Homewreckers

I wasn't afraid of the typical stuff, as a kid. A girl in my Brownie troop lived half a block from a cemetery, and we'd ride our bikes through the place and admire the more ornate headstones, sitting on the ones that had benches, distributing the tiny weedy daisies that grew in the lawn on the plots that seemed wanting. I had no worries about ghosts. I don't plan to be buried, but I figure you could do worse than to have a couple of dopey third-graders disrupting your Eternal Rest while wobbling around on their Schwinns and reciting selections from their favorite Bill Cosby albums. (Heather Lerwick--where are you now? If ever you Google yourself, surely this will be the weirdest hit!)

But I wasn't fearless. Oh, I had very specific and deeply held anxieties, over which I lay awake in dread on many a night. Would you like to hear about them? The three things that haunted my dreams and stirred me to helpless panic? Come scootch over here real close, and look upon the first face of terror:

That guy. That guy!

What is the deal, with the Cat in the Hat? Come on, he is PETRIFYING! He just shows up, while your mom is away, and she didn't even lock the door so he just COMES IN and starts WRECKING the place. Balancing shit! Spilling shit! Letting a pair of Things run amok! Strewing wanton chaos and mess in his wake!

Okay: my mom was a compulsive neat freak, taking her own anxieties out on dirt with furious aggression. We wiped out the sink after each use, played with one toy at a time, and knew to open the fridge with a sleeve pulled down to prevent fingerprints on the handle. She's mellowed considerably since then, thank Prozac...but there was a time when the slightest mess provoked her displeasure, and if mama ain't happy...well. Cat-induced mayhem boded ill.

And so at a tender age I was vaguely afraid of the Cat in the Hat, worried he'd show up to get ME into terrible trouble some rainy afternoon. (Although this line from the Wikipedia plot summary is splendid: The Cat's antics are vainly opposed by the family pet, a sapient and articulate fish.) On some level, I understood that a gigantic, bipedal, English-speaking cat sporting a stripey chapeau was...unlikely. (Thank heavens I wasn't subjected to Mike Myers's mutant visage as a kid; that gives me nightmares now.) But I soon had new demons to dread:

AAAAAAAAAAHHH! Laurel and Hardy! Coming with pickaxes, yet, to DESTROY YOUR HOME. (Yes, Mecklenburg, I can hear you laughing from here.) They were a silent menace that played on an overhead screen at the local Shakey's Pizza, accompanied by jaunty-funereal organ music as they smashed china and furniture and upright pianos to smithereens. Laurel and Hardy were real, if consigned to the realm of Olde Things, and I found them completely terrifying. All right, all right: the Cat in the Hat was a drawing...but these two maniacs could still possibly appear on your doorstep and tear the house down around you, giggling wordlessly, blinking their tiny black evil eyes. Laurel and Hardy: shudder. In a college film seminar, I had to watch "Big Business," and was hard-pressed to explain why I was peeking through my fingers in American Film Comedy. Not funny not funny not funny. Not.

Even less funny? Ohh, dude. Look at THIS:

OH MY GOD, NO. I was nine years old when 1941 came out, probably old enough to know better...but holy mother, look at that poster. That particular poster, in the back of some comic book or magazine I had, scared the bejesus out of me. SO MUCH DESTRUCTION. They are FIRING UPON the amusement park! Normally a fun place! They're blowing up the movie theatre showing DUMBO! That house, at the end, ruined and pulverized and pushed off the cliff into the sea! Merry Christmas! Ha ha ha! Wheeeee!

Oh dear lord, I could not handle it. Still can't; never seen it all the way through. The whole reason I started this post was because this blasted-ass terrible movie popped up on cable this evening, and I was lulled into false complacency by the merry jitterbugging in the USO. Before they SMASHED THE ENTIRE TOWN TO FLAMING SMITHEREENS, and I realized what I was watching and fumbled for the remote, whimpering into my mac and cheese. Not funny!

Also, now I am prone to wondering if there is a homeowners' insurance clause for Wanton Cinematic Mayhem. Acts of Laurel and Hardy?

Bree Sharp: "Okay, but seriously...why?"

Oh yes, I heard.

And of course it is damn sad, and mortifying, and more than a little pitiful. I feel for the kids, most, and for the missus (Sarah Lawrence, represent!). And on the subject of Ms. T, goddamn, because what hope in hell do the rest of us poor slobs have, if being whip-smart and wickedly funny and talented and a tall drink of gorgeous is not enough? Holy crap!

But meanwhile my lizard brain is all in a quandary, because The List, my List? has seemingly leapt from my subconscious and is running amok in the streets. Y'all have a List, right? The list of two to five celebrity free passes, against which you will brook no argument from your spouse or significant other? So that, if John Krasinski or Daniel Dae Kim, or both, should inexplicably show up on my doorstep bearing bottles of champagne, or massage oil, or both?...well, I could not be held accountable. The List. I invoke The List. Also I am single, so The List is under perpetual review at my own discretion or lack thereof.

