The Trip - Alabama

We just crossed into Alabama from Mississippi and stopped at the rest area by the state border to have some lunch.

We've been seeing signs for a while, and expect to see them for a while longer, telling us how many miles it is to Tuscaloosa.

I can't see the name Tuscaloosa without thinking of the Marx Brothers movie, Animal Crackers, which I haven't seen since 1983. My then-husband and I were on our bicycle trip through Europe, and near the beginning of our four months there, we met a guy in Paris, David from New York, who had been in Europe long enough to be desperate for American company. So we discovered that a movie theater was showing Animal Crackers in English with French subtitles, and we went.

There were times when the three of us were the only people in the theater laughing, and other times when they made a joke in the subtitles that wasn't what the Marx Brothers were saying, so everyone but us laughed. One of the times when only we Americans laughed was for the elephant joke, which I had to look up (here), because I couldn't quite remember the Tuscaloosa part. Groucho says:

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.

Then we tried to remove the tusks. The tusks. That's not so easy to say. Tusks. You try it some time. As I say, we tried to remove the tusks. But they were embedded so firmly we couldn't budge them.

Of course, in Alabama the Tuscaloosa, but that is entirely ir-elephant to what I was talking about.

When all you're doing is driving, you've got a lot of time to think. And much of that thinking is pointless mental triggers to ancient history. But I don't mind, because it's fun, and in Alabama the Tuscaloosa...