In my previous blog post, I wrote that I wanted to get out of Dickinson for a day or two, and I drove to the Prairie Knights Casino south of Mandan.  I was shocked and disappointed.  Is this the best that North Dakota has to offer?  This place was much worse than Dickinson, and I was trying to escape how bad things are in Dickinson.

There are many readers that don’t understand what I am complaining about.  Dickinson sucks, compared to what?  Women in Dickinson are horrible, compared to what?  I can answer this.

When I was living in a different state about ten years ago, I met a lady who was very wealthy.  It was not difficult to meet people who were very successful, very educated, very famous, or very wealthy because people in the town socialized with each other and were very civil, social, healthy, active, adventuresome, outgoing, and fun loving.  There was very little crime, discontent, or violence.

This woman that I met, she and her husband had had a company with 25,000 employees in the United States and different countries.  There was a book written about her husband because of his influence, innovation, and success.  This woman has many famous friends and associates whose names you would recognize.  But she also liked to spend time with me.  I have been friends with her for about ten years now.

She would invite me to stay with her at one of her homes in a resort town.  In this resort town, her house was in a private gated community where the least expensive house was $700,000.  These were all vacation homes owned by famous celebrities, politicians, and very wealthy people.  The buy-in to be a member of the country club was about $100,000.

Her neighbors and friends were mostly nice to me.  Her sons were nice and pleasant to me, they liked me, one of her sons had a degree in engineering like me, and was valedictorian when he graduated from high school like me.  Her daughter was also valedictorian when she graduated from high school, and she had graduated from law school.  I would play with her daughter until she would become irritated, which her mother and brothers enjoyed, until her daughter would complain to her mother to make me stop.  At which time the mother would announce, “Now I had planned on us all going over to the club for dinner, but we’re not going unless you quit fighting, and you can’t fight during dinner.”  Then we would all shut up and behave.

At the private club on the golf course, where members of the public were not allowed, they weren’t even allowed in the community, we would drive up, and the valet would take the vehicle.  The staff would greet the family, and we would be escorted to the best table on the veranda. The sun would be setting over the mountains behind the landscaped and meticulously maintained grounds.  The staff would come and light the outdoor gas heaters so that the women would not be chilly.  The men were all required to wear blazers, dinner jackets, or suit jackets so they were not as likely to become cold as the women.

The women would all order wine, but I would not, in order to not become a jerk.  They would all insist that I have wine, but I wouldn’t.  I would always order the fillet mignon.  I had had a navy blazer or two which were good enough, but just for something fun to do, the wealthy lady that liked me gave me several Armani suits, and had me go to her tailor to have them fitted.  This was probably as much for her sake, her daughter’s sake, and her friends sake, so that I looked better.

I would go and visit this wealthy lady at other places where she had a home, would go out with her to very exclusive resorts, and be introduced to wealthy women that she thought would like me.

To answer one of the questions that I said that I was going to answer, no these women weren’t like the women in Dickinson.  Some were doctors, some were lawyers, some were famous, some were divorced from famous people.  They had traveled around the world before they were even adults.  They had several homes, sometimes yachts, sometimes planes or jets.  These women were generally polite, friendly, and civil toward me.  So no, I don’t like it when trashy women bartenders and trashy women waitresses in Dickinson can’t even be polite, they are really wretched, and I haven’t been able to explain it to the reader until now.

Right now, I don’t want to go on and on about going to people’s multi-million dollar homes high in the hills above cities, with their private swimming pools, guest houses, outdoor kitchens, new Ferraris, Jaguars, and Mercedes in every garage bay, private art collections, rare book collections.  The owners being friendly, social, outgoing, communicative, educated, intelligent people, and entertaining hosts.  Dickinson is very poor, dirty, backwards, trashy, low class, ignorant, uneducated, and ugly in comparison.  This answers the question Dickinson sucks compared to what?

The very wealthy lady that liked me, was born and grew up in a town like Dickinson.  Once a week, on a Saturday night, her father would halfway fill a metal wash tub with hot water.  She would bathe in this tub first, then her stepmother would bathe in this tub second, then her father would bathe in this same water last.  They had an outhouse, no indoor toilet.  When she was about ten, she had to kill a rattlesnake that had gotten into the outhouse when she went to use it.

She left home when she was sixteen to live as a boarder with a family in town.  An older girlfriend went to a beauticians school in Denver, and got her to do the same thing.  They lived together, and worked together.  At night they would both go to the most exclusive resort hotel in town.  She and her girlfriend were welcome there because they were friendly and polite with the male gentlemen.

This was a very expensive, exclusive resort hotel.  Gentlemen would like the company and entertainment of nice young ladies.  As long as she and her girlfriend were polite, civil, pleasant, sociable, agreeable, and didn’t cause problems, they were welcome.  She was not the most beautiful girl, or the most intelligent, but she sure as hell knew that she had better get along and have a good attitude if she was ever going to make it out.

Because she was so agreeable and reasonable, someone introduced her to a nice young man, a salesman.  Conversely, since this salesman was a nice young man, he was introduced to this young lady.  This young salesman was very intelligent, knowledgeable, perceptive, well behaved, and well mannered.  His father owned the small company that he worked for.

These two became married, and stuck together, through the closing of the family business, a new career, a relocation to a different state, another new career, job disputes, formation of a new company, and eventually great wealth and success.  Their children were young when the new company was formed.  They have only just a few memories of there ever being a shortage of money when they were young.  Each of the three children were able to focus on school and they each graduated first in their high school class.  Each of the three children went to very expensive good universities, where they met their wives, and husband.

Everyone only knew this lady as the wealthy widow of a very famous successful business man.  Everyone probably just assumed that she had been a young debutante from a wealthy family, and that she was a trophy wife.  She was content to let everyone believe that.

The reason that she liked me, besides me being handsome and funny, was because I was partly rough and partly not rough.  I would try to be nice and polite, especially in public, which was required.  But she was like me, just no one knew.