Trapped On a Boat With Paula Deen

Even from a distance, though, she is very, immediately, likable. In real life, she walks and talks and looks and acts exactly like she does on television, only more like that. Her eyes, kohl-rimmed and framed by cartoonishly thick false eyelashes, are surely among the biggest, bluest eyes ever popped into the sockets of a human face. She exists in a state of perpetual delight, as if she is constantly being pleasantly surprised, and this delight is a contagion to those around her. Every once in a while her Georgia accent will drape itself so heavily over a word that that word is rendered utterly unrecognizable to other native speakers of American English. My notes are littered with baffled phonetic transcriptions: “Ailey…??”

Hairpin OG Caity Weaver spent a week on a Paula Deen cruise, y’all. I asked her for an #exclusive Deen detail (Deentail?) not included in the story, and she told me that Deen loves Jo Malone perfume, but not the “Red Roses” scent, because it smells “like a 95- or 100-year-old woman.” The more you know? Anyway, go read it.