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4 weeks ago | 
gardenandgun.com | Helen Ellis |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian
I love all card games. Gin, UNO, War, Spit, old maid, blackjack, Go Fish—basically any game where I can slap and scream in a social setting. Have you played Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza? You most certainly should. I’m so competitive a bridge teacher once told me, “Helen, we don’t bid out of spite.”I am the kind of woman who’s known as a card.
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1 month ago | 
gardenandgun.com | Helen Ellis |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian
The third season of The White Lotus, a fictional Max dramedy that drops a group of uber-wealthy characters into an all-inclusive but ill-fated paradise, has made headlines not for its scandalous character tropes or thrilling whodunit premise, but rather for two of the characters’ Southern accents.
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1 month ago | 
gardenandgun.com | Lindsey Liles |Helen Ellis |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian
As she crouches on a dock near Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin, Leslie Charleville rolls a thin layer of water-based paint onto the ridged, scaly body of a freshly harvested alligator. Carefully, she lowers a canvas onto the carcass and, using her fingers, presses the fabric into her subject’s every groove and scute. Then she peels off the canvas. “And that’s the moment of truth,” says the artist, who operates L. Charleville Studios out of her home in Rosedale.
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1 month ago | 
gardenandgun.com | Helen Ellis |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian
The third season of White Lotus, a fictional Max dramedy that drops a group of uber-wealthy characters into an all-inclusive but ill-fated paradise, has made headlines not for its scandalous character tropes or thrilling whodunit premise, but rather for two of the characters’ Southern accents.
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1 month ago | 
gardenandgun.com | Jeremy Burgess |Helen Ellis |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian
Decades ago, Central Alabama served as the home base for the Civil Rights Movement. Today the region is a hub of American history, though the work of its freedom fighters lives on through museums, churches, and the outreach of ordinary citizens.
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1 month ago | 
gardenandgun.com | Gray Chapman |Helen Ellis |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian
Arts & Culture In an open-air studio, one artist transforms tangles of invasive plants into functional objects Every morning, Delia Fian awakens to the sound of birdsong. As the dawn illuminates the valley below her home in the mountains bordering North Carolina’s Nantahala National Forest, Fian builds a fire and boils the water she brought up from the nearby spring the night before.
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1 month ago | 
gardenandgun.com | Helen Ellis |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian
Back for my fortieth birthday, I asked my family to meet me in New Orleans, feed marshmallows to a nine-foot gator on a swamp tour, and drink French 75s at Arnaud’s. And I wanted the women to wear corsages. My husband recalls everything except the corsages. He asks, “Did I buy them in New York City and bring them on the plane?”“No,” I say. “You found a New Orleans florist thanks to a Southern hairdresser who worked where I got my roots done on Orchard Street.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
gardenandgun.com | Helen Ellis |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian
People die, people divorce, we leave jobs and lose touch with coworkers, children grow up and don’t play with our children anymore (so we no longer must play nice with their parents), funds get scarce (more cards, more money), people cut us from their Christmas card lists, so we cut them from ours (I suggest a two-year grace period)—you can delete someone from your holiday mailing spreadsheet for plenty of good reasons. But sometimes things get personal.
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Jul 31, 2024 | 
gardenandgun.com | Helen Ellis |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian
My earliest memory of a potluck is my father nudging me at a 1970s neighborhood get-together. He pointed at the punch bowl where a runny-nosed kid was fishing orange slices from a Sprite and sherbet mix, sucking the juice out, and tossing the peels back in. It didn’t occur to us to leave because the whole house might be contaminated. We just didn’t drink the punch. Maybe it’s pandemic aftershocks, but nowadays it seems like people are giving this Southern tradition the side-eye.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
gardenandgun.com | Helen Ellis |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian
My husband, a born-and-raised New Yorker, tells me, a Southern lady who has lived in Manhattan for more than thirty years: “You go to book readings, museums, the opera. You’re more of a New Yorker than I am. I don’t like to do any of those things.”This is true. When my husband “takes me to the theater,” he walks me from our Upper East Side apartment to Times Square, treats me to lunch, and then deposits me at the theater door.
