Branson, MO - An East Coast Perspective

The wise sage and American philosopher Homer Simpson once declared that Branson, Missouri is what Las Vegas would be like if it was run by Ned Flanders. The truth of that statement cannot be understated.

I had been to Branson before and as this was my third trip out, I knew that this time I was prepared…or so I thought. It seems, however, that an east coast boy such as myself can never be fully prepared for Branson. It is now apparent that I will always find things that surprise, and quite frankly scare, me.

An example, perhaps?

Box cutters Optional…

On Saturday we braved the one hundred plus degree Missouri heat and went with The Wife’s family to an amusement park called Silver Dollar City. I grew up on the east coast going to amusement parks like Hershey Park, Six Flags, Dorney Park, and King’s Dominion. Silver Dollar City is quite similar to these parks…if they were suddenly taken over and run one day by the cast of the Beverley Hillbillies. Banjo music and steel guitars blare out of the fake rocks that are actually speakers placed strategically around the grounds. Character actors amble about the park dressed in nineteenth century gold digger garb. Succotash is cooked in fifty foot wide frying pans and sold alongside common amusement park fair such as hamburgers and hot dogs.

In spite of the banjos (and the Succotash), Silver Dollar City is a great place to take the family. The park workers are a thousand times nicer then amusement park workers on the east coast, most of whom glare at you as you walk around the park, as if they resent the fact that you are breathing and, on top of that, have the gall to take your family out for a day of fun in their park and force them to deal with you. The rides are decent and the food is pretty good. The thing that surprised me most about Silver Dollar City is that we were not searched upon entering. People carrying large bags, large enough to carry caches of automatic weapons and improvised explosives, were pushed right through the gates. No bag searches, no pat downs. 

As The Wife, The Peanut, my mother-in-law, and I were standing in a fairly long and sweaty line to ride the water flume, I saw something I had never seen before in an amusement park.

There was a family of four in front of us, mom, dad, sister, brother. They were all wearing the same color shirts bearing the logo of their family reunion. The father, a large beefy guy with hairy arms and thick side burns that stopped just short of his long goatee, was complaining to his wife about the fact that his t-shirt wasn’t sleeveless and it was “bothering the bejesus” out of him. She reached into the large pocket of his massive cargo shorts and pulled out a gleaming silver object. With a Wolverine like snikt she thumbed open a five inch box cutter and began performing sleeve removal surgery right there in the line. Out in the open, making no attempt at stealth, she wielded an instrument that would have gotten her detained at some amusement parks I have been to and flat out arrested in others. She sliced off the left sleeve, revealing a hairy shoulder, then switched and quickly dispatched the right. When she was finished she picked up the amputated sleeves, sheathed the blade on the box cutter, and returned them to her husband’s shorts. As she was turning around after stowing her husband’s sharp edged weapon she caught my eye. She must have read the confused look in my eye (which, given the agape nature of my lower jaw, was not too difficult to ascertain).

“Well,” she said with a grin, “ya never know, do ya?”

“Yes’um,” I returned with a tip of my cap, not wanting to antagonize her or her husband, whose cold steel eyes took me in from underneath the frayed brim of his camouflaged baseball hat.

And the banjos played on...

When we go back to Branson in two years I have to take a video camera. People here on the east coast just don't believe me.