You Are So Nashville If
Mike Williams has emerged this year with an encore. The 42-year-old exhibitor services representative for the Freeman trade show company has won the 2007 “You Are So Nashville If...” contest. His name may be a little familiar: he won last year’s too. Williams, who lives in Donelson with his wife and daughter, says he’s “not a part of the hip crowd or one of the insiders or anything. For some reason, I just get it.”
And obviously, he gets us. When the Scene editorial team sat down to review this year’s crop of entries—some 1,300 of them—more than 20 of Williams’ made the cut. It’s not like we’re googly-eyed over the guy—we don’t know who writes these things until after the judging, as we purposely consider the entries with the names removed (from an Excel document). But when you take into account how many Williams sent in (the equivalent of four pages, double spaced), his odds were pretty good.
Williams starts compiling his zingers a year ahead of time and has a team of co-workers weed out the bombs. In fact, he says he’s already got a surefire winner for next year’s contest. He knows all of this inexplicable YASNI zeal is kind of silly. The guy’s just damn happy not to be writing about his hometown of Johnson City, Tenn., where he says there’s nothing but big hair and Trans Ams.
When Kroger and Harris Teeter stores pulled issues of Out & About off the racks more than a month ago, citing a need to remain neutral on “specific agendas,” Williams had one question: where’s Kenny Chesney gonna get his copy now? “You hear rumors and things, innuendos,” he says. “[Chesney] went to college at East Tennessee State, where I went. There’s a big gay population there. You just joke about things like that.”
We’re not sure about those East Tennessee State gay stats. Still, Williams says most people can’t help but chuckle at the thought of catching Chesney at the magazine rack when they’re hitting up the cart corral. “For one person on my team, I had to explain what Out & About was because they’d never heard of it,” he says. “But they understood the Kenny Chesney part.”
If you’re familiar with Williams’ winning entry last year (“You Are So Nashville If...you were a gay cowboy before being a gay cowboy was cool,” a play on Brokeback Mountain), you’ll sense a common theme. So what makes being gay in Nashville funny? “I’m not saying it’s funny,” he says. “My friend the gay activist says, ‘You’re using my people to win contests.’ I didn’t mean for it to work out that way.... I just entered it. You’re the ones who voted on it.” Touché.
But all this fame hasn’t got him far. “It hasn’t got me invited to more parties...and I’ve still got to take out the trash on Sunday morning.” In fact, last year’s win got him some heat at church. “And with Kenny Chesney fans, I’m sure I haven’t made any friends there. But if you can’t laugh at it, get over it. Geez.”
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