After I got old enough to drive in Mississippi, where I grew up, one of the places we liked to go was across the river to Delta, Louisiana, where the land looks even flatter than ours and you could get 64 ounces of frozen daiquiri handed to you, in your car, through a drive-thru window. For us it was over the river, into the alcohol.
The place in the clip below is fancier than the one we went to -- I think that's because it's in New Orleans -- but you'll get the point.
Today, that same dispenser of sin has developed into having a good-sized building and a sit-down menu. But back in the day, selling drive-thru daiquiris was exactly half the business. They didn't advertise the other half so much. You never heard about it on the radio. You could spend your life wheeling through and never know about it.
But one day, for reasons lost to the mists of swamp juice (actual name of a drink there), we parked and went inside, where we found a thriving shop for live bait: crickets, minnows, night crawlers, whatever you needed. It smelled like a bait shop, the exact mix of fuel oil and dirt, and it sounded like one, with the tanks bubbling and the crickets singing. It was staffed by two people, both older women, the same two who served the drinks. Which meant that all along, the hand passing over a cup the size of a popcorn bucket was the same hand dishing out worms. It was the same hand.
In a way, that's just so wonderful, people making a living in a manner that made sense for their own time and hometown. In another way, now that we're all thinking about Mitt Romney selling sweet campaign promises and also bait for conservative white voters to hit and liberals to get mad about, I keep remembering our old daiquiri hut and the day we figured out it was the same hand.
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I remember all that, too, and I remember another reason to cross over to Louisiana: It was as far east as you could buy Coors and that made Coors special.
Don't worry--alcohol makes an excellent disinfectant.
I would suggest that you stay away from Mexico if you're a fan of drinks with crushed ice. Your second or third day will be hell.
Double post courtesy of Newsvine.
There used to be a place across the parish line from Monroe LA that served the same way.
Say, not to change the subject, did you know that Billy Long MO7 and Grover Norquist are appearing for two shows only at the Tampa Improv Comedy Club? Shows are at 11:30PM and 1:00AM, $10.00 cover.
You can't make this up. http://bus-plunge.blogspot.com/2012/08/billy-goes-to-tampa-headlines-at-comedy.html
http://bus-plunge.blogspot.com/2012/08/billy-goes-to-tampa-headlines-at-comedy.html
What I want to know is why the Hill Street Blues theme was playing in the car, even if for a few seconds ;)
"It was the same hand."
And it will be the same "hand" disenfranchising all but the most affluent in America if Robme get's into office!
Some years ago on a road trip through Cajun country, we stopped in Lafayette, Louisiana. It was a neat little town with TV channels broadcasting in Cajun French. But my most lasting memory was driving by the "Honk and Holler Drive-Thru Daiquiri Depot." Alas, it was closed at the time.
Laura, I'm pretty sure this post is deeply and karmically connected to Will's paleo-geology-as-economic-destiny piece from the other day. See, you even show a map! Jared Diamond would be proud.
Momento mori, food for worms, we get all existential on your ass too (a lot of the writers I studied with at U-Arkansas came out of Oxford, Miss., and Barry Hannah, we sent him back there! I miss Jim Whitehead more than Barry).
From northwest Arkansas, we made our booze runs on Sundays to Oklahoma, tho.
I LOVE the free-form associations above, and remember well my first drive-thru liquor stores in LA (I even worked them into a poem once).
The drive-thru funeral homes were even better tho. They had this lazy susan thing, and you said the name of the person you came to see, and it rotated the appropriate person up... I sh*t you not!
Did you live in Texas, too?
No, but all my ex's live in Texas... ;-)
Razorbacks are NOT real fond of them Longhorns, you know.
BTW, I am embarrassed to say, I meant Memento Mori above. Typo! Yikes!
When I was in BR, LA after Katrina doing work for the Red Cross a local friend of mine turned me on to a place called 'Zippies'...nothing quite like a 44/64oz styrofoam cup filled with a JacknCoke slushie on a hot LA day. They had an absurd assortment of slushified drinks and a drive-up window that was always busy...
Something about the implicit support of drinking and driving from these establishments got me thinking..."would a place like this go over well in Iowa?". I'm still looking for an investor so I guess not, lol.