bumpkin

“Shanghai was the place to be. It had the best restaurants, the best nightclubs, the coolest people. I felt like such a country bumpkin, but I learned fast.”

When their car breaks down in a rural Oregon town, they meet a seen-it-before who’s who of horror movie yokeldom: unsmiling boys, sweaty bumpkin mechanics, a diner waitress whose eyes scream “run, if you know what’s good.”

According to Taylor in his autobiography, “Private Domain,” Mr. Wagoner took on the persona “of being a bumpkin in the Big City for all it’s worth.”

“People may call me an ignorant bumpkin,” he once said.

So a school that I had never visited, Harvard, took an enormous risk and accepted me, and I became a token country bumpkin to round out a class of polished overachievers.