Actual Philadelphia Increasingly Resembles Cheap Meme About Philadelphia
This is us.
Have you ever met a stranger, maybe a boss or some other authority figure, who fixates on one small attribute of your character as a way of both remembering who you are and signaling that you’re not important enough to be considered as a whole?
Us neither, of course. But we’ve heard about such things. And it seems, purely speculatively, like the only dignified way to react to something like that would be to do your best to ignore it, or go out of your way to reveal some contradictory quality, or just quietly pray for the apocalypse. Philadelphia, as a city, takes a different tack.
“Remember me?” Philadelphia belches each morning. “I’m that fawkin’ hoawgie guy.”
Witness HoagieNation, the Hall & Oates-curated music festival planned for Memorial Day weekend.
“HoagieNation is a wonderful and colorful place where the citizens are united by a love of cold meat and Amoroso's rolls,” is an actual sentence uttered by the real Daryl Hall for the purposes of a press release. In a real this-is-who-we-are moment, even Mayor Jim Kenney, who once read an entire hoagie recipe into the legislative record in City Council, chimed in for the announcement.
Look, we’re not here to disparage the hoagie. We are very much here to eat the hoagie. This festival is probably going to be fun. But it would be cool if Philly occasionally put on a Hawaiian shirt or a pair of glasses, even if the cheese-fry-greased track pants are more comfortable.
