Years ago my sister, sister-in-law, and I decided that we would take a weekend excursion together every other year. We reasoned that if our men could go hunting in South Dakota annually, then surely we deserved three days somewhere every 730 days or so.
Our first excursion was to the All-American city of Boston. None of us had been to the Northeastern states, so we were quite new to the accent, not to mention other Bostonian oddities like the antique skull with angel wings headstones and such preposterous pride over something like baked beans.
Deciding to have dinner in the hotel restaurant late one night, we were greeted by the host commenting on my sister’s sweatshirt. It had a large stylish M with “Minnesota” scrolled beautifully across the front.
“I shoulda known ya were from Minnesota by your accent,” he jested.
Quick to the draw, my sister kiddingly pushed him on the chest and bantered, “Yeah! Like you don’t have an accent! Quarta, Quarta, everybody wants a quarta… pawk in Hawvawd Yawd.” Obviously, like the rest of us, she was tired of scavenging in her purse for twenty-five cents and trying to interpret the New England dialect.
He took it all in good humor and then popped an interesting question. “Do you know Lisa?”
“Lisa?” we asked.
“Yah know, Lisa from Minnesota,” he responded.
“Gee,” my sister said, putting her pointer finger to her lips as if seriously trying to think. “What does she look like?”
“Oh, blonde hair, blue eyes… about 5‘8”.” This, of course, typically described about half of the women in the Scandinavian state, half of those being related to us.
There was only one way to get to the bottom of this, I reasoned. “Is she Loo-tren or Cat-lick?” I sarcastically asked in my best Minnesotan dialect. In my hometown one was bound to be one religion or the other, with a spattering of Methodists in there.
Lisa turned out to be our waitress, and the fun had just begun. Since there was only one other table occupied in the entire restaurant, we had ample time to acquaint ourselves with our newfound friend.
Being the daring tourists that we were, we decided to splurge and buy ourselves a bottle of wine to drink with dinner. To put this in context, we were all mothers of fairly young children, so our opportunity to order vino happened about as often as we saw a two-headed calf born on the dairy farm.
After a good, long perusing of the vintage wine list (which might as well have been Pig Latin or Star-Trekian to us), Lisa came back to take our beverage order. We looked at her with bewilderment and, like any good communion-going Lutherans, we inquired, “Do you have any Mogen David?” This was one wine label we were familiar with, having helped fill those tiny plastic cups down in the church basement.
“No,” she laughed. “But we might have some Boone’s Farm Tickle Pink,” she reassured us. We all put our heads back and whooped, since this was the only affordable wine one could afford during our college years at $1.89 a bottle. We liked Lisa. She got our humor.
We went to a restaurant the next day to try out the famous baked beans everyone kept raving about. “Maybe we should have a Samuel Adams beer, since he was from here,” I reasoned.
Yes, by golly, this is how we would redeem our naïve need-to-get-out-more selves. We would show that we not only knew our nation’s historical figures from Boston, but also that we knew something about brews.
The waiter arrived to take our drink orders. Here was our chance to impress him with our Samuel Adams order.
Full of knowledge and patriotic pride my big sister announced, “I’ll take a John Adams, please.”
And with that I put my head down, relieved that none of us were donning a Minnesota sweatshirt.
