Posted on Thursday, May 10, 2007 - 11:19 pm:

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What Iowa Did to Manhattan

Not that long ago, I was in the apartment of some friends of mine and they introduced me to their neighbor, a banker who works downtown and lives in the Village, a woman who grew up in New Jersey. She and I exchanged pleasantries, and then, giving me a friendly, appraising look, she asked where I was from.

I hate that. I was pretty sure I knew what was coming next. I smiled and told her that I had moved to New York after living in Minnesota for many years. She nodded. "That explains the twang."

Excuse me?

"You have a twang," she said confidently. "You've got that Midwestern twang."

Oh, the things I could have said in response, such as, "No, that's not a twang, that's what English sounds like." Instead, I mumbled a terse reply and stepped into the kitchen, where I promptly gave myself a twang-free talking-to: Why am I getting so uptight? Who cares if I sound like I come from Illinois or Minnesota? After all, I do come from there. So I returned to the living room, determined to be less defensive about my Midwestern roots. I apologized, made a few jokes about my prairie-based speech patterns, and was just congratulating myself on how I had navigated this set of social rapids when the banker leaned forward with another question.

"You use the word 'crik,' right?" she asked.

"Only when I'm down in the holler" came out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

I was just about to apologize again when I realized that she thought I was serious. And that's when it hit me: she thought I was Tammy.

You remember Tammy, played first by Debbie Reynolds and then by Sandra Dee, the corn-fed character from Mississippi whose full name was Tammy Tyree? Who brought along a goat when she attended college? Whose adventures were detailed in such films as Tammy and the Bachelor and Tammy Tell Me True?

I a-reckon many of you do.

I was going to explain the geographic distance between, say, Mississippi and Minnesota, and then I just shut up. For some New Yorkers, there is no difference between the South and Garrison Keillor country, between people from Mississippi, Minnesota, or, for that matter, Montana. After all, those people are all from the same place: not New York. You can talk about provincialism all you want, but all you will get from them is pity. After all, they grew up in the greatest city on Earth or, more likely, in its shadow. And you didn't. When these New Yorkers are searching for a word to describe some poor rube, they will pull out the closest approximation that comes to mind and then to mouth: "Midwesterner" or "Kansan" or -- the ne plus ultra of a New Yorker put-down -- "Iowan."

I once asked a woman who lived in Tribeca what Iowa had ever done to Manhattan. She gave me a dimpled smile and said sweetly, "Everything."

She was from Michigan.

So that night, in my guise of Tammy, I tethered the goat and brushed the hayseed from my shoulders, determined that I would enjoy the rest of the evening.

Lord willin' and the crik don't rise.

Posted on Thursday, May 17, 2007 - 10:18 am:

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p.s. I guess the point is that these people--Los Angelenos, New Yorkers-- etc. don't have the slightest clue what Detroit even is. They just know that their city has more people (LA) and better transit (NYC).

Posted on Friday, May 18, 2007 - 3:31 pm:

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I'm still pissed-off by the recent shift at WDET, as I thought it's music programming was one of the major trumps that it had over it's NYC counterpart, WBAI.