A plaque remaining from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

Above, a 1934 plaque from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Discarded as trash in 2006. Now a Popeyes fast food restaurant on Google Maps.

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Entry from January 15, 2009
East Jesus (any remote town, but often associated with Texas)

“East Jesus” is a made-up name for an isolated place—usually in America and often in Texas (“East Jesus, Texas”). “East Jesus” is cited in print from at least 1950, but was probably used by soldiers in the 1940s, during World War II.
 
   
Wiktionary
East Jesus
(US) A fictional remote, backwards inhabited place.
. c. 1954, Behan, Brendan, The Letters of Brendan Behan (1992), page 55
So G. and I had a good piss-up together, as happy with one another as if we were both natives of East Jesus, Kansas, newly met in the Rue Scribe.
. 1998, Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees: A Novel, page 102
I’m just a plain hillbilly from East Jesus Nowhere with this adopted child that everybody keeps on telling me is dumb as a box of rocks.
. 1999, Sarah Bird, Virgin of the Rodeo, page 70
Only gave him seventy-five for the night; said he’d get the rest if he worked a black rodeo way the hell and gone over in East Jesus, Texas.
. 2000, David Gergen, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership Nixon to Clinton, page 151
Their staffs were also well looked after—except for the French, whom we packed off to motels in East Jesus in retaliation for their high-handedness toward the American delegation when they had been hosts a year earlier.
   
Urban Dictionary
1.  East Jesus
way the fuck out there
damn, the parking lot was full and I had to park in East Jesus
by d5 and d3 Apr 11, 2000
2.  East Jesus
referring to a place that is ungodly far away.
Teacher: “Will you be needing a hall pass?”
Student: “Yes, considering the fact that my locker is over in East Jesus.”

by Kyyylaaaa Nov 4, 2007
3.  East Jesus
a small, archetypical, and rural town(see also East Jesus State)
I don’t want to go back to East Jesus, the people there are a bunch of Yahoos.
by Light Joker Nov 4, 2004
 
(Historical Dictionary of American Slang)
East Jesus n. a remote or provincial town or place.
1961 Forbes Goodbye to Some 246 [ref to WWII]: We been out seventeen years…and sailed through nine typhoons and been to East Jesus an back five hundred and fifty times.
1972 B. Rodgers Queens’ Vernacular 150: East jesus any small hole in the mud town; blink your eyes and you miss it.
1974 N.Y.C. man, age 25: East Jesus means way out in the boondocks.
1979 J. Morris War Story 224: Advising the Igluks in East Jesus.
1988 21 Jump Street (Fox-TV): Some guy in East jesus…has lived with AIDS for seven years.
1992 Harper’s (Sept.) 32: The minors are all those 170 or so teams scattered…from Edmonton to El Paso to East Jesus.
     
Google Books
The Disenchanted
By Budd Schulberg
New York, NY: Random House
1950
Pg. 289:
“We’re marooned in East Jesus. It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. This is probably the last train out of this hole till morning.”
   
Google Books
The Ginger Man
By James Patrick Donleavy
New York, NY: Delacorte Press
1955
Pg. 17:
“So I told her she was a tub of lard and I wouldn’t take her to East Jesus. Have to get them a visa before you can touch an arm.”
   
Google Books
The Loving Couple
By Patrick Dennis
New York, NY: THomas Y.  Crowell
1956
Pg. 43:
“Groucho Marx comes on the other night with this couple from — I don’t know where they come from, some place like East Jesus, Nebrasker, if you’ll parm…”
       
Google Books
A Week in the Country
By Ernest Gébler
Published by Hutchinson
1958
Pg. 159:
“He’s English, he’s the thing—gosh sakes how Mom will gasp when I walk him down the High Street of East Jesus.”
     
Google Books
Don’t You Know There’s a War On
By Richard R. Lingeman
Published by Book World Promotions
1970
Pg. 148:
...likely a cute blond trick from East Jesus, Texas, who told you only the chicken croquettes were left and got 50-cent tips from the sailors and who had…
 
4 November 1990, Dallas (TX) Morning News, “Stanley Marsh 3: Life’s not all serendipity for Texas’ best-known eccentric” by Allen Pusey:
They carried a cooler of Lone Star beer, and a pail of cow dung, and announced to flabbergasted reporters that they had come from East Jesus, Texas.
   
