i never quite know how to respond when someone, at a bar or a friend’s apartment or in my own living room, throws out the inevitable “so where are you from?”
this really shouldn’t be an overwhelming query, i know. in fact, i’m likely to ask the same thing. it’s a normal thing to ask. i can’t hold it against the asker. but i always do, just a little bit.
mostly, i guess i’m just lazy. i don’t want to figure it out. do they want to know where i live in boston? where i went to college? where i went to high school? where i was born? do they want to know where i spend the majority of my formative years, or where most of my closest friends reside, or where i’ve spend the most money on rent for shitty apartments? do they want to know where my dog lives, where my cat lives, where my books live, or where my shoes live?
there are always the cop-out answers: “my family lives in north carolina, but i’m originally from illinois.” “i just graduated from BU, but i lived in north carolina for a few years beforehand.” and the concise, though slightly shameful answer: “allston.”
i know this is my issue, and not theirs. i know no one wants an extended biography. i pity the rare asker who gives me enough time to allow “well, i was born in bumfuck illinois, then moved to north carolina, then back to bumfuck, back to the dirty south, then to boston to a dorm resembling (more than anything else) a women’s prison, then allston, then deeper into allston, and soon somewhere preferably NOT in allston.”
this is one of the rare times that i envy people who spent the first eighteen years of their lives in the same house. i remember being surprised and a bit terrified when i realized, sometime in my early teen years, that most of the kids i went to school with had lived in the same place their entire lives. that’s boring. and i’m glad my parents subjected me to a few good moves. but it must be nice sometimes to identify solidly with one place.
but, as it is, i’m a dirty mutt. swedish, italian, and a little bit of everything western european (with my complexion a nice non-regional mix of all of the above); born in the midwest, bred on the atlantic seaboard, brained in new england; future locations & shenanigans unknown.
now, you may say, step back just a second. where exactly is bumfuck illinois?
and the answer is this.
area: 10.7 square miles
population: a surprising 20,151
per capita income: $23,210
renowned residents include orson welles (who attended the Todd School for Boys and put on productions in the very same old opera house where i took improv courses), chester gould (creator of dick tracy, whose “painstakingly restored” farmhouse was the very same where i spent ages 8-10), and lynn stewart (the cofounder of hooters). (yeah, i linked to hooters. don’t pretend you don’t want to read detailed articles about hooters’ girls skincare)
inarguably, the most important thing to happen in woodstock was the majority of the filming of groundhog day. remember the curb where bill murray kept stepping into the puddle? yeah, there’s a plaque on that curb. in fact, woodstock now has its own faux-puxsutawney phil, dubbed woodstock willie. woodstock loves groundhog day so much, they celebrate it for a week. probably the only holidays more important than groundhog day are the mchenry county fair and the nearby harvard milk days.
i salute you, woodstock. nowhere else would an entire week be dedicated to 1993 film in which a guy kidnaps a marmot and spends ten years killing himself.
