Red Belly Day

I think I received my highest ratio dosage of Southern stereotypes at an event I attended once near my family's property on the Suwanee River. About a ten minute walk or forty second boat ride from our place and you end up in Fanning Springs, sporting a good amount of stereotypes on any given day. This event however, is the creme of the crop so to speak. Red Belly Day, as it's been coined, is held every year in Fanning Springs; an event that involves an innumerable amount of belly flops to so who can get, as you may have guessed, the reddest belly. It is organized and ran by the Dixie County Chamber of Commerce , and is the biggest annual event in all of Dixie County, so often times the turn out is quite enormous.

When I attended Red Belly Day three years ago, I was bombarded with near every redneck stereotype I can imagine. A large portion of the parking lot was filled with a pickup of some persuasion, most often of American build. There were, that I could see, at least three televisions set up around the park with a NASCAR event on it, and any number of t-shirts with some sort of NASCAR portrayal. Many were those missing teeth here and there, there were a few pots littered across the park either boiling or frying something. If you can think of a stereotype, you could probably find an example there. But that isn't to say that everyone there fit into these categories, and in fact a good number of them didn't, on the surface at least, but there were enough to solidify my belief that Southern stereotypes are not founded on nothing.