Small town America

For the last week I've been living in small towns. Very small towns.

One of the towns was a back-woods oil mining town in Wyoming, about 150 miles outside of Laramie, WY. If you are not familiar, Laramie is well known for the 1998 hate crime murder of Matthew Shepard, who was brutally tortured and murdered because he was gay. Lets just say, I have new perspective on the play The Laramie Project, as I found our town in Wyoming to be particularly homophobic.

Every day I heard at least one homophobic/close minded comment coming from the locals. One of these was placed directly to my castmates, some others were merely overheard. This town is primarily high-school educated and oil industry based, but I still do not find an excuse for that kind of bigotry. I cannot even imagine what it would be like to grow up in that town and feel different. No wonder there are drug problems in small towns.

After leaving that small town, we stopped in SE Colorado for the night. The only things in that town was our Holiday Inn, an RV park, and a Wendy's.

Tonight back in New Mexico. Went driving around for 35 minutes looking for an authentic New Mexican meal, but apparently at 6:30pm on a Sunday night, everything is closed except for Applebees. I have now eaten Applebees 3 times this week.

Hey - I ate at Perkins 4 times last week. I haven't beaten that record yet.