Strike up the band.

So I was working in the music department of my bookstore last night while the biggest, rowdiest, funniest book signing I've ever, ever seen is going on.

A crowd of about 125 people, most of them women-over-40 in wigs and tiaras, was in my bookstore for a signing of Jill Conner Browne's latest book, a Southern favorite, The Sweet Potato Queens' Field Guide to Men.



According to the Sweet Potato Queens' website, Sweet Potato Queens are self-crowned, red-wigged, big-haired, feather-boa-wearing beauty queens who focus on fun and look like female drag queens.

Those women were having a great time, applauding, laughing out loud, bringing in their own bottles of champagne. And their husbands - some of whom were also in pink-and-black bondagewear costumes - were also enjoying themselves.

To top it all off - and to my shock and the shock of several customers, my managers arranged for a 50-member costumed volunteer band, The Seed and Feed Marching Abominables, to perform a trumpets-and-drums fanfare as they marched down the aisles of the fiction department toward the signing at about 8:30 p.m.

I have never, ever, ever seen anything like that in my entire life. Or, at least, I've never seen it inside.

"Oh my God," I kept saying to one of the managers. "Oh my God, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. There's a freakin' marching band in the store. It's like Mardi Gras."

It was a great party. It lasted for about four hours, with my managers passing around "sweet potato delight" refreshments, and there are still pink feathers and champagne stains in the floor of the carpet.

I've seen other signings, from the successful to the zero-attendance ones. Heck, my first day ever at Barnes & Noble Mall of Georgia, they had a book signing for WWE wrestler Diamond Dallas Page, and that had a massive line. I attended a fairly packed David Sedaris signing one year - where the author got severely pissed at the bookstore staff, and I know my store's hosted signings with an apparently fun Madeleine Albright and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But the Sweet Potato Queens, and their books of humor and recipes, have earned my eternal respect and admiration.

Because there was a damn marching band in my store.