Selfie With A Billionaire. Kiley At The Derby.

THOSE DEGREES OF SEPARATION. Supposedly you're only six contacts away from anyone else in the world. Many relate it to Kevin Bacon for some reason. I’ll just settle on the Prince of Monaco. We have this connection. I better back up a bit and explain. It started twelve years ago. I was a student at WKU and had won a national broadcasting award named after paper baron William Randolph Hearst. I was to fly out to San Francisco to wine and dine beneath the Golden Gate Bridge aboard a fancy yacht. Before the flight, I met up with a previous winner a little older than me named Gertrude (name changed). A two time winner from our school, and daughter of a legendary Kentucky disc jockey. A blonde with a smoky radio voice. Well, after describing her now, how about I change her fake name to Bambi? We had a five minute conversation about the winnings and left it at that. My only conversation with Gertrude Bambi Lee in my four and a half years at Western.

Fast forward about nine years. Now an alum, our former professor was compiling a list of Hearst winners via Facebook, and for the first time in nearly a decade, I spotted my blonde classmate. You know how it goes. Friended, chatted, dated, almost married Gertrude, on and on. It happens. We parted ways, but as with any relationship, mutual friends happen through the course that stick around after the fact. One such of our mutual friends was a reporter at a television station in Lexington, who made custom stitched monogrammed shirts and wares for kids. Last month, as I was expecting nephew number two, I arranged with the design expert to make a custom Map Dot onesie for the newborn. Her outfit (choice of word intentional) followed me on my newfangled Instagram page, so I looked at who else was following her constant barrage of monogrammed clothing. Kiley In Kentucky stood out among the list (Kiley is her real name). Looking at her page, here was this Miss Kentucky hopeful who was working in her hometown of Greensburg, a talent worthy of big city attention to the benefit of a Map Dot. We connected, and her last name proved familiar. Shuffett. That Suffett. Dave’s cousin, of whom I had worked with a few times, most recently with KET in a Kentucky Life role last year.


Kiley. For Real.

I made a roadtrip to Greensburg and had coffee with Kiley. In the midst of the historic Green County town square, Longhunters Coffee Shop rivals anything found in Kentucky’s larger cities. Impressive, though the historic district itself is a great lesson in small town done beautiful. I took my coffee per usual (roadtrip burnt rubber black), and bought a second for pageant hopeful (with a splash of cream per request). As the java was savored, she interviewed me for her weekly Kentucky blog followed by a walk through downtown talking pictures. In passing, she mentioned that for the first time in her 23 years, a girl friend was treating her to the Kentucky Derby. A bulb lit atop my balding head. I wanted a correspondent at Churchill Downs in a fancy hat, and she was just my girl.

Derby Day Southern Belle

Derby Day, 2014. Kiley and her friend Ramsey (for real) doll up for the spectacle. She’s in Blue with the matching hat and sash reading “Miss Monticello.” Apparently, you can enter these pageants from just about anywhere, even if you’re really from Green County. She was “Miss Cumberland Falls” once, for example. Whatever she was, she was texting me while I was at my factory job in Bowling Green, running off the floor to the locker room to run the Map Dot, Kentucky page in between truck frame inspections (nobody tell). First was the Red Carpet. She had somehow managed to get pictures with country star Miranda Lambert and Terry O’Quinn of Lost. We could have just stopped with that and been fine. I kept welding and got another buzz from my phone. “I’m on Millionaire’s Row right now! Don’t even ask me how I got here.” My jaw dropped. Beyond infield crowd for this crew. They had managed to get up to the exclusive Skye Terrace level of Churchill Downs, where a table goes for 50,000 dollars. Beyond Millionaire’s Row, in fact. She had attained to the High Cotton. Another text. “I just met the Prince of Monaco.” Um K. Two weeks prior, my crew had been eating bologna in a four way stop dot called Gold City in Simpson County. The name was about as close as gold got. Now this. She was taking selfies with a Billionaire. Hanging out with the heirs of the Campbell Soup name at the same moment. That’s about as Derby as you can get.

California Chrome

The pictures kept coming of hats and juleps and the view from the high dollar seats. I was in the car out in the factory parking lot at post time, listening to My Old Kentucky Home broadcast live on WHAS. The same way it had been for nearly a century. Then they were off. I was pulling for Uncle Sigh, who put on a good shew for a little bit, but was overtaken handily by California Chrome. How’s that for a turf writer’s use of wording? Kiley sent her last picture. She was holding up her iPhone as the shiny named horse crossed for roses.

And we were there, through her, all the way to the Prince himself. Those degrees.

-Originally in The Hickman Courier. May 2014.