LOW BROW

A little appetizer before the meat of this story…

Jeff recently went shopping for jeans here in Newburyport. Given the upscale nature of many of the shops here, I told him it may be difficult for him to find them at all. I suggested No Sweat Apparel, based in Massachusetts that sells union-made attire. However, Jeff thought that a business from the same state still wasn’t local enough to support, and off we went.

We found a very nice men’s clothing store nearby, and the clerk happily led us to the jeans section, where he helped Jeff pick out a couple of pairs to try on. While Jeff was in the changing room, he searched the shelves for special jeans made from a new material (recycled wood pulp) called Tencel. He was very disappointed when he could not find any. I was oddly suspicious that as cool as they sounded, his enthusiasm was driven more by the expensive of the item than its practicality.

He wandered off, leaving me to listen to the conversations of the other store patrons. A young woman had entered with her father. She needed an item altered. Apparently her father had had his golf pants altered at the same shop, and blah, blah, blah.

When the conversation turned to yachting, I redirected my attention to searching the store for those exciting Tencel jeans. I happened to glance at a few price tags and realized that one could purchase jeans in the shop for prices from a mere $60 to over $100. For one pair of jeans. I suddenly felt as if I had recently crawled out from under a rock, and seen the “real” world.

Right on cue, our friendly clerk came back over to check on us. Jeff was still in the dressing room.

The clerk saw me glancing at other pairs of jeans, and very helpfully shared the following information- and I quote, “These jeans (gesturing to a less expensive pair) are very popular with the workers, while these are more popular with Newburyporters.”

It was soon after that Jeff emerged from the dressing room, and we both decided that we would show solidarity with our fellow workers, and shop elsewhere.

Now, for the main course…

Last night we saw some of the “non-workers” of Newburyport while out on the town. In order to avoid some of the madness that is St. Patrick’s Day in a very Irish town filled with lots of pubs, we decided to see Second City Comedy Troupe at The Firehouse Center for the Arts, quite literally, right next door to our apartment.

The crowd looked like The Stepford Wives (1975), if everyone had a New England accent and ate a lot more granola. They all seemed friendly and harmless enough. But if you have ever seen a larger number of Newburyporters gathered in one room, and have ever lived in a larger city, you will notice one thing (and not just the man in the lavender cordoroy pants)- everyone is really, really white.

Second City was incredibly funny, and as we are fortunate enough to live in a “Blue State”, some of the biggest laughs of the evening came at the expense of ultra-religious conservatives. I was most impressed that the humor, while occasionally off-color, was not crude. I would love to see more of America able to use their brains in order to get a joke now and again, even if those jokes were sometimes at their own expense.