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Amish Girls Gone Wild

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in The Tailgate

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China

China

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Amish Girls Gone Wild

Behind the bonnet is a girl who just wants to have fun -- and another beer, please.

By Denise Grollmus

Published: March 14, 2007

It's Friday night at Twister's. Tina launches the evening with a tallboy of Sparks. Customers eyeball her white bonnet and shin-grazing dress as she sips from her can of malt liquor and caffeine. She's used to the gawking. Impolite scrutiny comes with being Amish.

Everyone stares at you," she says. "It's not very fun, but I just ignore it."

Besides, Tina's on a mission to get tanked. No amount of rubbernecking can stop her.

The DJ approaches. Rodger Locher, a clean-cut city boy, is what's known as a "Yank," the all-encompassing term for not being Amish. Since he became Twister's resident DJ, Tina's become a regular, obsessed with listening to Beyoncé, the Killers, and Korn over rounds of neon ****tails.

"Remember the last time you were here?" he asks her.

"Sorta," Tina laughs.

"Yeah, probably not at all. You were wasted! Got any requests?"

Tina asks for "Smack That" by Akon, then orders a Sex on the Beach.

Martha sits down with a Bud and bums a cigarette. Her cherub face is framed by a starched bonnet, her squat figure submerged in a dowdy dress. As Akon sings about slapping gyrating butts, Tina and Martha lip-synch, bouncing their bonnets to the beat.

Tyrna, hold my woody back through my drawers, they demurely mouth in unison.

A drunk lady with a crunchy perm dances toward Martha. She grabs Martha's hands, trying to drag her onto the dance floor, which is little more than a space between tables. Martha resists. "Oh, c'mon!" the lady shouts.

Martha shyly shakes her head no.

"Why not?" asks another Yank.

"If we dance, people will really start staring," Tina says.

The drunk perm dances back to her friends and knocks down a quick shot before playfully grinding her hips along a man's thigh. The smirk on Tina's face is a mixture of amusement and disgust. "I just like watching people," she says.

The way she climbs up and down them poles, lookin' like one of them Pretty Cat Dolls, she lip-synchs.

Twister's is Tina's favorite hangout. It's hidden on an unlit, tree-lined road, tucked inside the Dutch Country Restaurant in Middlefield. To get to the bar, you're whisked through a maze of families polishing off platters of gravy and dumplings under intense fluorescent lighting.

But the shoe-box tavern is a different world. Twentysomethings gulp beers and shots with names like "Redheaded Slut." For young and restless Yanks, Twister's is a reprieve from the farms and factories of Middlefield, a place where the guys shoot pool and gussied-up girls mimic the moves of rap videos. For Tina, who comes here almost every weekend, Twister's is everything her life isn't.

Though her house looks like any other vinyl-sided suburban home, inside there's no internet, no flat-screen, no electricity. She lives by gas lamp, sewing her own dresses and hitching buggies in the snow.

For the first several years of her life, Tina, the youngest of seven children, spoke only Pennsylvania Dutch, a slow, lilting language that sounds more like an ancient Norse dialect than modern German. She didn't learn English until she entered school, graduating by the eighth grade -- as all Amish do -- to begin working as a babysitter.

When she turned 17, she started her rumspringa -- the Amish rite of passage in which young adults are allowed to dabble in the indiscretions of our world before officially joining the church. "It just means you can do whatever Yanks do," Tina says. "Not everyone drinks alcohol. Some people just drink Coke and play volleyball."

At her first party, she didn't drink. She was already intoxicated by the chatter, the shiny silver kegs, the smoke of the bonfire and cigarettes, the dizzy dancing.

It was her first real encounter with Yanks. She found them fascinating. Their lives appeared woven of a more breathable fabric, free from the constraints of overbearing parents and ankle-length dresses. "It's just easier," she says. "Especially with parents. No one bothering them about where they're going."

She quickly grew a tiny collection of T-shirts and eye shadow, learning to drink by the six-pack until dawn and memorizing Eminem's entire discography. She even bought a cell phone, which her parents still don't know about.

Though the rules of rumspringa allow Tina to indulge in all of this, her parents still don't want these things around the house.

This was made infinitely clear when her mom caught her sneaking in after a late night of partying. "I saw you with jeans on last night," Mom said.

"So?"

"Don't ever do it again."

But there was little her mother could do. As long as Tina was still in rumspringa, she couldn't be shunned for breaking the rules -- a consequence saved for those who have already joined the church. "They get upset about it, but there's not much they can do about it."

For a while Tina dated a Yank. She cared for him so much, she thought about leaving the Amish. But if she did, her parents warned, the family would never speak to her again. Tina called off the relationship. "It would be hard not to talk to my sisters," she says.

When Tina was 20, she considered joining the church, but quickly realized it wasn't for her. "I had to promise in front of the whole church that I'd never go to parties again," she says. "And I was like, uh, I'm 20 years old -- I'm still going to go to parties. I like going to parties. I just like being around people and talking with them."

Tina decided to stretch out her rumspringa for as long as she could. Since there is no cutoff age, she plans to join the church when she's either sick of partying or tired of being nagged by her parents. "I'm sure I'll be done with parties before I'm 30."

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mjah

mjah

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At Hersheypark about 15 years ago, I overheard a teenage Amish girl talking about the Comet roller coaster with her much younger sister:

"It's better than an orgasm!"

The little sister just stopped and stared.

So the older girl just casually looked over her shoulder and said, "Stick with me, kid." And walked away.

When I first read about Rumspringa, suddenly it all made sense.

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