(a thought or two)
Start looking for the things around us that, every day, tell us exactly what our social reality is and you'll find them all, to their extreme, in New Jersey. More roads, more sprawl, more box stores, more money, more people. It might be ugly, one might want to ignore it, but the social landscape of Jersey is the social landscape of 21st Century America. It's the difference between cultured and culture. A night at the theater, shopping at Tiffany's, lunch at the French Laundry is cultured; the Paramus Twelveplex, Home Depot, a day at Great Adventure with ice cream waffles at Yum-Yum Palace is culture - like it or not.
Jersey's a special place so the people who live here are special too. It's just hard to see at first. Why? Because like so many other things here, we have more of our most obvious trait. Ordinariness. Ordinariness is so pervasive in the sprawling, disconnected suburbs of the Garden State that we've raised it to an almost transcendent level. And this is reflected in the citizenry. We're special because we think we're not. Our lack of self-consciousness, our inherent sense of inferiority, is what allows us to know to the depths of our souls what life is all about - the struggle to overcome pretty much everything.
But the appearance of Jersey Ordinary is deceiving. Like the world's best chocolate shop (shoppe!) hidden in that strip mall you've passed by for 20 years, the best of everything in NJ is hidden in plain view. And so it is with Jersey Girls. They come from this special place so they are, therefore, special. They walk through the ordinary streets of NJ, hidden everywhere in plain sight, holding in their individual presences all that is uncommon in common life here.
Writing about the creation of aesthetic Ideals, the art historian Kenneth Clark noted that in the Greek countryside today, one could still easily find the women whose body-type formed the basis for the female sculptures of Classical Greece. The Greeks invented ideals, we deconstruct them. But after 150 years of disfiguring the figure in art, who's to say Jersey Girls - with their street-smarts and sarcasm, their fierceness and vulnerabilities, their lack of pretension (or the unbridled display of it) and above all their tough loyalty - who's to say they won't be the beginning of a new ideal? Yes, it's true all women might have these traits. It's just that here in NJ, like so much of everything else, Jersey Girls take these characteristics to a higher level - maybe even a transcendent place. All one has to do is look.
Tom Birkner
Raritan Valley Line, 2008