December 13, 2006
HEY, HEY, PAULA
Headed south yesterday to see Food Network queen Paula Deen sign copies of her latest holiday cookbook at Sarasota News & Books on Tuesday night. I've interviewed her a couple times and saw her last at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, so I thought I'd go pay my respects since she was in the neighborhood.
Talk about a mob scene.
The store insisted that everyone who got to meet her had a ticket to get in. To get a ticket, you had to buy a copy of her $26 cookbook, If you bought a red ticket, that meant you were one of the first 500 to do so and would get first preference for meeting the Deen of Southern Cooking. A blue ticket meant you were headed to the back of the line.
The store sold out of the red tickets and dipped way into the blue as the signing hour approached. The two lines - red and blue - stretched down the block in two directions for hundreds of people. Waiters at Two Senoritas Famous Mexican Food on Main Street brought menus out to the people waiting in line. As soon as the margaritas were flowing, cameras began flashing and the back of the blue-ticket line took on a decidedly rauccous tone.
Those who came out of the store after having their books signed waved and yelled, "Merry Christmas!" to those who still had yet to go inside. One mother who had a sleeping baby on her shoulder was relieved of her duty temporarily by another woman who offered to spell her for a moment.
Another woman and her adult daughter joined their husbands at the bar at Two Senoritas. As they did so, the mother did "my Paula Deen dance."
Eyeballing the mob near the bookstore's entrance, one middle-age woman in a smart blue dress-suit with white piping and matching bag tapped me on the shoulder and commented, "And they say butter doesn't sell."
The line, which included mostly women, (WARNING: CLICHE ALERT) turned strangers into friends. Seriously. One woman in front of me was chatting with another who just happened to arrive at the last minute at the back of the line. The first woman had two books with two tickets inside. The late arriver had none. That was, up until the woman with two books sold one of hers to the other woman so she could get inside.
How crazy did things get?
The first fan in line arrived at 9:30 a.m.
From Orlando. She had already seen Deen there earlier.
Fans who happened to be queueing up in the red-ticket line mobbed Dean as she stepped out of her SUV limousine, snapping photos, screaming her name and her husband Michael Groover's name and begging for hugs from both of them.
A few fans pegged her black-vested security guard for info as he listened to a radio transmission through an earpiece. They especially wanted to know where Deen had eaten before coming to the 6 p.m. signing.
"Would you believe McDonald's?" he said with a grin.
The ladies gasped and giggled.
"Did she have the fries?" one woman breathlessly asked.
"No, she did not," he said.
"Oh, my," the woman said, clutching her neck. "As much as Paula loves potatoes."
After it was over, a clutch of fans waited in the alley again for one more glimpse. One young man named Jared who was dressed in khaki pants and a dress shirt hovered with a camera near the front of the limo. After about 10 minutes, he recognized a female colleague from work.
"Yes, Mary, we're that nuts," Jared said. "Are you gonna tell everyone at The Gap that I'm nuts?"
A tall, thin woman in a white T-shirt who clearly had enough of all the shenanigans chastised the snapperazzi lingering with their digital cameras.
"Folks," she said, "Give it a rest. It's over."
To which I applied my favorite line from "Animal House": "Nothing's over until we say it's over. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?"
Which garnered no laughs.
Tough crowd.
Fifth grader Hunter Horne, 10, of Parrish, skipped school from Palmetto Christian so he could get in line early.
Who brought him?
Two of his teachers, Gayle Ballenger and Leigh Evans, each of whom took the day off so they could bring Hunter to the signing to meet his cooking idol. Knowing how much Hunter loves cooking, the teachers approached his mother, Nanette, and asked if they could bring him. They surprised the boy with the plan on Friday. He'd been antsy and anxiously awaiting the day ever since.
"It's my dream to be a famous chef," he said after the book signing, during which Deen posed for a photo with the boy and chatted with him briefly.
I was joined in this ridiculousness by Salad Boy and Salad Mother-In-Law, both of whom are huge Paula Deen fans.
Deen commented on Salad Boy's hair color and skin. (Yes, that's SB in the foreground.)
Her husband Michael (who is chatting with SB in this photo as Salad Mother-In-Law laughs at Deen's question) asked him if he had made any of the recipes in the book yet. When he said he had not, he suggested Brian try making the Bread Pudding.
"It's so easy, I can do it," Groover said.
After it was over, we went out in the alley to see how crazy things would get. Salad Boy tried to give Deen a hug as she came out but was rebuffed by a handler. He had to settle for a high-five as she pulled away. (That's his meaty paw in the photo.)
And as she rode away into the humid night, she let out one last Deen-ism, holiday style: "Merry Christmas, y'all!"
You can see more photos at my Snap! gallery.