Refried Regionalisms

I have "I kissed a girl" in my head. I didn't... kiss... a girl... anyone... actually... that is... but the song is in my head.

It is a third stunningly beautiful day in a row. Fall weather makes me miss upstate NY. Few things make me miss upstate NY. Fall is one of them.

Leaves, apples, pumpkins, cider, colors, crispness.

All of that will arrive here eventually but it takes longer than it does further up North.

Lovely weekend but please, someone make me stop talking when you see me talking too much in a social setting. It's like my inner censor shuts down at gatherings and I rattle on and then have to wrack my brain later to try to remember what I said that I shouldn't have and to whom I said it.

Despite popular belief someone does not need to hear all about my junior prom date (including the story of how I asked him) just because they went to music school with him. They really don't.

Sunday night I saw my friend Josh's one man show for the umpteenth time. We both agreed I shouldn't see it again or else he'd have to qualify me as groupie rather than friend. I still enjoyed it. I love that Woolly is using their rehearsal room as a second stage sort of outlet, which is great and necessary and useful in this town.

We went to Austin Grill afterwards with the boys from the Rude Mechanicals.

I remember hearing about the Rude Mechanicals from my friend Chad at North Carolina who was also from Texas (and never let us forget it). They must have been in their incubative state at the time as they started in 1995 and this was not much later than that.

At some point in the evening it occurred to me that we were at a place called "Austin Grill". Brian from Woolly assured me that this was actually the selection of the Austin boys.

I can't imagine being in Texas and seeking out a place with a name like "DC Lounge" that served what? - bad crab cakes and unauthentic half smokes? - but there we were drinking sugary margaritas and eating mediocre tex mex with a bunch of folks from Texas.

Later (and completely sober) I got into another one of the aforementioned conversations. I've never ever been to Texas, not even close. And yet whenever I meet someone from Texas I have this tendency to say things like "Oh my friend Monica is from Houston, she's totally adorable and so funny - do you maybe know her?" or "One of my best friends is from South Texas, somewhere near the border, some small town, he played football in high school, do you know where that was maybe?" Or best yet "I've never been to Austin but I do have a T-shirt from Chuy's".

The Austin boy on the receiving end of this the other night finally said "Umm, Houston is the fourth largest city in the US. San Antonio and Dallas are also in the top ten. Texas is a really big state. It's really hard to make generalizations about a place that is so big".

In other words, stop trying to do that, chatty Northeastern girl.

I'm going to try to see their show, which got a great review in today's Post, tomorrow night.