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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The world can make fun of New Jersey -- big hair, Bada Bing, Bon Jovi and all -- but natives know who's boss.
Jun 4, 2004 | I grew up in New Jersey, in a town called Wall, not far from another town called Brick. In college, kids from glamorous places like Miami and Los Angeles and Great Neck thought the names of these towns, and their proximity to one another, were very funny. They chuckled about it pityingly -- Florida smirking at California, California shrugging amiably at Long Island -- as if they weren't in fact surprised. Apparently, something about those innocuous names fit in with a national perception of lump-headed Jersey folk. "Is there a town called 'Floor' around there too?" a boy from Gainesville, Fla., asked.
In other words, it took 18 years for me to figure out that New Jersey had a special reputation. My college classmates from all over the country would stare at my prom pictures with drop-jawed fascination, as if they'd believed big hair, sequins and too-tanned skin were just the stuff of legend. Here was proof, right in their own dorm, in 1995, that Jersey still yielded these curiously decorated creatures and their wife-beater-wearing counterparts -- women who swore like truck drivers, fathers who kept guns in bedside tables, cousins who lived in trailer parks, friends who were in the mob. To them, New Jersey was some white-trash fantasia, quite like what you find in Mira Nair's "Hysterical Blindness," the most terrifying depiction of Jersey life and fashions yet. It was a Los Angeles-born friend who said she'd hated New Jersey ever since she learned that the '80s show "Dance Party USA" was filmed there.
What struck me at the time, however, was that no other state seemed to incite such revulsion -- not arguably similar places such as Connecticut or Pennsylvania or Maryland. Not New York, with its colorful extensions of Long Island and Staten Island. Not remote, strange states like the Dakotas, or Alabama and Mississippi, those humid locales with painful links to our troubled racial history. No place inspires such freely expressed, comic snobbery as does the Armpit of America (New Jersey's persistent moniker, despite the fact that the vast majority of the state is wooded and pretty, not to mention very wealthy).
"It has an identity crisis," said Lance Strate, a professor of communications at Fordham University and a contributor to "This Thing of Ours," a book about "The Sopranos." "People call it 'Jersey.' No one says 'York' or 'Mexico' or 'Hampshire.' The name communicates a sense of disrespect.
"Take Martha Stewart," he went on. "When she was riding high, she was from Connecticut. Now that she's been indicted, she's from Nutley" -- New Jersey.
The opening credits of "The Sopranos" embody New Jersey's physical (and metaphorical) contradictions: Tony drives on the foul Jersey Turnpike, Tony passes ugly, working class towns, Tony ends up at his North Jersey McMansion, resplendent with green grass in a hilly neighborhood. "The Sopranos" has probably had the largest effect on the perception of New Jersey since Bruce Springsteen and Philip Roth. Thirty-five dollar tour buses now venture around Bergen County, showing off the state's "Sopranos" locations, from the Bada Bing, according to the tour's Web site, to "the spot where Big Pussy spoke with the FBI."
