Oh. I see. Desperate Housewives wins emmy prize. k. Since it was so.. botoxed. And…

Just to be clear, I’m not offended by the stereotyping–there’s a reason that I moved 2,300 miles away.

I had to fight so many rednecks, I became so familiar with the ritual of southern male pecking order fights, people who would challenge you just to see who would win. If I won a fight (it didn’t take much, it was largely ritual, once it got to where you were even close to hurting someone, it would break up, defeat would be acknowledged, or some kind of mutual admission of respect, at least) then three more rednecks would start trying to start a fight with me for the next few weeks, cause if I beat ole Beell, they needed to know where that put them. I thought my name was “damn yankee,” or “yaller haired hippie thang.” Fun times. My favorite was the one who started the fight with “you think you’re smart, lets see how smart you are.” The point being that smarts would not work against fists.

And you all know, what a mild, meek, polite quiet mouse I am. I never did anything to incite this. Heh.

I shoulda stuck to the racist code words, they are all true. Thats why all republican national candidates get themselves a good southern strategist/campaign manager, an atwater, a rove. They know the racist dog whistle words.

Tommmy, you owe me a martini. One of these days, I’m gonna jet down to Hell-LAy to collect.

It’s funny you should mention CT, though. I learned to talk by watching PBS when I was growing up, so people in the South think I’m from the Midwest or the Northeast (WGBH rulz!).

Here in Seatown, on the other hand, people think my Southern accent is so hillbilly extreme that they’re shocked I’ve got a shirt and shoes on. I get “I’ve never met anyone from Arkansas before” alot.

Poor OA, I’m always leaving you out! Will it help to know that I thought you were from Connecticut?

Hmmm, I see my name is mysteriously missing from the list.

@Prommie:

So here’s the deal: when I was a little kid in the 80s and Bill Clinton was the original Luv Guv and Hillary was our state’s most notorious, drug-dealing lesbian assassin, we heard a lot about “The Arkansas Brain Drain,” which meant that kids were fleeing like hayell outta Arkansas after high school graduation, mostly to coastal states, or after college graduation if they couldn’t afford to go out of state. Mr. OA and I drove until we ran outta freeway after college graduation cause we wanted to get as far away from Arkansas as possible, since our relationship was essentially illegal there at the time thanks to sodomy laws.

The problem is that it’s a self-reinforcing scenario. Sane, edumacated people leave in droves, the stoopids consolidate power and the state keeps moving further to the right, so edumacated people bail, etc, etc.

Things have actually gotten far worse legally for gays and lesbians in Arkansas in the years since we jumped ship (marriage & civil union bans, a likely unconstitutional adoption ban, etc), but people are strangely more personally accepting, at least on our visits. In other words, they hate you and will vote against your rights at the ballot box, but they’ll still be nice to you to your face, or at least the closet cases will suck your kahk on a Saturday night.

Fortunately, a lot of the sane people still living in AR are becoming a lot more vocal and organized, so hopefully they’ll be able to make some progress in the next few decades. There’s this one gal, Rita Sklar, the exec director of the Arkansas ACLU, who’s a hero of mine and likely has the most thankless job in the nation trying to reason with those tongue-talking morans.

“Welcome to Arkansas. Please set your clocks back 30 years.”