I went back to Spring Vegas as the kids are calling it these days (Yes, I have really heard kids call it that) over Thanksgiving and I had a wonderful time. I’m always amazed, though, at how much things have changed when I go back. In this most recent case, the entire airport was new and I spent the first few minutes hesitantly walking the terminal, freaking out and wondering if I had somehow gotten on the wrong plane. When I noticed that everything in the airport, including the carpets, was fishing-themed, I knew I was in the right place. There’s a Springfield-Branson (Spring Vegas hasn’t really caught on yet) National Airport Terminal Scrapbook if you’re interested in seeing a rug that looks like a river bed.
One other vexing change is the number of national food chains that keep moving into our formerly small town. This vexes not because I don’t like national food chains but because I like lording the fact that Chicago has these food chains and Springfield doesn’t over my family and friends.
As an example of my big-city sophistication, I was telling my dad about this great burrito place we have in Chicago where we can make burritos to order when he says to me, “Oh, that sounds like a place we have here. Chip-pottle. Have you heard of it?” “It’s pronounced Chip-oat-lay,” I huffed, foiled again by the boundless greed of corporations on the neverending death march that is capitalistic expansion. Don’t worry about me, guys. I’m sure I’ll find some other way to be cool.
A few days after this, my mother and I were running errands when we happened to park in front of an iconic Springfield shop. To call it a sex shop would be a misnomer and to call it a sexy shop would be generous. It specializes in the kind of marital aids middle-aged women pick up after reading an issue of Cosmo and believing that there really are 101 ways they could spice up their love lives and all of them involve buying junk.
Anyway, I call the shop iconic because even ten years after last hearing their radio ad, I can still sing it from memory: ♪♫ “Priscilla’s…where fun and fantasy meet!” ♫♪ (Here is a YouTube video of a couple of girls who can do the same thing). But as we pulled up in front of the store, I noticed that they had changed the name from Priscilla’s to Patricia’s: Where Fun and Fantasy Meet. I don’t know who the hell Patricia is and why she changed the name of the store, but doesn’t Patricia (Patty to her friends and sorority sisters) sound like the kind of person whose fantasies involve scrapbooking and not body stockings? If I want advice on my next PTA standoff, I’ll chitty chat with Patricia. But if I need to know which flavor of edible underwear tastes best, I want to talk to Priscilla.
My mother and I didn’t actually go in Priscilla’s (not calling it Patricia’s on principle), though there was a hilarious conversation while I was home that involved my mother detailing for her former mother-in-law/my grandmother where all of the sex shops in town were. “Oh, sure, you can find Adam and Eve right down the strip mall from Yankee Candles.” In fairness, my mother is not a pervert, she is a UPS driver and thus delivers to all of these places. Or so she says. What happens in Spring Vegas stays in Spring Vegas.
