By Kyle Crutchfield
Malinda Morsman is a 26-year-old Tulsa native who loves her home city and hates everything else in her state.
“I always tell people Tulsa is like an oasis in Oklahoma, because the rest of the state is...Can I say clusterf*ck in this interview?”
Morsman was born at Hillcrest and grew up in Jenks, where she attended high school. She shows me one of the many tattoos on her arm. It says “Be sweet.”
“This is my first one,” she says, pointing at the simple inked command. “My high school mentor would tell me that all the time, because I was not very sweet back then.”
After graduating from Jenks, Morsman went on to get her esthetics license from Clary Sage, where she now works as a beautician.
Morsman’s favorite spot in Tulsa is the arts district downtown, now known as the Tulsa Arts District. But, she says the other suggested names for the district needed a bit of a makeover.
“The suggestions they had at first, like NoDo, they were terrible,” she says, and offers what her ideal name would have been for the district.
“There’s a big bookstore that’s being built, called Magic City books, because Tulsa was called the Magic City,” she tells me, referring to the name given to Tulsa during the city’s 1920s oil boom.
“They suggested calling it Magic City Arts District, which I thought sounded really cool,” she says.
Although her roots are in Oklahoma, Morsman’s wish is to live far, far away from here.
“I’ve always fantasized about living in Norway,” she says. “Somewhere that’s just a bit more progressive and not so Trump-y.”
But for now, Morsman will continue to embrace her hometown, albeit at a tattooed arms distance.
“No place is perfect,” she says.
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