When I’m not performing on Broadway, modeling lingerie, or turning down marriage proposals from handsome billionaires, I attend support group

meetings for compulsive liars. 🤣

Back in the real world, I recently wrapped up a

three-year adventure exploring America in a

vintage Roadtrek camper van. Now I’m turning

all those miles, mishaps, lessons, tricks, and

discoveries into a fun RV tips book.

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I was born in Azusa, California, in 1960 and spent my early childhood in West Covina, with the San Gabriel Mountains as our backdrop. When I was five, my parents moved our family to my father’s hometown

of Little Rock, Arkansas.

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As the firstborn of four children, I apparently showed my personality early. According to my mother, I

was a creative thinker—organized, resourceful, and always figuring out how to make things happen.

 

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Growing up, my parents built three different homes, always “out in the country.” It was a different time.

We never locked our doors, had four TV channels,

and talked on an avocado-green rotary phone with

a 20-foot spiral cord. Oh, and the car keys? They

lived in the ignition. 🤣
 

My parents kept me out of teenage trouble by introducing me to softball, and I spent my summers playing shortstop and third base. My first job was pumping gas at the family gas stations, where

I learned some pretty useful life skills: checking

engine fluids, changing oil, and fixing a flat tire.
 

Somewhere along the way, I also caught the

travel bug. Long family vacations and youth church

trips took me across the USA, with glimpses of

Canada, Mexico, and Jamaica. I didn’t know it then,

but those early adventures were just the beginning

of a lifetime of wanting to see what was around the next corner.

 

At 16, I got my first car—a silver 1973 stick-shift

Chevy Camaro with red leather bucket seats.

Not a bad set of wheels for a sixteen-year-old! 🤣

Having a car meant I could venture one town over

for an after-school job as a pizza parlor waitress.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that little pizza joint marked the beginning of what would become a

lifelong career in the hospitality industry.

 

After high school, I graduated from pizza parlor waitress to server at John Barleycorn’s Vision in

Little Rock (10301 North Rodney Parham Road).

I was thrilled to get the job because it was my

favorite “grown-up” restaurant. Barleycorn’s

reminded me of my favorite childhood restaurant,

Casa Bonita. Dining there was an experience. It had themed private and semi-private dining rooms—including Hollywood, Arabian, and World War II

rooms—and a salad bar built around a life-size Ford Model T.  They were known for their Monte Cristo sandwich, Alaskan King Crab legs, and beer cheese soup.
 

Then one day, my manager told me the cocktail waitress upstairs had called in sick. “You’re working

her shift.” And just like that, I stepped into the

cocktail world. I had no idea that one unexpected

shift would help shape the rest of my life. Of all the memories and memorabilia from John Barleycorn’s Vision, I have just one little matchbook left. Back

then, all restaurants and bars had custom

matchbooks. Funny how something so small can

hold such a big piece of your past. Oh, click on their​

menu to the right to see larger versions of the menu.

The prices are crazy!

 

 

 

 

 

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Next came Cabaret, a popular bar at

2601 Kavanaugh Boulevard. I started as a cocktail waitress, but owner Lynda Johnson quickly began moving me up the ladder—from barback to service bartender, then bartender, and finally head

bartender, all within a year. The bar had a copper top that we polished every night, a tin ceiling, Bentwood chairs, and the full line of Libbey Chivalry glassware.

About 25 years later, completely out of the blue,

Lynda called me. She had followed my career and wanted to tell me how proud she was of everything I had accomplished, especially all the books I had published. That phone call meant a lot to me.

She was one of the first people in the bar business

to see something in me—and to give me the opportunity to keep moving up.

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One day while tending bar at Cabaret, a regular

named Daddy Jack showed me a bar trick using the cherry I had just dropped into his Manhattan. Something clicked. I was instantly fascinated. That

one little cherry trick opened the door to an entire world of what I came to call “social

amusements”—bar tricks, magic, jokes, toasts, trivia, games, cocktail history, and anything else that could entertain people across a bar. I quickly discovered something else: entertaining my guests was good

for business. People stayed longer, had more

fun—and my tips went up. 🤣

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From then on, whenever a patron taught me a trick, joke, toast, bit of trivia, or anything else worth remembering, I scribbled it on a cocktail napkin and tossed it into a shoebox. I had no idea those

shoeboxes would eventually become the beginnings

of my first book. Meanwhile, that travel bug I’d

caught as a kid was still calling. So when the opportunity came to tend bar aboard a Caribbean cruise ship, I packed my bags and took my

bartending skills to sea for four years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next, I was off to be part of the opening crew of

Walt Disney World's Pleasure Island.  My first stop

was the Adventurers Club, and I also tended bar for

the Comedy Warehouse. After a couple of years, I transferred to the beach bar at

Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa. By then, all those bar tricks and bits of magic I’d been collecting and performing had become part of my bartending style. Eventually, Disney approached me to teach bar

tricks and magic in Quest for the Best, its

mandatory training program for Food & Beverage

cast members. Imagine that—the little tricks I had

once scribbled on cocktail napkins were now something Walt Disney World wanted me to teach.

