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Jul212011

THE WORLD

In Which The License Plate Said Fresh And It Had Dice In The Mirror

Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 10:46AM

Born and Raised

by DAYNA EVANS

My first real American Halloween, my brother and I dressed up as Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones from Men In Black. You can see the problem with this already.

I insisted that I would be Will, so my mom slicked back my hair and drew a thick, black mustache on my face in eyeliner. We wrapped toilet-paper rolls in tin foil to represent the memory-erasing “neuralizers” and wore baggy black suits of undetermined origin. These were probably the worst Halloween costumes in history, with the exception of the year that my friends and I were “homeless” and just wore sweatpants.

There was no way in hell that anyone would know what we were, but we took this holiday as newly-minted Americans very seriously and so we remained undeterred. The rules of Halloween, as shown in the movie Hocus Pocus, were that a cute face got you candy and the elaborateness of your costume was somewhat inconsequential, though dedication was always encouraged. We came home that night with pillowcases stuffed with foreign candy and the British Isles began to seem like a very faraway place indeed.

If you were under the impression that America is just a jazzed-up version of England with different sports and a shorter history, I’d like you to think about Halloween.

Every October 31st, little children and their mischievous older siblings wear disguises and run around their neighborhoods in pursuit of free candy, which grown adults dole out happily. Then these children take this candy home and devour it, leaving the undesirables (Sugar Daddys, Circus Peanuts) for their parents. What the fuck is this about?

I learned about trick-or-treating from Hocus Pocus, which made my British imagination believe that every suburban town in the United States looked like Salem, Massachusetts. We celebrated Halloween in England but there was never the same level of fanfare — usually it’d be a dull party with eight kids drinking too much sugary squash and going to bed with stomachaches. I don’t remember ever dressing up.

In 1996, when we were relocated to the not-so-New-England-looking suburbs of Philadelphia, my brother and I were encouraged to approach perfect strangers while cross-dressing in ill-fitting suits and ask them to give us stuff. And they would oblige. My love affair with America had begun.

1989 in Leicester

The gray-haired lady whose name I don’t remember held two silver coins, one in each hand.

“This is a nickel,” she said as she raised the chunky circle with Jefferson’s face shining back. "And this is a dime." Much more nimble, I thought. "A nickel is worth five cents and a dime is worth ten. And a quarter" — she reached down and presented the silver piece in her palm — "is worth twenty-five cents. Like a quarter of a dollar."

I shifted in my seat, feeling slightly patronized, though I knew that that afternoon I planned on inspecting a handful of change to test myself on the various names.

The next task was a little harder. The gray-haired lady had made a list of words that were spelled wrong, which she handed to me and said, "These are the correct spellings."

Was this a trick?

"You may be used to spelling certain words one way but we do it another way here."

I looked down at the list. It was long and had some words on it that I didn’t even know, but the ones that I did looked like weird cousins of themselves with letters deleted and transposed.

Color, pajamas, center, organize, traveled.

"Uh." I looked at the gray-haired lady, bewildered.

"Just try and memorize them, okay?"

Must memorise, I thought.

1991 in Leiceister

England and America are bound by certain commonalities. We speak the same language, we share the same flag colors, and we both are fond of sports-related riots. I have always seen America as the younger teenage brother of England and that's why I loved it so much when we first moved — juvenile excitement is everywhere.

The first time I ate ice cream out of a plastic baseball cap, I knew that America had an edge. Who decided that for supreme enjoyment of ice cream, a baseball cap should be turned upside down, miniaturized, and enrobed in plastic? An American. This was one of the greatest joys I’d ever known until I had my first encounter with pancakes.

I wasn't ignorant enough at age 8 to have not ever heard of pancakes, and I may have at one point even eaten them, but in no way was what I knew of pancakes remotely similar to what I would experience.

When we first moved to America, we lived with my uncle for a few months until my mom bought a house. My favorite uncle is a master pancake-maker; he manipulates batter into the fluffiest, sweetest, perfectly round and circumferentially exact pancakes. Pancakes are a thing here, which I learned rather swiftly and with no complaint. A stack of Bisquick pancakes topped with Aunt Jemima’s syrup is one of the hardest things to look at and say "No, thanks." Seven a.m. couldn't come soon enough when I was living there — seven a.m. was the pancake time. The great, wholesome pancake time.

