America, You Sexy Bitch

by Meghan McCain, Michael Black

  We clamber back into our stifling, and increasingly stinky, RV for the final push to Branson, Missouri. I am probably more excited about Branson than any other stop on our trip. Mostly because I can’t wait to make fun of it.

  Meghan: So here’s a little confession: I had never heard of Branson, Missouri, before we started planning our road trip. When Stephie first brought up Branson as a suggestion, I asked her what it was like and she said, “It’s kind of like the Vegas of the Bible Belt, except I’m not sure if it’s a dry county or not.” Out of sheer curiosity alone, I thought it sounded like a great idea. Pretty much compare anything to Vegas and I’m in.

  After a few quick Google searches while on the RV, I see an advertisement for Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede, and I shout out to Michael that our Red Roof lobby research will not have been in vain after all. Vegas of the Midwest with a Dolly Parton attraction?! I worship at the altar of Dolly Parton. She is a woman who can do no wrong in my eyes and I am obsessed with everything about her. Her music, her hair, her cleavage, her movies, everything! If it’s cool with Dolly, I’m more than sure it is going to be cool with me. We are so there that it makes me grin.

  The more research I do, the more interesting Branson becomes. Surprisingly it is a relatively old tourist destination targeted towards wholesome family fun. For whatever reason I kept having flashes of Clark Griswold and the Griswold family from National Lampoon’s Vacation. I tell Michael that we have turned into the Griswolds.

  “I’m totally Russ, the smart-ass son,” I say. “And you are totally Chevy Chase’s character, Clark.”

  Michael barely looks up from his laptop. “Only if I get to sleep with Christie Brinkley,” he says without stopping his typing.

  “Christie then, or Christie now?” I say, trying to egg him out of his Twitter trance.

  “Either,” he says, not missing a beat. The RV takes a wicked, everlasting curve, and I start to feel like I might vomit again. Branson can’t get here soon enough.

  Michael: Branson has been a resort community almost from its founding in the 1880s. The first actual tourist destination was the Marvel Cave (“America’s third largest cave”), bought in 1894, then leased by the Herschend family in the 1950s for, of all things, square dances. The Herschend family then opened Silver Dollar City, an amusement park based on a frontier theme, still in operation today. In fact, it’s a major draw in Branson. The original cave is on-site and available for tours. No square dances.

  In the 1960s, performers started moving their live shows to Branson. More and more followed: Roy Clark, Andy Williams, Yakov Smirnoff, the Oak Ridge Boys. With the shows came restaurants and other tourist attractions. Now the entire city is devoted to wholesome family entertainment and goofy golf. I first became aware of Branson’s existence in the early nineties, when people suddenly started talking about the place as a family-friendly, affordable tourist destination. Branson seemed like Las Vegas’s goody-two-shoes baby sister.

  To me, it sounds indelibly hokey, one of those folksy “aw shucks” kind of places where people call you “sir” and “ma’am” as they extract every possible dollar they can from your wallet. No thanks. If I’m going to get ripped off, I want to at least do it someplace where the entertainment wears nipple tassels.

  In all my travels across America, I’ve never had occasion to go to Branson and see what it’s really like until now. So I’m excited. I’m going to mock this place with all the snarkiness I can muster. Hopefully I will not cross the line into outright cruelty, but if I do, Branson will have nobody but itself to blame.

  Stephie has booked us in someplace called Chateau on the Lake, a name so pompous it cannot help but be a letdown. And yet, as we drive up to the hotel, there is the lake and there is a giant building that looks less like a chateau and more like a mid-level Indian casino, but I’m not complaining. Not after our night in the demilitarized zone known as North Little Rock. Here in Branson, there are no meth heads anywhere within sight. Unless the hotel has a rack of blue jeans in the lobby, I’m sure I will be pleased.

  For Cousin John, it’s got to seem like a huge step up. Sure he’s still sleeping in the RV, but now he’s got a view of Table Rock Lake. It’s a little slice of Ozark heaven up here. For the record, I am not a completely heartless overlord, requiring my chauffer to sleep over the garage. In fact, just last night I suggested he sleep under the Red Roof, my treat.

