James Fox-Smith - STV: 20

Marc sits down with James Fox-Smith, publisher of Country Roads magazine, for a rich and engaging conversation about Louisiana, culture, travel, and the unexpected journey that brought him from Wales and Australia to St. Francisville. Along the way, James shares the story behind Country Roads, his life with Ashley, and his deep appreciation for the people, places, food, music, and creative spirit that make this region so remarkable. It’s a thoughtful and charming episode filled with local color, humor, and genuine affection for Louisiana life.

Listen to James Fox-Smith’s podcast Art Rocks! [Podcast]

Explore Country Roads magazine for stories on travel, food, arts, history, and life around the region. [Website]

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to See the Bill. And we really own a see the Bill today because I have James Fox Smith, who is the publisher of Country Roads magazine, which takes you all around Louisiana and it's a wonderful periodical that is very much appreciated in our region and all and again all around the uh the state and anyone who's going to visit our state. So James, what is the website for Country Roads?

SPEAKER_00 0:28

It's www.countryroadsmag.com. CountryroadMag.com. Country Roads with an A. CountryRoadMag.com. That's right.

SPEAKER_03 0:39

Excellent. And if you can get a copy of it, which here in town at several different places, uh it's a wonderful thing to pass through, read through, and just study for great ideas when you're visiting this area. So where are you originally from?

SPEAKER_00 0:56

That always comes up early in the conversation, doesn't it? That's what I'm asking. Yeah, I think. So I was born in Cardiff, in Wales. And when I was six years old, my parents kind of inadvertently emigrated to Australia. Didn't really mean it. Thought they would go for a two-year working holiday at a time when Australia was desperate for young medical professionals, and my father was a newly qualified doctor. And so took assisted passage to Australia for what they thought would be an adventurous couple of years, and essentially got marooned there through one series of financial disasters after another, ended up being really unable to come back to the UK, which is what they'd always thought that they would do. And uh at some point over the course of the ensuing years with myself, my younger brother and sister, by the time that things had changed enough for them when they could consider going back to the UK, they had teenage children for whom Australia was home, and the UK really just didn't seem quite as much like home anymore as it used to do.

SPEAKER_03 2:09

Do you remember moving to Australia?

SPEAKER_00 2:11

I do. I do. I was going on six years old. My recollections of it are being tremendously distressed at the fact of discovering that we weren't taking the dog. Because at that time, Australia had a uh a very strictly enforced, actually still does, have a very strictly enforced six-month quarantine for incoming pets. And so that was something that they weren't willing to put their dog through. We proceeded to get exactly the same kind of dog in Australia. So in the end, I'm not sure anyone could have told the difference. But uh yeah, the dog did not come.

SPEAKER_03 2:51

So you uh wound up in St. Francisville when?

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Stranger Things, isn't that a peculiar story? First time I set foot in St. Francisville was 1993 in September, which also coincided with the first time I ever set foot in the United States. Oh, really?

SPEAKER_03 3:10

Yeah. What a nice place to come if you can.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

It was, wasn't it? I'll tell you what wasn't the nicest place to come to for someone who's never been to the U US before, is the um downtown Atlanta Greyhound station at 10 o'clock on a Friday night in uh September 1993, which was a wild place for a skinny white boy uh to be um at that particular time. And yet Ashley and I, who were didn't have two nickels to rub together, were looking for the cheapest way to get from the UK to the US, and that at that particular point. Do you know how in London you used to before the rise of the internet, if you wanted cheap airline tickets, London was the place to get them. And there'd be these things called bucket shops that were around the city. You remember them? And you'd go and you'd see, and there'd be like a sandwich board outside, and it would have the airfares written on it in chalk of places. And we were walking through London one day, and she was homesick. She was really, really homesick. And she we walked by one, it was like Atlanta 300 pounds. And she was like, We're doing it, we're going. And and we bought two fairs. Got on a Pan Am flight and landed in uh Atlanta on a just before um Memorial Day. No, just before Labor Day in 1993. Twelve hours on a Greyhound, and we were in Baton Rouge. So there you go. My first welcome to America moment.

SPEAKER_03 4:44

And that's a long time ago. It is. I also in just the way this town is, because it was truly bohemian then.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

Genuinely was.

