DIPPITY-DO SIDEBURNS
A memoir by Manchester P. Davies

Dippity-Do Sideburns

Being a Mostly True and Almost Accurate Account of Growing Up in SoCal During the ’60s and ’70s.

Meet the Davies Read a taste




SAINT AGATHA’SPRAY • STUDY • OBEY
Coming
2027
Smog. Nuns. Family dysfunction.
And one hell of a childhood.
The book

A childhood soaked in smog, sunlight and holy water.

Southern California, 1956–1974. A boy grows up amid free-range suburbia, cigarette smoke, Catholic-school terror, family secrets, lowriders, bad decisions and the faint gravitational pull of Hollywood. Decades later, he looks back and discovers that the people he thought he knew—especially his mother, Betsy—were stranger, tougher and more human than he ever understood.

Funny, profane, nostalgic and unexpectedly tender, Dippity-Do Sideburns is less about surviving an extraordinary childhood than discovering how much extraordinary stuff was hiding inside an ordinary one.

Inside the memoir

A few stops on the wayback machine.

01

Elephant Ears and Fetuses

A county fair, a mortified teenager and a mother who never did anything quietly.

02

Smog and Oranges

Free-range childhood in the Inland Empire, before anyone had heard the phrase “helicopter parent.”

03

C-Nuns

Catholic education, fear, obedience and a lifelong inability to forget any of it.

04

The Great Whore

Family catastrophe, marital betrayal—and the inconvenient problem of liking the other woman.

05

Dippity-Do Sideburns

Adolescence, vanity and the terrible confidence of a teenage boy with grooming products.

06

Boysenberry Pie

Because in a life full of dickishness, sometimes somebody simply does something kind.

“My mom always worked the bloody fetus booth at the county fair.”
Imagine you’re me: it’s 1973. I’m a fifteen-year-old zit-faced, gap-toothed goober desperately wanting to both fit in and stay anonymous. Then one of my buddies sidles up to me at school and smirks: Hey Davies, saw your mom at the fair, man.

You couldn’t miss Betsy. And none of my friends ever did.
The author

Manchester P. Davies

Manchester P. Davies is a pseudonym borrowed from a character in an old screenplay—one of many writing projects that never quite conquered Hollywood. After years in the archives and library world, he retired to the Pacific Northwest, where he lives with his wife, an orchard, a garden, beehives and very few regrets.

Dippity-Do Sideburns is his first substantial piece of writing in more than twenty-five years. He says it will also be his last.

Mostly True
Almost Accurate
100% SoCal