Are you unwilling to live in a house without a granite counter top? Are your credit cards maxed out? Do you call your children's teachers when your straight-A darling makes a 96 on a project? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, welcome to your new, suburban utopia Toyota employees.


Plano offers a wide array of unique eateries such as The Olive Garden—a charming, authentic Italian establishment where one can eat pasta indefinitely, or Chili's—a cute, colorful Tex-Mex establishment with killer margaritas!

Don't, however, fall into a false sense of security! Plano also has a seedy underbelly. If you let your guard down, you could find yourself amid discarded peanut shells and Coors Light at Texas Roadhouse.


Although you will readily acclimate to the pleasure of Plano's local culinary luxuries, you will need to make a few adjustments. You will need to understand that California is a God-forsaken, hippy hellhole. Here we don't smoke weed, or gay marry. This is God's land.

You'll learn about the sinfulness of gay marriage and the lie that is evolution from your son or daughter's new science textbook—the Bible. You won't even have to buy it! Strangers will bring it to your door, and hold you in uncomfortable, earnest conversations about whether or not you've been saved. Let's face it though, you're from California, so you probably aren't. Luckily God chose to save you from yourself. Join a mega church, find Jesus and golfing buddies.

You will also need to adjust to the scorching hot temperature, which means you will have to remember to put the sunscreen on your bald head while you drive around in your convertible Lexus. I'm assuming that you're a bald, rich, white guy, which is sexist and racist of me. Consider it an amuse-bouche.


But the key to surviving Plano is to not resist Plano. Let Plano wash over you. Put sangria in a tumbler and drink it at your kid's soccer game. Spend 8-hours walking the perimeter of one mall. Find a pub in a plaza that you like, and slide comfortably into a huge parking spot. What's parallel parking? We don't do that here. Our parking garages soar far above Icarus.


In all seriousness, if I can offer one useful piece of advice to you, it's this — go to the Holy Grail. It will be right by your office. Go there and tell them I sent you. They won't know what you're talking about, and you'll look like an idiot.


So pack up your Lexus and hit one of our many highways. You may not be from Plano, but then again, nobody is, because Plano was invented in the 1980s.

—

Edith Horton is a humorist who has had the pleasure of living in many of the Dallas area's finest suburbs, including Plano.

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