The people here in Argentina’s capital are known as Porteños, and they can be both mistrustful and selflessly helpful. When I got to Villa 31, this man warned me to be watchful, by repeating “ojo,” or “eye” in Spanish, because I was a walking target with my big fancy camera. Then he invited me to tour his community radio station, perched above the makeshift buildings of Villa 31′s open marketplace. Not a bad start to my first visit. We were only a street away from the busy Retiro bus terminal, and less than two miles from the Casa Rosada, or Pink House, which is the White House of Argentina.

Even the dogs were giving me the ojo. But at this time of year, it’s summer on this side of the globe, and everyone was dressed comfortably and casually. There were Christmas decorations, but no sleigh bells. I could see I wasn’t going to die here. And instead of making me a mugging statistic, my trusty camera helped me win friends: when I snapped a shot of the dog, young men, mostly shirtless, cheered “Foto! Foto!”

Christmas may be a religious holiday, but it’s also another opportunity to indulge in the great Argentine mania for grilling meat. The intoxicating, smoky aroma of asado, or Argentine-style barbeque, started up a little early even though everyone — children included — would be staying up all night.

Children were everywhere. Some began tearing through the alleys and passageways, some of which were only ten feet wide.

Adults were busy getting ready for the long night ahead. Some of them offered me beer and sparkling wine, which I happily accepted.

I saw one man sweeping his doorway. Others prepared coals for their asado.

Kiki has lived here for thirty years, and he stuffed me with asado. He seemed to know everyone who passed by, exchanging greetings and the traditional Argentine kiss on the right cheek.

Kiki introduced me to his swarms of family, and his son even invited me inside to dance to updated versions of traditional cumbia music. Not only did I feel like family, I had forgotten about my love troubles.

The children carried their own lighters to set off firecrackers, sparklers, and bottle rockets.

At midnight on Christmas Eve, the celebrations reached a crescendo, with toasts, hollering, and children setting off their biggest and noisiest fireworks.

As I sat between two of my new friends, I felt a bit ridiculous for having been wary of visiting Villa 31. I didn’t die. I no longer felt lonely or heart-broken. And I realized I was having the best Christmas of my life.

Ethan G. Salwen is a writer and photographer from the United States with a gift for using his camera as a diplomatic sidekick wherever English isn’t spoken. He currently lives in Buenos Aires, where he continues to improve his Castellano, the Spanish spoken in Argentina.

Fragonard, 2007

The Post-Modern movement was built upon a series of fits of destruction. With Conceptual art, ideas destroyed visuals. In Pop art, visuals destroyed the sacred weight of the subject. With Appropriation, artists took the work of other artists and labeled it as their own, thus destroying the notion of artist as genius.

Once the smoke cleared, almost every over-reaching, Modernist myth had been debunked. Authorship, visual pleasure, the authority of the museum, and even artistic quality were all deemed fabrications of cultural chauvinism. That’s why it’s so tough for us to figure out if the carelessly-made object before us is an act of conceptual brilliance, or just lame. Too many quick quick-cut collages tell us only that we are less than the sum of our parts.

Unless you follow contemporary art the way I follow Mad Men, you may find yourself standing before a monument to Anti-Monument, thinking it isn’t worth the styrofoam it’s made from. That was my sense of under-whelment from viewing Thomas Shutte’s recent, 18’ high “Man in Mud” this past August at his exhibit at House de Kunst in Munich.

So it comes as a huge relief when an artist is willing to offer a nugget of meaning without irony. Dickson Schneider’s current series of paintings, of fashion models sharing space with works of fine art, offer just that.

He puts the two cultures of visual beauty together. Both the contemporary models and the fine art, modern and classic, are given equal but different values; he treats both with exquisite care. The result is an opportunity to feel the connection without any overt instruction from the paintings themselves.

The fashion models in Schneider’s paintings are imagery from advertising poses. The models are glorious and bizarre, as they are in life. Their unnatural proportions are mesmerizing; their long, adolescent legs, like stilts, retain a human appeal in spite of the perplexing distortion.

In the painting “Fragonard,” Schneider places an African-American model with straight blond hair and blue eyes before a backdrop of 18th-century pornographic fine art. In the background, plump, naked women frolic weightlessly in a wooded glade as the contemporary model in pink looks self-consciously, just a few degrees to the side.

This is so wrong it thrills me. Two sexual ideals, from different times and tribes, placed together. Our contemporary woman’s gaze breaks the reverie. It’s a brilliant touch: showing both the foreground figure as fitting into and rejecting a sexual fantasy idea is one of the best aspects of Schneider’s work. Every time I look deeply into the implications he presents, my eye is teased away by some different layer of a painted morsel. Distracted, I find myself thinking: “Cool purse.”

Sebastian, 2007

The same thing happens in his painting “Sebastian.” Using centuries-old iconography, a bevy of beautiful people from current times share play space with St. Sebastian, who, as usual, is tied to a post and skewered by a dozen arrows. A female saint grieves… Great shoes.

Similarly, in Isenheim a young woman with a perfect, vacant look for our times leans into the frame, causing her top to slip and expose her breast. Behind this image of current commercial beauty extends the arm of the crucified Christ as seen in the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald in 1512-16; Christ’s arm is covered in syphilitic sores.

The juxtaposition doesn’t scream, it just waits for us to notice it. The two periods, the two elements, are treated with even weight; every thread of runway couture is treated with the same reverence as the robes of the Virgin.

Isenheim, 2009

Paintings by Dickson Schneider are now on view through the end of December at Sohbert’s, 144 King Street, in San Francisco. Gallery contact here.

Katina Huston is a visual artist who is very, very close to Dickson Schneider. She attests that the foregoing is completely true.

If you live in Los Angeles long enough, the language of the billboards — the competition for space and the meaning behind them — all becomes clear. And these days, the signs are all about movies, fall-schedule TV shows, and fashion. Sorry, but it seems the music industry has no clout anymore.

On weekend nights, the Strip is packed. But at six in the morning, you can lie down in the street and stare up at the billboards–nobody would notice except the vampires heading home.

You would be able to see how Jay Leno’s billboard is in two separate places on the West Hollywood Strip. No one seems to be watching the show on NBC, though.

Meanwhile, the original British version of The Office is a show unknown to most Americans. It airs on the Cartoon Network during their time period known as Adult Swim, which is their programming for grown-ups. The reference to Adult Swim is down in the right hand corner and hard to see. This is an insider reference for hip people in-the-know about both the original Office series as well as Adult Swim.

This iPod ad occupies what is probably the most famous billboard spot on the strip. For years it was a six-storey tall Marlboro ad, on the first curve as you head west on the Strip towards Beverly Hills, just past Laurel Canyon. Because of the curve, the billboard seems to appear straight in front of you. It’s also right next to the mythic Chateau Marmont, the oldest and most famous hotel on the Strip.

