Amish Are From Wisconsin, Cows Are From Space

With the ratings success of Amish In The City, I have a feeling that some exec over at UPN is pushing a fifty-fifty Model/Amish line-up for next season. They could do it too. UPN is the last born kid in a huge family, licking wallpaper glue off of the walls and eating lint off its stomach. Since all the attention is lavished on the older, useful kids, no one in the house can be bothered to care what the little guy's up to. And every once in awhile it pulls something worthwhile out of its belly button.

While I liked the show's debut, I thought the producers made a gigantic mistep by totally eradicating the steps taken by the Amish before touching down in L.A. The series is predicated on the notion that the Amish are bumbling, technologically retarded country lambs, and that the "City Kids" they're paired with will function like shimmery holograms from the future, their urban way of living so fantastical to the simple folk that they'll have to pinch themselves later and wonder if it "all was a dream."

But the thing is, it turns out that while the Amish girls are moved to tears over their first look at the ocean, they're seemingly unfazed by the donning of string bikinis with Brazilian ass cuts. And this is where the show begins to lose me. The show introduces us to the Amish kids with their dowdy gear and primitive wood toys (a moment of silent reverence for the Beano stick?), and then, within twenty-four hours of getting to the city house, Amish-Miriam has busted out the mini-shorts and dangly earrings. From, apparently, her own suitcase. What I found myself thinking was, "How the hell did Miriam know that chandelier earrings are last season and that vertical drops are "all the rage"?" If these kids have been living in relative cultural isolation without TV and Joan Rivers, how did they decide what form their look was going to take once they hit Rumspringa (the period during which an Amish teen/twenty-something breaks free of the simple life and, to varying extremes, parrrtays in order be able to return to the religion of his/her own freewill. I think Rumspringa's going to be the breakout word of the year, eventually being co-opted by horny, drunk college kids to replace the slightly less descriptive, "Spring Break")? This is the process that I want to know more about. How are the Amish kids exposed to popular fads prior to their first plane ride-- do they subscribe to Us Weekly? Observe the way the teens look in the non-Amish communities surrounding their own? Or did some UPN stylist just take the girls out to "Forever 21" pre-taping, and why isn't this part of the narrative? In other words, where was that first moment of Miriam and Ruth getting a load of their first ever Juicy terry-tube dress?

The boys' stylistic decisions seem to be more naive, to the point where the resident City-gay-kid (a club promoter, which lets me already know I hate him before I've even watched him for ten minutes) has to take them shopping for Diesel jeans. But, if the boys aren't as big of a fashion mystery as the girls, I'm again perplexed when it comes to their feelings about the readjustment of gender-decided duties. One of the Amish girls lets us know that in an Amish household, males are not responsible for cleaning up after themselves, so this is why Amish-Randy is such a nasty, dirty boy. We see a lot of footage of the City-Kids bitching about Randy's dirty dishes. We see a lot of Randy making the dirty-dirty. What we don't see is any exploration of how Randy feels about this forced ideological shift. If, in Amish society, there's a sort of cultural imperative to toss the bowl cleaning over to the girls, is there something beyond Randy's filth other than simple inexperience and laziness? I'm sitting there wondering how pride plays into it, and what it does to a person to, in the course of a day, find himself having to live outside of the rules he piously adhered to, to be forced to treat them as though they're arbitrary.

The show obviously prides itself on its totally predictable angle that the City Kids turn out to be more difficult to identify with because they're mostly asses, and the Amish turn out to possess the qualities that most of us at home like to think we have too, even if we don't. Me, I know I possess the childlike wonder, appreciation, and mania of Ruth. To meet this end, AITC has cast Ariel, vegan space cadet, the first vegan I've ever had the privilege of watching who's adopted the lifestyle not because she believes in the autonomy of animals, but because she seems to think they're out to get us. She announces early in the show that cow milk is really cow puss, which is a fact that I haven't looked into, but I'm pretty sure is false. I don't think any living thing produces puss in that massive a quantity. Later on she drops the bomb that cows are actually from outer space-- all you have to do is look into bovine eyes to know this.

The Amish girls laugh in Ariel's face, having spent years working peacefully with cows, but it's all good again when everyone hits the bikini shop later. Miriam performs the all-American girl dance, bridging the great Amish-City divide, when she complains that she looks fat and turns around to examine her butt in the mirror. Oh, the things that unite.

Comments

[Lain]

There's a well made documentary about Rumspringa called "Devil's Playground", if you were interested. Cinemax (yes, of the ever famed skinamax) made it a few years ago. AITS actually took some of the footage of the opening sequence from the documentary. Hope you enjoy.

Lain

[marc]

you didn't let anyone down with your take on AMISH IN THE CITY. thank you!

[gwenda]

My boyfriend grew up on a dairy farm (no really) and says milk is definitely not pus and that girl is the dumbest girl in the world. Once he took me driving around to see the Amish that lived all around where he grew up and we saw a 13 or 14 year old boy and girl rollerblading together up this little country road in their full-on Amish gear.

He also has this great story about when this guy in his brother's band in high school impregnated his second Amish girl and the Amish boys borrowed a car from the local Menonnites (picture Spike's car on Buffy) and chased his brother and another friend home. Then his dad shot up the Mennonite car, sending the Amish boys fleeing into the night. A week later, they came with their horses and pulled the car away. My favorite phrase in the story is "the CLOP-CLOPPING of the Amish."

[nick]

totaly Awmish! but cows are cool and awmish suk!

[Teresa Phillips]

I was browsing when I found your review. I haven't seen the show;however, several people have told me about it. I am an X-Amish author("Leaving Lancaster County") who knows that outside or 'English" influence is all too real for young girls. There are times way before the age of sixteen, when young girls sneak out and explore the English world. My bestfriend did this, and married an SDA missionary. As for me, when it is 100 degrees and you are in a field with airconditionaed tour buses rolling down the lane, you really yearn to explore the lifes of the outside world!

[John J. Keim]

Well I am 55 yrs, old now but, I grew up in the same communities that one the girls grew up in. I believe her name is Sarah. To be specific, that community spanned 2 counties. They were Ashland and Richland county. That's in Ohio. I grew up on the farm. I milked cows by hand. I walked away from that life at the age of 19. I have never looked back either.If Sarah did come from that area, then I'm sure she knows some of my family. Yes the Keim clan is pretty well entrenched in that community, and there is no getting around that. LOL!! If there is anyone that reads this letter that has the capability of reaching Sarah, I would be ever so grateful if you could give her my e-mail addr.. My addr. is keim80@yahoo.com I always tell my friends I was liberated in "1969", which was the yr, of Woodstock. How appropriate. LOL!!