I’ve been reading Garden & Gun since the magazine launched in 2007. Most of our editorial staff has too. We love it and we love to hate it. The aspirational South G&G portrays is at once mesmerizing and maddening. Stories about finding new ways to use your heirloom silver, or how to “grab a frog like a Cajun” sometimes leave us wondering who on earth is living this life? That said, the magazine is beautiful. Full stop. The photos, the layouts, the writing, when G&G nails it, they really, really nail it. So maybe this week’s send-up is actually a love letter. Albeit one tinged with a little jealousy. We’re jealous that G&G‘s staff gets personal deliveries of country ham on the regular. We envy the magazine’s Filson-gilded office and its fancy-ass accoutrements, like a goddamn swing in its entry hall. Hell, even publisher Rebecca Darwin has a bar in her office. Sure, we have a bar in our office, but it’s a bottle of Four Loko in my desk drawer not a spread of top shelf hooch displayed on a silver tray. The truth is, like most mere Southern mortals, we know we’ll never live that glossy Garden & Gun life. We’ll always be the guttersnipes to their landed gentry. But no one can stop us from parodying them. And with that I give you Charleston’s own City & Paper, the “Mouth of the South,” our entirely facetious riff on this city’s most adored lifestyle brand. Happy Valentine’s, G&G. Mean it. —Kinsey Gidick, Editor in Chief
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