Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I lived in beautiful calm quiet small town Indiana. And while small town life didn't quite kill me, it sure as hell tried.
From here, looking back, it's easy to laugh at that year in a small town as my 'lost year' and let it go. But I really did come perilously close to mental problems, for many reasons. But that is, fortunately, only tangential to my story.
You see, Smalltown, Indiana was a corporate town. This little town of approximately 30,000 residents were overwhelmingly the employees and support network of a major engineering corporation I'll call Bobbins.
If you lived in Smalltown, you either worked for Bobbins, you worked for a company that did contract work for Bobbins, you worked in one of the service industries that supported the Bobbins employees, you were in school preparing to go work at Bobbins, or you were a retired Bobbins employee waiting peacefully to die.
I'm exaggerating a bit, you know. I think there was a cardboard-box factory, too.
But it was a town where there was little to do besides work, eat, and sleep. Teenagers cruised the main road and drank stolen beer in the mall parking lot. Children roamed the residential streets in packs and occasionally kicked sports equipment at passing cars. Adults watched TV and went to church. And everybody got a year older every three hundred and sixty-five days or so, and life went on.
There is, however, one good thing that Smalltown did for me, before I fled. Some lone deejay, perhaps someone as ill-suited to Smalltown life as I was, introduced me to the music of Dar Williams, now one of my favorite artists. And, also, to the very sense of irony I hadn't realized I'd been missing all that year.
Boyfriend and I were driving home one day, and all of a sudden, one of the dinky-shit radio stations started playing 'Are You Out There'. We listened fascinated all the way through, and then the deejay in question quickly said her name and moved on.
'Are You Out There', of course, is a paean to a deejay who helps his listeners realize the shallowness of small-town corporate life, before he gets fired for being too radical. Or at least, that's how I always read it.
Replies: add your comment: currently 9 comments
İİİAnd my boyfriend can't tell me I've sold out, because he's in a cult, and he's not allowed to talk to meİİİ
Posted by Lack Thereof @ 03/06/2002 10:13 AM EST
A moment to brag:
That DJ was actually Vin Scelsa, whose daughter was a close friend of my sister for many years. They were always getting backstage passes to Indigo Girls, TMBG and of course Dar Williams concerts, for which I was always wildly jealous of them. Vin's incredibly nice, and actually once gave me an autograph picture of Dar.
Posted by Lyn @ 03/06/2002 10:13 AM EST
30,000 people? Sheeut, that's practically the Big City ;P.
Posted by Lex @ 03/06/2002 01:21 PM EST
The town in which I went to high school (a town of one or two thousand, maybe) sounds remarkably like the town you're talking about. Except for the size. And the fact that, not only did my town (Onaway, MI) not have it's own radio station, if they had, there wouldn't have been anyone to play Dar Williams because they were all too busy liking 80s hair bands and country music.
Posted by Bonnie @ 03/06/2002 02:01 PM EST
*thwaps Lex*
Dammit, I knew someone was going to call me on that. Okay okay. As far as towns go, 30,000 isn't bad at all, and possibly on the large size.
But ever since I was born I'd lived in cities of a million residents and up, and the change was... uh... difficult to deal with. It's not the absolute population so much as it's the relative population!
Posted by Mooncalf @ 03/06/2002 09:15 PM EST
[laughs, ducks]
Hehehehe, actually, yeah, I get what mean when you said relative vs absolute. I guess it's a country thing. Anything with a population over 50 farmers and snowmobilers is large to me :).
Posted by Lex @ 03/07/2002 01:16 PM EST
I discovered Dar Williams around 4 years back browsing through Andrea Hartmann's directory on the GIA. Not quite as romantic a discovery, but hey. Then it took me like a year to find someone else who knew her, and now I'm always running into people who do, even though those people were just as common then from what I know. Go figure.\
Industry towns are kind of creepy, but on the other hand they're a necessity of capitalism, and it could be argued that they're a Very Good Thing. We got lucky and have a company that's not *particularly* evil running the place, but the bad ones can definitely be unpleasant. Heard about one somewhere that wanted the town to basically turn itself into a theme park advertising the company in question.
Posted by AJ @ 03/09/2002 04:18 AM EST
Oh, minor addendum -- the first Dar song I heard, and for a while the only one, was actually Are You Out There. Go figure.
Posted by AJ @ 03/09/2002 04:19 AM EST
Check out the Kinks' "Around the Dial". Same story different time. 'One of our submarines is missing tonight...'
Posted by Chris @ 03/09/2002 07:55 PM EST
