YOU SAY TOMATO

From the New Yorker...

STATES’ RITES

YOU SAY TOMATO

Issue of 2005-03-21

Red Mascara doesn’t much care whether the tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, and if he were a less patient man he might have become bitter over the expedited treatment that the tomato seems to be receiving in the statehouse. For forty-four years, Mascara, who is eighty-two, and whose birth name is Joseph Mascari, has been lobbying for the recognition of an official Garden State song; New Jersey is the only state that doesn’t have one. Specifically, Mascara is campaigning on behalf of his own composition, “I’m from New Jersey,” which he wrote in 1960 and then recorded in twenty-seven different versions—symphonic, marching band, keyboard. Every legislative session, without fail, Mascara appears in Trenton to plead his case, passing out gumdrops around the statehouse—to no avail.