You Can Always Come Homo

I believe it's always important for successful people to remember where they came from. My goal as a celebrity is to always stay true to my roots. That's why I felt it was important to make a pit stop to my childhood home before moving on to take over Chicago.

While I was waiting for my flight home from NYC trying not to sob in front of strangers, I decided to do some research on which of my blast-from-the-past friends would be around good ol' Frankenmuth. I remembered a notable evening from last summer (the summer when I almost died) when I got completely hammered with my good friends Mole and Matt. Lucky for me, they were both coincidentally in town for the same Wednesday evening of Bavarian boredom.

We planned to meet at Tiffany's.

SIDE NOTE: in my town, we grew up thinking that song about breakfast at Tiffany's was in fact a song about having breakfast at the hole in the wall restaurant in the middle of our town. You see, we were all very confused because Tiffany's of Frankenmuth does not actually serve breakfast...

As I walked into a cloud of nostalgia, I noticed my two friends had become four. Here was the breakdown.

Mole: we'd been friends since forever. She has gifted me approximately 5 stuffed animals for various birthdays. They're all still on my bed. I still consider her to be 4'11" and a virgin, but she's really a 5'6" hooch (at least in my story).

Matt: we were birthday party friends in middle school. He's a ginger. He lost a lot of weight sometime in high school and became rather athletic and studly. Cutting humor and quick witted. Great talks. My kind of people.

Jenny: I just call her the heiress. She's beautiful and everything you want to be. Prom queen. So of course she's dating...

Zach: The athlete that was also the nice guy. We were best friends in kindergarten. He had a rat-tail then and is therefore the definition of "grew up".

So there we all were throwing back beers as I'm trying to remind myself of where I came from.


and boy oh boy was I reminded where I came from.

You know that moment when you're sitting in a bar just drinkin a beer and suddenly you hear someone at the bar yell "faggot" as if he'd just said "hello".

Now, calm down! Of course he didn't shout the term at me or else chairs would have been flying and authorities (more authoritative than myself) would have been called. But it was that interesting moment when my table of friends fell silent as we all decided how best to navigate the outburst when I thought

"How the HELL did I grow up here and decide to pursue musical theatre?"

We remedied the situation by ordering more $2 drinks...$2 drinks...no wonder these small town people become alcoholics. I was in heaven.

We decided to bar hop to the Main Street Tavern. Those of you from the larger city spectrum can probably imagine exactly the type of bar this is. There's a boy who looks 17 serving drinks, a portly hammered woman in a dirdl, a few 25 year olds who just finished their shifts at various hotels, and a man with a very odd haircut playing the piano and belting out every Billy Joel song he knows.

and he was good. He was REAL good.

But you know what readers? These people were genuinely happy. I had no clue what the hell they had to do Thursday morning, but here they were drinking themselves blind on a Wednesday night and they were thrilled to be doing it...and I was right there with them singing...

but singing in key.

So that's where I'm from America. I'm from a small town full of Wednesday drinking, dirndl wearing, faggot haters.

and I'm proud of it.

Get me the hell out,

TJB: Making It