How much do you think my head weighs? February 4, 2011

 

As all my smarty-pants readers know, next Tuesday, February 8, is the day of reckoning. The day I will step on the scale and calculate just how productively I’ve been spending my time and talents.

What? No, not that. As if I would share my weight-loss efforts with you guys. No offense, but mind your own beeswax. I’m allowed to say that because I am a character in a Judy Blume young adult novel.

That right there — my widespread knowledge of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” “Superfudge” and “Blubber” — is something I hope will help me on Tuesday when I log on to the Jeopardy website and take the online test to be considered for an audition to be a contestant on the only game show that matters.

For whatever reason, the rules are fairly convoluted. I can only take the online test on this day, and my results are not revealed to me. Then I wait. If I pass, then my name goes onto the pile with other smarties. If I get the call to go to an audition city, awesome. Either way, I wait for 18 months before I can take the test again.

I don’t want to wait 18 months, people. So obviously I’ve got some work to do. Not on potential subject matter; when it comes to Jeopardy! subjects, it’s like a standardized test. You either know it or you don’t. You win by strategy. You pick your categories and you crush your opponents by ringing in the fastest. In my case, that would be categories related to music, pop culture, television, movies, religion, podcasts (as if), literature, media, pregnancy and cooking.The secondary strategy is also important: If it’s not your best category but you know bits here and there, you read the end of the clue while Alex is reading the beginning of the clue, go with your gut, and ring in. For me this would include politics, U.S. presidents, world leaders, chemistry and those crazy word puzzle categories. If you flat-out stink on certain subjects, just sit quietly unless the answer jumps out at you, such as in opera, physics and math.

So, what I’m really working on are my stories. If I excel on the online test, and the stars align, and I do get called to an audition, then I’d better have my Calvinette charm, poise and confidence ready to go, and I’d better have some good stories. I expect that at the audition, they’re also testing a person’s on-screen presence and potentiality for a witty exchange with Alex. Actually, it doesn’t have to be the greatest story in the world, evidently. This week, one contestant told a “story” about how when she received her college diploma in the mail, she could not immediately figure out how to open it. I … um … that is … so interesting … of course you would pick … that story … to start your first game …

Based on the riveting diploma story, I think I’ve got at least a decent foundation to start with. I figure I’ll need to have at least three good ones in the bank. (Makes me wonder what Diploma Lady’s back-up stories were about … the time she went went shopping and found a good sale on canned peas … AND ALSO REALIZED SHE HAD A COUPON?! Or the time  she fell and hit her head and forgot about everything interesting that ever happened to her?)

Not that I’m terribly interesting, but I have to at least believe I am interesting to get noticed at an audition, right? So my first stab at it will be to go right for the Gross-Out: The time I got Canyon Toe from wearing the wrong socks while hiking the Grand Canyon, and lost five of my toenails. Story No. 2 (the Suck-Up): The first time I felt Little Dude kick inside the womb was while watching Jeopardy. Story No. 3: (the Mishap) The time I started a kitchen fire while trying to make tortilla chips. If I need additional stories, like, in case I win more than two games in a row (you may stop laughing … now), I’ve got some more backups, including the tale of how I acquired my dimple by crashing into a barstool (I was 3, and no, not drunk); and finally, an explanation of what I plan to do with all my winnings, which is to give ten percent to our church’s deficient budget and then use the rest to help pay off the mortgage on our house in Texas, and then, if possible, donate the house and the land to someone deserving.

The other thing I’m working on is my husband. He’s supposed to be building me a little buzzer to help me practice my thumb speed, but he’s as yet to get started on that. In the meantime, I suppose I’ll just have to poke him in the shoulder with my speedy little thumb every time I have an answer for anything.

“Jenn, where’s the big scissors?” Poke. “Where you left it.”

“Have you seen my iPod?” Poke. “Yes, it’s very pretty.”

“Jenn, where are the baby’s socks.” Poke. “Top drawer.” Poke-poke-poke. “That’s for the next three times you ask me.”

Answer: “The number of thumb pokes it will take before the Husband makes me a practice buzzer.” Question. “What is 17, or until I decide to raid the toolbox and make one myself.”

