September 2007
Mobile Magnified – By Boozie Beer Nues, Social Butterfly, Lagniappe

Some of you have been naughty. So very naughty, in fact, I’m going to have to take you into my spank tank and bend you over my knee. Rrrrooow! Of course, some of you freaks will like it. I wonder if Judge Hermie spanked the bare booty, over boxers or just over the jeans? Ouch! In any case, it’s just freaky. Only in Mobile! And here are some other things you could also say that about…

Hermie gets a night at the Roxbury

My god. I just can’t get over this whole Herman Thomas thing. I swear the fact that we have a judge supposedly spanking bad little boys – actually full-grown criminals – in a closet/shrine is just incomprehensible. We should be so proud. Tons of national media coverage!

And the description of that little, secret room? OMG! There was a nice chair sitting there at a normal height and then one adjusted to be barely off the floor. Look, I know I have a filthy mind, but you know what that sounds like. Double OMG!!

I guess everyone has been a little obsessed with this. Local personality Jolene Roxbury was so much so she wrote a song about it called "Spank Me" to the tune of Blondie’s "Call Me." It made the FW: rounds all last week and is a scream. The chorus goes something like "I’m just sitting up here doing time/Spank Me, Spank Me, I’m fine/ Just bring the paddle, and I’ll bring the wine."

I looked on joleneroxbury.com and didn’t see a link, but I’m sure at least one of your friends can forward it to you.

I’m sure Hermie would not be amused, as he seems to be in a little bit of a bad mood lately. A Courthouse Spy heard the Hermster threw a fit at Government Plaza last week.

According to the spy, Hermie found himself locked out of his chambers last week and was none too happy when told he could not enter. He supposedly tried reminding the staff who wears the black robes around there, but was told that for the time being, his robes were in the closet.

Our spy also said Hiz Honor was overheard complaining that everyone is picking on him and that he’s being persecuted. Sounds like someone’s going to be taking a few folks to the woodshed – if he ever gets the keys to his woodshed back, that is.

February 2007
On Our Cover: Jolene Roxbury – By Deborah Mock, Editor, Alabama Dog

Local Mobile comedienne Jolene Roxbury is going to the dogs and she loves it. Jolene is a regular columnist for the Mobile Bay Monthly, has successful CDs full of hilarious skits and songs, she created a line of luxury cosmetics called Baff N Booty, and this month she reigns as the Grand Marshall of the Mystic Order of Persephone in Daphne. But on the homefront Roxbury is the owner of eight (yes, that’s eight) dynamic dogs, Missy, Molly, Scout, Jack, Sissie, Murphy, Coco and Puff (not Cocopuff, like the cereal). Roxbury talked to us about life in the Mobile Bay area with her pack. “As Dick Van Patten said back in the day, Eight IS Enough!” says Roxburyof her pooches.

Alabama Dog: What is your favorite thing to do with your dogs in the Mobile area?
Jolene Roxbury: I won’t peel crawfish for my husband, but I do peel them for my dogs. During the season, our favorite Sunday afternoon activity is enjoying crawfish and beer on the pier. No beer for them, though; they swim in the river to get cool. Meanwhile, I swim in Corona.

AD: What is the best thing about being a dog owner?
JR: With the exception of Jack, our Dachshund, all of our dogs were rescued. The look in their eyes is one of the most incredibly rewarding things in my life. They really do love you unconditionally. For instance, the dogs run happily toward me when they hear the can opener at dinnertime. Everyone else runs away.

AD: What has been your biggest challenge as a dog owner?
JR: Getting all the dogs to sit still for anything. You notice we're missing a few on the cover, right?

AD: You visited California last year. What is the biggest difference you noticed between California Dogs and Alabama Dogs?
JR: Alabama dogs come when you call them. California dogs take a message and get back with you later.

AD: Any special plans for you and your dogs for Mardi Gras?
JR: Well, I love chocolate moon pies. The thing is, I can't ever tell the chocolate from the banana or that incredibly nasty glowing orange moon pie since they are all in the same silver packaging. In one whiff, my dogs can tell which ones are chocolate, and which are not. So, after the elimination round, I put the remainder of the moon pies in a package and send them to my family up north.

AD: You have a line of beauty products for humans called Baff N Booty, any gift ideas from the Booty Boutique for the month of February?
JR: : How special would it be to receive a gift from your pet, right? Well, since our pets are no longer allowed to order online (we had a big Frederick's of Hollywood disaster last year – but that's a whole nuther story…) my husband sometimes surprises me with a gift "from them". And of course there are many spa-licious items to choose from at www.baffnbooty.com. I have great gift ideas for the precious little furry ones! (I am referring to my in-laws and their offspring.)

