I romanticized this part of the movie because I saw myself and Alex in Ruth and Idgie: two queer women in love. I brushed off Alex’s blonde hair from her own tan neck, and kissed her. I’ve just never seen it done before today.” With my arm wrapped around the ribs of my girlfriend, I felt her exhale, and she quoted Ruth, her own Southern accent deepening into a syrupy timbre: “You’re just a bee charmer, Idgie Threadgoode,” said Alex and Ruth in harmony. Her golden arms held the gift aloft to Ruth, who, awestruck but composed, speaking in the spacious, long-limbed vowels of a Deep South drawl, tells Idgie, “I’ve heard there were people who could charm bees.
While the trunk swarms with thousands of humming bees, Idgie, straw bale hair frizzed out in Southern humidity, reaches in and pulls out a whole chunk of amber-hued honeycomb. On the screen, Imogene, or Idgie, Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson) tells Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker) to stay under a wide oak while she walks across a clearing to a broken, dead tree housing a wild beehive. It was a Friday evening, and we spooned on the gray couch in her front room, the DVD player ticking and the window open to Kentucky’s late summer.
I had never read the 1987 novel, nor seen the movie, though Alex was known to quote both like scripture. I saw Fried Green Tomatoes when I was twenty-nine and dating Alex, the first woman who was not a secret to my family and friends.
