Troubled Britney has loving fans back home
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“I cry every time I see another story about her on television,” said Pam Wright, 44, who works at a convenience store along Kentwood’s main drag, U.S. 51. “I think she needs to come home and we’ll get her right again. Everybody here loves her. We believe in her.”
As the 26-year-old singer’s meltdown morphs through broken marriages, hospitalization, her two sons removed from her custody and bizarre behavior, residents of Kentwood stand by their marquee native.
“The media should leave her alone,” said store clerk Becky Gill, 35. “Everybody has problems, she’s not the only one. But she’s the one . . . under constant scrutiny.”
Amid its abandoned buildings and a dying dairy industry, Kentwood is known for Kentwood Springs - a Gulf Coast brand of bottled water - and for Spears. She grew up in a ranch-style house near town where her father, Jamie, still lives.
Driving into Kentwood about 90 miles north of New Orleans, you can’t miss the hot-pink sign that welcomes visitors to the “Home of Britney Spears.”
About 5 miles out of town is “Serenity,” the huge French-country style mansion Spears built for her mother, Lynne. It’s just past the convenience store featured in the movie Crossroads, which starred Spears.
“We don’t see much of them these days,” Gill said of the family. “But everybody in Kentwood knows everybody else.”
Many visitors make the 5-mile drive off Interstate 55 to the museum, where Hazel Morris said Britney tote bags, T-shirts and buttons sell so well they’re hard to keep in stock.
“People from all over the world come to see this,” said Morris, 86, who staffs the museum and said she knows the family well.
Morris tells visitors to carefully step into a darkened room, then with a flourish turns on the replica of the concert stage, complete with 600 colored lights and thousands of parts.
When Morris lights it up, a Spears song plays. A tiny Spears doll, microphone in hand, stands on the runway.
The re-created bedroom includes costumes Spears wore as a child entertainer and beauty-pageant contestant, dolls and stuffed animals around a white bedroom set. The exhibit, which opened in 2000, also includes a room for her awards, beauty-pageant trophies and pink cowboy hat.
Another piece of Britney history is about 10 miles north, in Osyka, Miss. At Nyla’s Burger Basket, Mike Price proudly points to the round table, covered with a floral plastic table cloth, where Spears signed her first recording contract.
Price said he and his wife, Nyla, have been cooking for Spears for years.
“She calls when she’s coming home and gets us to cook up Southern dishes - mustard greens, cornbread, things you can’t get out in Los Angeles,” he said.
He added that Spears could use a little home cooking right now.
“She needs to get herself home and get right,” Price said. “She needs to get away from that crowd out there and come back where everyone loves her.”