The sign for Chateau Marmont was big and prominent in the 1930s, when the Chateau was built. Looking east on the Strip, it’s now dwarfed by a billboard for Gucci. Currently, the Los Angeles City Council is studying a proposal to ban signs that cover entire sides of buildings.

This billboard is also on the eastern end of the Strip, and for as long as I can remember, it’s been a Calvin Klein underwear ad. Of course, not everything on the Strip uses sex to sell.

For example, this big ad for Banana Republic seems hip, but squeaky clean.

And the enormous movie billboards aren’t nearly as sexy either, even when they feature heartthrobs like Matt Damon, in The Informant, or George Clooney, in Up in the Air.

These movie ads are all over town, and each movie has two on the Strip itself.

Similarly, the television ads are more about male action than sex appeal. This billboard is for a reality show, where Steven Segal is an actual police officer in the New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. It turns out that Segal has been a bona fide law enforcement officer for many years, and now he can also play one on TV.

You may have seen ads and marketing materials for the movie 2012, with a storyline tied to the Mayan Calendar, which ends in 2012. That, to some people, portends the end of the world. It could also mean the Mayans just got tired of counting.

Presumably, the Mayans somehow knew when the world would end, but they didn’t know enough to keep their own civilization from collapsing. Naturally, fear and superstition are always effective storytelling tools. Ghosts, monsters, boogie men and aliens fall into this category.

Animal rights advocates also know the power of shock value. This fearsome image sits at the famous spot where Tower Records once stood. It was vast, but now it’s gone. Book Soup, the independent book store across the street is still going strong. Virgin Records, at the end of the Strip, is also doing well.

Still, this was the only music album billboard I could find, on the outside of the famous club, Whisky A Go Go. It’s about eight by ten feet, at street level, so it barely qualifies. It’s aimed more at people standing in line than at cars driving past.

And here is another small one, a poster not far from the sidewalk. It’s an ad for Henry Jaglom’s latest film. He was one of the original independent do-it-yourself filmmakers; his film Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? from 1983 put him on the Hollywood map. Like Woody Allen, he’s popular in France and cranks out a movie every two years or so. His ads have always been on the Strip when his films come out. They’ve never been huge, but he’s still doing his films the same as he’s always done them. Stars and movies crash and burn on the billboards high above and flame out never to be heard from again, but Henry’s been doing his thing for over 30 years now. A good story, good acting, no special effects, low budget… and a gigantic body of work.

Web-based shows like Suzie Cocktail are even more of an unknown. At some point, we’ll all be watching on the web, but right now, none of these shows is really making any money. That means nobody is sure how this new way of watching programming is going to work.

In the cable TV arena, Showtime has overtaken HBO as the subscriber network with the hippest shows. That means series like Weeds, Californication, and Dexter. Personally, I find the Showtime shows all bleak, with dark souls. None of the characters are redeemable and I feel like taking a shower afterwards.

In Dexter, a serial killer has been urged by his now-deceased father to steer his murderous desires to kill only “bad” people who deserve to be killed. And now, Dexter is a father. Welcome to 2009. I sound old, but this is the kind of poster that would not have been possible when I was young. The image here implies that Dexter and his baby son are both drenched in the blood of someone Dexter has just killed; that they are posing for a happy family picture is supposed to be humorous.

There are other examples; horror movies, and torture movies like the Saw series are now part of popular culture, and their posters are everywhere. For Saw III, the gigantic poster showed three chopped-off fingers standing up on end in a small pool of blood. People drove underneath the ad for months without pause. It’s hard not to interpret our culture is one where blood, murder, guns and torture is normal. If so, then we are ancient Rome.

In my view, torture is another pornography, and cuts through the boredom of our cubicle lives.

The real reason I like this billboard for Virgin Australia is because there are hot chicks in it having fun. It’s a sort of nostalgic and refreshing throwback; images of attractive women are still being used to sell beer and cars, but it’s been some time since airlines used sex to sell their services in the United States.

I spotted this on the side of The Roxy Theater, another of the famous clubs on the Strip. I’d much rather see a billboard of sexy women (and men) than see babies drenched in blood.

Donald Bull is a husband, father and TV producer who has lived in Los Angeles for the past twenty years. As they say in Hollywood, you can “imdb him” here. He has made countless drives up and back along the Sunset Strip.

Watch a documentary about a life on the Strip here.

I was watching a Seinfeld re-run and picking at some leftover kung pao chicken when an octopus curled its tentacles around my midsection and squeezed. I should have thrown this food out two days ago, I thought, and then the octopus squeezed again and took my breath away. Beads of sweat popped out on my forehead and my skin went all damp and clammy. Great. A hot flash and heartburn at the same time. Welcome to modern maturity. That’s the time between your first copy of the AARP Magazine and your first social security check, when you start getting used to theidea that you’re not only middle aged any longer, you’re old. Unless you expect to live forever, of course—which, up to then, you sort of do.

There was a little pink bottle of Pepto-Bismol in a striped ditty bag in the bathroom that I’ve carted all over the world in case I get sick from eating food from the street, which I never have and always do; my philosophy is, if you’re going to play it safe, you might as well stay home. But I couldn’t get to it—a wave of torpor held me down on the couch like an invisible force field. After a few minutes the octopus seemed to relent, so I tried moving. But then it snaked itself around my ribcage and let me know it was still there.

The phone rang, but there was no way I could reach it—it was only a couple of feet away but it might as well have been in the apartment next door. It rang seven times before voice mail finally kicked in; I counted them while I tried to remember how long ago I’d ordered in that chicken.

Maybe it wasn’t food poisoning; it might be a kidney stone. I’ve never had one, but once on a flight from L.A. the man in the aisle seat told me in excruciating detail how he’d once passed one on the seventeenth green. Actually, I don’t remember whether it was a kidney stone or a gallstone, only that when the stewardess held out the little cup of olives for his martini, the way they used to in first class, he’d just gotten to the part about how he still managed to finish the round a respectable three over par. He didn’t say that passing a stone felt like a contraction that went on and on, although to be fair, he couldn’t have known that. But he also didn’t seem the type who’d asked his wife how it really felt to birth little Tiger Woods Junior, either.

I took shallow, silent little breaths so the octopus wouldn’t notice, and let go of the remote; for some reason I’d muted the TV when the octopus struck, and when the phone stopped ringing it was suddenly unnaturally silent in the room. I felt alone and abandoned, like I’d fallen overboard without anyone on deck noticing while the boat disappeared over the horizon; when I turned the volume on again my arm tingled the way your foot does when you try to move it after it’s fallen asleep, and then the tingle heated up a couple of hundred degrees and radiated in waves down to my fingers.

“Oh shit,” I said out loud, “I’m having a heart attack!”

