CSotD: Leave the gun. Take the maple creme.
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Mamet has become a maple producer in this week's Deflocked.
Jeff Corriveau grew up in maple syrup country and, as someone who did the same and has lived in some other maple-producing areas since, I can see hints of his knowing what he's actually joking about in this story arc.
Which may not seem like much, but those of us who grew up in towns without shopping centers — or even stop lights — get enough views of ourselves in the funhouse mirror of imaginative city boys from places like Atlanta or Memphis. It's refreshing to see humor based in some small measure on reality.
The thing is, good humor can be accessible to the general public without resorting to stereotypes, and it's better and funnier, even if you don't catch the winks directed at the insiders. Woody Guthrie or Will Rogers specialized in playing the hick, but their personae have become immortal because they were built from experience.
It's related — on a deeper level — to Lucille Ball's insistence that, before she spoof a job on a candy-factory assembly line or in a pizzeria, she first had to learn how to really work that line or throw a crust.
The notion of a "maple cartel" is funny to start with, but twice (or maybe thrice) as funny when you know some maple producers. Maple producers are about as down-home and level-headed as anyone you'll ever meet.
And you will meet them. If you're really country, you have a personal relationship with your maple syrup source just like you do with your barber or the postmaster.
When my older brother was in high school, he had a friend whose family ran a sugar bush and he'd go up there and put in a day — or maybe it was a weekend — hauling buckets (this was before plastic tubing took over that task) and doing whatever else Leon was doing. At the end of his stint, he'd come home with a gallon of the good stuff.
The last two years, I've gotten my syrup from a teacher, after an annual presentation in her classroom and weeks of on-line interaction with her students.
But even without those work-for-trade relationships, you don't just go into a store and buy maple syrup. You go up to the sugar shack and you ask how it's going this year, you talk about the weather and if they've gotten the cold nights and warm days they need, how the trees wintered over and how their kids have grown. You try a sample straight from the boiler. You look over the candy from the new molds, and take home of few of those, too. If they make it home.
Where I used to buy my syrup in West Chazy, NY, the fellow was an officer in the cartel — I mean, the producers association — and so I knew him because, when there was a maple story to be written about, he was the guy I'd go interview.
But I also knew that his daughter was the Maple Princess one year (which has a lot more to do with marketing than tiaras), and I've gone there enough over the years that I saw his son Michael go from the cute little tyke with his own little boiler in the corner to a knowledgeable young man poised to take over when the time comes, and with a son who makes me hope he kept that little boiler around.
My colleague on the business page would always laugh that the apple farmers in the region never had a good harvest. The late frost had killed the blossoms, or there was too much water, or not enough rain or a hail storm had caused scabs or the apples were dropping too fast — the trees would be bulging and sagging with bright, crisp apples and they'd talk as if we were standing in a desert of bare sticks.
By contrast, you could go up to the sugar bush after the 1998 Ice Storm had smashed a third of the trees and torn down all the tubing, and Earl would tell you quite frankly how bad the damage was for himself and for the other producers in the area, but then he'd kind of look off into the distance and shrug it off.
This is how farming is. This is how farming has always been.
And, each year, if there wasn't a lot of syrup, he'd tell you how good the best of it was. If the best of it was kind of mediocre, he'd let you know how many gallons they'd boiled. But he'd never tell you he had a bad year because, well, I honestly don't think that, in his mind, he ever did have a bad year.
You won't find any of this in the "Mamet the Maple Mogul" story arc at Deflocked.
But it's there. Even if Jeff doesn't know it's there. Even if it just snuck in when he wasn't paying attention.
That's how the best humor works.
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