The following can also be found in the book Chicago Stories 1997. Click here to learn more, and to download a free electronic copy.

Originally performed with Monica Kendrick

Monica:
You see, there once was this Baptist preacher and this Methodist preacher. And they were old fishin' buddies, see? Used to go out to the lake every Saturday and go after catfish all day. And the Baptist preacher says one day, "You know, why don't you ever come over to my church? Tell you what, the next Sunday you have off, you and your deacons just come on by and you'll be our guest." And the Methodist preacher, he says, "Well, it's a done deal. And any Saturday you have off, well, you and the boys feel free to come on by yourself."

(Monica starts playing fiddle)

Jason:
I'm from southern Missouri. Deep... deep... southern Missouri. I'm from the town where the TV show "Grace Under Fire" is supposed to take place. No, really. I'm from the same county that the movie "Roadhouse" with Patrick Swayze was set. I'm serious.

Well, I wasn't born there. I was born in St. Charles, Missouri, a rural suburb of St. Louis. But every single relative besides my mom and dad lived -- live -- died in southern Missouri, and from the day of my birth until I was 22 years old, I traveled to southern Missouri at least four times, every year -- Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and a week in the summer to spend with my grandparents -- so yes, I count southern Missouri as an integral part of my growing up.

I had two grandmothers, two grandfathers and one step-grandfather. My grandmothers were both housewives, as the women of that time in that area tended to be. They were kept very busy raising their children, two on my dad's side, three on my mom's, a handful for anyone but nonetheless a severely lesser amount than the number of siblings my grandmothers had been raised with -- eleven on my dad's side, nine on my mom's.

All three of my grandfathers were lead miners. Each of them spent about forty years -- together, over a century -- down under the deep black Missouri earth, carving giant holes through Ozark rock and extracting the precious galena. These men spent their entire adult lives twisting their large hands into claws, wiping chat out of their eyes, watching themselves slowly lose digits over the course of decades. This is what they did. This is what everyone did -- my dad was literally the first male in my 150-odd year American family history to not be a lead miner. And I was the second male.

My family, my "kinfolk," are what could be called, for lack of a better term, "white trash." They drive pickup trucks with rifles in the windows. They kill deer in the winter and hang the carcasses from giant hooks in their sheds. They listen to country music, and I don't mean cool Patsy Cline doing a gentle two-step across the gently flowing hills to be wrapped up by the glorious midwestern sun country music. I mean Brooks and Dunn country music. My kinfolk are what could be called, for lack of a better term, white trash.

(Monica stops playing fiddle)

Monica:
So. One week in August the big revival took place over at the Baptist church and the preacher did find himself with a Sunday off, so him and his two deacons headed over to the Methodist church. Well, they got over to the church and found out that they just happened to be visiting on one of the busiest Sundays of the whole year for the Methodists. They walked in that back door to see that every single pew was completely filled up. And, well, they just stood around there in the back of the church, trying to figure out what to do.

(Monica starts playing fiddle)

Jason:
My grandpa, on my mom's side, was a real fan of Ozark jokes. He had a whole pocketful of them, collected from eighty years of Ozark living. I don't remember most of them because, frankly, most of them were bad, a Garrison Keilor monologue written in hell, strange stories about evil Methodists and little boys who keep worms in their mouths in the winter to keep the fish biting.

My grandpa would do a lot of these things, things that would annoy and frustrate me. He would lead us on rambling car tours that would expand throughout the entire county of St. Francois, for hours on end, which he would then totally forget about the next time we visited and end up taking us on the exact same tour -- "Oh, did I show you kids where the old high school used to be?" "Yes, Grandpa." "Oh, well now, that was the house where your Aunt Rose used to live." "Yes, Grandpa."

My grandpa used to make little sculptures, whereby he'd glue rolly-eyes onto walnuts and situate several of them on a wooden stand like a family or a barbershop quartet, and give them as gifts -- "We're all a little nutty in southern Missouri!" My grandpa would listen to Burl Ives on his eight-track stereo, he would rail for hours about those damn Germans and I don't care if they did take down that damn wall, they're a bunch of Nazis and we'll never be able to trust ‘em. My grandpa would talk to ugly, ugly teenage checkout girls at the Walmart and ask them that wouldn't they agree that his strapping young grandson Jason here was a mighty handsome young man and would make quite a catch.

It wasn't until I was older, of course, that I began to appreciate my grandpa for what he was and actually wanted to start hearing the old stories. But by then it was too late -- he was in a retirement home full-time by then, his drivers license revoked by the state, his stories gone and his mind now filled with the latest report from his doctor on his colon, plus curiously enough, an obsession in the last year of his life that the entire US Congress was now being run by five supercomputers buried deep in the earth under the Capitol building, which admittedly is a little insane but would clear up a whole lot of questions.