Tory looked up from her pillow—not hearing any magic words like ‘Let’s go out,’ or ‘Do you want a treat?’ she went right back to doggy dreamland. It was beginning to dawn on me that if I didn’t do something, call someone, get myself moving, I was going to die right here, all by myself, on a faded green velvet sofa surrounded by greasy white cardboard containers, a half empty can of Diet Coke, and the latest issue of Vanity Fair. Shuffle off this mortal coil in my ratty old sweats, irony of ironies, to the theme song from Going It Alone, which follows Seinfeld on weeknights on Nick at Nite. Live by TV, die by it, I used to say. But please, God, I didn’t really mean it.

Jane Adams

I managed to drag the phone over, but then I couldn’t decide who to call. Ignoring the mocking voice in my head—Help, you’ve fallen and you can’t get up, call 911, what are you waiting for?—I pushed “6”on the speed dial for Tel Aviv taxi instead. I’d rather be dead than carted through the lobby on a gurney under the rheumy gaze of Mrs. Bosenberg, who lives in one A and keeps an eye on the lobby, just in case Louie the night doorman is sleeping on the job.

Mrs. B.’s apartment is rent-stabilized, which means they can’t throw her out. So is mine, and the only way anyone ever leaves a rent stabilized apartment in New York, especially a classic five on the upper West Side, is feet first. After the relatives of the deceased have finished sitting shiva, the owners haul away all the dark, heavy furniture and slap on a few coats of paint before they put the place on the market for a sum that could foment a revolution in an African backwater. Since nobody was doing that to my stuff, especially not until I took my vibrator out from under the bed, cleaned out my stash of recreational drugs, and threw away some pictures I’d just as soon nobody saw, I’d rather let Mrs. B. think I was catching the red-eye to the coast.

Jane Adams has been writing about work, love, sex, success, intimacy and friendship in women’s lives for nearly three decades. You can continue reading Sugar Time by buying it from an independent bookstore, through Amazon.com, or for your Kindle.

Harry Austin

By Debra Utacia Krol

(Camp Verde, Ariz.) Unless you live in Indian Country—which encompasses not just reservations, but any place where Indians live, work, or play—you’ve probably never heard of the names Frank Harrison and Harry Austin.

The two men were members of what was then known as the Fort McDowell Mohave-Apache Tribe. Fort McDowell was actually one of the ancestral homes of the Yavapai people. But in the late 1800s, the U.S. Army forcibly marched the Yavapais off to a concentration camp in San Carlos, Arizona, where the mostly peaceable Yavapais were interned alongside Apache bands.

The Fort McDowell people didn’t give up their quest to return home, though. And in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order giving them back 48,000 acres of land along the Verde River, just east of Phoenix.

In 1924 the story really got interesting: that was the year all Indians were brought into the union as actual citizens, courtesy of the Indian Citizenship Act. Among other things, the Act gave Indians the right to vote in elections. Unfortunately, many states defied the Act and deliberately denied Indians that most fundamental of American rights: the right to vote.

In an attempt to rectify the injustice, Peter Porter, a Pima Indian and member of the Gila River Indian Community, filed suit against the state of Arizona in 1928. But not only were Indians were under federal guardianship, the Arizona state constitution denied the vote to “mental incompetents and people under guardianship.” Thus the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that Indians could not vote.

What the state hadn’t reckoned on was Harrison and Austin’s determination.

Harrison had already fought for and won the right for Indians to join unions and secure well-paying jobs, especially construction jobs. When the United States joined World War II, Harrison joined 25,000 other Natives who saw combat. Many served with highest distinctions, and some, like Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian who helped raise the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima, became national heroes.

After risking his life on the battlefield for his country, Harrison returned home to his impoverished community, where he was still denied the right to vote. His elderly parents were forced to work hard to survive; many Yavapai elders were still denied old age assistance and other federal benefits even though payroll taxes were deducted from their paychecks.

Frank Harrison

Determined to correct the situation, he sought out Native rights advocates, including Arizona Congressman Richard Harless and attorneys Lemuel and Ben Mathews. All of them were committed to challenging the guardianship clause in the constitution.

On November 8, 1947, Harrison and Austin, the chairman of the Fort McDowell tribe, both walked into the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office to register to vote. When they were turned away, their attorneys immediately filed suit. The case eventually reached the Arizona Supreme Court. Rights groups like the National Congress of American Indians filed legal briefs supporting the case.

Just over half a year later, on July 15, 1948, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously reversed the earlier courts’ rulings. Justice Levi S. Udall, (father of Congressman Morris Udall), quoted noted Indian law scholar Felix Cohen in his decision:

“In a democracy suffrage is the most basic civil right, since its exercise is the chief means whereby other rights may be safeguarded. To deny the right to vote where one is legally entitled to do so, is to do violence to the principles of freedom and equality.”

The case, Harrison v. Laveen, is now required reading in every Indian law class across the land.

Shortly after Arizona’s decision, other states that had been evading the law began revising their own statutes. (The last state to do so was Arizona’s companion state, its neighbor New Mexico.)

Yet Arizona then enacted a literacy test for potential voters, which effectively barred some 80 percent of the state’s Indians from pulling the lever. Only the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 eliminated the practice.

Lucinda Denny and Ella Doka, daughters of Frank Harrison and Harry Austin, have been carrying on the family tradition. Doka, left, was a leader in a 1992 standoff with federal agents over the seizure of Fort McDowell's slot machines.

Currently, rights advocates still monitor challenges to the right of American Indians to vote, but the Native vote is now considered pivotal to many politicians’ political ambitions.

In Arizona, the “Rez vote” is now considered a key swing constituency. It’s not unusual to see candidates marching at the Navajo Nation Fair parade, sampling fry bread, and kissing fat-cheeked babies on the campaign trail.

Harrison and Austin’s daughters, Ella Doka and Lucinda Denny, help out at Native voting drives. Denny makes it personal, reminding her own son, Dwayne, that his right to vote is what his grandfather fought for just over 60 years ago.

Debra Utacia Krol, an enrolled member of the Xolon (or Jolon) Salinan Tribe of central California, is a freelance journalist and NewsPlink correspondent based in Arizona.

Historic photos of Harrison and Austin courtesy of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation.

140,000 people watched the men's finals; 500,000 total attended the 2009 U.S. Open of Surfing.

But now, exactly half a century after the first West Coast Surfing Championships back in 1959, things have changed drastically.

This past July, the U.S. Open of Surfing was held, as always, at the Pier at Huntington Beach –- the original Surf City, USA. But this time, Hurley, the famed surfboard makers, boosted the purse prize for the men’s title to $100,000 — the largest ever in surfing!

The winner was a complete surprise, too. An unknown Huntington Beach townie named Brett Simpson took home the U.S. Open’s men’s title. That was a first. 500,000 fans attended over the nine day event; at least some of them had to think that one of the 10 famous All-Stars would win as usual.

Brett Simpson, 24, inspired the crowd with his surprising win.

But this was the year the public voted to decide which of the competing males would be All-Stars of the World Professional Surfers’ athlete union. These fans brought the following surfers into the All-Star pantheon: Kelly Slater, Mick Fanning, CJ Hobgood, Andy Irons, Bruce Irons, Dane Reynolds, Rob Machado, Taj Burrow, Jordy Smith and Yadin Nicol.