  “Can I offer you a nice hotel room?” I asked him. “Air-conditioning?”

  “Are you kiddin’ me? I used to live in a van in a hundred and twenty-eight degrees in Southwest Texas,” he said. “I think I can deal with this. Thanks, though.”

  “Offer stands.”

  “Maybe another time.”

  I think for Cousin John, this whole trip is a kind of vision quest, an opportunity to get out of his cozy Aspen existence, see the country, and test his endurance. What he hopes to find I don’t know, but I get the sense from him that he is a man on some kind of spiritual mission. He often says as much. His dad died last year and I think it had a profound effect on him. All of the bluster, the constant stories, teasing Meghan, all of it operates in parallel with what I think is a deep confusion about his purpose. Of all the jobs he’s had—tow truck driver, hotel porter, bouncer—the one that I think had the biggest effect on him was river guide. For a couple of seasons, he led whitewater rafts down the Rio Grande. When he talks about those days, he gets kind of misty eyed.

  “Were there girls?” Meghan asks him.

  “Are you kiddin’ me, Gumdrop?” he answers. Yes there were girls. And booze. And camaraderie with the other guides. But there was something else, I think. There was the responsibility he had of getting his clients down the river in safety. And I think that responsibility meant a lot to him. It was a pure expression of how I think he views himself. As a guide, but also as a passenger on the trip. He’s doing the same thing for us, guiding our little RV down the river. I don’t think he’s as happy with us as he was out on the Rio Grande, but he’s playing a role he knows, and I think it suits him. Hopefully it won’t be so hot out for him up in the mountains. I don’t know how he’s been able to sleep in that thing. It’s been so miserably hot, and yet he does it without complaint. He’s a strong dude.

  Meghan: As much as I like being on the road, and don’t mind riding in an RV, it has begun to get really smelly inside, and my nausea keeps coming and going in unexpected tsunami waves. I already get motion sickness pretty quickly, but add in an RV toilet that doesn’t seem to be draining properly, random trash and dirt that’s kicking around on the floor, and a completely worthless air-conditioning system, and I am more than shocked I don’t vomit all over Michael Ian Black’s linen pants and Crocs, which really would not be a tragedy.

  The drive to Branson is really windy, and I applaud Cousin John for doing such a good job maneuvering it because if I were driving, we would have already ended up like an accidental Thelma and Louise.

  When I see on the horizon the Lake of the Ozarks and the gorgeous mountain views, I feel relieved. Stephie tipped us off that the hotel we will be staying at, the Chateau on the Lake, is a really nice hotel. I am running out of clean bras and T-shirts and just can’t bring myself to sink to the Michael Ian Black level of rewearing dirty clothes. The fact that we are going to a hotel that has a laundry room and a decent restaurant makes me as happy as if we were pulling up to the Four Seasons.

  As we approach the Chateau I feel more and more guilty that we have not booked a room for Cousin John. He’s become a real trooper. Like everyone else, I am finally getting into a rhythm with Cousin John and beginning to understand his sense of humor. I don’t always do well with laid-back “hippies,” if you will (although “hippie” isn’t really an accurate description of Cousin John), but Cousin John is sweet and mellow, and really just wants everyone to live and let live. Plus, he makes the peace sign anytime I get a little too aggressive with an opinion, which actually works well at disarming me. If only my parents and
Michael had known this trick earlier, we’d all have been saved a lot of heartache. It’s weirdly effective.

  The Chateau is gorgeous, in an Epcot Alps kind of way, and my guilt at not offering Cousin John a room in its homey interior spikes. I ask Michael if we should combine resources and make an exception to our tightly orchestrated budget, and he tells me that he tried last night to no avail. This makes me feel a little bit better, and I can look forward to washing my tank tops somewhat guilt-free.

