We just returned from a weekend spent at The Riverboat Inn in Madison, Indiana, once again sharing time with my schoolmates from High School. The hotel is quaint, clean, has a great view of traffic moving up and down the Ohio River, and the help does a pretty decent job of making everyone feel like occupants are all part of one big family...
Fresh baked cookies coming out of the oven at almost all hours and the coffee pot is never empty.
Saturday morning, twenty or so of us boarded a trolley for a tour of the city. It's a neat town, obviously situated there because of the river and the trade coming from that line of communication. Something the tour-guide said set my "light bulb" off...
She commented how streets in Madison, in the old days, seemed to be lined with "A Hotel, a saloon, a brothel, a hotel, a saloon, a brothel..."
This statement, seemingly, was made with some pride. It made me think of the town I presently live in and how folks here speak with pride about the gritty things that happened long ago near our downtown hotel, adjacent to our railroad, our comparable line of communication.
What is it about the passage of time that makes a sordid past something to be proud of?
("Frankie and Johnny" and "Stagger Lee" are both songs/stories of passion and murder from St. Louis, and illustrate what I mean about pride in our "colorful" history.)
6 comments:
Bloody lovely. Now I'll spend the rest of the day (at least) humming "Stagger Lee" and thinkin' about "the bartender's glass". Could have been much worse.....
Good question, and yeah, now I'm gonna have that @#&** song stuck in my head too...LOL
The difference between Mayberry RFD and New Orleans?
An addition to your "celebrity" list.... Tony Bennett. Yeah, my heart breaks over that one.
OT/
Hello GB,
In case you have not seen it.
http://www.snotr.com/video/7926/Fantastic_helicopter_show
Best,
Erik.
Well, after 1.) enough time for the majority of the colorful characters to be dead, 2.) after a change in the economy so the "new money" becomes the "old money", 3.) the area/culture has changed enough that there is a profound disconnect between the reality and the romanticized version people want to believe (and the grudges are no longer central to the people's lives)... then it's inevitable that a romanticized version will be spun, in order to make the present inhabitants feel they have a proud past and separate culture.
People who had to use an outhouse as their septic don't put a fake outhouse in the yard to be "folksy!" But their grandkids, moving "back out to the country" while commuting to the office, might make that hideous yard-decoration error.
Similarly, you don't see African immigrants go all "Pure Noble Tribal Africa, Center of All Culture!" and celebrating Kwanzaa while wearing hideously garish dashikis and putting cheap wooden masks on their walls.
And for all the fifties poodle-skirt and Norman Rockwell nostalgia I've seen going around, no one seems to want to remember the "no blacks nor irish need apply" and the way most folks still had outhouses.
Have I mentioned how fond I am of indoor plumbing, electricity, a scarcity of cutthroats, modern medicine, reliable airplane engines, and a culture that is so past racism it thinks that word can be applied to people who won't vote for a corrupt black politician because he's a failure?
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