American Idol almost makes me like the South.

Did anyone watch American Idol last night? It was in Greensboro, N.C., so basically, one of those places that sounds familiar, but no one really knows where it is or goes to visit. Kind of like Laramie, Wyo. or "Montana."

Anyway, I generally don't like the South. They talk funny, dress funny and vote funny.*

My experience with it includes parts of Texas (Austin), Oklahoma (Moore) and I've driven through Missouri. That makes this California-cum-NYC girl an bonafide expert on all things Southern. But I learned a few things about the South when I was there:

1) A "good old boy" is someone who drives around in a rusty truck with a gun, drinking.
2) In a New York City restaurant, we are told that it might be a few minutes before we get a table. In Texas, we were told to leave our weapons outside before we can get a table (I'm not making this up. There was a sign.)
3) Southerners tend to know the exact population of their home town, and whatever strange thing it's known for. "I come from Chickapee, Missour-ah, population 56. Last year we raised the fattest pig in the whole United States!" Great. Remind me to add that to my next vacation itinerary.**

Anyway, getting back to American Idol.

Each new contestant was more disarming than the previous one. Fox has really perfected the art of tear-jerking, through the careful application of soft lighting, slow piano music and camera angles that feature the person's profile as they look wistfully off into a future away from their life of hay bales and large gold belt buckles.

My favorites:

1) That blond girl who lived with her grandfather. How cute was that shot of them back home in Whatevertown, Small State?
2) That girl who had been to 65 foster homes. Then she married, as a curious number of Southern girls do, a "good old boy" and had three kids with him. He left (surprise, surprise), so she did what any single mother with three kids would do: She tried out for American Idol.
3) The girl who showed up with 82 of her closest family members. That's something about the South that you just don't have in Manhattan: Families. I think the city actually eats people older than 50, so when most people turn 40 or 45 they move to the less life-threatening suburbs of New Jersey, until it's time to die. Then they move to Florida.



*This is not to say that the South doesn't have its share of redeeming qualities -- Texas has great barbecue ribs. But I'm not entirely sure if the ribs I ate weren't from the body of a Democrat some "good old boys" found wandering around lost on his way back to Boston.

**Interesting story: Driving through Texas with my boyfriend a couple of years ago, we kept seeing signs for a town called Groom, Texas which boasted having "the largest cross in Texas" and that we should "prepare for a religious experience." Sure enough, we drove past the largest cross in Texas, which was in fact very large. Our religious experience consisted of: Me: "That's a large cross." BF: "Yup."