The day Elvis died I was in a fat women's clothing store in South Georgia.

I remember the fat lady store quite vividly, because time froze while I was there and imprinted the setting in my mind permanently, like a photo.

Every summer my family submitted to what we called "Jewish migration."

This entailed bolting the El Dorado camper to the top of my dad's Ford pick-up, loading it with hot-weather clothes and enough canned goods to last us through a month of camping trips, then heading out on I-95 all the way from South Jersey to North Florida.

Since my dad was a schoolteacher and my mom's occupation was us kids, we all had the summer off together. I figured out pretty early that the underlying reason we hit the road the day after school let out was not some kind of wanderlust leading my parents to the ends of the Northern American continent, but a deeper truth. When we were all together, standing still, with no distraction of school or work, we drove each other stark staring mad.

In adult life I've never taken I-95 farther than Jersey to Delaware, so I don't know if it really was one long white line leading to the Deep South as I remember it, or if there were a few twists and turns that happened while I was sleeping. Or, maybe I was indulging in my favorite activity from birth till high school: daydreaming. I daydreamed from Jersey through Delaware and Maryland every trip. They were the states that seemed the most forgettable to me then and, well, I guess now, too.

Once past Virginia I started taking reality breaks, delighting in counting the rows of tobacco in the fields, reading the fireworks and pecan pie billboards and watching for every chance to pull into a road-side diner with a Southern breakfast special.

A Southern breakfast at a diner off the highway in the 1970s was worth a trip to the South. I am talking about coffee with as many refills as you want, buttermilk biscuits and homemade jam, sweet creamy butter and gravy, two eggs so slick and greasy they'd slide right off the plate if you didn't keep it completely level, grits, hash browns and toast. 

All this was served to you for .99 cents by a waitress in a blue uniform with a lace apron, who generally wore streaks of frosty green eye shadow, set her hair up into a bouffant kept in place by a white doily in the shape of a tiara and was almost always named Blanche, May or Charlene. I had a hunch that the reason we were always going to Florida wasn't to check on my parents' real estate but to eat our way through four of the Southern states.

Inside the camper, my sister and I slept on the top bed, placing us in the overhang on the roof of the Ford, the most glamorous spot in the camper during cool weather. But in the heat of summer, it was my brother's spot that we coveted. His single bed lay against "the hole," the crawl-way from the camper into the front seat of the Ford where my parents blasted the A/C until frost started forming on the windows. When it hit 90 or above, we would all take turns by the hole, chilling out and then. Just when we got good and comfortable, we'd be herded up to hot mountain. 

Nighttime, when we parked, for what was supposed to be sleep time, my parents made their bed by pulling out the dinette table and throwing a mattress over it.

I never slept when we parked.

My father snored, my mother let out strange, gastric noises, my sister hummed, my brother wheezed. This almost indescribable combination of noises made up the Ross family symphony, and there was just no sleeping through it. Nighttime, when we parked, was hell. But on extra-hot nights, my sister, brother and I would send out our motel whine a good two hours before sleep time. "Motel, motel, motel with pool, motel..." and if it was hot enough and we whined long enough, it usually worked.

Now, my dad liked a good swimming pool, color TV and A/C as much as we did, but he and my mom always held out to the last possible second, when we were almost too tired to enjoy these luxuries, because of a notion they fostered, that if you pulled into a motel late enough and there were still rooms free and you paid in cash, you could almost always get one at half-price.

I never was able to convince them that even though this was usually true, if all you did was pass out without using the pool, the TV or the ice machine and were too tired to even roll around in the shag rug or try ripping off the candy machine, then who cared if it was half-price? In kidland, this was considered a lousy deal.

The day Elvis died, we were dragging a little, worn out from a motel-less night parked at a truck stop just a mile or so past a full service Ramada Inn, so close and yet so far. Just when I didn't think life could get any worse, my five-foot-tall, 250-pound mother dragged me and my sister to a bargain clothing store for big women in some hicktown in Southern Georgia while my brother and father escaped to a discount auto-service station to do man things, like check the oil and battery.

