From Alaska to the desert to the movies

By Alison Angel
mcfaddenj@mytjnow.com

I used to think I came from a pretty small town.  As a teenager, I went through those angsty periods of wanting to get out of my ‘podunk’ little town (Irmo, if you’ve heard of it) and to a big city.

My perspective changed completely with one visit from my cousin last week.  I was suddenly insanely greatful, gleeful even, to have lived in a town where only fast food restaurants offered the entertainment.  Why?  Because I had not yet seen the alternative.

To give you some context, my cousin is from Wasila, Alaska, which I had the pleasure of visiting when I was about six years old.  It is quite literally the middle of nowhere and a frozen tundra with no entertainment for a teenager besides staring at moose.  Amazing scenery, but a 16-year-old hormonal boy craves a lot more entertainment than a picture perfect landscape.

I could sympathize with my cousin’s predicament as a teenager, even see how a small town like mine could be a great alternative:  I mean, come on, in Irmo you can go from McDonalds to KFC all in the same city!

I guess I never really understood the true scope of his tiny little town mindset.  Snow to me sounded great.  Moose?  It’s not a deer, so fantastic as far as I’m concerned.  Mountains?  Even better.  But for years my cousin merely insisted that it lacked the one thing a “big city” like Irmo, S.C. had:  culture.

I of course brushed him off.  Years later he joined the U.S. Army and started to travel the world.  When he came back from his most recent deployment a month ago, I was thrilled that he’d be able to come my way and I could show him a real city.  I was certain Charlotte would give him a sense of home, now that he’d gotten to travel the world.  But little did I know that I was setting my cousin up for the shock of a lifetime.

What triggered his catatonic state?  Oh, a movie.

Silly me did not realize that something as simple as a movie would blow my cousin’s mind and expose him to the world.  I knew Alaska was short on entertainment, but how was I supposed to know that they were about four decades behind?

I had made the mistake of assuming that in my cousin’s newfound wordly travels as a U.S. army officer, he had seen culture and worlds that I couldn’t imagine.  Surely a movie would simply entertain him, not rock his world.

Apparently, however, the only culture he was exposed to overseas was the barren desert.  Not even the military bases on U.S. soil were located in towns with the remotest sense of entertainment for my poor cousin.

So when he came to visit me at Winthrop, I immediately loaded him into the car and dragged him to Charlotte.

I could tell something was up the second he saw the buildings in the distance.

Immediately he started flipping out, asking questions like “why are you taking me to a rich city?”  All I could think was, “really?”

Don’t get the wrong idea here: my cousin is not uneducated, he is not a redneck, and he is not naiive.  He simply has the handicap of being born in a place where it is more common to see a moose than a big building.

After taking him to some of the best eateries I could think of I thought to myself, ah, the Uptown Epicentre: surely if we catch a movie, it will calm my poor cousin and bring him back down from this high of seeing too much civilization.

Big mistake.  Only as we stepped into the theatre did I realize that it wasn’t so average after all.   After my cousin carefully selected and reserved his theatre seat with the iPad that was so graciously provided, we rode the escalator to a lobby that more resembled a nightclub than any movie theatre I had ever seen.  After visiting the ‘concessions’ stand, which turned out to be one of the three bars in the joint (even I felt out of place), we decided ordering beverages would be the safest bet.

As the bartender went about his work, my poor cousin snapped photo after photo.  He literally took pictures of everything:  from the bar, to the endless menu that was the sole provisions for the theatre in place of the traditional popcorn and soda pop, to the individual teapot that the bartender brought us, complete with cigar box filled with fine tea choices for us to pick and place on our tea tray to bring into the theatre.

Okay, this wasn’t even a normal movie going experience for me.  I felt far too low-brow by the time we had stepped into the theatre, and by the time I was brought my own individual tea tray and took my seat on the couch in the theatre we had reserved, I was admittedly feeling pretty shell shocked myself.

I managed to forget that cultural divides existed even within the United States and made assumptions that could have saved my cousin the shock and confusion of being bombarded by an endless flow of new information.  I had exposed him to a world that was so vastly different from his own, I’m afraid I scarred him for life and have instilled in him a fear that all cities are merely for the rich and fancy (at least judging by the crazy-fancy movie I unknowingly dragged him into).

I learned a lesson that day:  never make assumptions about someone based on where they’ve been or where they are going.  No matter where someone lives in this world, be it England or the neighborhood a block down, their interpretation of the world and their experiences of it are going to be incredibly different from your own.

What may shock them may seem trivial to you and what they see as the norm may be foreign to you.  Either way, when dealing with visitors, my advice would be to gauge their experiences.  You don’t want to end up making my mistake and scaring them with something as seemingly basic as a movie.