In gratitude, these stars gave bonus performances gliding atop the waves to the 140,000 fans who watched the men’s final. Fans also got an autograph session. Bruce Irons even signed a very pregnant bikini girl’s belly!

Kelly Slater: nine-time champion.

Other sponsored events included women’s events, junior events, and BMX competitions. There was also a noseriding invitational and a skating demo.

The surrounding sports culture made a good showing, too. For example, bands played the music showcases, and there was a fashion showdown called Walk the Walk. Celebrity judges included former UFC light heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz, actor Wilmer Valderrama, and of course Mr. Hurley himself.

But the biggest inspiration came from Brett Simpson’s win. Simpson’s father was a defensive back for the Los Angeles Rams; young Brett was expected to play traditional sports. Instead, he got hooked on surfing by the time he reached age 12.

CJ Hobgood: another former champion.

Widely reported in the local papers was Simpson’s recollection of how his father questioned his passion, asking him, “What the hell are you doing?” He answered by going down to the beach twice a day, every day. He had, he said, only one goal in mind: the U.S. Open. Now 24, he had the satisfaction of knowing his father was in the crowd, watching him make this unexpected win.

Making — or watching — surf history is an extraordinary way for anyone to spend at least part of a summer vacation.

Hoiyin Ip is a freelance photographer and writer, who would love to wax Kelly Slater’s surfboard for the upcoming Hurley Pro Trestles 2009. Hoiyin admires the grace and beauty of the sport, if not the crowds.

Eugene Hicks, 65, leans on the front counter of his Clarksdale, Miss. restaurant, and his elbows thud on the wooden countertop. Hicks is a large man, and his establishment, Hicks’ Hot Tamales and Barbeque Banquet Hall, is a local institution. With one meaty finger he scratches his chin and moustache, thinking. The scratching sounds like sandpaper on wood.

“I don’t rightly know, but I suppose the hot tamale came up to us in the Mississippi Delta from Mexico. At least that is how I heard it.”

When? During the Mexican-American War? Brought by returning soldiers or captured Mexicans? Migrant laborers?

Hicks raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t know. Like everyone I talked to in the area, he is not certain how the hot tamale—traditionally a south of the border food staple—traveled to the Mississippi Delta. Neither guidebooks nor history books have an answer. Not even an Internet search was able to crack this enduring mystery.

Eugene Hicks talks about his Delta tamales with great pride, but like everybody else, he can only speculate about its origins.

Whatever its origins, Delta hot tamales are now a ubiquitous presence in this land of the blues, cotton mills and southern fried everything. No matter how small or remote the town, there is guaranteed to be at least one place that serves this spicy treat.

I decided to seek out the hot tamales establishments and find out for myself, and score some samples for myself in the discovery process. Hicks’ place is my first stop in my search for the ideal Delta tamale and the roots of how the heck they got here.

Steamed chili and corn meal fill the air in Hicks’ restaurant. I order a half dozen. Traditionally wrapped in a corn husk, a hot tamale is corn meal surrounding chili sauce and meat boiled to greasy perfection. Hicks explains that while the hot tamale has only a few basic ingredients, there has to be the right mix of meat and spices.

“No one has ever told me that they didn’t like one of my hot tamales,” Hicks says. “That is, to my face.” I don’t doubt this. Hicks’ hands are the size of compact cars.

There's no argument. Hicks' hot tamales are famous.

When I’m done, I walk outside, my stomach filled and my mind sleepy. Running alongside the restaurant is the Sunflower River. The water is so still, though, that “run” is just a traditional term.

Known worldwide as simply “the Delta,” this northwest quadrant of Mississippi was an uninhabited wilderness before the Civil War. Yearly floods from the Mississippi River kept away would-be pioneers. With modern levees and dams, early settlers transformed the rich land into an agricultural bonanza. Swamps were drained and trees removed, revealing farm-friendly alluvial soil created by centuries of river flooding.

When the Delta opened up, African-Americans, Italians, Germans, French, Chinese, Lebanese, and Russian Jews flooded the land as the river had before them. The economy boomed. Huge cotton farms were built between the years 1865 and 1930. The owners became rich. The share-croppers merely eked out a living.

Hot tamale fame is everywhere in the Delta, including Vicksburg, Mississippi.

John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, has researched the topic and theorizes that African-American share-croppers most likely picked up the recipe from migrant workers from Mexico some time after 1920.

Yet the Mexican tamale is a different than the Mississippi Delta tamale. Wrapping corn meal in a corn husk or corn “shuck” is standard for both, but Mexicans fill theirs with combinations of pumpkin, chocolate, meat, pineapple, raisins, vegetables and green corn to name just a few of the possible ingredients. The Mississippi Delta tamale, on the other hand, is filled only with beef, chili and spices.

Hicks: Presiding over an institution.

Barreling down Highway 61, I hear the snap-snap of insects in the 100-degree heat. Ribbons of soybeans, corn and rice spread out seemingly forever into the flat horizon. As I drive, I see surprisingly few cotton fields—the fields where Latino migrants might have once shared tamale secrets with share-cropping African Americans.

Agriculture has become mechanized and the vast cotton crop is all but gone, replaced by newer, more lucrative crops. As I drive through the tabletop vistas, I imagine that somewhere, in one of these farm fields, the Delta tamale tradition was planted alongside “king cotton.”

Plain on the outside. Delicious on the inside.

If I listen closely, I can make out the low hum of giant automated farm sprayers shooting water over the fields. Every now and then, an old moss-covered sharecropper home rots in the distance. Even less frequently, I see shacks that have been transformed into lodging for intrepid tourists.

The demise of the cotton crop led the occupants of these shacks—the African-Americans who created the blues and the Delta hot tamale—to move to large American cities such as Memphis, Chicago and New Orleans. Their remaining descendants are spread throughout the multitude of small river-hugging towns across the region.

Willie Harmon, in front of his hot tamale restaurant in Hollandale, Mississippi.

I’m driving toward one of these small towns to speak with the self-proclaimed “King of the Hot Tamale,” Willie Harmon.

Part businessman, part raconteur, and part preacher, Harmon, 64, sits across from me in the shade of the tamale restaurant he is building in Hollandale, Miss. The tiny town teeters on the brink between civilization and reclamation by Mother Nature. Many of the buildings are boarded up and abandoned.

Locals drive by in cars and call out, “Hey, Hot Tamale Man!” and Harmon gives them a slow, regal nod. He leans forward and places his hands together. The knuckles on his right hand are still crooked from a brawl at a juke joint he owned before he became a hot tamale man.

“When I was a young man I met a traveling man,” he relates. “The traveling man told me that if a man could sell hot tamales in a place where there was no hot tamales, well then, that hot tamale man could make a lot of money. I couldn’t stop thinking about how hot tamales were my future.”

Heaven in Greenville, Mississippi.

