Return to Sender: With Love to Our Pals at Austinist

Now, don’t go and start attacking us. We love Philadelphia. And we’re not telling you to run out, buy a gun, put on a ten-gallon hat, and change your voter registration. We’re just saying that there’s something to be said for the way they do things back home. Things like opening doors. We’ll never forget the time, back during our first month living in Philly, when we were going to a restaurant with a couple of new (male) friends. We arrived at the door a few steps before them and then took a few steps back. “What are you doing?” one of them asked. “Waiting for you boys to open the door,” we replied. We don’t think we could have startled them more – apparently gentlemen around here aren’t used to opening doors for ladies. We’re not setting the women’s movement back by expecting this. In fact, the truth of the matter is that your average woman has less upper body strength than your average man, and this city’s got a lot of heavy doors in it that can likely be more readily opened by a person possessing both X and Y chromosomes. Back home, we’ve actually offended male friends by opening doors before they got to them. One friend refused to go on a second date with a girl because she wouldn’t let him open doors for her (she wasn’t from Texas).

The door thing isn’t just a courtesy for men, though. Everyone should really be better about holding doors open for whoever else needs to walk through it. We can’t tell you how many times we’ve walked into a bookstore or a coffee shop, not three feet behind the person going in before us, and had doors slam in our faces. If you’re walking into a building, and there might be a person walking in behind you, you should at least make an attempt at holding the door open. Even if you’re in a hurry, you’re really not losing that much time. And if you’re, say, going into a building while someone is exiting through the same door, you should hold the door then, too. If the door swings toward you, take a step backward (don’t make the person duck under your arm, which we’ve had to do plenty of times). If it swings away from you, and the other person isn’t near enough to hold the door for you, walk through the door and hold it on the other side (as opposed to stretching your entire body to hold the door, therefore effectively blocking it). This may sound silly, but think of it this way: if you allow a door to slam in the other person’s face, you might end up paying for their rhinoplasty later.

Last week, we went dancing at The Texas Hall of Fame in College Station, Texas (we did a lot of traveling in the Lone Star State). Now, we’re by no means huge country music fans, but we have an affinity for dancing the two-step if the mood and the partner is right. We aren’t telling you to learn to two-step, though (although learning any kind of partner dance would earn you points in our book); but we’d like to emphasize that, at a club, there is a right way and a wrong way (the Texas and Philly ways, respectively) to ask a person to dance. The right way is to walk up to your potential partner (male or female – after all, we’re progressives here), and say, simply, “Would you like to dance?” Then, once you start dancing, you let your partner determine what he or she is comfortable with doing on the dance floor with you. To illustrate the wrong way, we’d like to tell you about this guy we met at The 700 Club. This guy walked up to where we were dancing with our friends, stood between us and our friends, thereby isolating us from them and (because he was at least a foot taller than us) keeping them from seeing our well-rehearsed distress signs, and proceeded to dance with us in a way that made us think “not on the first date, buddy” before attempting (halfway through the song) to get us to kiss him. See what we’re getting at? We were neither asked to dance nor comfortable with what was happening on the dance floor. Point, Texas.

But we’re not going to harp on why Texans seem to have better manners (because we’re not Amy Vanderbilt, and because we don’t want to get flamed too badly for this column). Instead, we’d now like to tell y’all about, well, the word “y’all.” First of all, the spelling is “y’all,” not “ya’ll.” Remember back in second grade when you learned about contractions? “Y’all” is a combination of the words “you” and “all;” it is a legitimate contraction that even appears in the Oxford English Dictionary. “Ya’ll” (the spelling we often see from non-Texans) would naturally be a combination of the words “ya” (which isn’t a real word anyway) and “will.” The word we think you’re actually looking for here is “you’ll.” Texans find “y’all” to be a very versatile word, and we don’t appreciate being made fun of for using it. In all fairness, we do admit to using the phrase “all y’all” a lot, and we know that it’s not grammatically correct – but a good Texan knows that “y’all” can be singular or plural, and so we say “all y’all” for clarity. Philadelphians seem to have this word that we’d previously associated only with cheesy comedies about gangsters: “youse.” This word doesn’t make any sense to us, because “you” is already its own plural.

The one thing that we miss the most about Texas (or at least the border region where we originally hail from) is the Mexican food. We’d love to provide you with recipes, but most of the ingredients we use are pretty hard to find in these parts. We’d at least like to enlighten you: Qdoba is not real Mexican food. We like it fine, but calling it a Mexican restaurant (which the University City District actually does, is fallacious. The easiest way to tell? Ask the Qdoba employees how to pronounce “pico de gallo.” We’ve been to restaurants in Philadelphia where we were playfully chided (by the wait staff) for not properly pronouncing French or Italian menu items, and we feel it’s only fair that Spanish (the second most widely spoken language in the world) should be pronounced at least somewhat well too. Someday, we’re going to open a Mexican restaurant that not only serves authentic Mexican food, but which has menus with pronunciation guides. For the staff. (Pronouncing the “l”s in “pico de gallo” will be a fireable offense.)

We’d like to leave you with this: cowboy hats are not fashion accessories. Well, we mean, they are now, because someone decided that western wear would be the new black, but cowboy hats have been around for practical purposes since about 1865. (Interestingly enough, John B. Stetson, the inventor of the cowboy hat, was the son of a Philadelphia hat maker.) Real cowboy hats keep your head warm and dry during the colder months and protect your head from the sun in summer. They can be used to fan a fire or urge on a reluctant horse. The sweatbands keep your hat on you and your sweat from blinding you when you’re riding at full speed. The idea that they’re now the trendiest items at Urban Outfitters is kind of laughable. In straw, no less.

There is, of course, plenty Texans can learn from Philadelphians. Like the proper way to make a cheesesteak, the joys of “wooder” ice, and the fact that the “Rocky Run” up the PMA stairs isn’t nearly as easy as Sylvester Stallone makes it look. In a perfect world, the city we love and the state that we love would morph together and become Philatexas (we know, “Texadelphia” sounds better – but the name is already used by a fast food chain in Texas and Oklahoma). If we were writing for Austinist, we’d probably talk about all the things Texans can learn from Philadelphia. But we’re not. And for now, we can only educate one city at a time.

Beginning next week, “Return to Sender” will appear on Thursdays. Different bat time, same bat channel…