Through the oddities of popular culture, my hometown of Odessa, TX, shows up from time to time in entertainment venues.  The movie Friday Night Lights, based upon the nonfiction book of the same name, is set there.  I've read the book, but I haven't been able to bring myself to see the movie.  So I don't really know how the town is portrayed in the movie, although I can make a few guesses. The book, being nonfiction, is about people I grew up with and did business with and went to school and church with it.  It's about the high school where I spend three years of my life.  It's hard for me to work myself up to seeing that all turned into a fictional movie.  I suppose someday I'll go there, but not yet, and it's been 4 or 5 years since the movie was released.

But I did experience on surreal moment of Odessa-as-pop-culture when Friday Night Lights went to DVD.  I now live nearly 1000 miles away from home.  And here in a Walmart I passed a DVD display, and on that DVD display are cardboard figures wearing football uniforms with my high school name on them.  Uniforms that I spent months and months of Friday nights (and Saturday afternoons in playoff season) watching while we waited for our turn at half-time.  Seeing those Permian uniforms on that display caused me to do a double take for the first three or four times I saw them. 

But yesterday I had another Odessa-as-pop-culture moment that ended up being a comedy.  My husband apparently bought the first season of NBC's show Heroes.  We have not watched this show as it's been on television, but the premise sounded at least interesting.  He popped the first one in last night.  The first episode is introducing characters and jumping between their stories.  The second or third scenaro began with a caption reading, "Odessa, Texas."  This, of course, got my attention.  I watched as the camera panned up a large structure the character was climbing.  And lo and behold, there it was.  A mountain.

I burst into laughter.  My husband, who had already watched a few minutes before I came in and restarted it, said, "Yeah, I thought you'd get a kick out of those mountains surrounding Odessa."  I have not yet investigated where this was shot.  I assume in California.  But I can assure you there is nothing resembling a mountain anywhere around Odessa.  It's one of the flattest places in the world.  Very, very flat.  No rolling hills.  Flat.  If you have ever been in that part of Texas, you know that the thought of mountains there is laughable indeed.

There were other incongruities, of course.  Their job, after all, is to tell a story, not to create a travelogue.  Bur for a daughter of the West, it was still a hoot.  First, there is an aerial shot that shows farmland as it pans down to a fire at a cotton gin.  Odessa has a petroleum-based economy, and there is no farmland.  Soil there is about a millimeter of poor soil covering up a whole lot of calichi.  So the thought of land in Odessa producing cotton like the farms about 75 miles to the north was the source of another little giggle.

Then the character's mother suggested they have a shopping date and go to the mall in Gardendale.  The though of Odessans going to a mall in Gardendale was another good chuckle.  Now, there is actually a town called Gardendale, and it's actually near Odessa.  Think of it as a bedroom community for oilfield workers.  It's in the same county as Odessa and thus part of the same school system.  But there's definitely no mall.  They go to Odessa to shop.  Or maybe Midland.  But never vice versa.  Odessa has a mall, complete with ice rink and television studio (actually, the TV studio was feature in another show on the TV Guide network), and when people don't find what they want, they go to Midland (Mrs. Bush's hometown).  But not Gardendale.  Really. Trust me.  It's funny.

And then toward the end of the episode, a character is placing pins in a map to indicate where he suspects the future heroes are.  The place where the pin for the Texas girl goes in was by Ciudad Juarez, which basically means they were placing Odessa (and Gardendale, which, BTW, is very misnamed, what with all that calichi) where El Paso is.  Hey, what's 300 miles, give or take?

Again, I know it's just a TV show and it's not about Odessa; it's about the heroes.  But for this displaced Texan, the incongruities offered even more comic relief than the Japanese guy.

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