Southern satire for the well-bred and barely hanging on.

The Author

I paid attention and wrote it down.

I spent fifteen years in television news as an anchor and reporter. If a hurricane was coming, I was generally the man outside explaining why everyone else should stay inside.

I’ve since spent two decades in advertising and public relations, building brands and telling stories for hundreds of clients. I’m a co-founder of DavisSouth in Mobile. I’ve helped more than a hundred candidates win elections, with a 90 percent win rate across candidate and issue campaigns. None of this qualifies me to move anybody’s Christmas place card.

I also worked on a Southern humor book published by William Morrow/HarperCollins. That began at Parisian’s corporate headquarters, where I was presenting packaging for pecans and candy. They wanted something with a Southern voice. I pitched a book that didn’t exist yet. A minor production detail, and certainly no reason to ruin a perfectly good sales call.

I was born in New Orleans, raised in Birmingham, with family roots in the Mississippi Delta. That accounts for the SEC football and some of the low-grade shame. Now I live in midtown Mobile, which is basically a cross between a church directory and a Real Housewives reunion.

My late neighbor Miss Kathy taught me about storytelling from her front porch. America met her as Katharine Phillips in Ken Burns’s The War. She never told a story the same way twice.

I’m still listening.

I want to write the kind of books my daughter quotes. As for the rest of my biography, “He was ridiculous, but he was never boring” should cover it. Conveniently, it fits on a flask.