SPEAKER_03 4:53

It really was. And now it's a bit uh well-heeled and uh more polite. A little bit bougie, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 5:00

A little bougie. Uh and I think that that was my first introduction to it, was to its bohemian side. Because let's see. My mother-in-law Dorcas Brown had established Country Roads. I agree with that 100%, especially if she's listening. Um she had established Country Roads and had it for about 12 years, and she founded it with Anna Mercedo, who everybody knows. And Anna was part of the beating heart of Bohemian, Louisiana, uh consummate artist, former owner of uh Anna Mercedo and Associates Agency, which is one of the most effective creative agencies in South Louisiana, and did all of the design work for Country Roads. And so the people that Dorcas rubbed shoulders with and hung out with was you know St. Francisville's Bohemian side. And that was my introduction. And I've always been grateful for that.

SPEAKER_03 6:02

Somebody once said to me, I you know, I never watched the television program for for people listening that have that St. Francisville at that time was like the the television program uh Northern Exposures, which was very laid back, relaxed, except a southern version of it, because that was taking place, I think, in Alaska.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

That's interesting to think. That's an interesting comparison to make.

SPEAKER_03 6:29

Yeah, somebody it was Beth Arnold that said that. And I've you know, I respect her and what she would describe this as.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

I can see where that comparison came from. Did you ever see the show? I've seen Northern Exposure in a long time. I have a long time. If you can see Well, in that it it was a place that not only tolerated but celebrated eccentricity.

SPEAKER_03 6:53

Reminds me of a funny story. Owen Kempt, who is the yoga guru here, and uh she's been on a podcast, she has an episode, y'all should listen to that. She told me her mother said to her, when Kenwood Kennan had Como and he had a commune out there, she said, Oh, there's a commune here, but they're all from very nice families.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

That's true. But I think that that was the thing that united so much of what St. Francisville's spirit was built around, right?

SPEAKER_03 7:26

And no one was a gentleman like Kenwood Kennan.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

No, he wasn't. No, you're quite right. So I guess he set the tone and the spirit for the whole thing. But that was that was kind of, I would say, a uniting principle behind the spirit of the place was the the people that were carrying the banner for, you know, alternative hippie St. Francisville planted their flag here, but they were the privileged sons and daughters of wealthy land-owning West Felician and sort of for lack of a better term, planter class. And they'd gone out to, you know, San Francisco or Carmel or wherever, and had, you know, done that time in the 60s and then brought some of that back here and found a found a foothold for it in the Felicianas. Um, people like Robin and Lynn, um, with The Birdman and the Magnolia, um, people like Michael Miller and Airhouse Pottery, um, Gordon Graham, you know, I mean, they're like Kenwood, Susan Lindsay, they're those folks are the ones who I think enabled St. Francisville to create an identity, a collective identity in a sense of itself that just was different from other small Louisiana, Mississippi towns.

SPEAKER_03 8:47

Yes, and it, you know, it always has been different. I do the, well, I'm gonna plug myself. I do a tour called The Ghost of Bayou Sarah. And one of the things that's interesting about St. Francisville is unlike other towns around here, Jackson, Clinton, Woodville, Mississippi, we don't have the typical southern town setup. We don't have a town square with the public buildings and the most important church and uh old residences that had just been here. All of the residences are one of two things. They were either moved whole or part up from Bayusera, or they were built after the Civil War, and a lot of them were built by uh merchants, Jewish merchants, who had been peddlers before the war and became uh general store managers after the war.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Like Julius Frehan.

SPEAKER_03 9:40

Yes. And the land where the town really sits was part of Pine Grove Plantation. So it was not a town so much. And I think that's one of the magical things about it that make it so different.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Um maybe it wasn't planned out the way that many, you know, like a Woodville or an Oxford, Mississippi. Totally where somebody said, right, we're putting a town here, here is the grid, here's the street, here's the church, here's the city hall, here's the Presbyterian. Well, here all you had was a series of ridges running between some completely impassable ravines, right? Mm-hmm. Exactly. With alligators in them. So you build along the ridges, you get Ferdinand Street and Royal Street, and uh not terribly many else, and those become the artery down to the river where the cotton gets loaded, where the where the merchandise comes off.

SPEAKER_03 10:30

I find that so interesting. Now let's bring you up to the future. So at Country Roads, um what are your plans or what are you doing now? What's your idea?

