Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Getting Wet In The Next County

I don't drink, so it doesn't really matter much to me, but I can't believe I lived 34 years before finding out what a dry county was.

I grew up in New York, and although they may exist there, I had never heard of it. I only learned about dry counties when I moved to Kentucky and was trying to cook one weekend and needed some wine for the meal I was making.
I left everything on the stove and ran into town to pick up a bottle of wine.

When I got to the store, I asked one of the cashiers where the alcohol section was and she pointed me to the opposite corner of the store. When I made my way over there, I realized she sent me to the area that sells rubbing alcohol. I went back to explain to her that I needed wine, not rubbing alcohol.

"Ohhhh. We don't sell that."

"You don't sell wine??"

"No."

"Well, who does?"

She rattled off some place I never heard of, followed by the words "in the next county."

"The next county???"

"Yes, ma'am. This is a dry county. No one here sells wine."

I thought I had moved to Mars.

I realized after living there for a while that the funny thing about the whole dry-county-trying-to-keep-the-residents-sober-and-Christian-like-and-cut-down-on-alcohol-related-accidents is, most people wind up making their beer runs drunk. To the next county.

So instead of someone running to the corner store for more beer on a Friday night, they're piling their drunk redneck asses into their pickup truck with the rebel flag emblem in the window and driving to the next county.

Can't beat the intelligence of redneck lawmakers.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Um....guilty. And I wasn't cookin'!

Mise en Place said...

LOL! Well, you know I live in Alabama for a while and believe it or not, it WAS a dry county. Believe THAT, ME in a dry county?

However, I always made sure I had what I needed so I was never twisted driving for my next beer. THAT was in a past life, FLORIDA.

What made it easier was, I lived on the TN/AL line so it wasn't far, lol!