Everybody's Favorite by Lillian Stone

Author:Lillian Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

Beware the Howler

I was raised in the shadow of a Yakov Smirnoff billboard. It’s on State Highway 248, a half hour from my parents’ place near the Missouri–Arkansas border. Glance up and you’ll see the Ukrainian comic’s grinning face, thirty feet in the air and partially camouflaged by a Cossack fur hat. Below him lies a stick of dynamite. DANGER! the billboard reads. EXPLOSIVE LAUGHTER! WITH YAKOV.

Drive a few miles down the highway and you’ll find Yakov’s two-thousand-seat Branson comedy theater. Drive a few miles in the other direction and you’ll find my hometown. Springfield is the third-largest city in Missouri, with a population that recently broke 160,000 and a shiny new Costco to prove it. It’s half the size of St. Louis, the next-largest city. You can drive from one end of town to the other in about twenty minutes if you’re really cooking, though no one ever is.

Like the Yakov billboard, Springfield is weird. In a good way, mostly. I’ve always rolled my eyes at the rhetoric surrounding other “weird” towns—places like Austin, Texas, or Portland, Oregon. Sure, your city might have a robust penny-farthing racing community, but Springfield has miles of underground limestone tunnels in which the United States government stores 1.4 billion pounds of cheese. Brag about your hometown heroes all you want; Springfield has the Baldknobbers, a group of fearsome masked vigilantes who stalked outlaws and corrupt government officials throughout the nineteenth century. Oh, your town square’s the site of an infamous Revolutionary War skirmish? Great. Mine’s the site of the nation’s first one-on-one quick-draw duel, which took place in 1865 between Wild Bill Hickok and Davis K. Tutt. Legend has it that the shoot-out began as an argument over a gambling debt, prompting Tutt to seize Wild Bill’s prized watch as collateral. Humiliated, Wild Bill challenged Tutt to a duel and killed him on the spot. After a three-day trial, a jury acquitted Wild Bill of manslaughter. They decided he had a pretty good reason for offing Tutt. A gentleman must accessorize.

Like I said, Springfield’s weird. I once heard someone describe the area as a “freaky vortex,” a bubbling cauldron that spits out the strangest artifacts—artifacts like Brad Pitt, who went to high school with my mother. He still comes home for the holidays, treating vigilant locals to selfies at an upscale pizza joint. When he’s not around, we settle for his brother, who is unironically named Doug Pitt.

And while the latest census data puts the median income around $38,000, it’s hard to classify Springfield as a blue-collar town. It’s got the quirk of a college town and the sprawl of a farming community; a Marxist bookstore, a firearms dealer, and a Route 66 museum are all located within a one-mile radius of the town square. There’s an emo ice cream parlor that serves charcoal-dyed soft-serve; there’s a weekly bluegrass hour on the local NPR station. Close your eyes and throw a Yakov flyer and you might hit a grizzled moonshiner, but you’re just as likely to hit the frontman of a moderately successful indie rock band.

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