Dear Ruby Ann: Down Home Advice about Lovin', Livin', and the Whole Shebang

Combining hog and hominy with heehaw homilies, the bodacious Boxcar is the""Trailer Talk"" columnist for GO! The Gayly Oklahoman. Her regular readers find her down-home dialect humor and colorful colloquialisms""funny as all get-out"" (as Ruby Ann might phrase it). With much marketing savvy, she attracted attention by larding laughter into budget-conscious recipes for a successful series of campy cookbooks (Ruby Ann's Down Home Trailer Park BBQin' Cookbook, etc.). From her two-story double-wide pink trailer in Pangburn, Ark., she kicks off this Southern-style shindig with lot-by-lot updates on her High Chaparral Trailer Park neighbors (some introduced in earlier books), including""dog-ugly Opal Lamb-Inman"" and""Flora Delight, the stripper with the wooden leg."" Advice to readers is spiced with recipes (""Fried Velveeta and Spam-Stuffed Wontons"") and household hints. Some seem devised by a haywire Heloise: if you make a Dr Pepper Salad, remember""the secret ingredient is two cans of Dr Pepper."" Along with words for the lovelorn, she covers everything from junk food and eBay junkies to makeup, jails, funerals and churches:""Even if there wasn't a heaven or even an afterlife of any kind, the potluck would still be reason enough to be a Baptist."" The plus-size Ruby Ann delivers some plus-size laughs, and she's got a double whammy dealybopper going, since buyers who purchase her titles as gifts often want copies of their own and return for a second helping. More than 20 b&w photo collages.