Cathy Day and the Big Thing

18 Tuesday Jan 2011

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(sounds like a Dr. Seuss book)

Last spring, I took Cathy Day’s fiction workshop.  Have we talked about how much I love Cathy Day?  (And that she’s totally a two-name person at all times?)  I had taken a short forms fiction readings class with her the semester before and sweet talked her into being my thesis chair.

To which she asked, “Are you writing a thesis or a book?”

Oh.

Well.

I don’t know.  By program design, we’re all supposed to be writing books.  Especially in nonfiction where people were encouraged to write narrative nonfiction with the fringes opting for memoir and some (this girl) writing essays in order to meet the two-hundred-page manuscript requirement.  People walk around the fifth floor of the Cathedral talking about my book. (More on this later.)

But are we writing something that meets the thesis requirements and will most likely be forever condemned to the box marked What $60,000 in debt buys you?  Or are we using our time and our efforts toward the hazy horizon of the publishing industry?

So I said, “Thesis? Question mark?” because I really wasn’t sure what to say.

Fast forward to January.  Workshop time.  Time, we are told, to work on our Big Thing.

First, thank goodness for the Big Thing.  Because manuscript sounds weird, thesis sounds like not enough for how much we’re expected to write (though I still continue to use it), and my book sounds presumptuous in ways that rarely please the fates.  The deal – as Cathy writes about in this incredible essay – is basically that we weren’t in there to write short stories (unless, you know, you actually wanted to).  Snippets of Big Thing, chapters or large portions of Big Thing.  You could have two little workshops or one big workshop to meet your fifty-page requirement for the semester.

A glimpse of what actually winds up happening in nonfiction workshops where we all workshop our manuscripts (ha, there’s another one of those words! Also, it’s my understanding that fiction students frequently workshop short stories for journal publication while working on their novels on their own time): confusion.  Nonfiction workshop is so often confusion.  The same semester as Cathy’s class, I also took nonfiction workshop, and I watched my friend try again to make something happen with her memoir only to be told to do the things she had been told not to do the previous year.  She, to say the least, was not thrilled.  And, really, twenty pages out of context isn’t enough to get the feedback you really need.

And then Cathy’s class.  We kept a class blog where each of us posted our project proposal and charted our progress and our process.  This alone was great.  And then I got to see how it went over to get fifty pages of a classmate’s work in a classroom setting.

You may or may not know that I’m president of the Julie Draper Fan Club.  This happened as a direct result of Cathy’s workshop.  Because we got fifty pages of Julie’s sweeping Southern novel, and I was In Love.  We’re talking a level of investment in a classmate’s work that usually takes semesters to acquire.  There’s such a huge difference in what you can feel as a reader in twenty workshop pages and fifty workshop pages.  And, sure, there are still problems with workshop regardless of number of pages, but that’s another discussion entirely.

And then there was the Big Thing about the Big Thing.  As with most workshops I’ve taken, there was reading to be done.  But because we were focused on the Big Thing, instead of the Little Thing, we were each asked to read a book and then take it apart.  You know, like you’ve done eight million times for short stories and other Little Things.  The book was our choosing – something that would help us figure out our own Big Thing.

What happened: Julie Draper finally explained Absalom, Absalom! so that I finally understood what the hell was happening.

Good for you, Julie.

The rest of us were not so ambitious.  (Short of something by Joyce, I’m not really sure what could be more ambitious than Faulkner.)

Because I’m working on a collection of essays and because I have a creepy obsession with Sarah Vowell, I took apart The Partly Cloudy Patriot.  Maybe you’ve seen me color essays/chapters of books/etc.  (It’s fun to be in class with me.)  I did, in fact, consider coloring the entirety of the book, but I don’t have that kind of time on my hands (though it would be a worthwhile future exercise).  Instead, I cut out sections of colored scrapbook paper to represent what I might color on the page.  Themes, tone, etc.  I cut them according to approximate proportion in each essay, and each essay in proportion to the book.  It was intense.

And the little creaky gears in the back of my head went click.

Oh.  The difference between a thesis and a book.

I had plans for ten twenty-page essays.  Workshop length essays.  Because that’s what you write, right?  But a book!  You guys, do you know what happens in a book of essays?  Ten-page essays.  Thirty-page essays.  A three-page essay containing nothing but quirky tidbits about the Pittsburgh airport and The Great Gatsby.  Little essays that reflect on bigger essays.  Funny essays, sad essays.

There are so many things I want to write about that I really don’t want to write about/don’t really have enough to say for twenty pages.  Lifetime movies. Series finales.  Sex and the City.

