It’s A Different World…

This has been a week of eye-opening experiences that has made me think a lot about the state that I now call “home”.

On Friday night, Allison and her friends introduced me to a TV show called “Toddlers and Tiaras”, a documentary-type look behind-the-scenes at child beauty pageants.  I watched in horror as a tiny three-year-old who looked exactly like a pint-sized version of Anna Nicole Smith was forced to endure a photo session while she was sick with fever.  Her red, thickly-lipsticked mouth quivered and drooped as a photographer went through histrionics trying to get her to smile. I just wanted to bust through the TV set and rescue her. The pageant she was about to win was in Texas, and most of the “stage moms” highlighted were from Texas, too.  It figures, I thought.

On Tuesday night, my husband, Andy, and I took Emmie to south Dallas to listen to her former piano teacher, Mark G. Meadows, play with his band in a jazz club called Brooklyn’s. She loved watching all the musicians and studied them intently.  It was also a learning experience for her in another way.  We were three of only about 10 “white people” in the entire place.  On the way home, she asked us all sorts of questions about segregation and what kinds of things went on in Texas not so long ago.  “I feel so sorry for black people when I see the movie, Hairspray,” she said.  I told her there were even better movies that show more history of the Civil Rights movement that we’ll have to watch someday.  As Andy talked about segregated drinking fountains and swimming pools (he grew up in Dallas), I was feeling proud to be from the North, and a bit homesick as well.

Those feelings came back last night as we sat at parent orientation in the auditorium of our local high school, where Allison will be a freshman in less than two weeks.  They have a (gulp) country-western dance team that wears (gulp) cowboy hats, and we learned the first school dance of the year is called “Howdy” and has a country-western theme.  The football coach got the biggest round of applause of any teacher that spoke.  Some moms came onstage modeling homecoming mums as big as flying saucers, decorated with more trinkets than a Joan Rivers segment on QVC.  We were told that both girls AND guys will be wearing them for homecoming in a few short weeks, and people have been working all summer getting 1,300 ready for sale. Made me want to run back to Iowa and hide in the cornfields with Shoeless Joe.

Yes, even after 25 years of living in Texas, I still sometimes feel like a stranger in a strange land…no, make that often feel like a stranger in a strange land… but I cope by thinking about all the things I love about being here.  Like the fact that you can go to the beach, mountains, flatland prairie and tall piney woods all in one state, though maybe not all in one day.  That some of the world’s best authors, playwrights, artists, entrepreneurs, chefs, actors, and musicians have, at some point past or present, called Texas home.  That the word “y’all” is acceptable anywhere here (I happen to think it’s a pretty useful word).  That certain gorgeous flowers still show their faces in the midst of dire drought, and real fried pies are not something that comes in a cardboard sleeve at McDonald’s.

Next Tuesday, my Girl Scout troop will be doing the flag ceremony when Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison stops in Dallas for her announcement tour in her run for governor.  I’m sure I’ll see a lot of cowboy hats there, but hey, what a great role model for the girls to meet, the first female U.S. senator ever elected in Texas –and that’s a pretty big deal, considering married women in Texas couldn’t even own property until 1967 and that prior to that, employers couldn’t legally hire them for a job without first consulting their husbands!  I just hope I don’t hear any music played that includes the words, “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way”… because I just might start fantasizing about running away and hiding again.  Only I don’t think the Iowa cornfields will protect me from that.