By emily

GRADE: F

Most accents are so excellent. For example, Southern Belle. Also, British. Every time I speak to a British person on the phone I immediately want to give her everything she asks for (“Excuse me, please, I simply wondered if I might have a couple of your internal organs?” ) just because she sounds so smart and cultured and polite. Other good accents: Russian, French, Spanish, Irish, Scottish . . . all European accents, basically, even German. I also like Sassy Carribean Lady, Minnesota, New England, Japanese . . . the list goes on and on. But it does not include: Long Island accent.

Here is an example: say you are lying on the beach, trying to enjoy one of the most beautiful summer days ever. Twenty feet away from you there is this guy. You can tell he is a guy because EVERY DETAIL of his . . . maleness . . . is disclosed by his belted (BELTED!) Pucci-print speedo. He is shouting into his cel phone. Even though you can hear every word clearly, as if he was speaking directly into your ear, it is still hard to tell exactly what he is talking about because of his Long Island accent. Something about the stock market, or about reading an MRI. Is this man a doctor? You shudder, imagining yourself paper-robed and vulnerable in the office of this shrieking moron. Then he reaches the crescendo of his rant:

“I mean, this place could be the next Fiah Island if it werant foah the shitty suhvice! I can’t get a cocktail on this beach! I have to bring my own cocktails in a thuhmos! They have just terrible suhvice. And you know me . . . I am a stickla for suhvice.”

It is all you can do to keep yourself from sprinting across the sand and strangling this man with his own banana-slingshot. But in your heart you know that this would be futile. He is like a roach, or a poisonous mushroom: if you destroy him, twelve other speedo-wearing, saddle-leather tanned Doctors (maybe he is a gynecologist! Aiee!) will just spring up in his place, because this is Long Island.

And Long Island has much more to offer us, besides assholes and its signature Iced Tea beverage. My very own grandparents happen to live in Long Island, in fact. I love them dearly, in spite of the fact that the only conversational topics they enjoy are:
1. Golf
2. How is Business
3. Art films, especially the ones they show at the Malvern theater which is a godsend because we don’t get into the city very often
4. Cats
5. How skinny your father was as a child
6. Find yourself a rich man and marry him

Ah, yes. Long Island. Home of the original planned suburb development, Levittown.

Home to a ton of nose-jobbed wenchies in Elsa Perretti ‘heart’ necklaces and those stupid ponchos, who come to NYU to major in Puking In A Trash Can.

Long Island. Home of Northern State.

I don’t think any place has ever deserved an F more.