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Growing up, I always found those pictures in Momma’s photo albums a bit, uh, creepy. You know the ones – pictures of dearly departed relatives in the casket at the funeral home. The pictures would inevitably end up right beside a picture of me digging through my Easter basket with crazy bedhead, attired in a gown & my Easter Mary Jane’s. But, in adulthood, I’ve finally come to understand why those pictures were taken . . . so that we can remember the tackiest of jokes made at Aunt Lizzie Rae’s funeral. In fact, I’m thinking of shopping around a new reality show, loosely titled, “Yes, We Really Act that Way at the Funeral Home.” My friend, Des, admitted to having laughing fits during her father’s funeral service. Luckily, such moments are often passed off as being “grief stricken.” I remember sitting in the corner laughing hysterically with cousin Jane, tears streaming down my face, about my beloved Aunt Sammie’s wigs that had a tendency to look like dead squirrels.

Sadly, some of my strangest moments have happened at the funeral home. My husband’s Aunt Francis passed away several years ago, so we loaded up the Beverly Hillbilly wagon and drove to the mountains of Smithville, TN. Tony’s people are country folk, and they eyed me suspiciously, walking in with a chocolate peanut butter cake & a black Prada purse. Let me go ahead and explain to you out-of-towners that the words “Smithville” and “Prada” are seldom used in the same sentence. And I heard such whispered sentences as, “Look at Tony and that hoity-toity wife of his . . .” But I didn’t blame them really; they had no idea how country my origins really are (plus, many a friend has told me I can come off a little "snooty" at first).

At this very funeral, my husband and his ancient Aunt Kenzata kept trying to feed me “white chocolate” from a ziplock baggy. Well, Momma didn’t raise no fool. I knew that “white chocolate” was in fact “lye soap.” Kenzata had mistaken me for a city girl, and it was her funeral home version of a snipe hunt. I bet you a Krispy Kreme doughnut that Kenzata had someone poised with a camera waiting for me to take a bite of that “white chocolate.”

My mother-in-law, Mean Lorene, the 120-pound, sugar-consuming tornado, was not about to leave her sister’s funeral without the rest of the chocolate peanut butter cake I had made for the mourners. She, after all, was a mourner. She walked into the kitchen with a clear mission . . . rescuing the cake. An elderly gentleman (I hope and pray it wasn’t her brother-in-law) was cutting a piece of cake. Lorene pulled the plate out of his hands and darted out the door. She didn’t even let him have the piece he had cut. She ate the remaining ½ of cake on the ride home WITH HER HANDS (she had forgotten to grab silverware in her haste to “leave the scene”). I watched in shocked amusement as she stuffed mouthfuls of cake into her mouth with her peanut butter covered hands.

To this day, I regret not having a video of that (the modern-day equivalent to the funeral home camera pictures, I might add). I believe I will do a “dramatic reenactment” of the funeral home cake heist for my reality show.