Boom.  Restructure.  Anchor essays.  Essays that move themes along.  Big Center Essays.  Lists both annotated and standalone.  Energy! Enthusiasm! Creation of the Cathy Day Fan Club, Pittsburgh chapter.

The semester ended.  I turned in a complete draft of my Big Thing.

A few weeks later, I got the two hundred pages back from Cathy.  Scribbled near the front: “I think you’re writing a book.”

Things noted while reading one of the last Sweet Valley High books (circa 1998):

08 Saturday Jan 2011

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  • Overuse of the word girlfriend.  As in, “Chill out, girlfriend.”  On average?  Once a page.
  • Ditto girl.
  • As well as a slew of Clueless catch phrases.
  • The token school band, The Droids, started their junior year playing such rousing anthems as “Different Drum” (it’s not that I knock it, it’s just that I am not convinced of high schoolers in the market for a band that plays Linda Ronstadt’s greatest hits) and ended the same year as an industrial punk band.
  • Also that the Wakefield twins and friends would fall all over themselves for industrial punk during their Southern California backyard birthday bash.
  • Can someone make an annotated timeline for the lives of the Wakefield twins?  For instance, Liz and Todd dated in the sixth grade.  Possibly before that (my knowledge of Sweet Valley Kids is slim at best).  Sweet Valley High starts with Liz finally scoring a date with Todd.  At some point, Todd moves away to Vermont; he and Liz break up.  At another point, he moves back, and they get back together.  Apparently, after I stopped reading the first time around, Liz cheats on Todd, and they break up in time for the earthquake (note: the Sweet Valley you know and love will never be the same).  During aforementioned birthday bash, they both note their years of loving one another.  Senior year passes.  They get back together just in time for graduation.  College starts.  They’ve been together — and only with each other — for an eternity, which is why Todd feels justified in kicking Liz to the curb when she doesn’t drop her drawers during week one away from home.  (I think at some point in college, they try to get back together again, but I’m unsure of this.) Whew.
  • For teenage dime-store romance, I find myself awfully confused with an alarming frequency.
  • In writing out the Liz and Todd sequence, I’m pretty sure I finally figured out the tangle that was my friends Lindsey, Mike, and Todd when we were in high school.  Thanks, Sweet Valley.
  • Asking for an annotated timeline means that writing one is probably in my future somewhere. On it, Francine.  Just toss that check in the mail.

Top ten made-for-TV movies

06 Thursday Jan 2011

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10) The Face on the Milk Carton – Kellie Martin (1995)

This was an event in my life.  It was the spring of sixth grade, and the year before I had first read Caroline B. Cooney’s book about a girl who discovers she was kidnapped when she was a toddler by stealing her friend’s carton of milk at lunch one day.  How?  Because that’s when they printed missing children on milk cartons, and the face Janie sees that day is her own.  (Dun, dun, dun.)  The movie, which would already be great because Kellie Martin knows what she’s doing, combines The Face on the Milk Carton with the book’s sequel, Whatever Happened to Janie?, because, unbelievable as this may sound, there’s not enough plot in either book to make a movie without the plot of the other.

Sample dialogue –

Stephen Sands: I was supposed to hold your hand that day, the day you got kidnapped, and… all I did was push you down…and walk away.  And when I looked back…you were gone.

Janie Jessmon: Stephen…Stephen, you were five years old.  You are not responsible for what happened.

Stephen Sands: Maybe.

9) Too Young to be a Dad – Kathy Baker (2002)

As we have affectionately called Kathy Baker since her days on Boston Public, Hook Lady stars as the mom of a fifteen-year-old boy who knocks up his girlfriend. I genuinely think that this is under-talked about subject.  Lifetime is riddled with movies about pregnant teenage girls and the deadbeat boys who run in the other direction.  Too Young to be a Dad shows just how complicated it can be for the teenage boys as well.

Sample dialogue –

Dan Freeman: Are you sure, Son?  It’s for life.
Matt Freeman: It’s already for life, Dad.

8) The Best Little Girl in the World – Jennifer Jason Leigh (1981)

The first of two movie adaptations of Steven Levenkron books (see countdown #2 for the second). Leigh stars as Casey, an anorexic teenager.  Parts delight in this movie: it’s 1981, involves Jennifer Jason Leigh, has somewhat outdated ideas about eating disorders, and it has a saves-the-day therapist. I’m really not sure what’s not to love about this movie, which took an inordinate amount of time to show up on YouTube, but it’s there now.

Sample dialogue –

Joanne: That is not true.  I love you.  I wanted you to have everything.