SPEAKER_00 10:41

You know, well, Mark, really I think that our idea now is not that dissimilar from what uh it's always been.

SPEAKER_03 10:52

Well, that's good to hear because it's really nice. I've just but it's interesting. Tell us about some of your features and and uh what you really like about the Trevor Burrus, Jr. All right.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Well, like then I guess so the uniting principle behind country roads for a long time has been to enrich the lives of residents of Louisiana and Mississippi by connecting them more closely to their culture. As you know, this part of the world is extraordinarily broad and diverse. And you don't have to go very far before things are completely different. You can cross the river and the accent's different, and the food's different, and the architecture's different. You know, never mind going to the Irish Channel or Jefferson Parish or Southwest Louisiana or Alexandria, every one of those within two hours is it presents an entirely different experience. It's so true. Culturally and culinarily and architecturally and everything else. And that and my mother-in-law Dorcas's idea, and which is one that Ashley and I have tried to carry on, is simply that everybody's a tourist when they're two hours from home. And everybody falls into their routine of things they do, the restaurant they go to, and the what they do on a Friday night, and so on. And life can be infinitely richer if you just know that two hours that away is a 150-year-old barn in an RV park where Steve Riley and the Mammu Playboys get on stage and there are three generations on that dance floor for five hours on a Saturday night. That's fine. And they will teach you how to two-step if you don't know how to. And that that experience can be replicated a hundred times over in every direction. And so many people don't know about that. And that and you don't have to, you know, Louisiana is famous for being the place that people that draws people from all over the country looking for these uniquely distinctive cultural experiences, right? But they're also available to us because those experiences are unique and unusual to us on this side of the river if you just go as far as Lafayette. And so our our goal with Country Roads is that you will pick up a copy and you will be uh inspired and enriched with oppos with things that you you'll come away knowing a little bit more about a dozen different things within easy reach, which is perfectly accessible to you, which can make your life richer.

SPEAKER_03 13:43

Aaron Powell Well, I always think of Country Roads as the the page opening to let people know as fabulous as New Orleans is, it's all fabulous. Because it really lets you know. And other things don't aren't as well known. And uh but we're a state of a lot of diversity and a lot of uh just incredible uh riches, as you said, the cuisine, the music, the architecture, the history.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

The ecology. Um the even some of the some of the state's biggest challenges, it's it's it's the plight of its coast, the degradation of its environment and landscapes. There are opportunities to introduce people to stories taking place in those areas. Conservation efforts involving recycling use of oyster shell, um river sediment diversion projects that are building new land. Uh groups of of young people building networks of natural gardens to build a diversified ecological zone to support populations of pollinators across the southeast in residential gardens.

SPEAKER_03 15:03

So important too, very people doing these things.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

They're not the things that we tend to think of at first when we talk about Louisiana and the Gulf South, but they're absolutely here. And what what we're trying to do is to is to it is to show people the promise and the opportunity that's there.

SPEAKER_03 15:23

So you've been doing country roads uh how many years? Country roads has been around for how long since Dorcas?

SPEAKER_00 15:30

42 years?

SPEAKER_03 15:32

Yeah, because it I remember the 40th anniversary.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

Yeah, well it'll be 40. This is our 43rd year. 43rd. 1983 in September was the first issue.

SPEAKER_03 15:40

And when did you get on?

SPEAKER_00 15:42

So we got involved in 1995. Okay. Um as two shiftless backpackers who were otherwise unemployable.

SPEAKER_03 15:49

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Which leads me to ask you if you would do us the great favor, because it is such a charming story. Um I've heard it, but I want the our listeners to hear how you and Darling Ashley got together.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

Yeah, well, she was elusive. You know, um, so you know, you you have to ask yourself, what uh what kind who but a Louisiana girl after after succeeding in making a boy fall in love with her would respond by immediately getting on a plane and flying halfway across Europe to a remote island with no forwarding address.

SPEAKER_03 16:29

Where did you all meet?