AD: Are your dogs the pampering type? Any plans for a beauty line for pooches?
JR: We have a line of toilet water in the planning stages.

AD: Xanadew is your ticket to “emotional calmity,” what gives your dogs that
same serenity?
JR: When their bowls are full, they are calm. Come to think of it, me too.

AD: What one thing do you think would improve the lives of dogs in the Mobile area?
JR: Life on both sides of the kennel would be better if there were more responsible pet owners.

January 31, 2007
Media Frenzy – By Rob Holbert, Managing Editor, Lagniappe Mobile Online

While it didn’t have the citywide reverberations of Inetta Da Moodsetta’s on-air quitting, WZEW’s morning show comedian Jolene Roxbury took leave of Mobile’s independent rock station Jan. 19, delivering an on-air resignation.

Roxbury had appeared on the morning show with Sean Sullivan (who writes a column for this publication) three times a week for the past couple of years. Her skits included reworking popular songs, changing the words to fit her comedic subject.

In quitting the ZEW, Roxbury reworked the Dire Straights song "Money for Nothing" into "Funny for Nothing," apparently a pointed reference to her gratis work for the ZEW. In a statement after her resignation, Roxbury said: "In the past year, I’ve been fortunate enough to align myself with terrific management and have been afforded some opportunities to expand my career into other areas that I hope will prove to be very gainful and I simply have to dedicate my focus to these projects. I loved and appreciated my time at ZEW and I loved what I was able to do bring to the radio. I would certainly not be opposed to doing radio again someday if the right opportunity ever presented itself. I am most grateful to my good friend Sean Sullivan for allowing me to frequently invade his personal space."

Roxbury has begun doing more personal appearances and pitching her "Baff n Booty" products, as well as currently producing an exercise CD called "Laugh Your Booty Off." Her Web address is joleneroxbury.com

september 2006
Newsletter – Kendall Jackson Estates Wine Club Newsletter.

March 1, 2006
Media Frenzy – By Rob Holbert, Managing Editor, Lagniappe Mobile Online.

WZEW morning show regular Jolene Roxbury is making pretty big splash these days – big enough, in fact, to land her a gig at a Kendall Jackson wine convention in California this summer.

Roxbury, who appears weekday mornings with host Sean Sullivan on 92-FM, has been honing her act for the past few years....

Roxbury performs comedy skits and songs, and the Kendall Jackson gig stems from a song she recorded called "Kendall Baby." Winery owners liked the song and developed a relationship with Roxbury.

"I sent it to them and they loved it," she said. "They asked around Christmas if I would come out in August to Santa Rosa, California."

Roxbury is also finding more success around Mobile, serving as a pitchwoman for Toomey's Mardi Gras Warehouse. She is also doing some work with the Historic Preservation Society.

Some of her recordings have even made it across the pond to England, Roxbury said. Overall, she says she is happy with the way her career as an entertainer is progressing.

"I was just looking for it to pay for itself. It took a year for it to do that," she said. "It was a stretch for a while."

Roxbury has even gone into the beauty products business, designing a line of "Baff & Booty" products. She explains its popularity in her unique way.

"Even skanks want to smell nice. They don't like to smell like skanks," Roxbury said.

Overall, Roxbury says she has "a lot going on and I'm having a really good time."

january 19, 2006
A Meeting of the Minds – Susie Spear Cloos, Living Columnist, Mobile Press Register.

There's no place more discreet than Boo Boo's King Kole in Point Clear, so that's the place where radio personality Jolene Roxbury and I chose for our rendezvous.
Indeed, it would be my first meeting with the enigmatic Roxbury, whose fame from regular commentary on WZEW-FM 92.1 had won my laughter and my complete fascination.

As an only child in a lonely Parlor, I wanted this woman, politically incorrect and brazen as she may be, to be the big sister I never had.

Maybe Belle Cadeaux could be the Godmother I always wanted? I daydreamed, relishing Belle's deliciously Southern and pregnant pronunciations of words like "portico" or "sideboard."

I imagined weekends with Jolene, riding scarved in her El Camino to Talladega for tutelage in recognizing true "nasty skanks." And she would surely have me out to the river, tie an apron around my waist and teach me how to make seven-layer dip.

No matter what, I knew that before I left Boo Boo's, I was going to be annointed by the Great Jolene.

Oh yes, her new line of luxury cosmetics had just come in, and she wanted me to sample her "Baff and Booty" line. Pssst! Look for it soon at The Market on Old Shell Road, where Jolene fan Blakeley Webb will showcase the inimitable line, featuring greats, such as Shea Moonpie cologne.

So I walked into Boo Boo's, headed toward the back, parted a veil of tobacco and smoke, and there she was in all her glory, pumping her atomizer like a nurse taking blood pressure and ready to spritz her new products!