So. Awkward. And ugly, and unfortunately titillating. Sigh. Anyway...Robert Downey, Jr. seems to have gotten his shit together, after a long, looong string of art-imitating-life-imitating-art, so...there is always hope. Get better, you beautiful trainwreck, for the sake of those chirrens at least. I will skulk back over here to the shallow end of the pool, where the water is uncomfortably hot and has the distinct whiff of sulphur. Dang, man.

It's time to call it a day

Dude, I am so not cut out for midnight movies any more. The thrill of the moment is grand, but oooh, the crash is bad news. I feel like I'm having a day-after-Christmas letdown, a little bit. Anyway. I won't spoil it for ya: the X-File, such as it is, plays out like a longish episode of the show, but we all know I was never there for the monsters anyway. And as a shameless love letter to the swoony romantic faithful among us? Total success, this movie. Kind of sweet of them, really.

Anyway. Go read Rebecca Traister in Salon, on her love of Scully; she got paid to write down the stuff I was amateurishly flailing at. Kumail Ali also made me laugh. This will conclude the dorky fangirl segment of the blog...at least until I retire, and go for a doctorate in Media Studies. Only half kidding!

Geek, dweeb, or spaz

Okay, confession time. By all accounts, it has thus far been a stinko summer for me and mine; I've already mentioned how I would kind of like to take a little vacation to the back of my bedroom closet, curled fetally around a pillow and a pan of brownies. But I have been clinging to one thing, one wee bit of Summer Fun-ness that I have been gleefully awaiting for a long, long time. Wanna guess what it is? I cover it pretty well; you might be surprised.

Ohhhh yyyyeaaaaaah. Mulder and Scully in the hizzouse, one week away. Believe again, the teaser posters said, and I would like to point out here that yo, I never stopped.

It's funny, I know. I am not by any stretch of the imagination a science-fiction kook in any other capacity. When I worked at Waldenbooks eons ago, one of my colleagues wore a homemade Star Trek uniform for Halloween one year, and all. day. long. crazy customers came out of the woodwork to point out to her the many ways in which her collar, her insignia, her belt, were not regulation. I thought they were ALL bonkers. Sure, I had Star Wars action figures as a kid, and Sis and I squabbled so much over the Princess Leia that we each had to have one...but we did not secure them in plastic bubbles as an investment; they got buried in the yard, their tiny ray guns and lightsabers mauled in the vaccuum cleaner. (My mother famously fell asleep during Star Wars, the original, at the drive-in. "I couldn't take it, all that boop boop and beep beep," she shrugged afterwards.) I hear good things, but I've never seen a single episode of Dr. Who.

And I was a latecomer to the X-Files, too. I had some friends who were entirely obsessed, and I remember inadvertently dropping by their place once a little early for Friday-night carousing, only to find them watching the second-season finale, six inches from the t.v. screen. "SSSSHHHHHHHH," they hissed frantically. My sole initial thought about this U.F.O. television program was what kind of names are those?

So I still can't explain exactly when I got hooked. At some point I discovered it wasn't just about the alien menace...and thank God, really, because I was never there for the space guys. I was snagged by the dark and the wet and the gloom, the dreary familiarity of the Vancouver years. And then I went through a rough, dark patch in my own life, and I clung to this story, to these fictional people. I stayed for the dynamic, the romance in a classical, gothic sense--fascinated by these two brilliant, damaged, doomed, devoted characters struggling to do the right thing, to put away more ordinary monsters, to keep seeking a measure of justice while the world got smaller and darker and crazier around them, every minute. It's a sad story, really. For an hour a week, my problems were petty. Poor Mulder and Scully--in the end, they each have no one but the other. How lucky! How costly!

Also, it doesn't hurt at all that both of them are insanely scorching hot.

Anyway. So I have been a regular, in this and only this fandom--I cringe even using that dopey word, a little--and today I was squaring up plans with some Seattle folks in an online forum, to stay up way too late and go to a midnight madness premiere and scream like ninnies to see our adored Moose and Squirrel back on the big screen. We are going to see our old imaginary friends! It is going to be so much fun!

Then I sort of realized that the ladies I was chatting with are all college-age, or even younger. One young woman cannot attend the midnight movie because her parents said no. So technically I am old enough to be her mother. Oh goodness. Well, we all could do far, far worse for a role model than Dana Scully, that's for damn sure. We are not out knocking over 7-Elevens or huffing paint or whoring our way onto a reality show, because we have intellectual pursuits! Also we are dorks!

I'll close by linking to David Duchovny's blog, because when the hell else am I ever gonna get to do that? Me and David, typing away in our Blogger templates late into the night, sharing our smarty smartassed thoughts with the Internet. We are practically, like, totally bonding and stuff. Step off, girls.

Edited to add: hold up. Steely Dan?! Feh. You're lucky you're pretty, DD.