Casey: Everything that you wanted me to have!  You don’t let me choose my own clothes.  You never liked my friends so I don’t have any friends…and I can’t take this pressure.

Frank: Don’t talk to your mother like that.

Casey: Daddy, for once in my life I am telling you how I feel!  I…I just want you to love me…no matter what I do.

7) Sharing the Secret – Mare Winningham (2000)

Okay, realistically, I could probably make a Top Ten Made-for-TV Eating Disorders Movie list, but I kept it to a third of this one.  (Eating disorders, abuse, teen pregnancy, what else is there to talk about?)  I was unsure where to rank this because, as far as these things go, it’s actually not a terrible movie.  Seriously.  Plus, I’ve had this love of Mare Winningham ever since St. Elmo’s Fire.  This movie follows teenaged Beth’s struggle with bulimia in concordance with her father’s new family, her overworked mom (Winningham), you know the story.  There’s one scene that is downright disturbing, wherein Beth and her mom argue and Beth throws up right there mid-argument.

Sample dialogue –

Beth: I eat tons.  I mean, it just stands to reason that if you put it in, you can take it out.

Mel: I don’t believe you.  Show me.

6) She Cried No – Candace Cameron / Mark-Paul Gosselaar (1996)

It was a toss-up between this and No One Would Tell (also released in 1996, but has Fred Savage instead of Mark-Paul Gosselaar).  Bonus points for actresses from my childhood shows, this one also has the mom from My So-Called Life.  She Cried No affirms everything they told us at freshman orientation: welcome to college; you will get raped.  My favorite part about Lifetime movies is that they do nothing to attack the culture of fear we hand over to women the day they’re born.  This particular movie was actually made by NBC, but it’s seen other viewings on Lifetime.  Plus, the post-movie public service announcement misspelled acquaintance as in acquaintance rape.  Kudos, NBC.

Sample dialogue –

Scott Baker, in defense of rape: “I haven’t done anything you guys haven’t done.”

5) For the Love of Nancy – Tracey Gold / Mark-Paul Gosselaar (1994)

Mark-Paul Gosselaar is practically right up there in Lifetime movie appearances with Meredith Baxter and other out-of-work ‘80s TV moms.  This is, hands down, absolutely the best eating disorder movie ever.  You know this story; aside from its ending, it’s the gold (chuckle, chuckle) standard of eating disorder narratives.  Nancy (Gold) is scared to go to college and break away from her mother and develops an eating disorder.  Her family (especially her brother, Gosselaar) gets righteously angry because they don’t understand why Nancy lies, hides, and nibbles lettuce in the most distressingly manic way.  Plot twist: Nancy gives up her medical rights in court so that her parents can force the proper care on her.  I’ve often wondered about Gold’s decision to make this movie with only a couple years in eating disorder recovery, but that’s probably neither here nor there.

Sample dialogue –

Sally Walsh: You’re hurting yourself.

Nancy Walsh: I know, Mom.

Sally Walsh: Well, I’m not going to put up with this, young lady.

4) Fifteen and Pregnant – Kirsten Dunst (1998)

Oh, it’s exactly what you would expect, only inexplicably starring someone who can actually act and was just hitting her stride.  (Kirsten, Lifetime is for people who can no longer get work, not pixie indie girls making splashes left and right.)  When The Pregnancy Pact aired in 2010, people went on and on about the sudden abundance of teen pregnancy on TV, but, really, it’s always been there.  You just had to look on Lifetime for it.

Sample dialogue –

Evie: He’s sixteen; what he’s gonna do, take her away on his skateboard?

3) She’s Too Young – Marcia Gay Harden (2004)

Anytime you put a venereal disease in someone’s throat and then put that story on TV, I’m in.  This movie came right after a similarly themed episode of Degrassi (both of which included teenaged actress Miriam McDonald).  Good-girl Hannah (not McDonald) realizes that, in high school, boys expect something out of you if they’re going to stoop down to date you.  Unfortunately for her, a good old fashioned STD outbreak happens, which includes a student infection web and parent meetings.  Her mom (Harden) leads the movement to get parents involved in their children’s lives and especially wants the parents of boys to teach their sons responsibility and respect.  Epic.

Sample dialogue –

Nick Hartman: Stick ‘em all, because chances are I have.

