Will "Bonnie 'Prince' Billy" Oldham: Kentuckian, singer-songwriter, actor, Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams super fan.
Ladies and gentlemen, since the June 15 release of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home, we've read lots of kind words about Jeni and her debut for Artisan Books.
The Columbus Dispatch called Jeni a superstar, while The Washington Post described her as a wizard. Also, earlier this week, the great LA Weekly stated: "When it comes to ice cream, no one has perhaps done more to shake up the waffle cone scene more than Jeni Britton Bauer."
The splendid quote storm actually began to kick up back in January, when Jeni was finishing Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home and Artisan Books began receiving quotes from luminaries of the food world (Michael Ruhlman, David Tanis, and Molly O'Neill), as well as one incredible home-brewed batch of sentences from one of Jeni's favorite Americans, Will "Bonnie 'Prince' Billy" Oldham, whom it's safe to say, operates on the fringes of the food world.
(How did we learn Mr. Oldham had a taste for the good stuff? Our ears are to the ground, is all we can allow.)
While Ruhlman, Tanis, and O'Neill's insightful quotes appear on the back cover of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home, the Bonnie Prince's killer sentences--written somewhere in Louisville, Kentucky, in the dead of the 2011 winter--deserved their own stage, we decided, when the time was right.
Well, the time is right. Everyone, please welcome Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams super-fan and Drag City recording Artist Bonnie "Prince" Billy to the stage:
"I expect only the best from life. Everything sub-best is training for the best. I train to eat Jeni's ice cream, and when I eat it, I feel justified. We make ourselves Right in order to deserve heaven, and heaven for each is individual and complex. I adore Marlon Brando, and his journey, but could never get down with his ulcerating ice cream binges. With Jeni's flavors I understand being on top of the world...in my mouth. I feel Brando's pain and it hurts so darn good."
Beautiful.
We'd have expected nothing less from the man who gave the world I See a Darkness and the man who starred in a Kanye West video, alongside the comedian Zach Galifianakis; appeared in the independent movies Junebug, Old Joy, and Wendy and Lucy; and who played a police officer in Trapped in the Closet, the multipart comic opera by the R & B singer R. Kelly.
Jeni (and everyone who works very hard to grow the ingredients and everyone who works hard to turn them into ice creams) could not possibly appreciate more such colorful accolades.
Thank you all, and thanks once again, BPB.
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