Harmon says he’s been selling hot tamales out of his car and from carts in these small towns for the past 35 years. He believes the hot tamale came to the Mississippi Delta from Mexican workers, but he doesn’t agree that the tamale is a purely Mexican dish.

“As far as I know from a Mexican up the street, Indians in Latin America made the first tamales and they were the ones who showed the Mexicans how,” he suggests. “Actually, the tamale is an Indian dish.”

Did Native Americans really make tamales? Did the recipe emerge independently of the Mexican version? I try to imagine Choctaw Indians showing Delta settlers how to make them.

“Could be, could be,” Harmon says with an uncertain shrug. Lawns and hedges are growing wild here, and sidewalks are broken. Gypsy moths have enveloped a large oak, making the tree appear as if it is covered in fog despite the bright sunshine.

Homemade signs are as authentic as the food.

I’m getting hungry again. I tell Harmon I am hunting for the history of the great hot tamale of the Mississippi Delta. He laughs and tells me his son Willie has a hot tamale stand, called “Hot Tamale Heaven,” just up the road in Greenville.

It sits amid a strip of fast food joints, between a Wendy’s and a root beer shop. I order half a dozen from Willie’s air-conditioned stand. Today, everything is locked up tight against 100-plus degree heat. No children are playing outside in the Delta summer sun.

Willie’s hot tamales are fat, and the meat is loaded with cumin and garlic. They’re delicious, but I’m on a mission. I set off for Nelson Street, in the old part of town.

The wide street once bustled with musicians, field hands, hustlers and juke joint owners. Now the juke joints are boarded up, metal bars cover broken windows, and shingles are falling from the sides of dilapidated buildings.

Doe's Eat Place, which started in Greenville, Mississippi, has been discovered and written up.

At the end of the street is a small white house; the sign says “Doe’s Eat Place.” There are Doe’s franchises throughout this part of the Deep South. But this one is the original, started as a juke joint by Dominick “Doe” Signa and his family.

Doe’s wife, Mamie, developed a still-secret hot tamale recipe, and by 1941, the couple ran a steak and tamales restaurant out of the back of the house. In those segregated times, the sit-down restaurant was only for white people. It became so profitable Doe and Mamie shut down the juke joint.

I walk into the front parlor and I see a large woman stirring a large pot on a large stove. She doesn’t want to interrupt her preparation for the evening meal by answering questions.

Cathy Wong, the manager, comes over instead and explains how her family, from Hong Kong, was friends with the Italian-American Signa family. I ask about this southern cultural mix in the south as she shows me around the living-room-like restaurant, where four women are rolling tamales by hand.

By hand, of course.

Wong, 55, explains that many immigrants—Lebanese, Italian, Chinese and Jewish—opened up shops in poor parts of Delta towns, and catered to working-class African-Americans. Since Italian and Spanish are similar languages, was it easier for Italians like the Signa family to learn the tamale recipe from Mexican workers?

Noted Mississippi Delta documentarian Amy Evans thinks the language connection is likely, although proof of the origins remain a mystery. Evans has logged many miles on what has been dubbed “The Mississippi Delta Hot Tamale Trail.” 

At Doe’s, the hot tamales have paper wrappers instead of the usual corn husks. The tamales appear rather slender and light, but they are laden with oil, and the seasonings are subtle.

They make a wonderful afternoon snack, and I’m overly fortified for my next stop, in tiny Rosedale, Miss. My stomach gurgles for the help of an antacid. The main street there is named Joe Pope Boulevard, in honor of the man who founded the “White Front Café.”

The town is tiny and pushed up against the Mississippi River levee. The trouble is, I can’t find the café. I see no gaudy signs or flashing lights. Finally, a local points me to a non-descript white house with the tiniest of signs over the door. By the time I walk in, even my sunglasses are dripping.

The price is always right.

Inside, Barbara Pope, 64, is gathering a few dozen hot tamales for a customer. She is the sister of Joe Pope himself, and she says nothing when I introduce myself and explain my hot tamale mission. She goes back to serving the customer in front of me.

Another customer pipes up. “These here are the best hot tamales anywhere. Ms. Barbara don’t even send these tamales in the mail. You have to come here with your own pot to her shop.”

Ms. Barbara sits down and silently turns the pages of the Bible, writing down verses. I bite into one of her hot tamales and I am amazed by the mix of spices and meat, filling but not heavy.

I am finally out of questions. Ms. Barbara stands before my table. Sunlight shines in from the doorway across her face and she smiles. I know I have found what I am looking for, and it doesn’t come in the form of an answer.

Barbara Pope in Rosedale, Mississippi, lets the hot tamales speak for themselves.

Sean David Hobbs is a writer currently based in New Orleans. He has also lived in and written about San Francisco, Berlin, and Istanbul.

Phil Witte is a widely published Cartoonist-in-Residence at the Cartoon Art Museum.

Customers love petite, blonde Amanda, but she’s back with her boyfriend and a stable job at an upscale department store in the suburbs. They also love little Danielle, who is in her 40s, but her latest excuse, a locked steering column, made Maya finally give up making appointments for her.

Meanwhile, potential customers keep sending messages and calling to schedule sessions. It’s up to Mama Maya, who once held the unofficial title of Seattle’s Number Two Madam, to manage the clientele.

Like any entrepreneur, she turns to her laptop. She logs on to commercial sex sites to keep up with business; to find new customers she’s also been checking some from Southern California and Las Vegas.

She poses as the girls themselves and sends coy replies as excuses until they’re ready to work again. “I hope to be back in town next week and I look forward to meeting you,” she taps out.

Fateful year: In 1982, Maya was 23 years old.

Reaching for another Camel menthol, she pads out to the patio of her friend’s (and sometime client’s) nouvelle ranch house, set among hilly cul-de-sacs in suburban Seattle, near the Microsoft corporate campus. “I’m such an honest person. I hate telling all these lies,” she exhales.

But that goes with the job: it keeps the customers happy, earns flexibility for the girls, and keeps future dollars flowing. It’s noon, it’s quiet out, and her friend is still sleeping enthusiastically.

Maya shushes his dog and sorts the recycling. She’s in her early 50s, slightly short and square-shaped, with big eyes, a pierced eyebrow, a pointed pixie chin and a reddish pageboy.

She won’t start eating for another few hours; she’s a former bulimic and wants to lose some weight. It’s one way to make up for snacks of Skippy peanut butter and caramel-flavored rice cakes in front of the evening TV.

The housework and on-line sex-market chatter don’t distract Maya from worrying about her dwindling bank account. She had considered herself retired, and hadn’t wanted to work again as a madam or in the “industry” at all: “I get sick of the bullshit, the drama, the excuses.”

There’s no pension or retirement plan in the sex industry, and no time for a career change. “I can’t wait two weeks for a paycheck—I have no choice.”

