Nineteen years after Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Club bunny for Show Magazine, and 20 years before Elizabeth Gilbert would immortalize (and, somehow, glamorize) the dank New York dive Coyote Ugly Saloon for GQ, D Magazine editor Amy Cunningham went incognito to get a gig waitressing at a new Fort Worth dance hall billed as “the biggest honky-tonk in the world.”
Read her March 1982 feature, “Billy Bob’s Honky-Tonk Angel,” today and you’ll feel the sticky grip of dried Lone Star on your boot soles, a patron’s pinch on your backside, and an ache for the waitresses just scraping by. In one scene, the manager, Don, scolds the ladies for a string of no-shows. “I don’t know what to say to y’all except that maybe a lot of you don’t know what it’s like to work at most of the clubs in town where the managers want to sleep with you before you can get anywhere,” he said. “That’s the way it works most places, and we don’t do that to y’all here, see.”
Cunningham, meanwhile, was furiously and furtively scribbling dialogue on cocktail napkins. Over the course of 13 shifts, she remade herself from a career-focused 26-year-old with a Neiman Marcus pixie cut and a ladder-climbing wardrobe (afforded after cashing in her $500 equity from the Dallas Observer, where she was one of the first staffers) into a Weller-slinging waitress sporting jangly earrings and a bandana around her neck. She was given more than a month to report the story, a luxury few journalists enjoy in today’s media landscape.
“We didn’t know how happy we were,” Cunningham says of her days at D Magazine. “I think to us as young people in Dallas, Texas, in that moment of magazine history, we couldn’t see what a great place it was to get a break and really write and work with outstanding photographers. We were all longing for big careers somewhere else.”
Her avenue east materialized shortly after the Billy Bob’s story was published, when she took a job at Washingtonian magazine before freelancing for women’s glossies such as Glamour and Mademoiselle. Decades later, though, her career path took an unlikely turn.
In 2009, Cunningham’s 94-year-old father died in South Carolina. He was a lover of Dixieland and jazz music, so, to close his service, an eight-piece brass band walked from the sanctuary down the aisle playing a mournful dirge. Then, just as the band broke through the chapel doors, it burst into a jubilant rendition of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” a song her dad used to play with two fingers on the piano.
“That was the moment I was awakened to the power of a good funeral,” Cunningham says. “I feel like a good funeral sends people out the door with an uplifted world-view and new marching orders on how you want to live and how you want to be. New resolve, I guess, to be a better person.”
For Cunningham, that new resolve was to go to mortuary school at the age of 54, eventually becoming the director of Fitting Tributes Funeral Services, her own bespoke firm in Brooklyn, New York, specializing in green burials and home funerals. The kind of memorial experience she designs: a sound bath service under the bend of a willow tree with sprigs of rosemary tossed onto the handwoven wicker casket as it’s lowered into the ground.
“I feel like a good funeral sends people out the door with an uplifted worldview and new marching orders on how you want to live and how you want to be.”
And though the technical aspects of her new career no doubt differ, her journalistic skills were nonetheless transferable to planning funerals. “What you’re revealing are aspects of that individual’s character just as when you write a profile of an individual,” Cunningham says. “You’re trying to get at what motivates them and who they are.”
Cunningham never completely abandoned writing. While still a mortuary student, she started the blog The Inspired Funeral to cover the subject matter Americans knew so little about. “I felt as though the stories were fluttering on pieces of paper in the streets, and all you had to do was pick them up.” She served as a consultant in the early stages of this death-related issue, for which we are grateful. She’s now preparing to write a “life-affirming memoir” about her work in death care.
“I can’t say that I fear death any less, but I live life more fully,” she says of the lessons she’s learned. “One way that expresses itself, one way I feel a lot of joy and completeness, is through music. It’s like I’m in one ecstatic room after another with grieving families processing a loss. Music with me is always a part of it. We have opening music and closing music. And it’s like my own personal auditory system has been altered, and the speakers in my ears are taking in music in a new way.”
This story originally appeared in the November issue of D Magazine with the headline “Dirge Overkill.” Write to holland@dmagazine.com.
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