2) Secret Cutting – Sean Young / Rhea Perlman (2000)

First shown on USA (the movie’s name changed to Painful Secrets when it got bumped to Lifetime).  Probably not since The Face on the Milk Carton did a made-for-TV movie get this much talk time the next day at school.  This was right around the time that self-injury/cutting started to get a lot of media attention.  It was like all 2000 students at my high school saw Secret Cutting and the celebrity documentary afterward.  This movie is bad.  Even by made-for-TV movie standards bad.  The protagonist has an eyebrow that seems to float independently up her forehead, which pretty much sums up the entire experience.  (Once, when asked what we were watching in my best friend’s basement, another friend replied, “A comedy!”  No one argued otherwise.)  The book it’s based off of is equally bad for different reasons.  What I gleaned from this movie: I really want Rhea Perlman as a therapist.

Sample dialogue –

Russell Cottrell (rolling up his sleeves, giving her a knife): Cut me.
Dawn Cottrell: What?
Russell Cottrell: If it makes you feel better to cut something, cut me

1) In a Child’s Name – Valerie Bertinelli (1991)

Before Sunday afternoons in dorm rooms with my hung-over friends, Lifetime movies were something I shared with my mom, In a Child’s Name becoming my first favorite made-for-TV movie.  This is a legendary picture, busting out at over three hours long.  In it, Bertinelli fights for custody of her niece after her sister is murdered by her (the sister’s) husband.  The best part of the entire movie is after the police have sprayed down the interior of the house with a chemical that glows neon green on traces of blood.  Their investigation of the living room reveals streaks of blood everywhere.  The one moment that makes people realize they have, in fact, sat through all three hours of this movie is a moment later, after a cut to that night, when the parents of the murdered woman are inexplicably allowed to stay the night at the scene of the crime.  They turn off the lights to be greeted with their dead daughter’s glowing bloody handprints all around the room.

No dialogue compares to the visuals and background music of the aforementioned scene, which can, and should immediately, be watched YouTube. (Get yourself to about 1:15 on the above link.)

Could there be two different girls who look the same?

02 Thursday Dec 2010

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Sixth months ago my source handed me a shopping bag and told me that I better love him for the rest of my life.

The contents?

All forty-eight books in the Sweet Valley Senior Year series.

Oh.

[Inside advertisement: "You're watching 'Dawson's Creek'...You're wearing Urban Decay...Have you read senioryear?"]

The semester had just finished, and I had turned in a 186-page draft of my thesis, and I had completed my term paper for modernism, all of which meant that my brain was gone.  Mush.  Even more so than usual.  And because I spent all year writing about TV, I wasn’t entirely into the idea of oozing into the dent in my broken futon for tube time.  (Sacrilege, I know.)  (Plus, when the regular season ends, there’s not much to love about regular television watching.)

So I started reading.  I read legitimate books, too.  And moderately legitimate.  But always I had a book from Sweet Valley Senior Year on my nightstand.  Sometimes, one of those slim volumes took weeks and weeks of two-pages-before-bed reading.  Sometimes, I’d fly through five on a rainy Saturday.

Senior Year is so weird.  It’s completely out of time and place in the Sweet Valley universe.  First, the ubiquitous twin description is nowhere to be seen.  There is the rogue mention of their sun-kissed blonde hair or their eyes the same blue-green as the pacific ocean, but not that mandated setup that fills Sweet Valley High.  The gang has new (mostly better) friends when the earthquake that ends their junior year combines Sweet Valley with another local high school.  You guys, there is an out gay guy, and because it’s 2001 by this point, it’s not a one-book problem like back in the twins’ junior year.  This kid is awesome.  I kind of love him.

Throughout this series, Jessica is slightly less sociopathic — she actually winds up being outshone in that arena by a character far more narcissistic than Jessica could ever dream of being.  Elizabeth is slightly less meddling as she gets in touch with her inner emo.

The regulars who filled the other books mostly fade into the background.  Todd gets a few random shoutouts.  Enid, Winston, etc. are all but forgotten for most of the series.  Ken comes to the forefront as an actual human being.  The books are oddly self-referential and meta-humored in a way that does nothing more than reward those foolish enough to have read this far.

All of these leads to a few conflicting thoughts.

["Lots of gossip goin' round," yes, but Gossip Girls they are not.]

Part of the appeal of Sweet Valley High is how awful it was.  It’s dime store romance for teenagers, which means that it’s not supposed to have any merit outside of escapist entertainment.  Which it does spectacularly.  Senior Year elevates the books out of that space into a territory where they’re not awful, but they’re not awfully good.  Well, I take that back.  They lack the pizzazz, scandal, whatever of contemporary series.  Like the revamped early books in Sweet Valley High, the books still mostly have 1983 plots with 2000 accessories.  They’re charming in their innocence.  So that doesn’t make them bad, it just makes them not terribly exciting.

