What's In a Name

For someone who doesn't drink coffee, who can't abide the taste (although I do love the smell), Notes From Hot Coffee would seem an unusual choice of a blog name. But Hot Coffee is a phrase that has a lot of significance to me as both a real and a metaphorical place.

The real place is Hot Coffee, Mississippi, a tiny town halfway between Natchez, MS and Mobile, AL. It is the place where farmers,  on their way to or from taking their crops to market, would stop at L.N. Davis' General Store for what Davis called, "the best hot coffee around" . The name stuck, and though Hot Coffee is best known for producing the actors Stella Stephens and Dana Andrews, I prefer to think of it as the place that produced my maternal grandparents Norma Lane Saxon Carter and William Matthew Carter. It is, in a very literal sense, the place were much of my family began. 

Hot Coffee is also the place where many of the stories my mother told me are set. It was alive in my imagination long before I ever went to visit the real place.  It is the place were stories are born, true stories, that combine tragedy, and laugh-out-loud comedy with a cast of good-hearted yet flawed characters who are just a little odd. You may not have ever been there, but you know these people, you root for them, and in the end you fall in love with them. It's creativity and beauty and real life. It is what I look for in the songs I sing and the stories I tell.

Finally, Hot Coffee is the name of the theatre piece I have been toiling over this past little while. One day it will be finished and see the light of day (or rather a theatre), but until then I will be sharing bits and pieces of its birth story with you. 

So, welcome to Hot Coffee! I hope that in reading my stories you will be inspired to share you own. Everyone is welcome here, because everyone has a story that's worth hearing.