Travels With Mike

Missouri Loves Company

by Mike Rank | October 24, 2002 Usually, the stripes on your overalls are vertical. This shirt really freaks people out down here. Buy CD's of all your favorite Redneck performers! Among the beliefs of the Mormon Church is that the Garden of Eden was located in what is now known as the state of Missouri. Likewise, when the end of the world comes, the Second Coming will also take place in Missouri. Anticipating that the apocalypse will destroy most conventional means of transportation to get the faithful to the staging area, the company has significant holdings in railroad companies to help facilitate the gathering when it does come. Sound ridiculous? Try reading the "Doctrine and Covenants" section of the Book of Mormon, available at www.mormon.com. Or if you don't like to read and need hard facts, look at the Osmonds. What would induce these hardworking, god fearing Mormon folk to leave their Utah safe havens to trek all the way Ozarks? Were they off their antidepressants again and just kept driving until they hit Branson? Or are they positioning themselves for a front row seat to the end of the world? When I landed a business trip to Springfield, Missouri, my intention was to use the layover on the way home to spend a few days in Chicago. But my grandparents were ecstatic to hear that I was heading to Springfield and began to rattle off a list of things I had to see, including a sporting goods store and an Asian guy with a fiddle in Branson. These are the same people who are thrilled about trips to Laughlin not because of the gambling, but because they can eat $.75 shrimp cocktails and spend the day going to $2 movies that they walk out of twenty minutes later because of the obscene language. I expected the entertainment value of Missouri to be nil and with good reason. I'd been to Northern Missouri years earlier as a Mormon missionary, taking Saturday trips to Lineville, a tiny town on the Iowa border. After driving nearly two hours to this tiny excuse for a town, we would spend a little under an hour knocking on the same doors we had been turned away from a month earlier. But it justified our trip to the Lineville Conoco Gas Station convenience store, a Mecca for numerous vices. While the center portion of the store was your typical stop and shop market, a third of the building was a maze displays of cigarettes, containing all the nicotine and none of the taxes of their Iowa counterparts. But we were more interested in the remaining third, which was jam packed with fireworks that we would purchase with our weekly food allowance. We'd take them pack home and shoot them at one another, inflicting numerous wounds that we would creatively explain away at church the next day. "My forehead?" I would repeat back with confusion to the Bishop while massaging the festering gash that was still oozing an equal concoction of blood, puss and sulfur. "Not sure. It must have been when I was bitten repeatedly by a mouse last night in my sleep." My journey back to the land of hillbillies and low cost cigarettes required me to arrive in Kansas City at 9 PM on a Wednesday night. It also involved an exhausting three-hour drive to Springfield in scattered showers. I normally spend these trips counting roadkill, but there wasn't a single dead carcass on the nearly two hundred mile stretch of road. Normally I would come across a zoo's worth of animals on an unlit, backwoods trail like this, which begs the question "Where's the Beef?" I've got two words. Waffle House. If you've never been to the southern region of our country, you're probably unfamiliar with the large yellow squares and black lettering of the Waffle House. It's a cross between a Denny's and a grease pan, providing you with a tasty meal that provides 100% of your daily-recommended allowance of grease and syrup. On my way to Springfield, I had sucked down a plate of eggs with a suspiciously thin and tough steak at a franchise that proudly displayed signs throughout the small diner emphasizing their equal opportunity hiring policies. Despite the questionable nature of my meat and slightly runny eggs, the cook and waitress serving me at the counter were two of the nicest people I've ever met. Their fun banter and casual conversation helped to make it one of the nicest meals I've had in a while. After work the next day, I decided to visit the sporting goods store that my grandparents had spoken of with such affection. Darn it, they were right; it is a cool place. The Bass Pro shops covers an area approximately the size of seven football fields selling everything from bullets to boats. They had several huge aquariums stocked with largemouth bass, a four-story waterfall and a freshly stock salmon stream that ran throughout the camping supplies section. After wandering around for nearly an hour, I felt obligated to buy something and debated between an aerosol can of synthetic deer urine or a fishing lure that looked kinda like a rainbow colored monkey. I settled for a cheeseburger from their in-store Mc Donalds. After a thirty-minute drive south, I arrived in Branson, entertainment capital of the Ozarks. I'd gone through a number of brochures on the available entertainment earlier in the day and was dismayed to find that the neither the Chinese guy with the fiddle or the "All-Elvis" extravaganza was playing. There were a number of established and well-renowned performers available including the Osmonds, Glenn Campbell and Andy Williams, but it was too clichˇ and easy to settle on one of these established performers. Branson caters to wholesome, family entertainment and I've never been one to settle for the like. My quest to find something tasteless and otherwise unwholesome led me to the Legends Theater, offering some of the greatest impersonators in all the Ozarks. Indeed, the suffix "-est" also applied to the audience in attendance, a delightfully freakish menagerie of some of the fattest, oldest, and/or gayest people I had ever set eyes upon. Maneuvering my way to my seat was the equivalent of navigating a minefield, explosives replaced with oxygen canisters, folded up walkers and wheelchairs. I took my seat next to a gentleman the size of a Volkswagen who looked sadly uncomfortable in his seat, not unlike a sausage ready to burst from its casing. The first part of the show had a number of less than impressive impersonators including Neal Diamond and Reba McEntire, two performers I could really care less about. Initially, I was a bit discouraged that the impersonators only vaguely looked and sounded liked the real deal, particularly the suspiciously Asian looking Neal Diamond. Fortunately, the shows producers were smart enough to throw in an entourage of scantily clad back-up dancers to help dress up the stage and before long, the main act then became a backing soundtrack for my gyrating ladies. The finale before intermission was the Blues Brothers, who provided a fun routine that got the crowd going, but I was ready to go right out the door at that point. But it was raining pretty hard outside, so I decided to hang out for the second half in hopes that it might clear up a bit. Although the weather ended up taking a turn for the worst, the show took a turn for the better. Liberace came out to start us off, playing one piano song, singing two more songs and filling the remainder of his spots with Gay jokes. Marilyn Monroe came out afterwards, again spending the majority of her act talking with the audience before bringing an elderly man on stage with her and molesting him while singing. Then as any good tribute show does, they finished off with Elvis. He spent a good majority of his act twitching and gyrating in a slightly unusual fashion which he later attributed to his unfortunate decision to wear tidy whities with his jumpsuit. Now these were entertainers. Rather than desperately pouring their hearts into performing dead on impersonation of these fallen heroes, they gave the crowd a satirical interpretation of these people's lives and talents. I don't remember what piano piece the Liberace impersonator played, but I won't forget him walking into the audience to show the members his faux jewelry. When an elderly woman remarked how beautiful his ring was, he fawned and exclaimed "So, you want this ring? Well, you're going to have to do the same thing I did to get it!" He then launched into hysterics and offered her a candy sucker instead. It's a Blow Pop" he explained to the blue haired woman. "Wanna guess why it's my favorite candy?" Now that's entertainment.