One of the frequent complaints about regular Sweet Valley High is that, like The Babysitters Club, the characters are in this unending revolving door of their junior year.  Christmas comes and goes and comes and goes.  Prom happens and prom happens and prom happens.  The twins are sixteen and Margo tries to kill them.  A year later, they are still sixteen, and Margo and her twin try to kill them.

[Best, best, best moment in all of Senior Year: when Jessica looks back upon her high school days and remembers "that crazy Margo chick."  That's it.  That crazy Margo chick.]

Senior Year is entirely linear.  The first thirty or so books stretch the pacing to almost real time.  A book will cover a day or two, and the next picks up right after.  The ghost writers must have gotten word that they need to wrap things up as the second half of the twins’ senior year is rapid fire, mostly the big hits like Valentine’s Day, Spring Break, etc.  I frequently argue that good TV is like literature.  In that equation, a season would be like a volume in a series, with each episode being a chapter.  The thing about Senior Year is that it read like a television show.  It could reasonably be a season of a show that was a lot better than the actual Sweet Valley High television show.

The advantage to Senior Year is that it was the last of the franchise.  Therefore, they had the benefit of having all of the previous books in the Twins, Kids, etc. series.  So there are fun moments like when Jessica wishes she could be like Janet*.  The disadvantage, however, is that Sweet Valley University exists.  The twins start college with the same personalities they had as high school juniors.  Their plots depend on those personalities.  If Jessica is who she is in Senior Year, she isn’t in the position to get sucked into Mike’s abusive world.  Elizabeth won’t be upset by Enid’s transformation into sophisticated Alex because the two haven’t been friends all year and Enid turned goth anyway.  The flip side of this is when the books don’t acknowledge what happened in previous incarnations.  Like when Elizabeth claims that getting dumped on prom night is the worst thing ever.  Unlike, you know, when she killed her twin’s boyfriend while drunk driving at the infamous Jungle Prom.

[The inclusion of Double Love means that I now own three versions of the very first SVH book.]

Which brings us to book forty-eight, Sweet 18.  The very last book in the Sweet Valley universe (until Confidential is released in the spring).  This book seems to be entirely written for people who have not touched the books in years, but are curious to see how things shake out.  All of a sudden, there’s Enid and Winston and everyone we haven’t seen since about book two.  And way the hell out of nowhere, Elizabeth and Todd get back together.  (I would have bought it if it hadn’t been so rushed in some vague attempt to make things align with the beginning of SVU.)  All of which is like a platter of sentimentality.

We all know how I do with sentimentality.

A few weeks ago, propped up in bed with pillows, too late to still be reading (aw, it’s like I’m ten all over again with more or less the same reading material), I finished Sweet 18.  The twins turn eighteen (obvi), they graduate high school, and we close the book (so to speak) on the Sweet Valley universe.

And I cried.  Of course I cried.

First, I cry over every graduation event on television, in movies, and in books.  There are few events as sentimental as that.  My family writes the book on sentimental crying.  In real life last June?  I started weeping at my sister’s graduation before they even finished “Pomp and Circumstance.”

So of course I cried over the end of Sweet Valley.

I’m interested to see how Sweet Valley Confidential uses the otherwise completion of the franchise to its advantage.  Will it be more Sweet Valley High or more Sweet Valley Senior Year?  Which would you prefer?

*just wanted to give you time to guess/remember.  Janet was president of the Unicorn Club.  But you knew that, right?

Americanizing Degrassi (no longer The Next Generation)

23 Saturday Oct 2010

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The problem with television is just how hard it is to let it go.  The discontinuation of various series is a subject for another entry at another time.  So is the general idea of breaking up with a show while it’s still going (hello, The Office and How I Met Your Mother).  There is one, though, that I just keep coming back to even though I haven’t truly loved it in a good five seasons.

I’m looking at you, Degrassi.

My problems with Degrassi are many, but most of them filter into the idea that the show has grown increasingly American over its run.  This breaks down into a couple of different major themes, one of which I’ll write about more later, but the one that’s getting to me today is sexuality.

One of the biggest highlights of Degrassi has always been its frank and generally honest approach to teenage sexuality.  As in, teenagers have sex.  Sometimes there are consequences, sometimes there are not.  Teenagers who get pregnant actually have to deal with pregnancy (keep, abort, adopt) rather than briefly fret over the idea of abortion/keeping and then magically miscarrying at the moment of decision (Beverly Hills, 90210; Party of Five).  There are gay kids, there are confused kids, now there’s even a trans kid.  Sexuality and class; sexuality and God; sexuality and violence; sexuality and agency.  Degrassi has been all over exploring these ideas.  These are all good, amazing things.  The show’s original run as Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High, the first several seasons of The Next Generation have had some of the most nuanced explorations of teenage sexuality on television.