There’s no bordello, no red velvet wallpaper, no scantily-clad ladies misting themselves with perfume behind a beaded curtain. Customers no longer need to turn to madams if they don’t want to pick someone up off the street—they can use the internet. Mama Maya has to compete digitally, and her competitive edge depends in part on the relationships she can develop on-line and into real life with the girls and the men.

While a convicted pimp currently serving time in Washington State calls madams “female pimps,” and law enforcement is focused more on street-walking, juvenile exploitation and money-laundering, madams now are usually a souped-up combination of web-savvy receptionist-schedulers and cellular mother-therapists.

The internet means less standing around.
(Photo: klabusta via Flickr)

During a separate conversation at a coffee shop in Bellevue, just east of Seattle, Amanda vigorously vouches for her: “I wouldn’t work for anybody but Maya.” She tells how Maya meets customers herself first to keep her girls safe.

“She’ll take the heat, she protects us, she makes sure these are quality people who aren’t going to hurt us. She even has my credit card information.”

Maya doesn’t consider engaging in paid sex herself. “If I was young and hot, I probably would, in a New York minute,” she says. But jumping back into “adult entertainment” is harder than it used to be; the internet is her lifeline but it’s also choking off her supply.

“Craigslist is riskier, but it’s killing the business,” she frets. “All these girls are advertising for $120 an hour.” Her girls usually charge $350; Maya’s cut is a flat $75 commission.

So she’s come up with a different idea: selling not her body, but her story. Maybe she isn’t the Mayflower Madam, but she’s got great tales and vast amounts of spicy, unusual knowledge. Speaking for this article might help turn her story into a book, now that recent political sex scandals have increased the public’s curiosity. It’s another scheme, along with her website, www.lippss.com, to pay the bills.

In the meantime, she’s right back to the hustle, where she knows she can come up with the cash—now—for her daughter’s cell phone bill and her son’s over-limit credit cards. It’s not the men in her life these days who get her money, it’s her three grown kids.

But without available girls to book for appointments, there’s no commission. Zero funds come in. “Desperate times don’t afford me the luxury of smart choices and mainstream jobs,” she sighs. And desperate times, as they say, beget desperate choices.

+ + +

“The only thing I ever wanted was to be a mother,” Maya reminisces. “I just wanted a family with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence.” She has some warm memories from when she was very young, of riding her tricycle over to grandma’s house in a small town in upstate New York near the Finger Lakes.

Business portrait: Maya from the front.

But in first grade, her parents, who were both from alcoholic households, divorced. Maya’s untalkative and unavailable father continued drinking himself into rages. His remarkable talent as a softball pitcher earned him a series of minor, sham jobs at banks and companies that coveted him for their teams. Her mother, a new divorcee, landed in a social caste reserved for whores, and got up before dawn to work as a key-punch operator at American Can and then as a secretary at an old-age home.

At age eight, Maya recounts, she began witnessing an alcohol-tinged tangle of short, violent remarriages and mismatched pregnancies. She made her mother proud by cooking dinner, keeping house, and watching over her four-year-old brother.

For fun, she tossed bags of garbage from the top of her apartment building into the dumpsters below. By the time she was 11, she impressed the local teenagers by smoking Old Golds and drinking beer on the roof with them.

One Christmas was nice, with a new bike courtesy of one of her mother’s serial husbands. Another marriage moved them out to a trailer and then to a two-room cabin so rustic that all their water had to be collected from a stream down the hill. To avoid smelling like a wood-burning stove, Maya carefully hung her clothes out to air before she went to school.

“We were poor,” she says simply. “This was 1969, and we barely had electricity.” She stayed pretty and popular—and guarded. Nobody knew about the outhouse, or the laundry hanging from the rafters. Nobody knew they were building a bigger cabin by constructing new outer walls around the old ones they were still living in.

She kissed a boy at a seventh grade party, which led to disastrous school rumors that she was pregnant. That’s when she learned how babies are really made. Maya first had sex later, when she was 13, as a way to keep her 18-year-old boyfriend.

...and from the back.

“It was zero pleasure,” she says, “I thought I was in love, I thought I was going to marry him.” The relationship didn’t last, and she married someone else when she was 19. By then she had graduated from high school and was working in a baseball bat factory. They divorced before their first anniversary; her ex-husband retired recently as a janitor at their former high school.

Following an invitation from a “random” girlfriend, Maya moved to San Diego. She found a bank job and then, in a downtown bar, the father of her first daughter; the family and the white picket fence hadn’t yet turned up.

Some of the relationships were more successful than others; a few men were unfaithful or violent or both. After buying her new husband a used sports car and watching him drive away with another woman, she followed them and punctured all four tires with a knife.

Months before he finally disappeared to Las Vegas for a career in high-stakes drug dealing, he wanted to become a Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman. The only obstacle to the stability and happiness the job would bring: the $100 necessary to purchase the required sales kit. Maya rashly promised him she would have the $100 by 5:00 that afternoon. She was 23.

+ + +

Mama Maya’s personal cell phone is mainly for her kids. She has another Seattle-based phone for girls who are working. They sit on the tidy kitchen counter next to her Vegas phone. One starts to ring.

Peering through her glasses at the caller ID, Maya sighs, “It’s Ding-Ding”—her private name for Gail, whom she describes as a beautiful, disorganized loser. Gail is flat broke with two grown kids and a broken-down Mercedes. She wants Maya to check out new photos of herself she has just posted on a California sex site.

“Oh, honey, you should have let me see these pictures before you did anything,” Maya exclaims. “You’ve got some bad shadows here on your inner thighs that should have been Photoshopped.”

She soon snaps the phone shut, fed up. Photos won’t be any help if Gail keeps saying she’s still a few hours away from being ready for dates—today will be scrubbed. Plus, Gail’s description of herself in the ad as “lonely” is a definite turn-off.

“What man wants to spend time with a pathetic, lonely loser?” Maya asks. “Men love to hear you’re a survivor, not a loser.” And yes, she says, most of them do want to find out all about you. “They love to get you to cross that line, to get you to fall in love with them.”

Maya thinks Amanda’s sob story was one of the best. “She would tell the guys that she was from Alaska, that both her parents died, and so she came down here to stay with her grandmother, but then her grandmother needed to go into a nursing home. And that’s why she was doing this, to get the money for the grandmother’s nursing home. Guys love that. You get more tips.”

Amanda probably would have earned fewer tips and gotten less customer interest than if she had told the truth: that she was from rural Kitsap County, Washington, and was just plain poor. That she lent her ever-jobless father money for a new pick-up truck and was never repaid; that her mother was a martyr, struggling to keep the family afloat; and that several tours in the Iraq War had left her brother “pretty messed up” and her boyfriend chronically unemployed.

One of Maya’s phones chirps: her oldest daughter, in Las Vegas, is texting the news that the rent has been paid on her apartment there. That’s a relief. Maya pores over the sex sites and notices a beautiful young woman on Craigslist. “I would love to recruit her, but I’m sure she’s got a pimp. You can see bruises on her.”

