Here's the deal, the premise of UPN's reality series Amish in the City is that they're taking five sheltered Amish young adults from the middle of nowhere in the midwest and sticking them in a house with hip young "city dwellers," and watching them react to their new and very different surroundings. Sounds all well and good, but since when was Sarasota, Florida part of the rural midwest?
Among the Amish cast members is 24 year old Randy Stoll, who is described in his UPN bio as "one of seven children raised on an 80-acre corn farm in Indiana," which is true, but what they don't tell you in his bio is that the guy's from Sarasota now, and doesn't appear to be living a particularly traditional Amish lifestyle, if he's got friends like the one quoted in the Herald Tribune article who is only interested in finding out from him "Who hooked up with who?" Yeah, LA is really going to be a culture shock moment for him.
When two of the five Amish cast members have lived in Sarasota (Miriam reportedly spent about a year living in Sarasota), it's not exactly a representative sample of small town Amish youth. We're talking about people who are from an international tourism destination, not some sleepy little town that nobody's heard of in the middle of Indiana or something. I mean, people like Dick Vitale call the Sarasota/Bradenton area home, as does recent Wimbledon champ Maria Sharapova, and a bunch of other pro athletes have homes here, so despite the fact that I tend to complain about it being not a particularly interesting place to live, it really is a fairly happening place, and certainly not an area that is sheltered from the outside world.
Posted by kathryn at Julio 28, 2004 11:40 PM | TrackBack