we sure wish you were moving home

B- has lived in New York for six years. She’s from T-, Texas—“population 2,000” [a generous overestimation]—a predominately Lutheran town forty miles northeast of Austin. Seven generations ago, her mother’s ancestors emigrated from Germany to Galveston. They traveled inland and established a farming community on the Texas plains. “It’s very rare for anyone to leave,” said B-. “I’m an anomaly. And I didn’t even leave the state until I was eighteen!”

B- has light brown hair, green eyes and self-described “big boobs and linebacker shoulders.” Up until last week, she worked in a millinery shop in midtown, making hats for Broadway shows—Wicked, The Little Mermaid, Legally Blonde. “I get to make little works of art every day,” she said. But the aftershocks of the stagehands’ strike and the economic crisis were halting orders and shuttering suppliers. “The first thing that goes in the costume is the hat,” she said. B- studied technical theater at Southwestern, a university 30 miles from Thorndale, and went on for her master’s at UT—it’s one of the country’s top technical theater schools. New York was the next step. “It was the thing to do. It’s the top for the field.”

B- will spend the summer working in a seasonal theater up in Massachusetts, but she was scrambling to put together a portfolio for job applications. She’s not sure what she’ll find when she returns to the city in the fall. “I just can’t afford to live here anymore,” she said. Many of her friends have moved away, and she’s tired of living in a cramped apartment. She’s ready to settle down. “I’m in my early thirties, and I have a roommate. I really don’t want to have a roommate unless I’m sleeping with them.”



Which isn’t really happening in the city. “It’s extremely hard to date here, and I think I figured out why,” she said. “The ratio is skewed between straight women and straight men. There’s fewer straight men, and the guys know this. We have very slim pickings.” She gave me a pitying, no-bull glance. “My friends in Texas ask, ‘Is your life like “Sex in the City?”’ I hate ‘Sex in the City’ because of the stereotypes it has given single women in New York. ‘No!’ I tell them. No one I know is like that.”

She hopes to move back to Texas, or at least somewhere nearby. Most of her family is still in T--; they get together at her grandma’s every Sunday evening. “We sure wish you were moving home,” her family tells her every time they talk. “There’s a very deep seeded tradition in my family that I’m very much going against,” she said. Her mother is scheduled to have heart surgery next month, but B- can’t afford the time or the ticket. “My family doesn’t really know how to deal with having a child who lives so far away,” she said.

B- wants to teach technical theater at the college level, but the positions are few. She’s had one interview in Texas, but she didn’t mention it to her family. “I didn’t even tell them I was in the state,” she said. “Because the second it comes out of my mouth, they’ll have me packed and moved and my dad will have bought me a car. They’ll call the newspaper and publish an announcement.”

She laughed.

“God forbid I marry anyone who’s not from Texas.”