OCLC WorldCat record
East Jesus
by Lee Ranaldo
Type:  Musical CD; English
Publisher: Chicago : Atavistic, 1995.
 
11 August 2002, Seguin (TX) Gazette Enterprise, “‘Growing Up Simple’ simply magnificent” by Amanda Crow, book review, pg. 7, col. 4:
Growing Up Simple…In Texas: An Irreverent Look at Kids in the 1950s
By George Arnold
Eakin Press
Non-Fiction
(...)
But in the simple times of Texas’ 1950s, George is allowed to live life to its fullest, and walk away with such life lessons as: “Riding your bicycle all over East Jesus will cost you that bicycle, ultimately. Same goes for West Overshoe.”
     
BNET
A Texas trilogy: Seven Years in East Jesus
Afterimage,  Nov-Dec, 2004 by Leann Erickson
Everything is bigger in Texas. The chili is hotter, the beer is colder, and the stars are brighter. In fact, as a travel ad campaign informed us a few years back. Texas is really like ‘a whole other country’. President George W. Bush not only proudly hails from Texas, his ‘western Whitehouse’ is located in Crawford, Texas, just a stone’s throw from Waco, once the home of the Branch Davidians cult. As ‘Dubya’ clears brush and consolidates power all eyes, national and international, are often on Texas. Yes, things do seem to be bigger there.
 
Seven Years in East Jesus, a recent video by filmmaker and university professor Mary Slaughter, casts an outsider’s gaze on Waco, Texas. A transplanted Californian, Slaughter spent seven years in Waco while teaching at Baylor University, and her subtle but critical eye has resulted in a piece that attempts to delve beneath the easy stereotypes that TV news soundbytes often relay of Texans. However, what is ultimately revealed does not comfort the viewer. Behind shirtsleeve patriotism and “howdy ma’am” vernacular Slaughter reveals an uncomfortable and sometimes frightening relationship between religion, violence, and intolerance.
 
Seven Years in East Jesus is structured as a trilogy with each of the three sections delineated by a title. Beginning in an impressionistic space, each succeeding section becomes more visually and philosophically concrete as the filmmaker moves through space, place, and ideology in an attempt to ‘understand’ this ‘foreign country’ she has landed in. Slaughter uses the elements of air, earth, water, and fire as organizing devices within and between the three sections.
 
Section one, “Where Grackles Swarm” is an impressionistic rendering of the Texas landscape. As flocks of black birds swoop and converge, a parade of Texas icons marches across the screen. Manipulated shots of rodeo events, cowgirls, and midway rides depict an unsettling celebration in the making. A cryptic chorus of sound accompanies these series of visions while a swirling and undulating hot air balloon figure slowly inflates under the night sky. As in a waking dream, the viewer is initiated into a nocturnal world where once familiar things induce apprehension in the viewer, offering a premonition of the unsettling events to come.
 
The title “East Jesus” appears signaling the start of section 2 of the trilogy as the night visions give way to daylight. East Jesus is a local nickname for Waco and a Christian-themed message seems to meet inhabitants at every turn in the form of billboards, church signs, and media communications. The earth/air dichotomy is more concretely developed here as earth bound humans struggle to be worthy of a heaven bound Christ figure depicted as an enormous hot air balloon. Flames and gas belch, suggesting fire and brimstone, as a nylon Jesus, arms spread wide in admonition, inflates and ascends on a cloud of air. With Pentecostal zeal a male voice expounds on the Rapture, the Christian rendering of the end of the world, but his words of fear and judgement bring no consolation. In a time of simplistic patriotism and unexamined jingoism, the rhetoric of this section suspends viewers in a place between heaven and earth while the ever-present flames of hell lick at their heels.
   
The Truth Seeker
Conversations with the Crow Part 5
TBR News.org – June 10, 2008
(...)
RTC: We had to cover up failures as well. I think you can say that the Company pretty well controls the media in this country now. Take the AP for example. Every little jerkwater paper out in East Jesus, Texas , cannot have a reporter in Washington or Moscow so they rely almost entirely on the AP for anything outside their town.

Posted by Barry Popik
Texas (Lone Star State Dictionary) • Thursday, January 15, 2009 • Permalink


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