Why would I think the America we see on TV shows is NOT real? Rosie ponders and thinks….maybe ‘it is because it seems so different to the everyday life that we, here, in the South Pacific experience’.
The perfect cul d sac of Wisteria Lane with its huge porched houses, green lawns and beautiful gardens….it does exist, this is a typical middle class suburb Rosie and the Operator have seen with their own eyes.
Perfection rules in these idyll paradises, and that is just it, it all seems too perfect for us, we always have one person in the street who refuses to mow their lawns till it is knee high or doesn’t take in their wheelie bin for two weeks… Sooooo, that means the bossy woman that organises the Christmas street parties exists also, she would go and knock on ‘unmown lawn mans’ door and demand he maintain the standard of the neighbourhood, just like in the movies…..
The trailor parks do exist, the High Schools with the date of the Homecoming dance on signs outside, cheerleaders and the school band practising on the playing field while the football squad runs drills, totally real. The Baywatch lifeguard huts with bronzed lifeguards on patrol watching over the bikinied beautiful on the golden sands…(come on, what did you expect, it is California), are totally real.
You have seen the movie, a handsome young couple (Rosie and The Operator…) driving down the lonely, narrow, winding road in the half light in their red convertible. Woods are on either side as far as the eye can see and there is no mobile phone reception. Suddenly they get a flat tyre. The Operator gets out of the car to change it while Rosie checks her hair in the rear view mirror. Out of the forest comes the deformed hulking figure of a hillbilly in bib overalls conceived through some incestuous family liaison and drags Rosie quietly out of the car to be tortured and mutilated back in the cabin deep in the woods…..you know the story…..
….we have seen these sets too….it is, incredibly, real life America.
We have driven through the sets of westerns where you look up at the large desert outcrop with cactus growing on it and expect to see the silhouette of the cowboy sitting on his horse against the blue sky….
Life imitates art I suppose and one draws inspiration from life. Rosie has never thought about real life America…and you know what? It is just like the movies!
Tomorrow – Tipping / Rosie saves the American Debt Crisis
Can't wait to travel to America, just to prove myself again, that New Zealand is still most beautiful place in the world…