  Michael: I practically run into the hotel to get out of this stifling air, bringing up the rear behind Meghan and Stephie, who are already chatting with the check-in girl, who is really cute. One thing I did not expect to find in Branson was attractive people of a healthy weight, yet the very first person I meet is somebody I would consider leaving my wife for. She’s doing an internship here while studying for her hotel management degree at the University of Kansas. Meghan is up in her grill asking inappropriate personal questions: Does she like it here? What’s the dating scene like? How long does she have to stay here? The girl and Meghan chat for a bit. I hang back, not saying anything because pretty young women make me nervous, as evidenced by my experience having Phoenix rub her tits all over my face in Vegas. So I just kind of wait for her to go, “Hey, you’re that dude from VH1!” and then ask me to stick my tongue down her throat. This does not happen.

  The hotel itself is fairly upscale, including a “glorious ten-story atrium lobby with a setting that mimics the beauty of the Branson outdoors.” And glorious it is! Lots of greenery and burbling water features. I love it. This has to be Branson’s finest hotel. (“Four Diamonds,” as rated by the AAA.)

  First order of business: laundry. My linen pants and T-shirts are starting to get a little raggedy, even for me. I throw some stuff in the machine and walk around the hotel a bit with Stephie. We amble over to the in-hotel candy and ice cream bar, saunter outside to the fancy swimming pool, and then decide to stroll down to Table Rock Lake. Unfortunately, there is no direct walking route to get there, which means we have to clamber down the winding drive for about a half mile or so, which is not easy to do in heat and Crocs. But it’s worth it. The lake is lovely, and its shoreline is filled with happy families doing waterfront activities. I guess that’s called “swimming” or something. I don’t know because I avoid it as much as possible, but we do roll up our pant legs and wade into the warm water. Mmmm. It feels great.

  All around us are well-behaved people having outdoor fun on a sweltering July afternoon in Missouri. Despite my best efforts, I can find no fault with any of them. Everybody’s getting along, and unlike in Vegas, it doesn’t seem to be a competition for “fakest-looking human being.” The people here are unselfconsciously flabby. They look, dare I say, like people. The first tendrils of shame start to crawl up my spine; why is my first instinct always to make fun of everything? These are just regular people on vacation. Why do I have to bring them down? Why do I have to be such an asshole all the time? I have no good answers. Sometimes I find myself to be such a caricature of an elitist East Coast liberal that it’s embarrassing. Standing in the shallow water with my pants rolled up to my knees while looking around at all these pasty white families is one of those times. Right now, I’m what’s wrong with this country.

  Meghan: When we walk into the hotel, it really is quite nice. It has a real concierge, glass elevators, and a giant waterfall and river/ pond with drawbridges going over it in the main lobby area, and most important, a laundry room.

  After we check in, I immediately open up my self-admittedly way too large suitcase, and my clothes nearly explode out of the bag because it is packed so tight. I am woman enough to admit that I really did bring too much crap on the trip, but as of yet I am the only one not reusing shorts and underwear, so that has to count for something. I pack all my dirty clothes in my computer bag and purse, and carry the rest in my arms down to the laundry room.

  Naturally, between the time I cruised the empty machines, gauged how much laundry I could get done, sorted it, and brought it back downstairs, someone has already taken up two of the three machines. I’m pretty sure I can see a pair of linen pants swirling around, and seriously consider stopping Michael’s machines and taking his wet clothes out until mine are washed. But then I consider the greater good for humanity of letting his clothes finally get what they deserve, and push my whites into the open machine, hauling my darks back to my room. I’m thrilled to see the huge stone-tiled shower and put myself through a thorough wash cycle, exfoliating, shaving, and conditioning the hell out my body. Not since my Vegas sex shower have I felt so squeaky clean. I already love Branson. Branson is the Mecca of the Midwest.

  Michael: We are going to see the comedian Yakov Smirnoff tonight. Yakov has been a Branson staple since 1992, when he opened his own theater here. For those, like Meghan, who have no idea who he is, a brief history: Smirnoff is a Russian émigré who came to America in 1977 and, very quickly, became one of the nation’s most popular comedians. His schtick was to point out the differences between America and the Soviet Union, always wrapping a joke with the catchphrase “What a country!” He even had his own short-lived sitcom, creatively called What a Country. When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did his career. He moved his act to Branson a couple of years later, and twenty years on he’s still going strong here.