In the store were racks and racks of brightly colored, extra-loose, cotton dresses. Living in Southern Georgia necessitated the need for clothes that fell off your body, not stuck to it. Even in the '70s, you did not see a whole lot of polyester in Southern Georgia come summertime.

I was 12 years old and feeling really uncomfortable about my body and the strange things that were happening to it. I comforted myself by imagining hiding inside one of the large, cotton house dresses, disappearing in the waves of soft, cool yellow, pink and magenta ... feeling weightless and invisible.

The store was filled with a dozen or so large Southern women, black and white, dragging their chubby kids around. "Chubby" was the politically correct term back then for "fat kid." If "chubby" still hurt your feelings, there was always "husky," which sounded almost like a compliment if you said it right.

My mother called me husky.

My sister -- the skinny one -- had abandoned ship immediately and was sitting on the floor in the changing room reading romance comic books and pretending not to watch the fat moms undress, leaving me at the mercy of my mother's sense of fashion.

"How about a nice pink polka dot dress for back-to-school?" she offered in complete denial of the fact that the only thing I hated more than dresses was polka dot dresses.

Every fifteen minutes or so, a high-pitched, overly feminine, voice would come on the loudspeaker, which was really not necessary, since the store was small enough for you to hear anyone in it talking above a whisper, anyway.

The voice would announce things like, "Ladies, if you'll head on over to aisle twooooo, there's a half-off sale on slips, and they'rrrre reeeel purteeeee!"

Then the fat moms would stampede to the aisle, leaving all us chubby and husky kids alone on the rumbling floor.

I was hiding behind a rack of bumblebee-yellow house dresses, watching mom go into her shopping trance, when the crackling of the speaker came on for the last time.

 Crackle ... crackle ...

Time froze, as it does in the movies, and I was able to turn and stare at all those faces in suspended animation. Shock, disbelief, followed by silence. Then ... like a surge coming up from way down under, came a giant simultaneous wail.

"OOOOOOOH NOOOOOOOOOOO! Lord ... NOooooooo!"

The fat ladies started clutching at their breasts crying and asking the Lord to make it not so, and all the children came running to their moms screaming, "Mamma, mamma, what's wrong?"

Racks of pantsuits marked "As is" spilled across the floor like a sea of secretaries, and one of the chubby kids dove under them, scared and blinking.

It was pure pandemonium.

In the middle of it all, the pastel flying, the babies screaming, the shrieking Southern mothers' breasts pounding, stood my Northern Jewish mom, looking around at all of them, grasping the moment, listening to the eerie sounds of fat-lady despair. Then she got a faraway look in her eyes as though she was remembering something from too many years ago.

She sat down in the extra-wide shoe section and started to cry.

Long after the Southern moms had composed themselves and reapplied their powder and eye shadow, my mother sat in that chair and cried.

I didn't understand, but I went over to her and tried to comfort her by rubbing her shoulder and holding her hand between my two hands. I whispered, "Mommy ... I didn't know you liked Elvis so much."

And my mom looked me in the eye for the longest two seconds I have ever experienced, scrunched up her nose in that way she had whenever something confused her and said, "Why? Did something happen to Elvis?"

Rossi -- yes, she only has one name -- is one of the New York City's most vivacious personalities. She has written for several major newspapers and publications, such as The New York Post, The Daily News and Time Out New York. She has been the host of a monthly radio show on WJFF, a featured guest on The Food Network and has also read her memoirs on WNYE FM.

Rossi, who credits America as her hometown, grew up in a camper wedged atop a Ford pick-up, and had visited all of the United States -- except for Hawaii and Alaska, 'cause you can't drive there -- by the time she was 10 years old. Her wacky humor and down-home sense of fun, reflect her Hungarian Yiddish background and her love of all things hot and spicy.

"I think I was the only kid in high-school who had a Yiddish/Jersey/Southern accent," says Rossi, " ... and a passion for Tandoori chicken."