One sniff of Shea Moonpie, and I was transformed. "Good-bye," I would say to the Grace Kelly signature scent Fleurissimo by the House of Creed.

And God bless that fella from north Alabama and his pretty smell called "Southernness," but this is a whole 'nother kind of Southern. A little less magnolia and gardenia, and a little more night bloomers with cotton candy high notes.

I was so impressed by Jolene as she took out her Blackberry from its leopard case and phoned ZEW deejay Sean Sullivan just to joke around and make him jealous
of our Porter House platters.

We chatted for hours and lamented the fact that neither of us had the chance to meet members of the British Polo team when they played Point Clear in the early '90s and hung out at Boo Boo's every night. Even Fergie's daddy, their coach, had a seat of honor in the little club.

Jolene finally conceded, looking at me over her Norma Kamali cat-frame sunglasses, that she reckoned she could shake just enough starch out of my stiff Parlor persona to make me an acceptable running buddy.

I beamed with pride, grabbed my sample caddy of "Baff & Booty" products, then waved and watched the diva wheel away in the wind, the sunset adding glow to her Hermes scarf, and pea gravel pummeling my shins from her expert Bootleg Spin.


december 13, 2005
Comedy of Jolene Roxbury Tickles Internet, Radio Audiences – Mike Brantley, TV and Media Editor, Mobile Press Register.

Ask Jolene Roxbury if she exfoliates.
Go ahead. Ask her. We'll wait right here.
"No," she'll respond to you with a lightning wit. "But I have been tossed out of Robertsdale."

The laughter comes a moment or maybe two later, after the joke settles in enough to permeate the cranial cavity. A knowledge of Baldwin County municipalities helps this locally flavored, zesty zinger. You know, ex-FOLEY-ate.
They're laughing at Roxbury's humor in Foley, certainly, as well as at other places within the radio reach of 92 Zew. Segments featuring her comedic banter with morning show host Sean Sullivan are aired most Thursday and Friday mornings at 7:50 on WZEW-FM 92.1.

They are laughing with Roxbury – not her real name, by the way – all over, actually, as the Mobile radio station's programming is sent out onto the World Wide Web via an Internet digital audio stream at www.92zew.net. They've gotten feedback from faraway capitals including London, Roxbury reports. Digital MP3 audio files of Roxbury's material – particularly a funny bit of business that purports to be the voice mail of a gynecological office – is being swapped via e-mail and other computer-age means.

Roxbury is an equal-opportunity offender, with another comedy bit dealing with the unwanted exposure of "male nudicals" in too many of today's movies.

She's selling her stuff on compact discs, too - with the new "Hanukwanzmas" CD and other merchandise celebrating all things Roxbury being sold via www.joleneroxbury.com. The gynecological piece, as well as being on "The Best of Morning at the Roxbury" CD, has been featured on "The Big Show with John Boy and Billy" syndicated radio program (airing in Mobile on WRKH-FM 96.1), furthering Roxbury's growing fame.

Among the selections on "Hanukwanzmas" are the title song, which pokes fun at modern society's preoccupation with being politically correct during the holiday season.

"We are the United States of the Offended," she laments, "just fighting over Nativity scenes and all of that when to me the whole point of being a free country is, yes, you can express yourself."

The $20 CD also features her newly recorded rendition of "Christmas Skank," as heard recently on 92 Zew. Spend much time at the mall this time of the year, and you'll easily relate to "Cell Phone Shoppers" and "Christmas Shopping Man," two other tracks on the CD. The selection called "Office Party," played on 92 Zew last week, describes some of what can go wrong when business is mixed with pleasure.

A Louisiana native and longtime Mobile resident who was a paralegal in a past life, Roxbury is a stay-at-home mom to her school-aged son when she's not creating comedy for the airwaves and for cyberspace. She prefers a certain kind of anonymity that goes with using her most popular character's name as her own stage name, and that's why you won't learn her real identity in this story.

As far as creating a public identity that's apart from a private life, lots of radiofolk do it, Roxbury asserts. But we're not naming names here. Their names have been changed to protect the...well, who knows?

"Jolene Roxbury is a real person," she insists. "It's me, though I don't talk that way. Well, I do sometimes."

Some people think Roxbury's radio voice is an imitation of a black person, she acknowledges, and it may have started out that way. But this blonde, white lady from Louisiana says there's some Cajun in there, too. Maybe some Creole, as well.
Mostly, though, it's her own people who lend her their way of speaking.

