I just discovered that Bill Ferris is now the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. That bit of information pretty much overloaded my synapses for a few minutes, but I recovered just long enough to write this short piece.

I used to work for Bill Ferris at the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis. Bill comes from an old South family from Vicksburg, MS, and while a college kid, he took a liking to filming the Negroes around his plantation. This led to him actually becoming known as a filmmaker, although it was always the underlings who did all the real work for him.

The thing that absolutely floors me about finding this out is this: No one man in this age group from the South, aside from the man who obviously gave him this gig, has ever been known as more of a male whore. He showed up at work one day with a French girl with a parrot on her shoulder; he'd brought her all the way from Paris to see Memphis. He actually kept a map of the world with pins in it. You can guess what the pins represented.

A parrot on her shoulder! You can't make this stuff up. I wouldn't be surprised to see her on a rope line batting her eyes at the POTUS any day.