When people don’t speak the language of their new home country, it’s not uncommon for them to pick up a lot of its nuances by watching television. It makes sense — not only do you get to hear the accent and see a less stiff version of the language than a book could show, you also get to see the new culture acted out. Though I already spoke English and needed no phonics assistance, I was a large proponent of this practice when I was younger.

I watched TV to find out what the hell an American was and how best to become one. When I would watch Sesame Street as a young girl living in an old British home with the original 250-year-old ceiling beams and a greenhouse, I believed my house was actually on Sesame Street. I have been told that most kids think this way, which is the magic of the show, but most kids don’t confuse their antique gold-gilded door chime in the perpetually chilly and dark foyer for a lively front stoop framed by window boxes of geraniums. I believed I was American before I had even left England.

My favorite TV shows when I moved to the States greatly influenced my understanding of American culture. They were all the 90s standards: Step By Step, Martin, Family Matters, Full House, Hanging With Mr. Cooper, and that weird show Dinosaurs, which I guess didn’t help me understand America but did freak me the fuck out. They all donated some key information — uncles are creepily affectionate, there is always drama at Thanksgiving — but there was no show that quite defined Americans to me more than The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

I wrote a 10-page paper in college about Will Smith. Looking back on this now, it was with certainty one of my best undergraduate achievements, marginally edging out my multimedia presentation on Shakespeare’s similarities with the Animaniacs. The paper reflected on how his presence in rap was essential for the progression of more legitimate hip-hop to go from underground to mainstream. Reflections like these remind me a cantaloupe with legs could get a liberal arts degree.

Given my insistence that I be allowed to dress up as Will Smith when I was 9, then 12 years later wrote a paper defending his legitimacy, it should be obvious that I have a slight fascination with him. A guy I dated my freshman year in college sent me a digital canvas portrait of Will Smith that has hung in every apartment I’ve lived in for the past five years. It is one of the best gifts I’ve ever received. Not to mention, he sent it to me anonymously months after we’d already broken up. For fifteen minutes, I speculated that maybe it was Will himself who had delivered it, knowing what a huge fan I was. Once I sleuthed around enough to figure out the real sender, I admit to a level of disappointment that probably is not natural.

I watched episode after episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. It was something about Will Smith’s simultaneous arrogance and empathy that made him seem so American to me. He wasn’t tight-lipped but he wasn’t necessarily impolite; he was funny and personable and warm. He was a guy who didn’t fit in with his surroundings but was making it work while occasionally failing, like when he used Carlton’s handspun silk pocket square as a tissue. It was his persona that I emulated and envied as I grew up surrounded by Yanks.

Looking back, channeling a 6’2” black man who played a loud-mouthed prankster with NBA aspirations on a television show about L.A. was one of my more misguided decisions. When he turned 38, I threw a Will Smith–themed party in my college dorm with balloons and crepe paper; I wore a backwards neon hat and Nike dunks. That may have been the weirdest thing I have ever done.

I was drunk in a bar with two British friends when we got into an argument over which city was cooler: New York or London. Obviously, this is typical conversation for the metropolitan twenty-something douchebag, so I’m sure you can imagine what was said ("Uh, The Strokes, dude." "Have you seen Alexa Chung?") but at some point, there was a shift that made the disagreement much wider. Four or five pints in, in a state of belligerent twenty-something douchebag disarray, I found myself arguing that it wasn’t just New York that was better, it was America. Like, I was actually doing this.

My friends rolled their eyes and retorted with bland indifference. I became heated, saying things like "it’s just funner [sic] there." They even remained calm when I said that they were lucky Shakespeare was British because he was their "only defense." (I’m not even quite sure what that means.) There was no weight to anything I was saying because I obviously believed both places have their merits or I wouldn't have gone back to England several times since I’d moved. But the less they responded to my attacks, the more I wanted to prove that I was right. So finally I said what I’d wanted to say all night: "Brits are like Americans, but with less swag."

Dayna "I'm a patriot" Evans: 1, The Commonwealth: 0.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about summer reading.