Toto, I Don't Think We're in Chicago Anymore

It's 2006 and I have a business meeting in Tunica, Mississippi. Yes, you read it right. Tunica, Mississippi. My company is in a buying group and most of the companies in this group are in the South so they like to make our annual buying group meeting somewhere close to most of the people attending. Now, I have to first tell you that the most of the people attending this meeting in my buying group are some of the nicest people I've ever met so as much as I don't want to disparage the South, this one is just way too good not to tell about. So I land at the Memphis airport and get on a shuttle bus for about a 45 minute  ride to the hotel where our meeting is at. Well, it kind of looks like farmland and things I've seen before(with the exception that it doesn't look like there is a building in town that was constructed after 1955) until we get to about 10 minutes from the hotel. At that point, I look out the window and see miles and miles of cotton fields. Well, this Northerner has never seen a cotton field before. The 9 other people in the shuttle bus didn't seem fazed at all. Well, being the smart ass I am, I say "Geez, the only thing missing are the slaves." You could hear a pin drop in the bus. OK, so I got a tough crowd. No problem. Keep quiet until I get to the hotel. (SIDENOTE: It's a good thing I wasn't driving because my fear would be that I would get pulled over and the Tunica Policeman would look at my license and say "FRIEDMAN? Is that Jewish? Boy,I was going to write you a ticket but I think we're going to have a trial."). So we get to the hotel which is this behemoth structure of a hotel/casino/convention center. I'm assuming it's the only building in Tunica that has more than 2 bathrooms that are inside the building. I walk in to the registration counter and it smells funny in the hotel. It smells like smoke. Cigarette smoke and a lot of it. You know how Las Vegas pumps oxygen into the casinos to keep people up to gamble? Well, I think this hotel was pumping cigarette smoke into the casino! I'm not kidding! I say to myself "I only have to be here 3 days then I go home where I'm in the correct decade." Our meetings are going fine and we break for lunch. The lunch the hotel had set up for us was a buffet of Southern specialties. I'm always open to trying new foods and I was fortunate to find out the 5 Food Groups that are in a normal diet for someone in the South:

1) Fried
2) Greasy
3) Tobacco
4) Blackened/Mashed (anyway to mutilate perfectly good food)
5) Fried- They really like Fried Food!

Also, everyone just got the biggest kick out of my Chicago accent. I swear the next time I heard "Hey, y'all from New York?" I was going to answer "Hey,y'all from the set of Hee Haw?"

I survived the the rest of the trip without having the intelligence sucked out of me, being hogtied or getting engaged to someone in my immediate family. All joking aside, the people of Tunica, Mississippi were really nice folks and treated this Northerner well but I can honestly say I don't think I will be visiting Tunica anytime soon.