SPEAKER_00 16:30

Right. So we met in in Dublin, in Ireland, in 1993. I think it was April 1993. And uh each of us had gone for different reasons. Each of us had fallen in love separately with Dublin and then with one another. I'd gone for uh a friend's wedding, for which I had been invited to be best man. An Australian friend of mine who was marrying an Irish girl, and she had gone after she graduated from LSU uh for what was supposed to be a six-week summer trip with some money that her grandpa had left her. And she had absolutely fallen in love with the backpacking life and had concluded that she just did not want it to end. And she'd called her mother, Dorcas, and said, Can you sell my car and send me the money? I'm not coming back. And she was like, Yeah, okay, because that's how Dorcas was. She was like, sure, I'll send you the money. And so Ashley, by the time I met her, and when I got to Dublin, she had already been in Ireland for probably three or four months, and she was this tall, it was first almost the first American, but certainly the first southerner I'd ever met. And she was this kind of tall, athletic, ring-letted blonde-haired girl who looked just like Laura Dern to me, who had three jobs and was just killing it in all of them, and was waiting tables at the restaurant named the Badass Cafe, where my friend who was getting married was a was a cook in the kitchen. Oh, funny. And I got a job there washing dishes because after three days in Ireland, I'd concluded that I didn't want to go home either. And I wasn't going back to the job that I was supposed to start, and the girlfriend that I had in Australia at the time, and I was staying in Ireland as well. And uh so, like I said, after succeeding in we had about a week where we crossed over in Ireland, and after succeeding in making me fall in love with her, she got on a plane with her roommate and flew to Greece. Pre-arranged trip. She and her roommate Rana had were had already made plans to relocate to an island called Paros, which is uh about a 10-hour ferry ride out from Piraeus, one of the many, many Cycladian islands. And uh so off she went. No forwarding address. I knew that island. Okay. No forwarding address, of course it's pre-internet, no, no uh no cell phones, no anything like that. But I did have a post-restunt, which is, if you remember, that's how you used to. You you could make you could send a forwarding address, and then you could pick up mail from a post office in Europe if you were in a place. And so she'd left a post-restant, and so we'd exchanged a couple of letters, and I knew she was on this island. But I didn't have any money, and I stayed in I stayed in uh Dublin for about another three months until I made up enough money to get a cheap charter flight. And then one day in August, after spending a couple of nights possibly celebrating my departure, I got onto a plane at six o'clock in the morning and flew to Athens. Got off the plane in Athens and got onto a ferry, bound for Piraeus with a couple of thousand other backpackers and travelers and Greeks and goats and fish.

SPEAKER_03 19:51

Totally different time, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:52

Totally different time. Paid about 15 bucks, I think, for this ferry ride because I hadn't slept for a couple of days, promptly fell on fell on climbed up onto the deck into the cheap seats and fell asleep. Now my skin hadn't seen sun, having been in Ireland, for about four months. And when I woke up, I was so sunburned I couldn't open my eyes. Oh my gosh. And the ferry was backing down into port in Paros. Town called Nausa. And these ferries, you know, they're huge. It's like the love boat, right? And it comes in backwards and it's got this gigantic ramp that just goes down like that. And my entire plan, because I had no idea how to get in touch with this girl, and she didn't know I was coming, was I looked at the island on my pocket round McNally Atlas, and it was about this big. It was like 20 miles around. I was like, how hard can it be? Find a blond American girl called Ashley, who kind of looks like Laura Dinnon, right? So I'm I the ferry pulls up to port, the ramp goes down, and I look down into a sea of humanity. Apparently, the entire population of Athens decaps to Paris. And there were about 250,000 people on the gosh. And I took one look into this through my squinty, swollen eyes and looked around and was like, I'm never finding this girl or anybody else. And I had no money and no one would plan whatsoever. So anyway, for lack of anything better to do, I rented a motorbike and started riding around the island, stopping. Anyone who looked as if they might speak English or German, which I speak a little bit of, and there are a lot of Germans in Greece in summertime. If they knew a blonde American girl who looked a bit like this line of questioning, and uh it was at this point five o'clock in the afternoon, and the motorbike was due back on the other side of the island. And I had met on the road, I was passed by three South Africans on the same motorbike. And there were there was a guy and two girls on this motorbike, and they they pulled up alongside and they were like, Can one of them get on with you? Because we're going to kill ourselves.

