ClayNation Dixieland Delight College Football Tour: Egg Bowl

If I absolutely had to be a male cheerleader, Ole Miss would be my choice. That's because I could end up a United States senator like current Mississippi politicians Thad Cochran and Trent Lott. Either that or I could end up a member of the "world famous" Bud Light Daredevils. These are evidently the three most famous alumni of Ole Miss cheerleading. At least according to http://www.olemisscheer.com/funfacts.html. So basically, no matter what, I'm going to end up pretty cool. Either doing backflips off trampolines and dunking the basketball for thousands of uninterested halftime fans or giving incendiary speeches to CSPAN about the need for a bridge in Yalobusha County while no one else is in the Senate.

But, think about this: What are the odds that both of a state's senators would have served as cheerleaders for the state university? Even more amazing, imagine you are Thad Cochran and have been elected as senator. You're thinking you pretty much have the Ole Miss cheerleading achievement honor locked down. Maybe they'll hold your name up when they build a pyramid during halftime or do a basket toss or even chant your name while the cheerleaders layer the hairspray into their hair. And then, suddenly, your old cheerleading buddy Trent Lott arrives in Washington and gets elected Senate majority leader. And Lott's hair never moves, which means no one is chanting your name anymore while they hairspray each other during pregame. Welcome to Ole Miss, where even the cheerleaders are members of the good ole boys network. It's a bona fide Southern-fried cheerleading mafia.

The state leadership by the Ole Miss cheerleaders must drive Mississippi State fans particularly crazy. The elected leaders of the entire state probably still have dreams where they wake up screaming, "Are you ready?" and then lead the Hotty Toddy cheer. Don't worry, we'll talk about this later.

When I tell my wife, Lara, about both Trent Lott and Thad Cochran being senators after serving as Ole Miss cheerleaders she responds, "It's well-known that being a cheerleader is important for your political career." I take the bait and ask why. "Because it gives you a leg up," she says with a straight face. This joke absolutely kills at 8-year-old cheerleading camp.

My wife and I in The Grove.

So with visions of cheerleaders-past tumbling (I originally wrote cartwheeling and my wife said, "If their cheerleaders are just doing cartwheels, they're really lame cheerleaders") through my consciousness, I head to Oxford for Stop No. 12 of the DDT at the Egg Bowl. Accompanying me was my wife and her parents. This meant, as always, I was on my best behavior.

1. We arrive several hours before kickoff and park near the Lafayette Courthouse in the center of Oxford. Put simply, if you haven't ever been to Oxford before, go. It's spectacular. The town square is worth the trip alone. All around us, Ole Miss and Mississippi State fans are streaming by on the sidewalks. It seems possible that everyone in the town is smiling. Kickoff is several hours away, but until then, everyone seems to want to enjoy the Oxford square.

2. My wife, who has heard rumors about some of the shops around the square, leaves me, and I wander into Square Books, which has not one, not two, but three different bookstores all located within a post pattern of one another.

3. I'll confess that I've been biased in favor of Oxford as the best town in the SEC since I traveled down to visit William Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak, and met now deceased Larry Brown signing copies of one of his books in Square Books. Per capita Oxford is the most hallowed literary ground in America. And I can't imagine anyone not being impressed by a visit.

4. Not everyone, however, finds Oxford as spectacular as we do. I meet an Ole Miss graduate and current fan by the Lafayette Courthouse and discussion immediately begins about what Oxford is currently like. "It's the three O's," he says, "Overpriced, overrated, and overcrowded. These out-of-towners come in here and they don't have any idea what things should cost. A 1,300-square-foot house just sold for $350,000." He shakes his head, "All these stores are expensive here." Suddenly, leaving my wife to shop seems like a bad idea.

Faulkner wishes he had any seatmate but me.

5. Oxford's most famous resident, William Faulkner, now sits forever on a bench in the town square. I leap a fence and sit down beside the Faulkner statue. It's a beautiful fall morning without a single cloud in the sky. Or as someone writing bad Faulkner might describe it, "The pulchritudinous and ponderous autumnal sun, which sun had not and would not ever stop rising above the temporal and tumescent day, could not, nay would not stop; it was indefatigable, reigning triumphant, the very apotheosis of life come, springing forth verdant and bounteous on the myriad prisms of indomitable and incandescent rays, until the primordial, iniquitous and querulous night should come stealing, vulpine and sinister, over the rolling hills of the town."

6. Ole Miss wears the colors crimson and blue to mirror the school colors of Harvard and Yale. Oxford utilizes red double-decker buses modeled on those found in England, and there are phone booths like those in England around the square. Mississippi State fans would call all of these gestures pretentious.

7. I hustle back to LeShea's, where my wife is shopping, but before I can even get to her, she has found me on the square. "I need the credit card," she says. I shake my head. Inside the store, I sit down along an antique bench. Somehow, I always end up on antique benches whenever my wife is shopping. Once I spent a long time wondering why all the places to sit are so uncomfortable in trendy women's shops. Then I realized that I had never seen a woman sitting down in these stores. Ever. These chairs/settees/Mediterranean divans/couches/Saharan stools solely exist to look nice. And men are the only people to ever sit down on them. Somehow, this makes the money being spent even more painful. "Look," my wife says to placate me, "they have free Mountain Dew."

8. My mini-Mountain Dew costs me $80. I feel lucky. A year ago my wife bought a beige ottoman to put in front of our couch. (For the record, I just had to ask my wife what this thing was called. She said, "An ottoman, you ask me that at least once a month.") It cost me something like $400. It replaced a trashy brown table that I could always eat off of and put my feet on. Now I can't eat off the ottoman or put my feet on it. Worse, I had to spend more than a day practicing law to buy it. I love this. Because if, when my alarm had gone off that morning, someone had knocked on the door and said, "You better get moving to the office or you won't get this ottoman at the end of the day." I would have just gone back to sleep.