Going to see the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Girl in Savannah

We dropped by Savannah when we were down south attending my nephew's Marine boot camp graduation ceremony. Savannah is surprisingly close to Parris Island so it made sense to make it a long weekend.

We got upgraded to a suite at the hotel. 

the suite! bless my heart!

Savannah is on the tiny side... I guess I say that as a New Yorker so keep this perspective in mind. It's a very walkable place and they have this amazing free bus that goes around in a big circle. You can hop on/hop off and manage to get yourself in places that you probably shouldn't have bothered with. 

We successfully located this Alley Cat Lounge fancy cocktail establishment which Scott had highly recommended. We went by at like the crack of 4pm or something on a Thursday -- which turned out to be maybe the only time we would have ever gotten in without a reservation. We sat at the bar and had an lovely time chatting up the bartender, who turned out to be the bar master and an expert in Japanese Whiskey and knew more about the NYC cocktail scene than we did. 

Maybe the whole reason I wanted to go to Savannah was to bask in the city's Spanish moss vibe. I read the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil book by John Berendt a long time ago and have been fascinated by the whole idea of Savannah ever since:

https://amzn.to/3TwYCHj

Five to the High to photographer Jack Leigh for pulling off the image on the cover of this book. It's a book that so perfectly judges Savannah. Here's me copying a paragraph from "Garden & Gun" magazine so you can see how right I am about this book:

"It’s considered one of the great literary portraits of any city. The personality of Savannah itself propels each page—creaking art-filled mansions, unforgettable characters like the Lady Chablis, the magnetic and moody Bonaventure Cemetery, Chatham Artillery Punch–fueled parties, and the unraveling of a murder that somehow, in some way, involves just about everyone."

(You know me, always flirting through different magazines, but I always come back to Garden & Gun. 

I'm kidding of course.

I do not understand the first thing about why a magazine would be entitled Garden & Gun. There's some nice alliteration, sure, who doesn't love words that starts with "G." 

Mostly I'm just reminded of the time I went back to my hometown, walked down an alley and happened across a guy out mowing his lawn with a semi-automatic pistol in a holster strapped to his hip. Now that's a gun in a garden!

I said out loud in an I'm-making-fun-of-you voice, "oh look at me at 3pm on a random Thursday at the ready just in case of misdeeds in my yard requiring gunfire." He couldn't hear me over the roar of his 500 horse power lawn mower, which for sure was important for my safety.)

Anyway. This Bird Girl sculpture you see on the Midnight on the Garden of Good and Evil cover I wanted to get a gander at. It's no longer in Bonaventure Cemetery. They had to take the sculpture out of the cemetery -- where it was originally when this photo was taken -- because so many tourists were tromping out there. And I can see why. The cemetery is named Bonadventure. What a name. We don't have names of this caliber north of the Mason Dixon. We need more misty swamp heat to get all up in our creative like this.

So we saw Bird Girl where she currently resides... on the third floor of a rickety mansion museum that has a definite smell to it. Here's my list of exhibits that I remember from this museum:

1. The Bird Girl
2. The Gift Shop (which was surprisingly enchanting)

I know I'm such an a-hole New Yorker. I can see why the first sentence of the Garden & Gun article goes like this:

"A little more than three decades ago, a Savannahian pulled the journalist John Berendt aside and told him, “As far as Savannah is concerned, being a writer and being from New York is a deadly combination.”

Touché people of Savannah.