OK. I finally did it. I watched 15 minutes of "Jersey Shore."
My son (genetically approximately 1/4 of his genes are of Italian origin) has a new girlfriend, a fellow nuclear engineering graduate student. On learning that he's from New Jersey, where she's never been, she asked if it's really like "Jersey Shore."
We never saw the show, so I rented it, and watched 15 minutes of the first episode with my wife (who grew up on Staten Island).
We laughed a bit, then turned it off.
It was apparently about being proud of being a "Guido," or a "Guidette," body building, considering one's self as incredibly sexy, and drinking. The show is about being young, clueless Americans of Italian extraction who happen to congregate in New Jersey.
Of course, when I was growing up on Long Island, I thought of New Jersey as some kind of hellhole, an opinion I continued to hold when I lived in California, until I moved here.
We were embarrassed because we actually brought our kids to Seaside Heights for family vacations. Trust me, it wasn't like that.
I suppose somewhere in this state there is this kind of reality, but no, that's not us.
New Jersey is a kind of heaven. It takes a while to realize this, but it's true.
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First of all, I came of age in the 1970's and my experience of New Jersey, as it was then for many Long Islanders was to cross either the Goethels Bridge or the Outerbridge on Staten Island to the refinery zone, Elizabeth etc. This was followed by a stretch, often at night, down the Turnpike, generally on my way to Florida.
When I was a child, I would sometimes go to visit my father's cousins and my Great Aunts who lived just across the bridge in Parlin, NJ, which may as well have been Staten Island.
When I moved to California, my housemate in the LA area, was also from Long Island. We remained friends after we married and when my wife and I left California (San Diego) for New Jersey, and I left a message on the answering machines that existed in those days saying I moved to New Jersey, he left a message on my machine asking if I was working in a chemical waste dump. (I'm a chemist.) I, in turn, left a message on his machine pointing out that I lived much further from a refinery than he did. I live in the Princeton area; he lived in San Pedro, an LA suburb near the oil refining facilities in Wilmington, Lomita and Torrance.
My wife, who grew up on Staten Island (in the time that it was mostly known for its dump) cried when I got a job in New Jersey, although she agreed to go if only because the opportunity was too good to pass up. She couldn't believe we'd leave California for New Jersey. (Now she would definitely refuse to move to California for any reason.)
I would suggest that your friend may have had a negative opinion of New Jersey at some point since she said it "arrived."
Actually, it didn't "arrive;" it's always been a slice of heaven, a high culture, high tech center, with a deep connection to the history of this country; it's just that we Long Islanders (and in my wife's case Staten Islanders) were too provincial to notice.
It's funny. Occasionally, to visit family, I have to go to Long Island, and to be clear, I kind of feel sorry for the people who live there, a 180o change from the way I grew up.
My wife and sons make fun of me because I have a hard time sitting through movies about Long Island culture, although the movie that most reminds me of that culture is actually "The King of Staten Island." It does seem that Long Island culture (as I remember it anyway) is captured in "The Jersey Shore."
For the record, I grew up in the lower middle class on Long Island in post war tract housing and I certainly lacked in sophistication and a broad perception of the world at large. My parents were only marginally educated; neither graduated high school and in fact my father quit school before high school. Many of my friends were what we called "greasers," (Guidos in the parlance of "The Jersey Shore," although the concept extended beyond Americans of Italian heritage) for whom the way to have a decent social standing was to have a hot car. Until I was 12, I never left New York State except to go to Parlin, NJ, and I was 19 when I left New York State (except for Parlin, NJ) for the second time. I was, again, a provincial.
Here's how I felt upon leaving Long Island for the first time (for California):
I now think that people from Long Island are mildly amusing people who talk funny. I do love and have loved people who lived there, including some who remain, but it's not a culture to which I could return.