You know, my parents once visited me up here in Chicago a couple of years ago and we ended up getting fairly tipsy at the top of the John Hancock building one night. The conversation turned philosophical as it is wont to do these days between me and my parents, and I asked them if they think they would've ever been happy staying in St. Francois county, if they think they could've enjoyed living a long adult life in their smalltowns of their youth. My dad was quick to answer and his loose lips burst that night with a resounding, "Hell NO, I'd been trying to get out of that fuckin' town since I was thirteen!" But my mom paused a moment, looked out the window and down onto the twinkling buildings below with a misty look in her eyes and said, "Yeah. Yeah, I think I could've been very happy staying in St. Francois my whole life." And right at that moment, I could see my mom suddenly in a green taffodila prom dress, standing at the corner of the high school gym, slowly swaying across the floor with a pimply-faced boy in a pressed white tuxedo jacket to the seductive rhythms of Bobby Vinton. Tell you the truth, I could even see my mom sneaking around the back of the gym to secretly take a snort or two of hooch and maybe make out for a while in the backseat of dad's Oldsmobile.

My grandpa, on my mom's side, was the very first eagle scout in Missouri history, not to mention Missouri's first recipient of the Order of the Arrow. He was the first person in the history of my family to take a college class. He completely redesigned and resodded his town's public square in the 70s, by himself, by hand. He cooked and delivered meals on wheels to a dozen infirmed people, for ten years without ever missing. My grandpa, on my mom's side, saved a man's life once, actually saved another human being's life, down in the lead mines in the 1940s.

And I swear to you, I swear to God, I would give anything to hear one of his stupid Ozark jokes again.

(Monica stops playing fiddle)

Monica:
So the Methodist preacher, he's up at the front of the church, getting ready to start the service when he spies his Baptist buddy in the back. So he leans down to his deacon and whispers in his ear, "Quick, go get three chairs for the Baptists." And this deacon, he just gives the preacher a look like he'd suddenly gone crazy, yells out a "What!" The preacher leans in again, says, "You heard me. Go out there and get three chairs for the Baptists." So that poor deacon just walks right up to that pulpit and yells out in this sorry, confused voice, "Okay, everybody... three cheers for the Baptists!"

(Monica starts playing the fiddle)

Jason:
I'm not sure why I'm telling you all this. Part of it, I think, is the fact that the last time we hung out at Estelle's a couple of weeks ago, I realized that I really do like you, that it's not just a stupid crush like I'd always assumed it was, but I actually sat and talked to you for hours and realized that I really do find you funny and smart and attractive and talented and sexy, just so damn sexy. And you know this because we got really drunk that night and talked precisely about how much I like you. And I know you don't like me -- well, not that way -- but still, at the end of the night you reached in of your own free will and planted a quiet, soft kiss on my face and I know that you have no clue what that kiss meant to me.

You and I, we go to these open mics and we sit there and watch Chuck go up on stage and talk about his African heritage and we see Ben go up there and talk about his Latino heritage, the generations strung out on a line like antique clothes being dried by the warmth of a Mexico sun. And I've bitched about this, talked about how great it would be if I could get up there and talk about my heritage, how inspired I get hearing my friends talk about these families that I'll never have.

This is my heritage. It's a heritage of trailer homes, of broken cars on cinderblocks in front yards. My heritage is of Klan meetings in the woods, moonshine being distilled in cellars. My heritage is Sam Hildebrandt, the most notorious criminal in the entire Civil War, who would wait in the woods until the Unions and Confederates were done killing each other off in an Ozark town, then calmly stroll in and rob the empty houses blind, slitting the throats of any random passersby and raping any of the women left behind.

My kinfolk are, for lack of a better term, white trash. But my kinfolk are also noble, they're gentle and they're kind. My family is a family of quiet, proud laborers, women who never once felt the need to apologize for their priorities, men who could tell you more with a turn of the head than I ever could in a snotty six minute generation x monologue drunkenly delivered on a smoky Chicago stage. My heritage is a heritage of calico summer dresses, of volunteer firemen. It's a heritage of store credit and free candy to children during union strikes, a heritage of sweaty, laugh-filled square dances at the harvest festival, of passionate couplings in the hay, in the barn, on lazy August afternoons.

Who my relatives are is who I am. And in my more egotistical moments, I like to think that perhaps I am just a little more calm than most of my friends, that I am just a little more polite, a little more old-fashioned. And when I see those snotty, obvious movies and TV shows that the west and east coasts churn out about the midwest, when they show the bumbling Barney Fifes and make that joke about fucking your sister for officially the one millionth time without it ever having been funny one single time -- when I see these smug condemnations of my family sprayed across the movie screen, it occurs to me once again how much they'll never get it, and how, if I was to tell them one of my grandpa's Ozark jokes, they would never, in their entire lives, laugh once.

I'm from southern Missouri. Deep, deep southern Missouri. I am, for lack of a better term, white trash. And never, in a million years, would I ever change that.

(Monica finishes fiddle song)