"It's my family that influenced the way I speak on the air," she says, without a hint of Jolene, or "J-Ro," in her dialogue. "Through Katrina, I had family that was over there in Louisiana that didn't leave. They weren't in the Dome, but they were in Metairie. They didn't get flooded badly where they were. Imagine an 80-year-old aunt talking."

Then she shifts into the unmistakable dialect that's so familiar to her radio listeners.

"She smokes those long, brown cigarettes," she says. "She talks like this, honey. National Guards, honey, they're walking up and down, up and down the street in front of my house."

She is also the voice of Belle Cadeaux, by the way – another character who has been on the radio in Mobile. Belle was a fixture in the mornings on country station WKSJ-FM 94.9 for a while there, though local radio listeners first "met" her a couple of years ago when Roxbury phoned in to Sullivan's program on 92 Zew.
The on-air topic of the day was the controversy attached to news reports of cockfights going on in south Alabama.

"I had just dropped my son off at school, and Sean was talking on the radio about the cockfights," she recalled. "And I was watching all these huge SUVs with these tiny little women and with these tiny white tennis hats and tank tops driving these huge barges and letting one 3-foot child out of it. There was just one right after another, one right after another."

As she was watching this daily routine, she wondered: "What would it be like if a bunch of those women happened upon one of these cockfights?"

A character was born. Adopting an affected voice and the moniker Belle Cadeaux, she called Sullivan. He put her right on the air. In character as Belle, she reported to Sullivan and his listeners her imagined encounter with a cockfight.

Recalls Sullivan, "I just got a call from someone who amused me who I had never heard from before. It was later I found out she was many people inside one."
Her grandmother used to call her "my little belle cadeau," which is French for beautiful gift. She had plenty of other inspiration for the character, as well.
"Actually, she is a combination of a few real people, my mother being one of them," she said. "Another is the wife of a former employer who is just the consummate Southern, graceful, wonderful lady. I love her, and she was inspirational."

Later, the character of Jolene Roxbury largely supplanted Belle Cadeaux on the air, because that's the persona to whom 92 Zew's listeners responded so enthusiastically.

No one is more enthusiastic about Roxbury's humor than Sullivan, who frequently can be heard cracking up to her antics on the air. In that way, he may be considered a Harvey Korman to her Carol Burnett.

"There you go!" she responds to that analogy. "Oh, my god! You know what? They called me a little Carol Burnett when I was a child."

During the twice-weekly segment on 92 Zew, the topic one day may be piles of hurricane debris, Sullivan says. Next, it might be domestic relations with Roxbury's husband, Shepard, he says. (Track No. 3 on "Hanakwanzmas" is "Ain't Riding With Shepard No Mo.")

"The one thing I hear about her humor, what people like about it, is that it is relatable," Sullivan says. "What she says is relatable. We may get ridiculous with things, but at the core it is about something that people can relate to."
She's had a lot of practice. Roxbury can clearly remember being the class cut-up early in life.

"I have letters from fifth-grade teachers," she quips. "But I can turn it off and be a responsible person."

When she introduced 92 Zew listeners to the Roxbury persona, she pretended to be "someone from the state of Alabama" telling people how to properly dispose of hurricane debris.

"It was hilarious, and it was like these people" – she shifts into "the voice" now – "can't tell the difference between puttin' somethin' on the curb and puttin' somethin' in the street. Well, there is a simple test for you to take, OK? If you have your stuff out thar and you are dumping your trash and you look up and you are about to get hit by a car, you are in the street. This ain't the time to get all your nasty furniture from the huntin' camp. That ain't hurricane debris, OK?"
Roxbury says she never envisioned a career path that would lead her to become a professional comedienne, and she's not sure where her current path will take her. Maybe she's a budding act destined to bloom on the larger pop-culture stage.
For now, she says, her activities on the radio and the Internet are only about having fun and providing herself with "a creative outlet."

"I am just amazed I am actually getting paid to be me," she says. "And I know that sounds silly, but I am Jolene Roxbury. It is me. It really is." CUTLINES: Images courtesy of Macadeaux Productions Jolene Roxbury contributes her unique blend of humor to 92 Zew's morning show in segments airing most Thursday and Friday mornings. Her comedy also is available on CDs sold through her Web site, at www.jolene roxbury.com. 'Hanukwanzmas" is the newest CD compilation of humor and songs by Jolene Roxbury and alter ego Belle Cadeaux. Images from "Queens" courtesy of Michael Cunningham.

september 9, 2005
Music World Strikes Back – Lawrence Specker, Entertainment Reporter, Mobile Press Register.

This article all about Jolene's Katrina Relief CD entitled "Laugh Aid". It featured characters, Belle Cadeaux, Martha Stoowert and of course Jolene Roxbury's music tracks and bits from the 92ZEW Morning Show with Sean Sullivan.