United States Of Tara, Kansas, And Missouri

Diablo Cody’s new-ish comedy about multiple personality disorder, starring Toni Collette, takes place in Overland Park, Kansas. I grew up in a house in Prairie Village, the city adjacent to Overland Park, and I spent a lot of time in Overland Park. Overland Park and Prairie Village are both part of Johnson County. And if you’re from Kansas, then “Johnson County” is the label that you’d apply to me most readily.

So far (we’re near the end of the first season), The United States Of Tara has depicted Johnson County with startling accuracy. Offhand references to landmarks and neighboring areas are all accurate. The characters’ living situations match their socioeconomic status in a distinctly midwestern way. One character, who is the 20-something manager of a stand-in for TGI Friday’s, shares a modest but comfortable house with a friend, in a nice part of town. Tara’s family of four has a nice two-story house and a “shed,” actually a comfy unconnected building in the back yard where Tara’s alternate persona T creates and stores her artwork. (What exactly Tara’s husband does is, I think, still a mystery. But that, too, is midwestern. Your occupation doesn’t define you as much there as it does in a big city… at least in New York.)

Johnson County is, in many ways, the perfect place to set a story about someone with a confused sense of identity:

• JC is a relatively liberal area, in a region that is heavily conservative.
• JC is a relatively wealthy area, in a region that is relatively poor.
• For someone who lives in JC, it’s not quite accurate to say that you are “from Kansas City,” although that’s what all of us do when we leave the region.
• As soon as you say that you’re “from Kansas City” to someone from outside the region, you open yourself up to the well-meant but torturous question: “Are you from Kansas City, Kansas, or Kanasas City, Missiouri?”

To a kid from the suburbs, the most technically accurate answer is “neither.” I usually say that the towns of Johnson County are suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri, but that those suburbs happen to be on the Kansas side of the border. Even this admittedly confusing answer is an oversimplification. There is a Kansas City, Kansas, and a Kansas City, Missouri. But they and their satellites are all part of a vast, non-political yet very real entity known as “Greater Kansas City.”

It’s not uncommon for kids from JC to move to big cities. And when that happens, it’s not uncomon for those JC kids to discover to their horror that Kansas is considered by some to be in the South.

It’s not in the South. I won’t even go into that here. It’s fodder for another post.

The point is that to grow up in Kansas City – suburban Kansas City, that is – is to grow up with the appreciation of official borders that mean almost nothing, and the appreciation of imaginary borders that mean a great deal more. And hearing someone try to explain it in a way that makes sense outside the midwest is a lot like hearing Tara explain herself from inside one of her multiple personalities. Which is to say, her answer may be confusing, but it’s accurate in a way that no other answer possibly could be.

tower image by flyfshrmn98. It’s a building in “The Plaza,” which is one of the commercial districts on the outskirts of downtown KCMO.

multiple girl image by gotplaid?

Here’s the page for the Facebook group, Bitch, Please. I’m From Johnson County.