[Manny]

Every one of those moments, however, has been entirely Canadian.  In The Next Generation, season three, Manny finds herself pregnant after what may or may not have been a one-night-stand (we know she and Craig have sex once, but their hidden relationship in later episodes appears to not go there).  In an entirely daring move on the show’s part, Manny makes the decision to have an abortion and actually goes through with it.  Not only that, but she does so with her mother by her side.  That’s big.  And, of course, American kids did not get to see the two-part episode on their TV until years later during an “every episode ever” marathon.  (The episodes were included on the American DVD release and used as a marketing tool for such.)  American TV has huge problems with abortion (duh).  Also, during the first season, and I’m not sure in how many years of repeats, the poster in the girls’ bathroom that’s basically a PSA for condom usage is blurred for American viewers.

But, okay.  We know that, right?  We get weird about sex in our supposedly over-sexed media.

[Adam]

Continuing.  The thing is, The Next Generation exists entirely as a result of teenage sexuality in Degrassi Junior High.  Punk-rocker kid Spike gives birth to a baby girl, Emma, whom she chooses to raise.  The Next Generation starts as Emma begins junior high.  The years that follow include Manny’s pregnancy, Liberty’s pregnancy (adoption), an oral STI outbreak, teen mom Mia, Manny’s drunken flashing to a video camera, Emma’s sober flashing to make a feminist point, etc.  Whether or not these events are handled in the best way possible is always up for debate, but the point is that they’re allowed to exist.  And the consequences to the characters are in line with real life consequences — just, you know, melodramatically so (because this is still TV, Canadian or not).

Recently, the second half of the tenth season started — we’re four episodes in (I think).  The end of the summer “Boiling Point” twenty-four-episode extravaganza concluded with a couple characters hooking up in a classroom and characters using the boiler room for reasons that give a delightful nod to the boiler room of My So-Called Life.  And Snake (married to the now unseen Spike), recently promoted to principal of Degrassi, throws down.  Locks up.  Locks down.  Whatever it is that’s this season’s catchphrase.  And now I’ve got problems.

First. Travel back with me to that third season when they had that vaguely misguided Breakfast Club episode.  Snake’s recovering from cancer and informs the principal that he needs to loosen up, let teenagers be teenagers, and to remember that life is short.  It’s very moving.  When Emma flashes the school in protest, Snake does little more than shrug his shoulders and beg Emma to have a nice, quiet end to her senior year.  (And he’s nothing less than compassionate when she drops the bomb that she might have an oral STI.)  Snake, as we know him, tries desperately to remember what it’s like to be a teenager while still drawing authoritative boundaries.

[Seriously, it's a super unsettling episode, especially if you were a teenager when the Columbine shootings happened.]

Second. Travel back with me to the fourth season when there’s a school shooting.  That’s one hell of a two-parter (still leaves me shaking when I watch it).  The consequences at the school are minimal – mostly resulting in the principal leaving – but let’s just say there are no metal detectors.  Also, once again, Snake proves to be the voice of reason in helping students deal with their feelings about the shooter.  Ditto in season six when beloved character JT is stabbed to death at a party (at Snake’s/Emma’s house) and when, at the beginning of season seven, characters partially involved in said stabbing become students at Degrassi.  There is so much violence that is handled, more or less, in stride.

And now this season.  There are metal detectors.  There are school uniforms.  There are very few after-school clubs/activities.  It is police state central.  Because a couple kids got caught fooling around on school property.  (Which, you know, never actually happens in real life. I’m remembering you, boy best friend, with the girl in the baseball dugout.)  Girls attached to the rampant sexuality that’s supposedly taken over the school (whether in actuality or in rumor) are forced to take a self-esteem class.  Because that’s the problem.  Because there is a problem in the first place.  There is no equivalent for the male characters.

This absolute overreaction to teenage sexuality is, for me at least, the final step in the Americanization of Degrassi.  They’ve been working at it for a while, and now it’s done.  And I’m left with questions.  I mean, why?  Is this because they’ve got (or, should I say, had, because the numbers have dropped, dropped, dropped) a great American audience?  Because police states make for more dramatic television (and give some plots to an otherwise exhausted series)?

Lastly, I’m interested in what happens next.  Both to Degrassi and another show that’s garnered similar attention from across the ocean.  British teen soap Skins has been lauded for the realism (even more so) that used to make Degrassi so amazing.  And now it’s coming to the States.  Remade.  Apparently go-for-go (which, at that point, why not save money and syndicate?).  That’s never going to fly.  That will last for half a second before someone, somewhere reminds whoever’s in charge of American television that sexuality has drastic, drastic consequences — ones far more serious than any kind of violence and definitely ones far more serious than pretending that what we don’t talk about actually doesn’t exist.

