Can I have a fork in a night? Thanks. No, just four. We need more plates. Oh, uh.

That one good. Honey, you're eating southern.

We're in Memphis, this is Paula Casey, one of my new favorite people.

Paula is Tennessee down to her bones, barbecue, grand old Opry, and of course its most famous son.

I was in the newspaper business in 1977 in Clarksville, Tennessee on on the Tennessee Kentucky line when the teletype started ringing,

ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and it said, Dateline Memphis.

Elvis Presley died today.

Now, Paula's father happened to represent a big national florist in Tennessee,

and his company got the funeral gig.

He sets up shop at Graceland and people start sending flowers but

they send so many he can't figure out what to do with them all. So they decided

to pass out flowers to everybody who filed past Elvis's cast.

Which put Paula's dad right over the body through the whole thing.

Paula, of course, was a humongous fan, still is.

So later, when her fellow Elvis fans had, you know, questions about

the King's sudden death, she knew who to ask.

So I said to my father, daddy,

they're having all these Elvisotics, what do you think he said?

You know?

I stood by that cast it.

That some bitch was dead. Thank you for that. So that's Paula. She's a big personality,

gregarious, unafraid, and deeply southern, which she would have to be,

...