Thanks for Coming to Des Moines

Back from a weeklong trip that took me to Chicago, Seattle, and the fabulous Des Moines, Iowa. If I’ve ever been to Des Moines before I don’t remember, and if I return there again, I suspect I won’t remember having been there before. Not that there’s anything wrong with Des Moines. It’s a pleasant enough place filled with kind and good people who half-apologetically say things like, “Thank you for coming to Des Moines,” as if I’m doing them some favor for showing up, when the opposite is true: thank you, Des Moines, for having me. Nobody ever says, “Thank you for coming to New York.” They expect you to thank them and to gratefully accept an upturned middle finger for your efforts. Not so much in Des Moines.

There’s a lot of American cities like that, places that affect a kind of “aw shucks” self-effacement about their hometowns. It’s charming, but also a little sad. Now that I also live in one of those small cities that people don’t think very much about, I understand the mentality a little bit better. There’s a sense in small cities that the larger world doesn’t give much of a hoot about us, which is true in the sense that small cities and towns don’t attract the kind of attention that our larger sister cities do. There’s a Manhattan in Kansas, too, but nobody’s jetting there for Fashion Week. Isn’t that the point of living in a small city, though? Don’t we want to be out of a nation’s critical eye?

People in Des Moines or Savannah or Racine, Wisconsin or Provo, Utah, or a thousand other cities and towns don’t live there expecting to be the center of attention. We expect to live our lives a little bit out of the way. We expect, and want, to be left to our own devices. Sure it’s nice to be acknowledged once in a while. It’s why locals get so excited when our cities are featured in movies or TV shows. Isn’t it exciting to point at the screen and say, “Look, there’s the place that I see every day!”

When I was a younger person, I couldn’t imagine not wanting to be in the center of everything. I lived in New York City for ten years, and on the city’s outskirts for twenty more. New York is a world center, the hub around which the spokes of commerce, fashion, and finance revolve. When they say it’s the city that never sleeps, that’s not an exaggeration. New York hasn’t even begun its evening by the time Des Moines is in bed for the night. No wonder New Yorkers are so grouchy - they’re sleep-deprived

One of the reasons to celebrate small cities is that, when left alone, they have a tendency to make cool things – restaurants, music scenes, art – just because. Yes, it’s cool for a band to pop on the national stage, but it’s just as cool to have a bunch of musician friends who hang out and make music and go to each other’s shows without much more of an expectation than a few beers at the end of the night. Small cities encourage eccentricity. In Savannah, for example, we don’t have an Apple Store, but we’ve got the Graveface Museum, a funky little private museum featuring exhibits on “some of the most macabre aspects of recent history including death cults, serial killers, Satanism, the occult, and inexplicable phenomena experienced inside and outside the establishment.” Plus, they’ve got pinball.

When I first moved to New York City in the late 80’s, you might find a spot like that somewhere in the East Village, but now, with rents being what they are, nobody can afford weirdness for its own sake. Nobody can afford anything. Which also might explain why New Yorkers are so grouchy.

Unfortunately, being away from the nation’s media centers also breeds a certain insecurity and resentment. It’s why people in small cities sometimes barely hide their snarls when they find out a visitor is from someplace a little more highfalutin. It’s maybe why so many mistrust the federal government (I mean, in addition, to the myriad other reasons why somebody might mistrust the federal government).

People forget the enormity of this nation. It’s a big place. It holds Great Lakes and mountain ranges and deserts and forests, all of it held tight by a shining sea on either coast. Holding this thing together is a tough job under the best of circumstances. It’s no wonder so many folks feel forgotten, ignored. Where is Washington in their day-to-day lives? Where is Moscow in the day-to-day lives of those living on the Russian steppes? For people living on the sidelines of their nations, it’s easy to feel a touch disconnected from their country as a whole. People react in different ways: some cling ever-tighter to their flags. Some shrug and go about their business, preferring lives out of the limelight. I’m more the latter than the former. And I guess I always have been. Some people might end up feeling lost in a country as big as ours. Others, like me, prefer to disappear within it.

Of course, I still made jokes about Des Moines to my Des Moines audience because people in small cities usually have a good sense of humor about the perceived shortcomings of their cities. But they also usually have a lot of pride, too, so I’m always careful not to go too far. “Comedian Missing in Iowa” is not a headline I want my family to read. I did two shows there, at a club called Teehees that’s so small it doesn’t have a green room. Instead, comedians just kind of hang out in the back, separated from the audience by a wicker screen. Afterwards, audience members don’t have much of a problem coming back there to chat and ask for pictures. I happily obliged (“Happily” might be a slight exaggeration on my part.) Invariably, though, after we took our photo, somebody in the party would turn to me and say, “Thanks for coming to Des Moines.”

My pleasure.