October 12, 1950

12 Tuesday Oct 2010

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Sixty years ago today, the television incarnation of The Burns and Allen Show premiered on CBS.  It was the first of what would be 291 episodes.  You should probably know that Gracie Allen is one of my favorite actresses of all time.  It makes me some kind of sad that her legacy hasn’t had the same endurance as her husband’s or some of her peers’.

I first heard the genius of Gracie Allen on a road trip with my dad when I was thirteen. As we continued on toward Indianapolis, we listened to a skit from The Burns and Allen Show.  While I knew who George Burns was from the movie Oh God!, I had never heard of Gracie Allen before.  Something about her high-pitched voice captured me much as Gilda Radner had years before.  By the time the skit was over, I was flipping through the tape case, looking for others we could listen to.  I wanted to know everything about her.

The brilliance of Gracie Allen’s comedy is best summed up by Burns: “She was smart enough to become the dumbest woman in show business.”  Beginning when the couple paired up (professionally – the marriage didn’t come until four years later) in 1922 on the Vaudeville circuit, Allen took the traditional Dumb Dora role and completely owned it.  At first Burns wanted the laughs, making Allen the straight man of the routine.  It didn’t take long, though, for him to realize that the audience loved and responded to Allen.  He became the straight man as we remember him, eyebrow raised and cigar in hand.  (Fun fact: before their live shows, Burns went on stage to test the direction of the air, so he could stand where the cigar smoke wouldn’t get in Allen’s eyes, something he learned the audience members were very concerned about.)

The Burns and Allen Show, both in radio and television formats, is a domestic sitcom.  In most episodes, character Gracie gets herself into some kind of misunderstanding, be it with the mob or just trying to get George to replace Cary Grant in a movie role.  She means well, of course.  For all her supposed lack of smarts, she always seems to outwit the sometimes tyrannical George.  When Allen spoke, the audience believed her; no matter how wacky the statement, you could find the logic eventually.  While the gags are quaint by today’s comedic standards, they were a hit at the time, earning the show eleven Primetime Emmy nominations (five of which were for Allen).  The Burns and Allen Show also became the second American sitcom to become rebroadcast in the UK (The Amos ‘n’ Andy Show got there first).  Allen is remembered today in the Gracie Awards, given yearly by American Women in Radio & Television.  (Fun fact, part two: the famous “Say goodnight, Gracie” / “Goodnight, Gracie” bit never happened.  “Say goodnight, Gracie” was always followed simply with “Goodnight.”)

David Bianculli at TV Worth Watching has already bemoaned on both his blog and on Fresh Air that we don’t celebrate our television history.  I’m so with him.  While the person who memorizes Oscar-winner statistics is lovably and/or admirably called a film buff, there’s only something vaguely pathetic about people with a vast knowledge of TV.  Doesn’t that make anyone else a little bit sad?  Think of all those people who don’t know the comedic talents of women like Gracie Allen because we mostly value the very moment in front of us on the small screen.

Savor these moments, too.  Happy birthday, Burns and Allen!

Women like Mary Karr

11 Monday Oct 2010

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Last week, to my absolute delight, I got to see Mary Karr speak as part of the Drue Heinz Lecture Series.

First off, it was just fantastic to have someone representing Team Nonfiction.  Two of the speakers last year (fiction writers – the authors whom people from school actually went to see) got into some serious hating on nonfiction.  So having one of the reigning queens on nonfiction was a total plus. (Another total plus?  Tracy Kidder will be here for the Series in February. Like, the week of my birthday. Best present ever, universe!)

But, regardless of genre, regardless of status within the genre or the writing world as a whole, it was so good for me to see Mary Karr because she was nothing but Mary Karr.

An explanation.

I understand that, in general, writers are different people when they’re speaking in front of an audience than they might be in their real lives or in their written lives or whatever.  I don’t spend most of my time with writers in performance mode, though.  I spend most of my time with writers in real life mode.  And in my life, that means a good deal of Midwesterners, New Englanders, and overall a metric shit-ton of introverts.  People are very contemplative.  They are mostly quiet.

An example.

We had our big writers-in-the-woods MFA retreat a couple of weekends ago, and we had ourselves divided by genre cabin-wise.  So the nonfictioknights were circled up in their cabin for dinner on Saturday night and it got Dead Quiet.  Just people chewing away on their burritos.  My dearest Robyn later said how wonderful that was and, while no one else was around to agree or disagree, it looked like most people would have agreed.  Everyone looked various shades of content during that quiet meal.

