-year-old lover a bit old for her! Yippee! is just all I can say to that. Now that the Queens are older and, we believe, wiser, we have amended this to the new Mommer’n’em