Tennessee Mick-Taking

I was not prepared for what the British call "banter." Keep in mind, I attended an all-girls school from age 11-18, and then I was surrounded by wonderfully close female friends in college. My knowledge of How Guys Get Along, and especially of How British Guys Get Along, has been forged in the fire of the Bryanston dining hall.

The dining hall here is a large tent. It has laminate flooring and chandeliers and semi-permanent drink dispensers, but let's call a spade a spade; it is a tent. A tastefully appointed tent, but a tent nonetheless.

The real Dining Hall is being refurbished, and apparently come November we will pick up and move back to the main building, where a new seating arrangement will establish itself accordingly.

The current arrangement is this: More fashion catwalk than chapel aisle, a space cuts up the middle of the room (tables on either side) and provides a thoroughfare from the main course to the drink machines. According to habit and unspoken hierarchy, the oldest students sit toward the back, the youngest students sit closer to the front, and resident teachers sit in the first two rows.

It's at these front tables where I, sitting shoulder to shoulder with rugby coaches and rowing coaches, learned how to get the mick taken out of me. By lads, no less.

Translational Note:
"Lads" in England are like "bros" in the United States. They prize male camaraderie, brotherhood if you will, and usually forge it through mutual suffering (i.e. sport, sport training, or extreme weather predicaments), alcohol consumption, and banter. See next note.

"To take the mick" out of someone is to make fun of them, usually with pithy one-liners and sarcastic questions (the collective body of which is known as "banter"). There is a ruder version of the same phrase, "to take the piss," but I gather that nice girls don't say that. So I won't.

So the lads took the mick out of me. How, you may ask, did I stumble into the crosshairs?

I almost made it too easy.
I quoted Eminem.

And because I've established quite a reputation for pop-cultural ignorance, one of them looked at me, astonished.

Lad 1: "You know who Eminem is?"
Me: "Of course I know who Eminem is."
Lad 1: "How? Did he record a country album?"
Me: "Just because I'm from Tennessee ---" At this point, I was interrupted with an impromptu Eminem-on-the-banjo routine, at which I laughed. And that's when the floodgates opened.

Lad 1: "What's it like in Tennessee? Like, in your house, do you all say good night to each other after you turn out the lights?"
Lad 2: "Do you use a pool table for your dinner table, and just put the utensils in the pockets?"
Lad 3: "If you want to watch TV, doesn't someone have to get on a bicycle to power a generator?"
Me: "Well, I usually go outside, put on the pair of shoes that the ten of us share, walk down the road to the gas station shack where we get our chickens fried, and ask the snuff-dipping man there to turn on the power for an hour so we can watch Little House on the Prairie. And that's our TV for the month."

Over the course of dinner, I realized that they had, at least in jest, cobbled together an impression of Tennessee from snippets of The Waltons, The Simpsons (in particular, Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel), John Wayne Westerns and The Beverly Hillbillies.

Which, when you think about it, is about as fair a list as Goodbye Mr. Chips, Robert Downey, Jr. as Sherlock Holmes, Love Actually, and Oliver Twist.

My mom asked me later, "Wait - you didn't tell them what Tennessee was really like?"

Of course not. They were having far too much fun for me to have even a chance at setting the record straight. Heck, I was probably laughing the hardest.

Plus, saying, "Hang on, we've got the 42nd best public education system in the country!" doesn't really help your case when people are asking if you walk around with a wheat stalk shoved between your teeth.

I gathered, anyway, that the rules of banter are much like those of improv comedy: Say "Yes" to your partner; keep the scene going for as long as it will stay funny. There were five or so of these guys taking the mick, so the scene stayed funny for a good long while.

But I would like to apologize formally to those who feel I ought to have shown more Tennessee pride. I did my state no credit, unless you count fanning the flames of ridicule with an enthusiasm that equaled the lads'.

I think Tennessee can handle it. And so can I.