DIXIE'S DOG & PONY SHOW (or How Time Flies When You're Having Fun)
by Dixie Cash

A couple of weeks ago, the other half of Dixie (my sister) and I set out on the Dixie Book Tour, our goal being to visit independent books stores in several states and celebrate the release of DON'T MAKE ME CHOOSE BETWEEN YOU AND MY SHOES.

I couldn't keep from thinking of that nutty movie with John Candy and Steve Martin, PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES. We flew, drove, were escorted in luxury sedans and drove and flew again. We didn't take a train, but we saw one.

We left Dallas in an American Airlines jetliner, headed for Memphis. You notice I said “in” a jetliner. That's because George Carlin re-runs last week educated me that we don't fly “on” an airplane; we fly “in” one.

After visiting Davis-Kidd book store in Memphis, the next morning we picked up a Ford Focus at Hertz and drove from Memphis to Nashville to Lexington and back to Nashville in 3 days. Now, if that sounds like a challenge, you should have seen the flight schedule we opted not to take. Only the current airline mess could take you the less than 200 miles from Nashville to Lexington by way of Atlanta.

Once we were back in Nashville, we flew to Birmingham via Southwest, then flew back to Dallas “in” another American Airlines jetliner. It was a whirlwind trip, but we made it and weren't late once.

It was also an adventuresome trip and we saw some wonderful independent book stores. That's a big deal to me because, in Texas, there just ain't very many independents and I don't know of any as elegant as the ones we visited. The Davis-Kidd stores in Memphis and Nashville are wonderful. In Memphis, we were on their local TV morning talk show and it was sort of a reunion because we had been on that show before.

In Nashville, our escort's husband turned out to be Kenny Rogers' manager or something like that, so she was fun to be with. She knew all the country-western music gossip, so we got the skinny on some of our faves. The annual country-western music fan fair was gong on in Nashville, and, if you've read the Dixie Cash books, you know we're big fans. But, alas, we had no time to fritter away on listening to musicians.

The Joseph-Beth store in Lexington is the prettiest book store I've ever seen and the most well-stocked. We were scheduled to be on local TV in Lexington, on the CBS affiliate, but we got bumped by Hillary Clinton's concession speech. I guarantee we would have been more entertaining. Probably wouldn't have drawn as large a crowd, but we would have had more laughs. From there we went to the Little Professor in Birmingham.

We did have a Debbie Sue & Edwina moment or two. For instance, in Nashville, my sister locked the keys in the car with the motor running. When we finally got checked into the hotel, apparently they were running short on rooms because my sister's room was upgraded to a 9-room luxury suite. Incredible. In Birmingham, we were enjoying an ice cream cone in an ice cream shop and a house caught fire a couple of blocks away, burned to the ground, and sent a firefighter to the ER.

All in all, it was a great time. Book promotion is fun. Book stores are fun and so are the people who work in them. I'm happy to say that all of the readers we met were fans and people with great senses of humor.

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