Built inside the shell of a massive and defunct Chinese restaurant is a Blimpie's. I walk in and they seem glad to see me. An affable woman behind the counter seems genuinely surprised that I don't want a 60-ounce cola to wash down my six-inch sandwich. She offers me a free peanut butter cookie, which is dry and slightly burnt. Nice lady.

Geographically, Branson, Missouri is not quite the midpoint between Las Vegas, Nevada, and Nashville, Tennessee. I feel ambiguously marooned between the two cities. Branson is like Vegas, but without the sin. Branson is like Nashville, but without Graceland. I find it impossible to approach a description of the city without leaning on other places as reference points.

The analogies proliferate and become increasingly opaque. Branson is an oversized state fair that drove deep pilings into the soil under the fairgrounds and never left.

Branson is Main Street USA, sponsored by Rogaine and marketed by Don King in RV magazines - tonic, on the rocks, hold the gin. Branson is country music's rendition of the land that time forgot. Branson is the second derivative of the American Dream. And it's weird.

The water isn't running yet at Water World, the go-carts at Kids Kountry are in the garage for lack of drivers, and only a few jacketed stragglers brave any of the city's nine golf courses. Barren artificial climbing walls are painted with huge cartoon mountaineers. They face huge steel trellises, from which idle bungee cords hang.

A strong breeze blows cold air into the region that used to be west and north of here. The overnight temperature fell to freezing the day before. Branson aches to its vaguely geriatric bones for spring.

By mid-March the city will be shaking off its doldrums, launching "Branson Country Spring" with barn-burners like the Branson Fest, the Roundup at the Dixie Stampede, and the Quilt Show and Fishing Tournament at Rockaway Beach. Then there's the ever-popular Branson Belle Comedy Cruise, a riverboat condemned to spend its days in a lake.

Unfortunately for me, it's not yet spring. For now, I will have to settle for a trip to the outlet malls, which are of course open and bustling.

Most of the hillside, RV-sized campground sites are empty, but there is a trickle of traffic on "The Strip". In the summer it can take several hours, I am told, to drive the two-lane highway, from the shore of Lake Taneycomo in old downtown to The Strip's terminus, the parking lot of Country Tonight, only a few miles away.

Sin appears to be absent from Branson, which is precisely what The Strip is designed to project. A handful of Baptist and Methodist churches are nearly indistinguishable from the entertainment venues. The Osmonds are a perennial favorite here, with the next generation already pressed into service as singers and dancers in the family business. That the wandering Mormons were driven out of the Midwest in the last century does not seem to bother anyone. Branson doesn't hold a grudge.

How an obscure town in the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri became such a tourist and entertainment Mecca is a classic American tale of self-promotion, portions of which bear mention. A pair of dams built after WWII turned the meandering White River into sinewy Lake Taneycomo and its upstream big brother, Table Rock Lake.

Weekend boaters and summer cabins in the neighboring countryside soon gave way to Highway 76, which snakes out of old downtown and up an adjacent ridge that was once all branch and bramble. Here, along Highway 76, small variety shows cropped up along Main Street and The Strip,

Today those original shows are still being performed, alongside of the new productions. Amazingly, Branson's venues offer a total of over 50,000 theater seats - this is in a town of under 4,000 residents. More seats, as a matter of fact, than are found behind the bright neon lights on Broadway.

But you still don't quite get it.

To truly appreciate the deeply bizarre, laugh-out-loud peculiarity of Branson, try answering the following question.

Which of the following seemingly washed-up performers has a theater on The Strip:
a) Mel Tillis
b) Anita Bryant
c) Box Car Willie
d) Glen Campbell
e) Tony Orlando

Give up? Astute readers know that the correct answer is actually
f) all of the above.

All of these entertainers and more. The roads into Branson are lined with billboards touting eponymous establishments, their moderately famous faces frozen in perpetual good cheer: Andy Williams' Moon River Theatre, Bobby Vinton's Blue Velvet Theatre, the Charley Pride Theatre, the Mickey Gilley Theatre, the Osmond Family Theater, the Roy Clark Celebrity Theatre, and the Wayne Newton Theatre. There's also the newly opened Yakov Smirnoff "What a country!" Theater, located in Yakov's American Pavilion.

The Hollywood Wax Museum has created a Mt. Rushmore knock-off on its exterior. All hail John Wayne, Elvis, Marilyn, and Charlie Chaplin!

An IMAX theater serves up sensory gluttony. The film that's featured during my visit provides a take on the region's often troubled hillbilly past: not quite stolid north, not quite tepid south.

There are scores of other theaters here. One production presents an Asian violin virtuoso and his perfect Anglo family - kitschy kick lines, magicians, obscurities, everything but the circus sink.

The only facility that seems to have closed recently is loudly ironic in its insolvency - Cash Country (as in Johnny) just couldn't cut it. Perhaps the successful revival of his recording career was just too much for this town to take.

Branson is a lot-a-bit country, with just enough rock-n-roll thrown in to justify the sequins and the increasingly showy excesses of the modern country music machine. Driving out of town, past exposed sheer walls of native limestone and those rolling gray hills of oak and anonymous saplings, I can smell burning brush and hear the din of construction machinery. Cut open the earth in southern Missouri and mineral-rich rust-colored dirt bleeds to the surface. The natural beauty of the Ozarks is stunning. Fall serves up a wide spectrum of backcountry colors, but nobody drives this far to pitch a tent anymore.