Roasted 2w ago29 views29 pts
We're sorry. Actually, no we're not.
A Pulitzer-winning novelist looked at Odessa and wrote it off as one of the ugliest towns he'd ever laid eyes on, and the town has been wearing that review like a participation trophy ever since. The local joke is that you raise your kids in Midland and raise hell in Odessa, which is a cute way of admitting that the next town over is the one that gets the good parent-teacher conferences.
Odessa's big attractions are an eight-foot jackrabbit statue, a Stonehenge replica, and a Shakespeare Globe knockoff, so the town has plagiarized England and then added a bunny. Even the nickname is Jackrabbit Roping Capital of the World, which sounds less like a point of pride than a hostage situation for the rabbits. Visitors take a selfie with the rabbit, check the clock, and discover they've finished the whole itinerary by lunch.
Odessa's greatest cultural export is a book about how a whole city hung its self-esteem on teenage boys in a stadium, and the town has been trying to live up to it since the 1988 season. When the oil crashed, football was the only thing left, and when the oil boomed, football was still the only thing left, because the complaint on every Facebook meme page is that there's "nothing to do." Permian and Odessa High fans still show up in black and red, an oil spill versus a bloodstain, like it's a funeral for everybody's weekend.
Texas Monthly found great carnitas in a Cricket Wireless parking lot in Odessa, and the surprise was the whole headline. The local vocabulary is just as colorful: "Gentleman from Odessa" is a polite-company euphemism for a son of a bitch. This is a town where the fine dining is a food truck and the only gentleman is a phrase you can't say out loud.
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