This weekend, I was truly blessed to have my one & only sister, F, come visit me here in the land of Magnolia trees and candied yams.
As a welcome-to-Raleigh gift for F, I made her a disc of my 17 favorite Country hits, hoping that she would be excited beyond belief. Normally, it doesn’t take too much for F to get excited – seasons changing is usually enough of a reason for her to start dancing incessantly. A city girl at heart, she lives for the hustle and bustle of urban life.
However, when I presented her with the CD, it was as if she felt personally violated. I think she was petrified -- petrified by the power of country music. Now don’t get me wrong, she probably has good reason to be scared. After all, just a couple of months ago, I was a normal, non-dialectal Midwestern kid. Now I practically need to walk around with a Southern-to-Midwestern interpreter when I need to converse with Yankees. I have no idea how I’m going to survive in Iowa.
Friday night, F and I went to see S perform at an improvisation comedy club. There were a few parts where F got lost in the show, but I think it takes a whole show just to figure out what the heck is going on because everything is so face-paced. It was my third show, and even I got tripped up. When the director of the show asked the audience for an activity someone “hates doing around the house,” I shouted the first thing that came into my head . . . coloring! What can I say? . . . I love reading administrative law treatises around the house, but I absolutely abhor coloring.
After the show, we went out to this, I’ll admit, pretty hip club. The décor was fashionable and modern and the music was . . . pretty decent. There were flat screen televisions throughout the club displaying the videos of the music being played. F and S, hands down, were the hottest girls in the club. After they played a Spanish/Spanglish song, “Oye mi Canto,” [Hear my Song] I was relatively impressed . . . for a non-alternative club.
We were fortunate that we had enough time this weekend to pay a visit to Silent Sam on the UNC campus – the University of Negroes and Communists, at least according to Jesse Helms. F was so energized by my post about Silent Sam that she just had to see him for herself.
F and I bought our first (and probably last) pieces of Carolina gear. I bought a UNC hooded sweatshirt for those arctic summer days around here, and F bought a shirt that says “Carolina girls the best in the world.” The shirt purposely omits the necessary state-of-being verb “are.” I guess this sentence comes from a song, but it doesn’t really matter. For me, the shirt summarizes the interesting dichotomy of Southern race relations. If White people use grammatically incorrect language, it’s considered cultural; if Black people use it, it’s viewed as ill-mannered and ignorant. God bless the South.
