Bits 'n Pieces - Jill Alexander

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Coffee or tea?

Sweet tea – the thick kind with pure cane sugar.

Favorite movie?

Miss Firecracker (late eighties with Holly Hunter) and Edward Scissorhands. I love the quirky and off beat.

Have you ever sang karaoke?

Are fish wet? Dolly Parton, Taylor Swift, Beyonce – just to name a few I’ve covered. Currently on Rock Band, my alter ego Judy Nails has the high score singing Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On Prayer. My thirteen-year-old son pays me to stop singing in the car before we arrive at his school. I’m also not permitted to do the Mariah Carey spastic hand waving while demonstrating my vocal range.

Would you rather spend the day surfing the internet or the ocean?

I’m more of a channel surfer. CMT, The Bachelor, Ace of Cakes.

If you could have lunch with any three people (alive, imaginary, or dead), who would you choose and why?

I don’t really have a desire to break bread with dead people. Have you seen Beetlejuice? So I’d LOVE to do lunch with Kellie Pickler, Dolly Parton, and Harper Lee. Four generations of Southern women with stories to tell. It’d be like our own Ya Ya Sisterhood.

What is your biggest pet peeve?

Whining. Really. Call the Wambulance because I just can’t tolerate it.

Where would you bury your treasure?

In a mason jar in a barn. True story: My grandfather buried mucho casho in mason jars in the dirt floor of his barn. When he began to develop Alzheimer’s, he took my mother to the barn, gave her shovel, and told her to dig.
But in further truthiness, I’d probably not *bury* treasure. I’d blow it, share it, and have a great time.

What are some of the little things you love in life?

To me, the little things are those precious, stolen moments like when I sneak in some quiet time to memorize the poetry of e.e. cummings, or the way my husband reaches for my hand under the table at snooty dinners. And those times when I speed, no, fly down a lonely stretch of highway – Elton John’s Rocket Man on blast. Yeah. Take me there.

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be hot and sophisticated. As in sexy hot and in another location. I was a string bean country girl living in a rural town of four hundred people. Could. Not. Wait. To. Leave. Now, as a writer, it is the emotion of that girl in that time and place I find the most attractive.