CAMPS

All of which is to say, Hoosiers are solid, salt-of-the-earth, genuinely nice people. They are quintessential citizens of middle America who have developed great knacks for making pork sandwiches and playing basketball. They’re patriotic and orderly and devoted to their football team, even if they’re not overly demonstrative about it.

Louisianians are products of a very different place: a cultural mecca, a crossroads of the Americas, a melting pot of influences that simmered for hundreds of years to produce a city and a state whose character is much admired and often imitated but never duplicated.

We’re the crazy uncle at the wedding reception, dancing with everyone and no one and singing along at the top of our lungs to every Kool & the Gang song the cover band knows. They’re the quiet relatives from the other side of the family, sipping their ginger ale as they watch stoically from their table against the wall, not really sure what to make of us.