I have a confession, Internet…  Sometimes I pretend I’m British…

OK, so “sometimes” might be slightly more often than I’m alluding to here…(as in nearly all phone calls with friends and members of my family, on my fictional cooking show, Maggie’s Magnificent Meals, on occasional evenings out to dinner, and just when I feel like spicing things up a bit).  I’ll admit it:  I find flashing my attempt at a native Londoner accent makes just about any situation much more fun.  I don’t know how it began exactly, but I’ve always adored the English accent and think that just about anything sounds better when spoken with its eloquent tongue.  Go ahead, you can practice out loud, you know you want to!      

One Christmas, when my niece, Summer and nephew, Cody were visiting from the wee small town of Page, Arizona, we decided it was time to play the best game on the face of this earth.  (Now, I’m about to divulge some seriously valuable information here, folks, so be prepared to do the dance of joy for all eternity.)  Here it is…I pass the torch on to you with care…Follow your Nose.  Do not pass go.  Buy it immediately.  It rocks my world!  Oh, how it makes me happy!  But, I digress…we decided playing the best game on earth could only be paired with the best accent on earth and assigned each other new British names.  Summer became Su-mer, Cody now Cod-y, Maggie =   Mad-gai, and Dorothy = Doroty.  From that moment on, there was no going back.  We would always be Brits.

This year, the gorgeous and super cool Su-mer came to visit her Aunt Mad-gai & Uncle Hallmark in NYC for her sixteenth birthday present, and we couldn’t have been more thrilled to have her.  Coming from a town that prides itself for it’s proximity to the beautiful Lake Powell, and   has a total population of approximately 7,000 people, about 16 restaurants including the decadent Subway and KFC, one movie theater, and just got its first and only Starbucks inside their local Safeway, caused Su-mer to find the pace, people, and grandeur that NYC so proudly boasts to be a tad overwhelming.  We hit the pavement and explored every inch we could with our British tones and had a blast.  One afternoon I asked the lovely Su-mer if I could take some pictures of her and she kindly obliged. 

Su-mer from the microscopic town of Page, Arizona, who reads massive novels any spare moment she can find, who loves shopping, horses, Chinese food, pizza, texting, her boyfriend, Jaime, her best friend, Danielle, and dance, filled our not so microscopic New York City with joy and laughter.  She could’ve easily looked at me like I’m crazy old Aunt Mad-gai, like she’d outgrown my silly attempts to sound like a Brit years ago, but instead, she pretended she was a Brit right along with me.  She laughed and smiled, and was simply Summer.  And, when I look back on these images, I’m reminded of all that Su-mer is to all of  us…pure happiness.