My little town
The city where I was born has produced something truly extraordinary: The Grand Rapids LipDub Video, a ten-minute, single-shot video that travels through downtown as a whole bunch of people take turns lip-synching (and acting out lines from) Don McLean’s “American Pie.” It’s stunningly well-choreographed and executed. And since it was posted on YouTube a couple of weeks ago, it’s been viewed more than two million times.
The project was meant as a response to a top-ten listicle of “America’s Dying Cities” posted on Newsweek.com; Grand Rapids was #10. Considering that any good list of “America’s Dying Publications” would include Newsweek itself, the irony is as thick as frozen molasses.
Newsweek’s editors later disavowed the list, saying that it appeared on their website as part of a “content-sharing” arrangement with other websites. Way to abdicate your editorial responsibility.
This video made me proud and happy, and more than a little bit surprised. I didn’t think they had it in them. In my mind, Grand Rapids was a stuffy, conservative, whitebread place; the buckle of the West Michigan Bible Belt, full of devout, humorless Calvinists.
A little background. I was born in Grand Rapids. My family lived there until 1965, when we moved to the suburbs of Detroit. I was 11 at the time.
Not long after we left town, KMart moved in and sparked a controversy over its plan to open on Sunday, which no sizable retailer had ever dared to do. Horrors! One of the leaders of the anti-KMart movement was the pastor of my family’s church in Grand Rapids.
It’s certainly true that Grand Rapids has more than its share of humorless Calvinists. But my childhood experience was extremely narrow. I lived about two blocks away from my school. The church was just down the block. My friends all lived nearby. In fact, our neighborhood was so full of children that we filled out our own Little League team. (The team was really good; I sucked.)
My family didn’t go out much. I was hardly aware of the city’s pockets of poverty, or its significant population of blacks and Hispanics. We were insular, and I was insulated.
Jump ahead three decades. For most of the 1990s, I was an air personality at Michigan Radio, a public radio service with stations in Ann Arbor, Flint, and Grand Rapids. On several occasions, I covered stories in Grand Rapids. It was only then that I got a taste of the city’s diversity and complexity. I saw poverty; I saw great creativity. There was a substantial gay community near the heart of the city. There were plenty of neat stores and restaurants.
Still, I only got a small sample. It didn’t really prepare me for the experience of seeing my hometown do something truly epic. The Grand Rapids LipDub Video certainly qualifies.
And after it rains
There’s a rainbow
And all of the colors are black.
It’s not that the colors aren’t there
It’s just imagination they lack.
…Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town.
— Paul Simon
For most of my adult life, I would have gleefully applied these lyrics to the Grand Rapids I thought I knew. Now? Not so much.
The lack of color or imagination was as much mine as my hometown’s. I don’t really blame myself; in my childhood, I didn’t experience much of the place. And I think it’s not uncommon for a child — at least, for a child with conscientious parents who are good providers — to see only a small slice of the world. But my lingering disregard for Grand Rapids was built on a faulty foundation. And I couldn’t be happier for my hometown to prove me wrong.
I shouldn’t be surprised, really. Over the last ten years, I’ve explored the stories and experiences of people from all walks of life, from communities large and small. One of the chief lessons I’ve learned is that anywhere you look, you will find interesting people doing interesting things. Grand Rapids is a big, bustling, complicated place.
And to be fair to myself, it’s gotten bigger, more diverse, and much more open since I left more than 45 years ago. Nobody’s leading a charge to reinstate Sunday closings, for sure.
We should bear this in mind when we dismiss a community, a city, or an entire region by invoking Paul Simon’s words. Or Gertrude Stein’s remark about her hometown of Oakland, California: “There is no there there.”
A remark that is almost universally misapplied. It’s taken as a rebuke of a community without heart or soul. But she was writing about a return visit after a three-decade absence, when she found that her house and the familiar landmarks of her neighborhood had passed into history. It was meant as a personal observation: for her, specifically, “there” was gone.
In fact, there is a “there” everywhere. There are people living, striving, and creating. Doing good and doing evil. Triumphing, failing, surviving, overcoming. There is texture, depth, and complexity. There are stories worth telling, and people trying to tell them.
I know this is true. But somehow, I have to keep learning it over and over again. This time, I learned it about my own birthplace by, of all things, watching a YouTube video.
