The road to Branson is paved with billboards. Highway 76, otherwise known as West 76 Country Boulevard, touches the northern border of Silver Dollar City. That’s where the billboarding begins. In December, Silver Dollar City (theme park, not ghost town) hosts the nation’s ‘#1 Holiday Light and Tree Show,’ including a ’5-story Special Effects Christmas Tree.’ After lunch, cars line up nearly a mile to get past the front gate. Along the way, there’s no shortage of reading material. ‘Yakov Smirnoff,’ ‘The Twelve Irish Tenors,’ ‘Shoji Tabuchi,’ ‘Presleys’ Country Jubilee’ tower over helpless tourists. Trapped in their automobiles, on the highway, in the glow of four million Christmas lights, they salivate over a vast buffet of TV dinner delights. “As Yakov says, ‘Only In America can a Russian and a Japanese own a theater in the middle of the Ozarks!” (Courtesy of Mr. Smirnoff’s website, www.yakov.com: “Danger Explosive Laughter.”) The advertising is not menacing, at least in my estimation. I sense its manipulative and malfeasant intent, but it feels clingy, clammy, sweaty. Like grandma gone rambunctious or Ted Stroehmann, dick caught in zipper, Branson’s billboard bonanza poses no real erotic threat. The whole shindig just plays out as a mesmerizing and pathetic performance.
I rescued it from an ancient bookshelf in my third grade classroom. It was yellow, soft around the corners, with scoliosis and thin pages. The cover, rubbed worn and chipped, barely kept its faded red letters from evaporating. I borrowed the book and read it over a three hour car ride from St. Louis to Branson. In Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia—and forgive my faulty memory, for I haven’t read the book in 13 years—Jess gets a racing-car set from his dad. The Aarons don’t have much money and the toy is junky, but Jess knows his dad spent too much on the gift, anyway. Although Jess tries to play with the cars and says he loves the set, his dad knows that it’s crap. When I first read the scene—drowsing in the van’s back seat, peeking onto cow country, licking peppermint sticks—I recognized Paterson’s masterful craft: the plain language, meant for children, manages to provoke a startling and complex range of emotional responses. The prose toggles effortlessly between Jess’ empathy and his father’s shame; the dialogue is pungent and heartbreaking; Paterson has forced us to play the father and watch the performance through the son’s eyes. I have been vacationing in southern Missouri for 13 years; I have driven through Branson more times than fit on a hillbilly’s extra fingers (yuck yuck yuck hee-haw!); and my response always follows from the Terabithia postulate—I am both a participant and a spectator, caught up in the spectacle and disgusted at my own dirtiness.
“I still like bologna on white bread now and then.”
Branson is a cheap wonderland stuffed with a miniature museum of the Titanic, seafood restaurants, life-size plastic dinosaurs, a wooden rollercoaster, terrifying discount motels ($25.99 a night!), antique malls (hot wheels cars, Nazi war medals, dirty Danielle Steele paperbacks, Civil War medical spoons, glassware, guns, cast iron pans, pocket knives and pocket watches, buttons, fudge), Hannah’s Maze of Mirrors, Hollywood Wax Museum, Baldknobbers Country Restaurant, Aeropostale, Cracker Barrel, Mel’s Hard Luck Diner, Target, Victoria’s Secret (a frightening proposition), and Great Wall Chinese Super Buffet. Everything is insulated by a layer of slick fat. Visitors come plump and leave plumper. The sky is glazed blue and bloated with the occasional oily gray cloud, and the air tastes like b.o., and I feel claustrophobic. Branson is an oasis of pleasure set in dry-living land—it is wet, dense, compacted, fenced, squeezed into a pocket of buttery capital. “Standard island beach resort cliché, but that’s okay.” The universe fixates on inexpensive expenditure and threadbare hedonism. Beneath every greasy surface, rotting cork decays into hurting, longing cavities. I watch mom and dad (both tribal-tattooed around the neck) pack screaming kids into a used, metallic beige (actual color) minivan. We are exiting “Antique Mall” (purchased: one Male magazine, “What Are the Russians Really Like,” “Diary of a Streetwalker”), and I hang out and listen to classic rock pumped into the parking lot. I feel bad for the kids and the parents and the whole shindig, and as I am wont to whenever I am in Branson, I feel in need of a hot shower and scrub-down. I wonder whether mini-me got a cheap race-car set for Christmas, cause the parents are screaming, too, screaming about spending too much money at Christmas and now this whole Branson shindig, well, what to do except cram the kids in and waddle off to Yakov, Chinese buffet for crab rangoon and Singapore rice stick and spaghetti and barbecue ribs and scallion pancake and egg drop soup with wontons and red jell-o, some of those donut turds rolled in granulated sugar, fortune cookies, back to Baldknobbers Motor Inn for Brad Paisley on KRZK 106.3 FM, Branson’s Hometown Country Station.
On our way out of town, we stop at Bennett’s Donuts. Close to closing time, we manage half a dozen: red velvet (oh so red, red hot red, beef blood red, red wax lips red), pumpkin (stale icing), glazed (deflated), chocolate cake (tastykake), maple (flavor), apple caramel (doughy like skin pinched off a fat cousin’s pallid cheek). They might not be especially delicious, but they’re Dixie Fried, and I’m happy to hold them on my lap down Highway 65 towards Arkansas. Forget Branson snobbery (those damn hillfolk! Hee-haw! Howww-deeee! (accent on the –deeee) I’m jes’ so proud to be here!) and anti-Branson snobbery (those damn tourists! Hee-haw! Howww-deeee! I’m jes’ so proud to be here!)—or forget avant-garde versus kitsch. Forget it in fistfuls of donut-donut-donut-donut-donut-donut. Better yet, stay hypnotized. Yuck yuck yuck away at Yakov. Visit the Titanic. Eat fresh fried shrimp (Southern Missouri! Fresh shrimp!) and fresh fried okra, hot rolls spread with Land O Lakes® Fresh Buttery Taste® Spread. The real danger of Branson is not becoming beguiled by billboards; rather, it is despairing at the acceptance of and frustration with the mediocre middle by the middle.
