The Maine Public Broadcasting Network held its spring fundraiser yesterday.
MPBN's ability to raise $374,000 in one day reminded me how much better Maine does public broadcasting than that little corner of Pennsylvania whence Himself hails and where we lived for a number of years.
And that got me thinking about other things that I prefer about Maine.
I don't mean to diss on that corner of Pennsylvania. It has lots of stuff going for it: Hunter's wings, Yuengling lager, rolling hills, and the type of Italian food you only get where a third of the population has a last name ending in a vowel. (And hey, it's been quite a few years since the Youngstown organized crime spat spilled over the border and a box truck exploded in that restaurant parking lot, so it's all about the food now, right guys?) People who live there love it. My brother-in-law would no sooner leave than he would light his hair on fire. Hell, we can't even get him to visit.
But I'm a Maine girl. Not to say that Maine doesn't have issues, but I say, perhaps not objectively, that certain things here are superior to Pennsylvania.
Here are my top eight:
1. Public radio. Which inspired this post. It's tough for a regional station in farm and gun country to scrape together enough of the target demographic to make a go; the Erie station would routinely claw its way toward a $75,000 goal over the course of ten days of increasingly strident and panicked pleading. By comparison, MPBN is a well-oiled statewide machine with a huge audience base. They rake in a few thousand pledges in one day and call it done for half a year. Plus the programming is better.
2. The New York Times. Here, one can walk into any grocery or convenience store any day of the week and get one. In Meadville there were only a handful of places that got in half a dozen copies on Sundays and if you weren't there by ten a.m. you were SOL.
3. Alcohol sales. There, one has to go to a drive-through distributor for beer and wine coolers, or to a state store for wine and hard liquor. Here, one can walk into any grocery or convenience store any day of the week and get whatever spirits one's heart desires. Exception: Sundays before 9 a.m., our nod to the good old blue laws. Whatevs. If you're doing your grocery shopping early on Sunday, just grab a New York Times and relax until the cashier can ring your vodka through.
4. Paper birches and balsam trees.
5. Less snow.
6. Maine's long and dignified political tradition. Paul LePage (the monomaniacal blowhard who currently occupies the governor's mansion after a fluke of an election resulted in a 38% plurality) aside. Us: Margaret Chase Smith, Ed Muskie, Olympia Snowe, Nelson A. Rockefeller. Them: Tom Ridge. And Rick Santorum. And HE'S positively mainstream compared to Teresa Forcier and her pistol-packing-momma endorsement of Mark from Michigan. Then there was R. Bud Dwyer - good Lord. And don't forget the 1995 Washington Post cover story which quoted some of our local business leaders (anonymously, but everyone knew who they were) who thought the rationale behind the Oklahoma City bombing was sound. We just don't have that shit here. Thank God.
7. Halloween. Seriously. For starters, in Maine we hold it on October 31 instead of the second Friday after the second full moon after the autumnal equinox or however it's calculated down there so you have to look in the paper every year to find out when to go trick-or-treating. Plus, up here we're pretty light on Mennonites. A plague of locusts has nothing on a busload of Anabaptist youths delivered to a neighborhood where people are giving out free candy.
8. Lobster. Did you know this is the only state in the union which doesn't have a Red Lobster franchise?
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