SPEAKER_03 22:03

Oh, so one motorbike hit three people on? Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 22:07

And I was like, yeah, sure. And so this girl got on with me, and I got to talking to her, and we were riding around towards the next town, and she was like, Well, there's a group of like ten of us, and we're sleeping on a beach over here, and tomorrow we're getting on a ferry and going to Turkey. And if you want to go, if you want to come, if it doesn't work out, if you don't find it, come back to that beach and you can just hook up with us. Young. That sounds cool. Okay, I haven't got any other ideas. I guess I'll go back and do that. But I'll try one more town first. So I go around to the I go around one more cove and come to a little village called Pisa Levari, which means little fishes in Greece. And I uh and as I came into the town, it was glorious. It's this little cove like this, and the sun's going down over the sea in that direction. I'm on the opposite side of the island from Nausa, and uh there's a little old Greek man putting out chairs on the terrace outside of his restaurant. And I so I sidled up to him, and you know, as you do when you don't speak the language, shouted at him very slowly in English, like, do you know an American girl? And he was like, Jesus, mate, shut up. What's your problem? He was from Melbourne. Oh, how funny. Um, which has the largest Greek population beyond Athens in the world. That's funny. He was back in the old country for the summary, and I was like, okay, stupid question. Don't even know why I'm asking, but I'm looking for a blonde American girl called Ashley, who looks a bit like Laura Jones. Like, yeah, she lives next door.

SPEAKER_03 23:34

I love that.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

Yeah. And she um and uh she works at that bar down the beach, and he pointed down the beach, and there was this, it wasn't so much a bar as a lean-to shed, held up by giant speaker stacks and some tin over the roof, um, just pounding Euro Trash dance music out over the sand, and it was just heaving with people, and then so I rode my motorbike around there and I go and I go and I pushed my way through, and it was just completely full of like Greeks in G strings gyrating on tables, and there was this one blonde head going back and forth behind the bar, and I went up um and kind of propped on the bar from uh closer than me to you, four feet away. And uh granted, I was eyes are swollen shut, both heads like a tomato, and she looked at me and she looked away. And I thought, oh, that's not quite the uh response I was looking for. And uh she went down the bar and I, you know, followed her down, and I kind of went a bit closer and did this, and you know, she sort of backed off and was like, security. She doesn't see that well, and she didn't have her glasses on. And the third time I followed her down the bar, she was like and she ran around and threw herself into my arms and said, I'm seeing somebody and proceeded to introduce me to Leander, the half English, half Greek male model with hair like Fabio and shoulders you could ski down.

SPEAKER_01 25:06

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

Wore a sarong and sold the drinks on the beach, and uh, who she'd been jacked up with for a period of time. But any case, I think I looked so crestfallen. I got the sympathy vote. And after a period of negotiation with Leander, we left the island. So that that's the beginning of it.

SPEAKER_03 25:25

That's a wonderful story. That really is that's a nice story to tell your lovely children.

SPEAKER_00 25:29

Well, they uh we they've heard it a couple of times. They're like, oh god, not this again. But yeah, so uh that precipitated. We ended up backpacking for about two and a half years from that point.

SPEAKER_03 25:41

Where did you go?

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Uh a lot of Western Europe, Central Europe, Australia, Northern Australia, US, um, back to Europe for a second ski season.

SPEAKER_03 25:53

What did you do for money?

SPEAKER_00 25:54

We washed a lot of dishes, weighted a lot of tables, we shucked corn, I mucked out some stables, um, whatever it whatever was available. There's so my passport's British, and at the time, when Britain was still part of the European community, um, it was pretty easy. You could just roll in and get a work visa. Less easy for Ashley, but we tended to go to countries where there was a way around that. So we spent two winters in Austria, um, which at the time Where in Austria? In Tyrol, uh between Kittsbull and Innsbruck in a little town called Westendorf.

SPEAKER_03 26:30

So beautiful, I wouldn't.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

It's a lovely part of the world. Um But you can support yourself doing that until you get tired of living out of a backpack and washing dishes for a living. Which does happen after a couple of years.

SPEAKER_03 26:42

And so you did that for two and a half years?

SPEAKER_00 26:45

About two and a half years, and then we did get sick of it, and then we had to have the conversation about where we to get married, where we would be where would we be. And she has a large family based in St. Francisville that she's very close to. And I come from a small family of serial immigrators. So it made better sense for me to move than she.