For me?  Torture.

Here’s a short list of personal attributes: extroverted. Loud. Eighteen synonyms for loud.

At the most recent AWP Conference, I had lunch with a fabulous Italian-American/New York writer whom I super adore.  We were talking about loudness/inability to be quiet, and I said, “I’m Italian and Southern.”  To which she responded, “Honey, you don’t have a chance.”

Truth.

I’ve tried to shut up.  I really have.  As young as preschool age, watching Daniel Striped Tiger on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, I knew that people valued quiet.  They valued the ability for people to keep their mouths shut.  I tried and I tried.  I still go through spells where I think this time I’ll get it.  Mostly, I don’t.  (If I had my yearbooks with me, I’d scan this picture as proof, but know that in my first grade class picture, you can spot me easy.  Because I’m the one talking.)  Because when you’re loud – when you’re the type of person who just can’t shut up – and you’re surrounded by well-mannered introverts, you get That Look.  All the time.  The what the hell are you talking about? look and the Are you still talking? look.  Mostly the Please, please, please be quiet look.  (I won’t even address the Southern part.  Suffice to say I’ve gotten more than one “the South scares me.”)

So to see Mary Karr be everything she is on the page and more was, in a word, affirming.  She’s all Southern and full of things like addressing people as “Miss [First Name].”  There was a lot going on with her hands and just so much personality.  And she didn’t back down.  She just let herself be.  And, again, that could entirely be her I’m-speaking-in-front-of-people persona, but it felt real enough that I’ll take it as such.  Or imagine it as such.  Or whatever.

And, you know, maybe that meant that people I go to school with got the chance to vocalize everything they don’t like about me in saying everything they didn’t like about her.  But I already knew those things anyway.

And, in an academic-writing world of people who border on being too much the same, it’s good to know there’s a space (even if it’s just a little one) for the women who are not.

Guest blog from Alex

06 Wednesday Oct 2010

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There are few things in this world for which I ask: enough money to pay my bills, slippers with a balanced comfort to warmth ratio, a working popcorn button on my microwave, and some resolution to the series finale of my favorite television shows. It was a blow when Showtime didn’t sign Carnivale on for a third season—never to resolve any of the mystery and allure of the show; I didn’t want to invest in a series for a long time after that. Over time, I learned to trust the television again—even marveled at the grace in which Mitchell Hurwitz resolved Arrested Development on such short notice. Although I watched Six Feet Under years after it had gone off the air, the series finale stuck with me for weeks, and I still consider it one of the best ever aired. But all of my faith in television vanished last May when Lost aired its series finale.

For lack of desire to come up with a less melodramatic way of putting this, I felt betrayed. Cumulatively, I invested almost a week of my life into watching that show, not to mention the countless hours I spent defending the outlandish plot line to critical peers. I never questioned the believability of a polar bear on a tropical Island, or the alternate universe subplot; I simply trusted the writers and producers to make the necessary connections to keep me grounded in the world of the show. They did this, for a time, but the plot got more and more twisted, and, eventually, they lost control—or merely lost interest in good story telling—until the series finale left so many contradictions, plot holes, and unanswered questions that the viewers were uncertain of what they had seen until Jimmy Kimmel interview the cast on his show.

I won’t get into the details—because I’m done thinking about them—but I will say that the show betrayed the only principle that television has left; that is to leave its viewers satisfied. Life can be unsatisfying enough without television adding to that. People don’t watch television because it will improve their lives; they watch it because it’s an escape from the aspects of their lives they can’t improve upon, and a lack of resolution is one of life’s biggest disappointments.

I’m not asking for television wrapped in a neat little bow, but television writers need to consider the aspects of their show that attracted people in the first place. People were attracted to Lost for the mystery because they wanted to be able to put the pieces together, they liked to talk about it and develop theories, pull some meaning from the chaos of the thing, and Lost creators told people they would just have to be satisfied with the loose ends. I say that sucks.

I can remember people saying they loved the ending of No Country For Old Men because it was “unresolved, just like life” and all I can remember thinking was that I wanted my money back. I can watch life happen in a coffee shop, and I can see unresolved drama in a Walmart. I want more from my television, from my investment in the characters that people it, and I don’t think a proper ending is asking too much.

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Alex didn’t give me a bio. Know that he is one of the most driven, awesome, talented people I’ve ever met. He’s going to take over the world, so suck up to him now. He blogs at 70@Heart.

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