 

That got me thinking: Maybe I could turn all this stuff into a book. So I started researching how to get published. Three years and an astonishing 350

rejection letters later, somebody finally said yes. My

first book, Miss Charming’s Book of Bar Amusements, was accepted by Random House. Those shoeboxes

full of cocktail napkins had officially become a book.

 

In 1998, I dove headfirst into an exciting new world called the World Wide Web. My introduction came through WebTV, and I was immediately hooked.

To me, it felt like having the world’s biggest library

right at my fingertips. I quickly discovered there were only a handful of cocktail-related websites, and search engines as we know them today were still in their infancy. So I taught myself HTML and set out to build what I wanted to find: a one-stop online resource

for all things bars and cocktails. That little website

kept growing—and growing—and eventually became MissCharming.com. The site you’re looking at now

is its fifth major redesign. If you’re curious to see how far it has come since 1998, you can take a little trip

back through its previous designs at the

bottom of this page.

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The first decade of the new millennium opened up a whole new creative world for me. I studied graphic design at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida,

and Ringling College of Art & Design in Sarasota,

while the Internet connected me with a growing community of cocktail people from around the world.

It was an exciting time in the cocktail world, too. Tales of the Cocktail and the Museum of the American Cocktail were born, and suddenly this community of bartenders, writers, historians, collectors, and cocktail enthusiasts was finding—and learning from—one another.

I kept creating. I developed Miss Trivia, an early

drink-trivia app packed with 10,000 questions. I designed bartender business cards and résumés, created cocktail-themed jewelry—including ice cube and cocktail glass rings that became favorites—and somehow managed to publish nine more books along the way.

Looking back, it was the perfect marriage of

everything I loved: cocktails, creativity, graphic design, technology, writing, and connecting with people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was also the beginning of what became known

as the second golden age of cocktails. The kitchen

and bar began to merge as a new generation of bartenders embraced fresh ingredients, house-made syrups, culinary techniques, forgotten classics, and a renewed interest in cocktail history. I had a front-row seat to the transformation.

For perspective, when I first started bartending,

my backbar had exactly two vodkas: Smirnoff and Absolut. That was it. 🤣 Over the next four decades,

I watched an explosion of new spirits, brands, ingredients, techniques, tools, and cocktail styles

make their way behind the bar. From 1980 to 2020,

I experienced an extraordinary evolution of the

American cocktail firsthand.

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In 2010, I moved to New Orleans and became bar manager/bartender at The Bombay Club. Its cocktail menu was still hanging on to the Martini craze of the previous decade—with a whopping 160 Martinis. I trimmed that monster down to 60 and reorganized

the menu as a Martini timeline beginning in 1862, giving guests a little cocktail history along with their drinks.

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In 2013, I became Bar Director of the Bourbon O Bar

at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel. That same year, one of my bartenders was named New Orleans Magazine’s Mixologist of the Year. A few years later, I received the same honor, making Bourbon O the first bar to

produce two winners.

At Bourbon O, I had the opportunity to put decades

of experience—and plenty of unconventional

ideas—to work. I created the first fresh-ingredient

craft cocktail bar on Bourbon Street and made it the French Quarter’s first smoke-free bar. I introduced a machine that could shake a Ramos Gin Fizz for six minutes, stored bitters bottles on the ceiling with magnets, introduced a giant gold plastic Champagne bottle souvenir go-cup, and many other things

I'm probably forgetting.

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Oh, and somewhere in between tending/managing bars, teaching, traveling, and designing corporate cocktail menus for Brown-Forman programs, I

somehow managed to get eight more books published. Apparently, I wasn’t very good at

sitting still. 🤣

 

By April 2020, though, I was ready for a completely different adventure: exploring America in a camper

van.

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COVID arrived a month before my camper van departure and, like everyone else, my plans came

to a screeching halt.

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This wasn’t going to be my first time living on

the road. I had full-time RV’d in the 1990s, when our idea of high-tech travel was paper maps, pagers, and payphones. 🤣 This time, I’d have solar panels, GPS, smart devices, and Wi-Fi. What a difference a few decades make!

 

Post-COVID, I moved into a Bourbon Street balcony apartment and returned to managing the Bourbon O Bar at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel. But the open road was still calling.

 

In 2022, I finally answered.

I climbed into my vintage Roadtrek camper van and spent the next 1,000 nights exploring America while chasing my favorite weather—70 degrees. Along the way, I collected plenty of miles, memories, mishaps, tips, tricks, and lessons about life on the road. Oh! While on the road, I also created my first self-published books: Young MacDonald Had A Farm and Miss Charming's Cocktail Coloring Book: Volume 1 Classic

& Popular Vodka Cocktails.

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If RV life interests you, wander over to my

RV & Van Life page, follow my travels on my YouTube channel, or browse my commission-based Amazon Store, where I’ve gathered the products that actually worked for me on the road. And now, I’m turning

2,000 nights of RV experience into my next

adventure—a fun RV tips book.

Cheers!

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