SPEAKER_03 27:07

Now St. Francisville, even today, is a rather small town. And uh smaller than Melbourne. Back then smaller than Melbourne. Back then it was even smaller. And everybody knew everybody. So you came back as Ashley's Beau.

SPEAKER_00 27:26

That must have been quite I did have a certain exotic benefit, let's say. I didn't have the didn't have to compete with many other Australians. A foreign accent's really my only qualification. It just goes so far though. It does, doesn't it? It raises your IQ by 15 points.

SPEAKER_03 27:44

It really does.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

Yeah. But St. Francisville's been incredibly good to us. Louisiana really has. I don't think as peculiar and esoteric perhaps as our career has been. The journey's been a wonderful, unexpected, amazing one. And uh ri if we had gone to Australia or somewhere else, I very much doubt we would have had an opportunity to do something as interesting and possibly, dare I say it, um impactful as we've been able to do here. Because Country Roads has found a place in the cultural landscape of Louisiana that we're very grateful for and proud of, too.

SPEAKER_03 28:32

And one thing I enjoy, and I just came across it one day when I was flipping channels, was your show. Tell us about Arcks.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:41

I love that. Tell people what that is.

SPEAKER_00 28:42

Well, thank you. Um ArtRocks is a um television magazine program which profiles visual and performing artists in Louisiana that airs on Louisiana Public Broadcasting at 8:30 on Friday nights. And we've done it for about seven years now. Um we are between seasons at the moment. I have a new producer, uh, and we'll be starting a new season during the summer, which will start airing in the fall. Um but it's wonderful. So that and there's a lot of crossover really with what we do with the magazine, but it gives an opportunity for us to profile artists whose work we think does something meaningful to illuminate a different point of view or perspective on life in Louisiana. That's kind of what we try to focus on. And uh visual arts profiles give us an opportunity to tell those stories.

SPEAKER_03 29:39

I'm sure you I know you know what I'm talking about. Across the river, uh there is a Baton Rouge Museum, and it deals a lot in uh African American history.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

You're thinking about the West Baton Rouge Museum?

SPEAKER_03 29:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

Yeah. That yeah, that Angelise Bergeron. Angelique Bergeron is the curator over there, and Angelique does a wonderful job.

SPEAKER_03 30:03

She really does. She does. I've enjoyed that place so much. Me too.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

It punches far above its weight as far as a museum uh institution goes.

SPEAKER_03 30:12

I uh my friend Owen took me there and I was just and was for a live music show, and it was fabulous.

SPEAKER_00 30:18

Right. Was it in that um Duke Joint space that they have? One of the old you know, that's a fascinating history. I'm sure that they told you about the the the Golden Mile that used to be the West Baton Rouge the banks on the far side of the river. When East Baton Ridge Parish was dry on Sundays, the way to get a drink was to get across the river, and the the bars and juke joints up and down the highway on the West Bank were the they a lot of the creation of swamp pop was evolved in those.

SPEAKER_03 30:54

How interesting.

SPEAKER_00 30:55

Yeah. Because on a Sunday that was where you could get a drink, and so you'd go over there, someone would be playing, and you could buy a setup where you'd get a little pint bottle and a couple of you know, your Cokes or your gingers or whatever it was, and about a box of ice, uh, a bucket of ice, and that was that was the basis of a whole lot of South Louisiana's musical heritage. That's fabulous. West Baton Rouge Parish.

SPEAKER_03 31:24

Yeah, I enjoy that place very much. Me too. Tell us what because I'm so ill-informed, what is it called, the the place?

SPEAKER_00 31:31

The West Baton Rouge Museum.

SPEAKER_03 31:32

Everyone, you should really visit the West Baton Rouge Museum. It was quite an eye-opener and some great exhibits.

SPEAKER_00 31:40

On North Alexander Street in Port Allen. Yes, in Port Allen. Literally three minutes from downtown Baton Rouge when there's not a wreck on the bridge. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 31:50

And if you take the if you come from St. Francis, where you take a beautiful ride over a lovely modern sculpture bridge, and you ride along the river and then you kind of wind your way around. It was a lot, it was a great night when I went there.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

Yeah, that's true. We did a uh for years, we did a a series of themed dinners called the Country Road Supper.

