Southern Charm.(art of being a Southern gentleman)(Brief Article)

This summer I embarrassed my Brooklyn-born girlfriend at a wedding in South Carolina. I had dragged her down to Charleston to meet some friends from the University of the South, two of whom were walking down the long aisle into holy matrimony. She was leery: Southerners and New Yorkers usually mix like Scotch and tonic. But her reservations melted as she watched my charming Southern buddies in action: shag dancing rather than doing the humpty hump, and opening doors for their dates. Yes, they might spill beer on her heels from time to time, but there would always be an apology with a light touch on the small of her back.

All was well, in other words, until I embarrassed her in front of a bow-tied old Southern gentleman. He (tipsy) and I (more so) had been talking politics when I accidentally let a burp slip out between syllables. The man was kind enough to play it off. "Nice belch," he said, and I thanked him. My girlfriend was mortified, however. All these well-bred folks at a black-tie reception, she said angrily, and here I was behaving like a subway bum. I conceded that the faux pas, but I pointed out that in such a crowd, there is no stigma attached to drinking. Drunking (and burping), yes. Yet still, a man just might get away with an errant burp if he'd been trained in some of the other arts of Southern gentlemanliness.

Luckily, I had. Like many folks at that party, I went to the University of the South. Spectacularly set atop a Tennessee mountain, it's a veritable factory of what Tennessee Williams might have referred to-- drawlingly, with a cigarette dangling--as "gentlemen and women of substance." The school goes by any number of affectionate aliases (The Mountain, The Domain, Sewanee) that speak to the proudly Old World feeling that pervades the campus. It's the sort of place where you sign the honor code, and ever after leave your car, dorm room and bike unlocked. I took tests at home, unsupervised but without cheating. Elsewhere in the country, students attended class in flip-flops and pajamas; we went in coat and tie. We didn't have bars, decent fast food or cable TV in our rooms, but we had America's second largest campus to explore: a sprawling forest of lakes and caves, with a glorious Gothic chapel directly in the campus's center. Southern-fried hip-hop boomed in the mid-'90s, but we were too busy searching for a good New Orleans jazz band to notice.

Shakespeare and strong drink were not ...