Maya says she’s more mother than madam: “That’s why I’m Mama Maya. I would give the shirt off my back for these girls.”

Maya tries Gail again to see if she’s finally ready to start taking appointments. No answer. She takes out the duffel bag she used back when she had up to 10 to 12 girls working for her, back before she supposedly retired. Inside are tea light candles, room freshener, mints, mouthwash, drinking water, a spray bottle of Febreze, and plastic bags full of hotel soaps and shampoos.

“You have to make the room look like you just got there. You arrive early, grab extra sheets and towels, and hide them in the drawers,” she explains. “If they ask, you tell them you have one client in the morning, and one in the afternoon.”

Maya's book. Another way to support the family.

The reality is different, of course: girls who know what they’re doing want to make the most of their time and the room fee by seeing, perhaps, five men consecutively, and girls will normally share the use of a room with each other.

Mama Maya’s record was with Amanda, when together Maya scheduled and Amanda entertained nine men in one day, back-to-back in one-hour time slots, at $300 a pop. Not long ago, Inez saw six men in one day and earned $2,790. The money’s fast, good, and tax-free; there’s no college degree or certification required. Plus, the job is flexible enough to let them get back to dealing with their lives.

Gail’s teenaged son calls from somewhere in Orange County, California, looking for his mother. Later, after mulling over the best price to charge for her services, Gail laments the lack of control she has over her kids: “Back when we stayed at the shelter, they always knew they had to go to school.”

Maya is exasperated; this is a woman who needs a better work ethic. She points out that Gail is still attractive enough to earn the money for her family’s needs. It’s hard not to agree.

+ + +

Maya remembers she had no real plan at all to get her husband the $100 she promised him for his Kirby vacuum cleaner job, and the 5:00 deadline was a few hours away. She was living in San Diego with him and her two-year-old daughter, and his mood and behavior were getting “progressively worse. I knew money would bring him back to me.”

She had a vague idea of being a drug runner, but didn’t know how to go about it. She brought her friend’s dogs to the park while she considered the problem. A pimp pulled up in a van, started a conversation, and offered a solution. Maya was riveted by his explanation of the trade that centered on El Cajon Boulevard.

There are ready-made templates for creating escort web sites.

“He said if I could fuck him, a total stranger, right then and there, that I could be a ho. So we climbed in the back of his van and did it. Sex didn’t mean anything to me anyway.”

Still, it took a couple of fretful hours of walking up and down the “stroll” to get up her nerve. “I was petrified. I just couldn’t get in a car.”

Finally, a white Mazda RX-7 pulled up, and the graying, portly man inside bargained her from $25 down to $20 for a blowjob. She remembers he was very nice, with a box of tissues in the console.

“I couldn’t believe it—this much money, this quick. I couldn’t wait to get back to the boulevard. In 1982, minimum wage was like $3.35 an hour.” Maya shakes her head: “Twenty-five years later, girls are still giving away twenty-dollar blowjobs!”

The second customer was a blur, as were all the rest. For about eight months, her daughter stayed home with her husband while Maya worked the stroll—plenty long enough for her to realize he didn’t love her.

He quickly gave up the vacuum cleaner gig because she made more money than he did. He left for good and she stopped streetwalking. Two more children, a few boyfriends, and a husband later, she wound up in the Seattle area as a Navy wife.

She gave up a relationship with a man she found who really adored her to return to chasing her white picket fence dream. A devoted mother, she went on every school field trip. Military pay was so low the family qualified for food stamps, but she was determined that her kids would have the things and the nice shoes she never had.

Marketing sex has never been faster or easier.

Maya’s eldest daughter, Dominique, now 29, is a staunch defender of her mother. “She was always the cool mom,” she says by phone from Las Vegas. “Our birthdays were like holidays—she made the world stop.”

What Dominique doesn’t volunteer is about the day she was molested by Maya’s third husband. The marriage immediately turned ghastly and ended. Maya’s guilt and disappointment are still worthy of a day-time reality TV show; bouts with alcoholism and bulimia set in.

She drove a bus in a small town on the Olympic Peninsula; her three children rode along on her route in the early morning until school started. With Dominique’s help (“My mom always said I was like the Marilyn character in ‘The Munsters’”), Maya built a house with her own hands, the way her impoverished stepfather had done back in upstate New York.

She worked in administrative jobs in western Washington, where overbearing supervisors found bureaucratic methods for punishing her “trailer park” style. Reprimands and memos floated into her file for not dressing appropriately—foregoing stockings on a hot day was a no-no. She was accused of sexual harassment and suspended for 30 days without pay for showing coworkers her vacation photos; one showed a man holding coconut halves over a woman’s breasts.

Maya gave up and emptied her desk. “I’d rather suck a dick for money than kiss somebody’s ass for $10.83 an hour,” she remembers telling herself.

+ + +

Maya is sweeping the spotless steps near the kitchen again at the suburban house when her 20-year-old son, Ian, Jr. calls from Las Vegas. “I feel like a fucking ATM machine,” she grumbles.

He’s bought himself designer clothing and can’t make the credit card payments. This galls her, considering he wore her down until she bought him a used Mercedes a year ago; she knows she will have to sell it soon, at a loss.

“After the molestation, my kids lost everything, including their father and their home,” she explains. “As far as I’m concerned, I can’t give them enough.” She admits she has spoiled them, and can’t seem to set things right; with no money coming in, her options are even more limited.

One good picture can sell a thousand sex acts.

Suddenly, the clouds of doom part: the next phone call is from Inez, one of Maya’s all-time best workers, back from visiting her sick mother. She’s ready to work—hallelujah!— the retirement is really over.

Maya wastes no time helping her post a new ad on a Los Angeles sex site. She starts the coffeemaker while she’s still on the phone and before it’s done brewing, the first call comes in, vibrating across the Formica.

The exhorting and lamentations she delivered to her son a few minutes ago have evaporated. Now her tone is friendly, breezy, and businesslike:

“Good morning, may I help you?” She remembers the caller as a previous customer; he is itching to spend an hour with Brazilian Inez’s smooth olive skin and long hair. Reading off a web site, she gives him directions to a Southern California hotel as if she were near the freeway herself.

“Oh, aren’t you efficient! Don’t forget the diamond ring!” she coos. She hangs up and chuckles: “One first-timer told me he was too nervous to go through with it but that I was so friendly I put him at ease.”

She texts Inez when to expect the customer’s arrival and adds what kind of car he’s driving. She writes down the name and appointment into a spiral-bound notebook. Inez texts back and Maya calls the customer again:

“Inez just got there and she wants to get the room ready for you; I just need you to give her an extra five minutes.” Little white lies help massage extra men into more tightly-scheduled appointments. By the end of the day, there will be five appointments, limited only because Inez will have to pick up her niece.

Maya states the obvious: “I’m really good at multi-tasking.” Phone calls add up quickly, especially when several girls are each seeing a series of men.

