The rest of the world, in this case, is the cosmopolitan orbit of the cultural hot spots of New York and Boston. Hers is a sentiment one hears often when talking to residents of this town where high culture rubs elbows with the folksiness of everyday people.
To say that Stockbridge represents small-town America is more than a rhetorical flourish. After all, Norman Rockwell lived and worked here. You don't have to look far to find people who modeled for his illustrations of an idealized vision of the egalitarian values he attributed to a robust democracy.
Mention Rockwell in the bar at the venerable Red Lion Inn and cocktail waitress Jenna Nejaime, 21, might tell you about her father, whose hand is the younger of two hands in an intergenerational clasp in one of Rockwell's paintings. At one end of the Red Lion's formal dining room is the table Rockwell used in one of his most famous paintings, ''Freedom From Want." In it, a matronly figure in a white apron sets a Thanksgiving turkey in front of a gathering of clean-cut people notable for their uniformly broad smiles. A photo-print of the painting hangs on the wall next to the window depicted in the painting, and a small patch of the original wallpaper is preserved next to the light switch.
Wilcox himself was a model in a painting of two Boy Scouts receiving an award. He remembers the experience primarily for the crisp $10 bill he received for his troubles, which involved half an hour posing for the photo from which Rockwell then worked.
The Norman Rockwell Museum, which decamped from the center of town in 1993 to a 36-acre site in the Glendale section with a view of the Housatonic River Valley, invites former subjects of Rockwell's paintings on the third Friday of the month for a public forum called ''Model Citizens."