Helluva town

The TiVo picked up On the Town the other night; I've probably seen it half a dozen times, but that didn't prevent me from sitting down in front of it again, with a plate of spaghetti, this evening. Three sailors on a 24-hour shore leave in New York, seeing sights and picking up dames--as a plot, it's wafer-thin, but what a giddy primary-colored love letter to the city it is. They used to show free movies, Friday and Saturday nights at Sarah Lawrence, and I remember that one year, On the Town was part of their "welcome to New York!" film series in September. (Probably they paired it with more nuanced portraits, like Fame. Or Taxi Driver.) I remember that during Ann Miller's big "Prehistoric Man" number, the young feminists in the audience became quite ruffled when Jules Munshin dragged her across the set by the hair. Oh, olden times! You so crazy!

But really. Cave-man antics aside, those are pretty well-mannered sailors. It's been a while since I've seen it, and I was surprised this time by how aggressive the ladies are, for 1949. Betty Garrett as Hildy, practically molesting poor scrawny little Frank Sinatra in that cab! That she drives, I hasten to point out, even though one of the other characters notes with perplexity, "the war's over!" Ann Miller's character, Claire, alludes to some sort of "guardian" she's supposed to have while conducting her anthropological studies in the big city; at any rate, she successfully evades said chaperone enough to get Jules Munshin in a headlock, and liplock, pretty quickly. I know this movie is hardly social commentary...and yet it hovers on some shimmery border between Rosie-the-Riveter days and the booming 50s with their accompanying rigid social strata--the stuff that I'm watching fall apart in Mad Men, set a decade later. Innnnteresting.

And that is some pretty heavy cultural significance that I'm attempting to hang on an MGM musical, so I'll knock it off and just talk about why I love it. The beautiful location shots for that first number--real, old, gorgeous, filthy New York. The traffic-light colors that run throughout the women's costuming. The little in-jokes: when Gene Kelly's Gabey shrugs off the passing girl that the others are ogling, Ozzie (Munshin) demands, "Who ya got waiting for ya in New York, Ava Gardner?" (And Frank does not even blink. I didn't get that one, when I was twelve.) Or, one of the first lines of dialogue, when they're all straight off the boat: "We nevah been heah befoah," Sinatra's character Joiseys, and perhaps they should have given that particular line to someone else? Because his delivery is somewhat unconvincing.

And ohhh, Gene Kelly. I am still hot for Gene Kelly. I went through a big classic-musicals phase, when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and sure, Fred Astaire's effortless gliding around was lovely. But Gene Kelly made me feel...funny. His dancing was not effortless: you could see him working at it, see that this was a man in very deliberate control of his body, of his physical and athletic ability. It...promised something, something I recognized before I understood it. Hot damn, Gene Kelly. His IMDB bio has this quote, among others: "I work bigger. Fred's style is more intimate. I'm very jealous of that when I see him on the small screen. Fred looks so great on TV. I'd love to put on a white tie and tails and look as thin as him and glide as smoothly. But I'm built like a blocking tackle." Um...yyyeah. And whew. What was I saying? Anyway. The fact that he was handsome--and ripped--aside, nobody did moony-eyed smittenness better than Gene Kelly. He'd float after a girl, two inches off the ground, clicking his heels together, and it was completely believable.

The movie just looks like fun, period. Why wouldn't it be fun, to be tearing around Manhattan with a hot sailor for one day, going to museums and nightclubs and doing datey things? Plus eventually evading the police and having a few Coney Island hoochie-coochie-show shenanigans thrown in for good measure? I am slightly older (to my horror) than all the participants in On the Town, I think; I'm sitting here now in a ratty United Way t-shirt and gym shorts, and I don't know that I could stay up for 24 hours, even on a date, even if you paid me. (For Mr. Kelly, maybe.) But it sure looks like fun.

I graduated from college May 22, 1992--incidentally, the day of Johnny Carson's last show, and the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend. My mom and I stayed on in New York City for the holiday, and when we got to our shabby-genteel, Let's Go-recommended midtown hotel, we learned that Memorial Day coincides with Fleet Week in NYC. The place was teeming with sailors, boyish in their caps and bellbottoms, everywhere we looked, crowding the lobby. It was as if we'd been dropped onto a soundstage. I was 22; I'd been up for a week straight, pretty much, either packing or partying; I was probably in no shape to have a 24-hour dream date. It didn't matter anyway: my mother introduced herself to one of the sailors in the phone-booth-sized elevator on our way up, and said, innocently enough, "My father was a Navy man!" And I am telling you, we did not lift a suitcase or open a door for ourselves for the rest of that entire weekend. (Most of which, I confess, I slept through.) Those boys were gentlemen, to a one. It might have gone differently, if I had been alone. And if any of them had looked like Gene Kelly. Oh well.

How to secure a standing invitation

Talk at our adolescent-mortification-themed book club meeting (a whole 'nother story I'll fill in later) turns to John Hughes movies. One end of the couch is holding forth on both Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club, but I dismiss each as "too Messagey."

"Sixteen Candles, no question," I say. "It's the first one and the only one I can pretty much recite word-for-word."

At which point the newest book-club attendee, Kristin, turns to me and declares without preamble, "No, he's not retarded!"