Anyone who's spent more than 15 minutes in Oxford, Mississippi, has probably heard of local legend Ron Shapiro. Now known simply as "Ronzo," this ever-upbeat and unpredictable local icon has, to say the least, a colorful history.
In 1995, when the late Larry Brown first published the essay "Billy Ray's Farm" in THE OXFORD AMERICAN about his son's farm in Lafayette County, Mississippi, he was both realistic and optimistic about the challenges of farm life. He could not have known that one day his friend, the renowned chef John Currence, would open Big Bad Breakfast, a new kind of diner featuring local ingredients, including dairy products from Billy Ray's heifers. John T. Edge recently visited Billy Ray and his milking cows at the Brown Family Dairy.
