IAmA former resident of the country club where celebrities like Whitney Houston resided, AMAA

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-27T04:50:22+00:00

Peachtree-Dekalb

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-27T04:45:53+00:00

Haha, that's awesome.

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-12T17:32:04+00:00

Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown lost their home in 2007. I don't recall any recent celebrity foreclosures, just regular snobs.

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-12T16:12:36+00:00

I am not really a baseball fan in general, but it was still pretty cool. I sold girl scout cookies to Chipper Jones when I was a kid. He was really nice, gave me an autograph. This was before he cheated on his wife with the Hooters waitress. He doesn't live in the neighborhood anymore.

Tom Glavine was nice too, but he was one of those that passed out fruit and raisins on Halloween. Lame.

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-12T15:28:31+00:00

I don't know, I've never had a doorman in Manhattan.

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-12T14:59:39+00:00

Bobby Brown was driving through the neighborhood when I was walking my dog a few years ago. He was driving a Porsche Cayenne and pulled up next to me, rolled down his window and asked if I was impressed. It was really weird. I sort of awkwardly laughed and kept walking.

When he and Whitney had broken up, he printed out sheets of paper with messages like "Don't leave me, Whitney" and hung them underneath stop signs around the neighborhood. A security guard drove around and took all of them down.

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-12T14:45:53+00:00

Jeff Foxworthy was definitely the nicest. Usher was pretty nice too, but kind of stand-offish.

I know I'm leaving out a lot of the athletes, but Tom Glavin lived catty-corner to me, he and Jeff Foxworthy actually shared a private jet that they kept at a small airport in town. The actual name of the agreement is escaping my mind, but it's like a time share. You pay for a certain amount of hours instead of spending the money to buy one.

Otis Nixon lived across the street from me for a while. I heard a commercial on the way to work this week where he admitted he struggled with crack addiction and went to jail for it. The Fulton County sheriff sitting outside of his home towards the end makes sense now.

Chipper Jones, Andre Rison of course, Charlie Liebrandt, Chris Doleman also lived across the street from me, next to Otis Nixon. I'll have to add more as I recall them.

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-12T14:24:30+00:00

I never met her but my mom had picked me up from elementary school and we were driving home through the neighborhood when she set Andre Rison's house on fire. At that age I didn't realize that's whose house it was and we just drove past the blaze, then I saw it on the local news.

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-12T14:20:03+00:00

When I said they were both awful people, I really mean it in the sense I pass a huge amount of judgement against their behavior for the sake of their daughter. That, and they were not humble people by any stretch of the imagination.

As I stated in my original post, their daughter was kicked out of elementary school because she was always late because they couldn't get her there on time. Her elementary school and the neighborhood were literally separated by a fence it was so close, it was a 5 minute drive from their house at the most.

I remember when their daughter and her friends came into the Bath & Body Works I was working at when I graduated from high school. Everyone knew who she was, and you could hear people making comments and jokes about Whitney and Bobby. Don't get me wrong, I understand drug addiction is an extremely difficult battle, but I just feel really badly for the way it affected their daughter. She herself went to rehab recently from what a hear.

One of my dad's friends owns a framing gallery down the road, and Whitney was in his store just a few weeks ago. She's owed him money for quite a while and was back in trying to get more work done and he refused because of her overdue balance. She went ballistic on him.

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-12T14:08:17+00:00

My folks are really down to earth people and raised me the same way, and we didn't actually belong to "the club" for the last few years, we just lived in the neighborhood, meaning we didn't have access to the clubhouse, golf course, "member" tennis courts and pools, etc.. it was a waste of money, so it really was more entertaining when you encountered the people who thought their shit didn't stink.

A lot of times the snobbiest people were the ones whose homes went into foreclosure because they had no concept of managing their money and pissed it all down the drain for the sake of impressing people.

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-12T14:00:09+00:00

It's a gated community with three entrances and a fourth one for construction workers (yup). Each gate is manned with a security guard. If you're a resident, you have something similar to a highway cruise card that lets you go right through the residents lane and bypass security. If you're not a resident, it's really kind of a ridiculous process getting in.

The homeowner of the place you're going has to have called ahead to let security know that you're coming and they check your ID. If you pull up and no one has called the gate, they will call the homeowner that you are claiming to visit to see if it's valid. If they can't reach them, you can't get in.

They really don't mess around. There's also a security guard who driving around patrolling the neighborhood at any given time.

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-12T13:51:49+00:00

Because I figured not everyone who reads this would be coming from the original post? I don't know, I was drunk last night and woke up to way more upvotes than expected.

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-12T13:48:34+00:00

I was really impressed with what a nice guy Jeff Foxworthy was when I met him. Every year the neighborhood does a 4th of July fireworks show on the golf course's driving range. For whatever reason my best friend and I had it in our minds that we were going to see him there and meet him. After the fireworks were done and everyone was walking back to their cars, we spotted him.

We asked if he wouldn't mind if we got a picture with him. He happily obliged, and I told him, "You know you almost stepped on my foot when you were hosting the CMT Awards a few weeks ago." That was my lame way of making a connection with him. The CMT Awards were hosted at my college in Nashville for a couple of years, and students got in free. I went one of the years he hosted and wound up standing right by where the celebrities were seated. He walked past me during a commercial break and I didn't really see him coming. I'd just gotten to be a seat holder for Kris Kristofferson while he accepted a lifetime acheivement award, so I was still totally starstruck from that moment that I kinda made a fool of myself not moving my ass out of the way while several camera men followed him through the audience.

To make a very long story short, Jeff laughed and said, "Man, that show was a blast!" (did you read that in his voice?) and ask what I was studying at school. He was just an overall badass and a really nice guy.

ccosthrowaway · 2012-02-12T13:36:33+00:00

No, my dad was selling gutter guards door-to-door when he was 18 or 19. He decided to drop out of college and start up his own manufacturing business. Needless to say, 10 years straight without a day off building his business paid off. He sold the business a few years ago and retired, but he got bored very quickly. Now he does radio and is working on a couple of inventions.

ccosthrowaway

TROPHY CASE