The next call comes from Jessica, Maya’s younger, 23-year-old daughter, who is in a vicious struggle with Oxycontin, the hugely addictive prescription painkiller. Jessica has hocked all her jewelry and plowed through the thousands of dollars of rent money Maya gave her.

Now she’s crying on the phone, unable to reach her boyfriend who has locked her out of the apartment they’re borrowing out in a small town in the country. He’s dead asleep and Jessica had to spend last night in their car.

The boyfriend has his own troubles, having finished a prison sentence for manslaughter after killing a teenager during the course of an impromptu drag race.

Streetwalking: not quite obsolete. Selling sex: never obsolete.

“I’m scared something’s going to happen!”Jessica wails, in a post-high semi-paranoia. She has spent time in jail for writing false checks. “I just can’t go back to jail!”

Maya calls her daughter’s neighbor, claiming to have a question about picking up their dog. The innocent neighbor obliges, wakes the boyfriend, and Maya spends several minutes urging him to get a job—and help for both of them. She admits to me in an aside that it pains her to learn that Jessica tried turning a few tricks.

Another phone call interrupts the parental lecture. “Good afternoon, may I help you?” Again, from the sound of Maya’s voice, there’s no way to detect her anguish from an instant earlier.

“Hey, where are ya, pretty boy?” She tells the caller Inez’s room number, and gives him parking advice. “Thanks, baby!” She hangs up, calls Inez to let her know he’s parking his car, and mixes herself another café latte in a take-out Starbuck’s cup.

“I think I have to spend some time in Vegas,” she says. “With cell phones, I can take this job with me.” First she’ll take a day or two to help out Jessica in the country while Inez is off work, visiting her mom in the hospital.

Then she’ll spend time with her two grandchildren in Vegas: their father used Maya’s—their grandmother’s—history in the prostitution business as the basis for getting custody of them.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Tears slide down her cheeks and her voice closes up. “The motherhood thing I wanted—well, I’m accepting the blame for how everything turned out,” she weeps, wondering if she has failed despite her lifetime of effort.

Knowing she was completely different than her own, ungiving mother, though, is a tremendous comfort. When Maya hears her children say “What’s wrong with being like you?” she feels not only redeemed, but successful. But she’s shaken by any news in the business, as when the “D.C. Madam” committed suicide after facing up to 55 years in prison for promoting prostitution.

“I’m supposed to be part of the underbelly of society because I was a whore,” Maya muses later. “But I don’t feel like a criminal. I feel a lot more honest than someone who marries a person for their wallet.”

Two weeks later, Maya navigates her Ford Escort to the interstate on the way to Vegas, where, both proud and disgusted by her roles as madam and mother, she will keep chasing the dream of the family with the house and the white picket fence.

Photo of see-through stilettos from Mandy’s Hot Stilettos.

L.D. Kirshenbaum is Editor-in-Chief of NewsPlink.

To give the other guys a chance for glory, we’ve pitted the righteous Rocky Road, a product of the Annabelle Candy Company since 1950, against the venerable Valomilk candy cups, made by the century-old, family-owned Sifers Candy Company.

In this corner, the Rocky Road bar, a western favorite.

This exercise matters because these are products of a time before the interstate freeway system made candy—and everything else—easily transported around the country. Regional production meant each town had its own bakery, brewery… and candy company.

And, in this corner, the Valomilk candy cup, a mid-Western classic.

The good news: sweets are a recession-proof industry. Even in hard times, customers can usually scrape together a few coins for a candy bar.

The Sifers Candy Company, which makes the Valomilk, could win based on nostalgia alone.

Both of our contestant candy bars are made from chocolate and marshmallow. Both are long-time regional favorites with loyal followings. Neither is produced by a publicly-owned conglomerate.

Let the games begin!

Round 1 – Package Prettiness

You can’t help but judge a candy bar by its cover.

Summary: The easy-to-spot metallic red makes Rocky Road simple to make a grab for. But because the point is to recreate the experience of walking to the town candy shop and eating sweets off dishes with paper lace doilies, we’ll have to go with the olde shoppe look.
Winner: Valomilk

Easy to tear into. Easy to bite into.

Round 2 – Packaging Function and Ease

If the candy is smashed, will it taste as good?

Summary: Rocky Road has nothing more than that red foil wrapper, but was relatively unscathed. Despite a little slip of cardboard, many of our Valomilk test samples were leaking marshmallow goo. And the Valomilk is tricky to open. [Editor's note: Packages of Valomilk at the store were intact; only those that arrived at the NewsPlink laboratory via a third party were damaged.]
Winner: Rocky Road

Round 3 – Sex Appeal

Does it look good enough to eat?

Summary: In perfect condition, both candies look mighty fine. Especially with the choco scent wafting towards the nostrils.
Winner: Draw

A substantial dose. Trickier to open, trickier to eat.

Round 4 – Mouth experience

Taste and texture both count, especially if you’re not keen on candy that sticks to your teeth.

Summary: Both have that moment of fabulousness that comes when the chocolate shell snaps apart under gentle pressure from your teeth. Valomilk’s marshmallow insides run over the tongue immediately. By contrast, the heft of the Rocky Road’s fluff allow the teeth the joy of punching through the pillowy filling.

While this is a highly personal and intimate decision, we feel that the semi-liquid marshmallow “milk” in the Valomilk creates the sense of just a bit too much sweetness. The air-filled Rocky Road doesn’t scorch the tongue with sugariness.
Winner: Rocky Road

Russell Sifers runs and owns the company. He answers the phone, too.

Round 5 – Extra credits

To Rocky Road, for saving other little-known candy bars from extinction, like the Big Hunk, Look!, and Abba-Zaba.

To Valomilk, for the charm of its owner, Russell Sifers, 61, who sits behind the desk and answers the phone himself. “They tell me I make the pitchman for Motel 6 sound frantic,” he chuckles. “And being portly—I corrected my teenaged granddaughter, who called me ‘fat’—is one of the occupational hazards of the business. What can you do? But if the president of a candy company is skinny, you figure there’s probably something wrong.” He limits himself to no more than one Valomilk cup a day, and to two on Friday.

To Rocky Road, for removing the preservatives from one of their candy bars, and admitting that Rocky Road does have some hydrogenated fats.

To Valomilk, for using the same basic ingredients. We start to worry when the semi-liquid marshmallow hardens slightly on the plate, but hey, we’re talking real egg whites here.

To Rocky Road, for being run by the third generation of the founding family, with a potential for a fourth. And for gallantly calling Valomilk a “friendly competitor.”

To Valomilk, for being in the fifth generation of family. And calling Susan Karl of Annabelle “a good friend.”

Winner: Draw

Final conclusion?
Buy ‘em both when, and if, you see them. We’ll try for a more dramatic smackdown next time.

Rocky Road is made by Annabelle Candy, Co., Inc. in Hayward, California. The company was founded in San Francisco in 1950.

Photography by Andrew McDonald, except for Sifers Company photos, which are provided by the Russell Sifers Candy Company.