Represent!

I love Facebook. I have really enjoyed catching up with some old friends over the last couple of years, and I have made some new ones as well. I guess the biggest surprise was just how funny and articulate some of my friends are. I don’t mean to sound surprised…but I guess I am. One of things I almost never do on Facebook is open a link that takes me somewhere else. Yes, I would like to know the identity of the people looking at my page, and I do wonder what happened to the girl that was driving while texting, but I won’t risk opening the (probably virus infected) link. I broke my rule this morning.

When I saw that the link for “Toddlers and Tiaras: A dollar make me Hollar” was filmed in McIntyre Georgia, I had to take a look. All I can say is you can’t put the genie back in the bottle; Elvis has left the building! I had to laugh even though I see people just like this every day. And yes, there are times when I fit right in with them. Sometimes when we are sitting around the house one of us will say something “extra Southern” and we’ll all belly laugh. You know, laugh and look around to be sure nobody is filming! No reason to give those that live a few miles north any more reasons to think we’re all stupid down here.

But why is it that a person that has a Boston accent so thick that only their mother can understand them doesn’t sound stupid? They just don’t. Maybe it’s the same phenomenon as when you hear your own voice on tape…is that what I sound like? I don’t know, but it sure seems like every time a UFO is spotted in the south it chooses to hover over a trailer park? When a natural disaster occurs here the media doesn’t interview the people that live in a gated community, they go for the “representatives”. Like the guy in an Atlanta mobile mansion community that was interviewed after a tornado hit a few summers back, “Hell, these folks ain’t got nothing and they lost that”. What?

I will say that I’m proud of who I am and where I’m from. I’ve traveled around enough to know that there are “characters” in every town and country whether the cameras find them or not. But maybe…just maybe, we should pretend we are giving a book report in front of the class when the camera is pointed our way? Pretend we are saying a few words at an awards ceremony…a funeral? Or maybe we should just be ourselves; the south is crowded enough already!