Wish me luck!

Why directors’ cuts don’t offer that much more September 4, 2009

As in, the director’s cut of the pilot of “Glee” aired Wednesday night on FOX.

With all the hype leading up to the Sept. 9 premiere, though, you know FOX had to give us rabid fans something other than the 17th viewing of the original pilot on hulu.com. What’s that you ask? Why? Well, what did you spend YOUR summer doing? I see. Well, at least my skin won’t look like a catcher’s mitt when I turn 50.

Anyhoo,

You all know how over-the-top excited I am about Glee. I said as much right here not that long ago. So now you know about my overheated feelings regarding this show. Perhaps I will explore the “why” of my intensity in a future post. Right now I’d like to talk about some of the extra stuffing crammed back in for the director’s cut.

You saw the best of the extra scenes in the previews, I’m sorry to say. When the football coach approaches Emma, the guidance counselor, with two tickets to fire-spewing monster trucks, at first it’s just extra icing on the fact that we know he has a crush on her. I mean, wouldn’t anybody at that school have a crush on Emma, Wearer-of-Incredibly-Cute-Shoes and Possessor-of-Biggest-Doe-Eyes-Known-to-Humans? Then she turns him down, and he exacts his revenge on McKinley High School’s sweetest little germ-ophobe by licking his hands and rubbing them on the door handles of her car. Too funny.

But then, the coach turns on our beloved main character, Spanish teacher and show choir director Mr. Shuester. He accuses Shue of wanting Emma all to himself, and I’m not sure I buy it. Emma never said she was into Mr. Shue, even though she implied it, but I don’t think the satirically thick football coach would be able to put two and two together. He also throws in an accusation that Shue is trying to kill the football team by stealing his quarterback or whatever, with Shue having to explain there’s no reason that Finn can’t do both activities, and retorting something about the football coach hating football anyway. What? I don’t remember the set up for that line anywhere previously in the ep. This extra bit of fluff could have been left out.

Near the end of the ep, after Shue has turned in his resignation to pursue a purportedly more lucrative career as an accountant after finding out his wife is pregnant, we get an extra scene in which Shue relives one tiny shadow of his show choir glory days by strumming and singing “Leaving on a Jet Plane” to an empty auditorium, with cuts to Emma, who is sad, but also pondering and plotting on how she can get him to stay in school. Despite the show’s satire and black humor and biting wit, I’ll also admit that at the same time, the show is a great mountain of sincerity and sentimentalism. You can’t have a show about singing without “opening yourself up to joy” sometimes, as we read on the plaque of Shue’s late show choir director from a bygone era. However, the lone guitarist on the stage, intercut with the lonely guidance counselor, is just a little too much. We get it.

But I’d like to end on a high note, and comment on the best use of extra footage: the full version of show choir diva Rachel Berry’s roof-blasting audition with “On My Own” from Les Miz. I’m totally biased. It’s my favorite song from my favorite Broadway musical, and I will never turn down an opportunity to hear the entire song from beginning to end. I don’t know who this girl was before Glee, but she brings it. And the long version of the song gives more screen time to the background on Rachel’s character, definitely overshadowing all the other singers, even Finn. But that’s OK, because by all rights she’s the best.

I’m not really sure how to end this, except to say that the show’s season premiere is at 9 p.m. EST on Wednesday, Sept. 9 on FOX. All I can say is, I can’t get enough of this video. You can download the whole thing on iTunes.

The righteous dude: a tenderness that made it easier to bear August 8, 2009

A long time ago, I could be heard quoting John Hughes constantly. Now that he’s gone, I can’t think of a single clever thing to say. The only thing that comes to mind are song lyrics he made stick in my head.

Specifically, the song he quotes at the beginning of his 1985 masterpiece The Breakfast Club: “And these children that you spit on as they try to change their world are immune to your consultation; they’re quite aware of what they’re going through.” I have the suspicion that the children David Bowie was singing about at the time the song “Changes” was popular were those who came of age in the 1960s, i.e. our parents. But Bowie has a true artist’s soul, and I’m sure he’s fine with Hughes having applied it to us who were kids in the 1980s. Because it worked. The Breakfast Club became one of the defining movies of our generation.

