a parallel but warmer universe

leaving aside some of the concrete details of our new orleans trip, since my southern blogmate is working on them as we speak (taking breaks to wonder how on earth she is a bridesmaid again), i was thinking again about ways i could reciprocate my wonderful tour of louisiana with a less-wonderful tour of wisconsin. this was brought up again by my mother, who asked, "i'm glad you had such a nice time. when are you going to reciprocate?" (seeing as mom is a very smart lady but not one given to words like reciprocate, i can only conclude that she is a mind reader and i'd better not have any ill-willed thoughts, ever.)

she clearly does not need more exposure to hippies, jam bands and little coffee shops, and we've done madison before, so as much as i would like to spend a weekend at mother fool's, weary traveler and the come back, i'll hold off for now. she might need more exposure to microbreweries since there's something like two in the state of louisiana (and i've now toured 50% of them) and sadly i found myself the relative beer expert, by which i mean i'd heard of three floyds when one of the hippies asked me about it. she's done lakefront in milwaukee, the most fun tour - if we stayed in southern wisconsin maybe we could do new glarus, just for the whole swiss-ness and bar that does smelt fry for $4.99? yeah, new orleans might have colorful crawfish, but we batter fry stuff that looks like bait and call it a delicacy in selected church basements. there's really no point in trying to compare to the local art galleries with the blue dogs and distorted french quarter buildings - i could maybe buy her a shirt with a mallard on it from northern reflections in the mall or something. or i could make her play "count the wildlife t-shirts." or we could swing over to paoli for the entire town made up of paoli cheese and two little art galleries. not as cute as ponchatoula (that even sounds southern!) but it's nice. the biking between those two is great, but since the locals are all pissy since the last ironman i'm afraid we'd get lynched. we could go to door county (that's the thumb of the state, for the southern contingent), since if new orleans has narrow streets by the water, locally owned businesses, and boiled fish in a big pot, door county is as close as we can get. plus now that we're from illinois we fit right in! real wisconsinites usually can't afford the nice parts of our state - they're pretty much owned by chicago.

the problem with those ideas is that as kitschy as they sound, that's nice wisconsin, and it would be a lie if i tried to claim to be from there. when mb and i started dating, and i told my family where he was from, their eyes got a little big and they said "oh, he's from the nice part of the state." (nice = a town of 10,000 with a senior citizen dinner theater.) where i'm from just got air conditioning in the wood-paneled bar where drunk men with mullets come to race their remote control cars on wednesdays.

i draw these conclusions:
1) wisconsin might actually have some comparable, though smaller, attractions (omitting the whole architecture problem, unless there are national groups coming to tour the intricacies of the split-level ranch)
2) we will never actually see said attractions, because they're nowhere near each other
3) we will instead end up drowning our sorrows in $1 leinenkugel's at korth's and listening to my dad tell the same stories over and over
3.5) there was a suggestion to drink old milwaukee and laugh at the hicks. i have a question: where is old milwaukee actually sold in wisconsin? i've never seen it except in gas stations in south carolina. blatz, yes. huber, sure. schlitz, proudly. old mil?
4) it will be worse than the time my alternator died in milwaukee and none of my relatives would answer their phones to come help us
5) my blogmate will never speak to me again