SPEAKER_03 32:13

Oh, yeah, I remember. Yeah. We did one at the West Bad Ridge Museum.

SPEAKER_00 32:17

How long ago was that? Ooh, probably 2018, before COVID. Um, and we had a chef uh named David Cruz who runs the Delta Supper Club out of Clarksdale, Mississippi, I think he is, or Greenwood. And um, they put on dinners in all kinds of cool structures and they kind of specialise in open fire cooking. And David came down and he put together like a five-course dinner, and we did it in the juke joint, or in a tent attached to the juke joint.

SPEAKER_03 32:47

I've attended some of those. Do you have any of those planned for the future?

SPEAKER_00 32:50

We haven't. We haven't done them since COVID actually.

SPEAKER_03 32:52

Yeah, it's been a while.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

Uh we we we loved doing them because it was an opportunity to unite all of the things that the magazine's about, which is regional culture, going to places that you wouldn't normally go, invite being invited to g letting people come to places they couldn't normally go, and then experience some aspect of the culture and have a great meal there. And do so at communal tables where you sat with people you didn't necessarily know and came away with a new friend. Mm-hmm. Um they were wonderful, and for a small team, we are but eight people. They were more than we could continue to carry on. And unfortunately we had to we were doing eight of them a year. And really we got to the point where we we had to kind of choose it was going to be that or the magazine, really, it was one or the other. So what we put it out, we we kind of poured everything we learned from those into the St. Francisville Food and Wine Festival instead.

SPEAKER_03 33:53

Oh, that makes sense. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 33:55

So that's really the genesis of the Food and Wine Festival at the Myrtles, which happens once a year, is everything we learned from the supper clubs. And applying that to a big event that kind of pulls them all into the same place.

SPEAKER_03 34:07

The last one was so lovely. It was a beautiful day.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

Well, the weather was very cooperative.

SPEAKER_03 34:12

The music was great.

SPEAKER_00 34:13

Thank you very much. We love doing that. It's been a tremendous tremendous uh well, realization of a lot of the other things. An opportunity for us to bring a lot of the things that we write about in the magazine to bear in a live experience. And so hope that it reflects that.

SPEAKER_03 34:33

How often do you get to go home and visit your family?

SPEAKER_00 34:37

Well, not as often as I'd like. Um I was home in December. Uh not for the reason you'd want to be. My mother suffered a stroke in late November. No. And uh the after effects are still we're still taking into account. And the time before prior to that was when my father died in 2024. Before that, we would try to go when our children were young, we tried to go about every 18 months, is about how often we made it. We tried for every year and never quite made it.

SPEAKER_03 35:08

Do they like Australia?

SPEAKER_00 35:09

They do, they love it. They love Australia. Um and well the last time they were there was 2023. And I think they'll go back under their own steam. I it was always important to me that they feel comfortable and that it felt like home to them.

SPEAKER_03 35:24

Do they have dual passports?

SPEAKER_00 35:26

They have with the UK, funnily enough, because that was mine. That's great. And um I have a lot of extended family in the UK, and they both have spent probably more time in the UK, honestly, because more of my extended family is there than it is in Australia. We were a bit the, you know, outpost expats in Australia, but the extended family's more in the more in England. But they both they love they love the UK. We were there for Christmas with my I have a first cousin who lives in London, and we were with him, and then we took our son, who is a rabid Manchester United fan, to a manu match uh against Newcastle in Manchester on Boxing Day, which was a fabulous experience. I bet. Yeah. So, you know. I don't know where I belong, but I'm pretty comfortable here. I feel the same way. Well, I know. It's a place that is very, very welcoming and accommodating of strangers.

SPEAKER_03 36:25

Well, uh James, I can't thank you enough for coming and sitting with me today. I've loved this visit, and I hope we can do it again.

SPEAKER_00 36:32

I hope we can too, Mark. Thank you for the opportunity. It's uh it's a lovely way to spend.

SPEAKER_03 36:37

Well, I know everybody always gives me feedback. I know they're gonna really like this episode.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

Well, I hope so. Thank you. Hope I hadn't been too dull.

SPEAKER_03 36:44

Hard hardly. I want to thank everyone for tuning in and remember to check out our upcoming episodes. And don't forget, I do a tour called The Ghost of Bay Sarah. Check that out if you're interested, and thank you for listening.