I was 12 years old when that movie came out, so I was a little late in the game. I never got to see a Hughes movie in the theater. I also had to be careful about when to watch the Hughes movies — the best being The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, Some Kind of Wonderful — when they finally appeared on HBO. In our pre-cable days, Dad had taped a piece of loose-leaf paper to the top of our wood-console television, next to my mom’s ceramic sea captain figurines. The list went a little something like this:

“Shows Jennifer is Not Allowed to Watch:
Dallas
Falcon Crest
Knots Landing
Dynasty
Three’s Company.”

And no, I’m not making that up.

Funny thing, Hughes was my dad’s age. My dad grew up on Chicago’s South Side, while Hughes moved to the North Side as an early teen. Hughes probably grew up as a Cubs fan, and was making movies about teen angst at the same time my dad, lifelong Sox Fan, was working on telephone poles and wondering from year to year whether the IBEW union was going to go on strike.

In the years post-cable, there was a verbal addendum to Dad’s list of television no-nos, which stated that I was not allowed to watch MTV or Rated R movies. But our TV was in the basement, so it was easy enough not to get caught. I could practically hear ants crawling down those creaky steps. And with all the repetition on pay cable channels in those days, it was fairly easy to wear my mom down with “But there’s nothing else ON besides ‘Sixteen Candles.’” And actually, she liked that one as much as I did.

But Hughes was important in ways far beyond just being entertaining. Even at his most silly and crude — think “Weird Science” — he had something to say about the freaks and the geeks. He had a deep kind of knowledge about what it was like to feel a crippling amount of insecurity, either because he was one of us, or because all of us have it. He had the ability to poke fun of us socially awkward nerds on one hand, and then turn around and show us our strengths, without making it seem contrived or out of place, or changing the tone of the film. That was a gift, and he shared it with us.

Or, as Grace the Secretary in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off would say, “The sportos and motor heads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, d–kheads…they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.”

One of my favorite scenes ever — from ANY film — is in “Pretty in Pink,” when Duckie (John Cryer [oh, John ... why "Two and a Half Men"? Why? Why? WHY?]) performs a lyp-synch serenade for Andie (Molly Ringwald). It’s a totally pointless and unnecessary scene. But it’s also sweet and funny and adorable, and it’s just another reminder to us girls who stare across the computer lab longingly at the over-priveleged preppies why we need to forget about the watery-eyed rich boy Blaine (Andrew McCarthy) who will inevitably lie to us and break our hearts, and learn to appreciate the boy right in front of us, whose heart is completely open. Duckie might not have been totally aware of what he was lip synching at the time: “Oh she may be weary. Young girls, they do get wearied, wearing those same old dress. But when she gets weary, try a little tenderness.” Specifically, the line “the soft word they all spoke so gentle, it makes it easier … easier to bear.” Yeah, OK, when you listen to Otis Redding sing it, especially the live version, it seems pretty clear Otis is trying to tell the guys how to be extra nice to the girl in order to … well you can use your imagination.

But when I listen to it, I can understand why Hughes liked the song enough to not leave the scene on the cutting room floor. One, it’s just a great song. Two, Andie was the most weary of all of us girls who didn’t quite fit in, and Duckie — who I think shares a kind of resemblance to Hughes himself — is the tenderest of all friends, the best friend that every girl wearing homemade clothes needs.

In the same way — and yeah, I’m totally aware of how overly sentimental I’m being — Hughes may have played a part in helping me and a million other insecure American girls decide not to care so much about high school, or about what kind of dirt the people who’ve known you since Kindergarten might have on you.

In Sixteen Candles, Some Kind of Wonderful and Pretty in Pink, he assured us misfits that we all had a niche, even if we were of the argyle-sweater-and-tan-trouser-wearing Asian exchange student category, prone to driving automobiles into “Lake … big lake.” In The Breakfast Club, he showed all of us how everybody — the jock, the prom queen, the nerd, the stoner and the artsy freak — are not all that different from each other. Finally, in Ferris Bueller, Hughes showed us a totally brand new archetype with Matthew Broderick: a guy who transcended labels in pursuit of happiness and garnered the praise and adoration of everyone, and showed us that the real enemy is not somebody who belongs to another clique in our peer group, but the single-minded authoritarian adult, and any one else who might rain on our parade.

