Proposal for a new Column/Television Program/Cartoon Strip/ Musical Comedy/ Extravaganza on Ice: The Erstwhile Urbanite

Context: “Erstwhile” is a great but sadly ignored word meaning “former” and “urbanite” means somebody who dragged herself from a city (in most documented cases, NYC) to go live in Another Place. Okay, so you already knew this, but I wanted to explain it by using small words, as if writing a grant proposal.

Imagine an academic version of Eva Gabor in Green Acres leaving Berkeley for a job in Ames (“The stores!”; “Goodbye city life!”); think of a graduate student version of Emma Bovary leaving NYU for a job in Carrollton, GA (“She was not interested in landscape. Emma was interested in conversation”); think of a scenario whereby a visiting-fellowship version of Dorothy Parker meets the Visiting Professor Dorothy from Oz (DP: “All I need is a cozy place to lay my hat and a few strangers” vs. D from Oz: “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home”).

What’s a displaced academic to do?

Rationale for the Series: The audience member will have to have moved from a bustling urban center to Sleepy Hollow to understand.

Universal concerns are illustrated by the following examples:

Dear Erstwhile: When I lived in Manhattan, we made dinner reservations for 8:30 or 9 so that folks could finish up what they had to do at work or even meet folks for drinks before meeting another group for dinner. Where I live now, most restaurants close their doors at two in the afternoon because the breakfast crowd has finally left and going out for a real meal means driving 45 minutes and having iced-tea with dinner in order to be able to drive back. How do I adjust?

Or:

I love the small town I live in but as a divorced woman in her early 40s, I have either already slept with, or decided I would rather remain celibate than sleep with, the four available grown men in my small college community. Undergraduates are out because of the religious nature of the school and because of how they dress. Is there a way for a lady to have a life?

Or:

I have a wonderful tenure-track job but it is in a town where a person cannot order dinner over the phone after even the longest day. The pizza joints deliver on-campus and I (thankfully) do not live in a dorm. And not that I’m bitter, but the only clothes you can buy here are at least two years out of date and made from fabrics so synthetic they were originally developed by NASA. Also, everybody goes to bed before midnight and — far worse — gets up early. How can I survive?

Sample response:

Those of us who once lived in A Metropolis, who consider ourselves in some fundamental, perhaps genetically driven manner to be city dwellers have a difficult period of adjustment when we move to a community where neither lights nor noise can be perceived after 9 p.m. Even in the summer.

Some of us wait for rescue, some hope relentlessly for excitement, certain individuals even bide their time expecting life to show up on the doorstep — as if Destiny has a “Take Out” option that delivers to a home address while we relax with our feet up.

We place unrealistic pressures on our hometowns, treating local communities as if they were potential mates (“Will you make me incredibly happy for the next 60 years?” “Will you provide emotional, physical, and financial support without making demands interfering with my career/child-raising/tennis game?”) and wonder why everything isn’t the way we hoped.

My advice? Don’t shipwreck your expectations on the rotted, rusted hulk of a long-sunk ideal — how’s that for a happy image? — but rather figure out how to congratulate yourself on leaving behind what needed being left.

You think if you were back in The City you’d be living it up, going out dancing every night after attending fascinating first-night theatrical performances embedding themselves in the memory of the culture at large?

Did you ever actually do these things? More than twice? C’mon, did you ever do them and enjoy them as much as you enjoyed telling other people about them?

Or are you, as I am, secretly happy to be more erstwhile and less urbanite?