  When we mapped out our itinerary, I thought it would be great to interview Yakov. He’s a true American success story, a guy who came with nothing and ended up making his American Dream come true. Plus, I figured he’d want to talk to us. I do standup, Meghan is a professional talking head; we’re not just a couple of fans looking to get an autograph. We are practically comrades. The good kind.

  Stephie wrote him a lovely email in advance of our arrival asking if we could interview him. He blew us off:

  Dear Stephie,

  Thank you so much for your interest, but I do not have the time right now as I am booked with other commitments. I do wish you the best success with the book!

  Love and Laughter,

  Yakov

  It is a somewhat gracious blow-off but I am still irritated. Yakov, don’t even give me this shit about how you “do not have the time” to meet with us. We both know you live in Branson; you definitely have the time.

  Also, it would have been good for him to sit down with us. Our book is a love letter to America. He is the recipient of American love. Plus, we have so much in common: I too am of Russian Jewish heritage. I too am a comedian. I too am an American patriot. And Meghan’s dad IS America.

  Irritating.

  But I will not allow my annoyance with the man ruin the show for me. I am determined to love Yakov even if he doesn’t love me back.

  Meghan: I was born in 1984, which I have come to learn was right around the time of Yakov’s career heyday, so I had never heard of the man before our trip.

  I google him and discover that he’s in one of my favorite movies, The Money Pit, which makes me think it’s going to be a family-friendly fun night. I like family-friendly humor, and Yakov is in fact living the American Dream. I love any stories of success about immigrants who ended up making it big in this country, so I figure we are probably in for a pretty good show.

  There is, however, one little dent in our plan. Before we head out to see Yakov at his theater, Stephie tells us that Yakov has blown off our emailed request for a meet and greet. Of course there have been times in my life when I myself have been guilty of doing the same thing, so I shouldn’t be annoyed that Yakov blew us off, but I am. Even though Yakov’s email is a nice enough blow-off, I think it’s a little shot to Michael’s and my egos. Nothing like a “celebrity” who’s been off the radar for twenty years not knowing who the hell you are—or worse, not caring who the hell you are—to make you feel insignificant. To be fair, an hour ago I didn’t know who the hell he was either.

  “Total blow-off,” Michael repeats, clearly a bit wounded that a fellow comedian wouldn’t want to trade tales. “He’s not ev
en trying.”

  “But he signed it ‘love and laughter’ and he wishes you guys success,” Stephie says, ever the sweetheart.

  “Yeah,” I say, my excitement over going to the show a little deflated. “It’s still a blow-off.”

  Michael: The first thing I notice about the Yakov Smirnoff Theater is its size. The place is bigger than the Sapphire Club back in Vegas. As you drive in, there’s a huge Yakov billboard featuring a giant sculpted Yakov head and, in case you didn’t know, a banner that reads “Famous Russian Comedian.” I feel a pang of fear.

  The entrance to the theater also has an oversized Yakov head, maybe seven feet tall, and wearing a bright-red clown’s nose. It’s a great place to pose for pictures, which we do.

  As showtime approaches, we venture inside. The theater’s walls are lined with grotesquely patriotic paintings, all signed “Yakov.” I did not know that Yakov is also a painter, and in fact was an art professor before coming to the United States. You can buy his paintings in the Yakov gift shop, which also features Yakov CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, books, and all manner of Yakov Smirnoff ephemera. I do not purchase anything nor, as far as I can tell, does anybody else in the building. Nobody wants to take a little piece of Yakov home with them.

  Not that there are a lot of people here. There are not. Showtime is only minutes away and the place is deserted. There was more bustling activity going on in the Lower Ninth Ward.

  An usher shows us our seats, which are close to the front. Third or fourth row. Behind us is a vast and largely empty theater. I’m guessing the place holds over a thousand people. If it’s 15 percent full, I’d be amazed. It’s a legitimate bummer. But the show must go on, and soon we are enveloped in the irritating strains of traditional Russian music. A troupe of four “Russian” dancers comes out, kicking and clapping and occasionally yelling, “Hey!”