Hughes mattered because he took us seriously, but helped us not to take ourselves too seriously. Who knew such a tenderness could come from somebody our dad’s age? And from a Cubs fan. Thanks, Mr. Hughes. You did right by us.

We were doing this in school, about 100 years ago August 6, 2009

He shot a man in “Weno” … July 30, 2009

Best cover of Folsom Prison. Ever.

King of Pop, postmortem June 26, 2009

With everything going on this week, I was a little behind the curve about the passing of a childhood icon and fellow Indiana native.

It was about 6:50 a.m. this morning when I grabbed a copy of Entertainment Weekly and sat down, bleary-eyed, in the waiting area of the Honda dealership, and attempted to tune out the noise from CNN on the television. Then some talking head mentioned “the death of Michael Jackson.” My head popped up.

“Michael Jackson’s dead?” I said. The two little old ladies sitting nearby nodded vigorously. “Heart attack,” said one of them. My hand went to my mouth; it’s a reflex. This is what I do when I’m shocked and sad. But not in the same way I was shocked and sad when I heard about George Harrison or Johnny Cash or Paul Newman — people for whom I had real affection, whose artistic talents have shaped my personal tastes in music and films, and whose passing sliced off tiny, painful bits of my pop-culture obsessed heart.

With Michael Jackson’s death, my first chagrined thought was “He never had a chance to snap out of it.”

When I say that he was a childhood icon, that’s not to say I was ever a true fanatic. His music was fun and original for its time and was great accompaniment for pre-teens just learning how to shake what their mommas gave them. I never had any desire to see him in concert, I didn’t care to own a red be-zippered leather jacket, and I didn’t find him particularly attractive. He was still an icon, though, because he was ever present. Back in the 1980s, you couldn’t escape his face, his songs, the news footage of his screaming fans waiting for a glimpse of his passing limo. So what was a fifth-grader to do, but give in? And so, on that Saturday of my 11th year, when Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” premiered on MTV, I and my cousins gathered in my parents’ basement around our huge wood-framed console television set, on top of which sat the dust-collecting, nautical themed knick-knacks which I now blame for my lifelong dread of housekeeping (have you ever tried wiping dust out from inside five thousand seashells no bigger than a thumbnail?). Back when music videos told stories, and indeed when MTV showed videos, the “Thriller” video was an EVENT. And it did not disappoint. Did I run out and buy the record? No.

In those years, his music was on the radio so much and his mug was so ubiquitous, I never even gave a passing thought to buying any of his albums. He’s so ingrained in our collective consciousness that we owned him even if we never saved up our babysitting money to bike over to Venture to buy the audiocassette. Yeah, I liked his singing, and “Billie Jean” might always be the best roller rink song ever. But because I’m nothing if not an aural learner, I already felt like I owned his songs. All that exposure meant I didn’t need to buy his records or hang his posters on my wall, because I already owned him in my head. We all did.

I think that collective ownership has something — but not everything — to do with his eventual bizarre downfall. As I grew up and as Michael seemed to get weirder and weirder, I thought less of him. Tastes changed, for me and for Michael. His skin got whiter and his nose became ever more peculiar, and meanwhile I grew to like “little Michael” better — the adorable soul singer of The Jackson Five fame. How could you not? He had the sweet, innocent face of a well-looked-after child with no intention of ever owning a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles, naming his sons Paris and Prince or influencing young boys to drink alcohol.

There’s something tragic that happens to some people when they become that famous. It’s like a personality disorder. The rest of us, poor schlubs that we are, have real friends. We don’t pay people to hang around us, and so our friends tell us exactly what they think.

“You might want to re-think those shorts.”
Or, “Put that donut away, you know they give you heartburn.”
Or maybe the occasional but necessary, “Shut up, you’re being an ass.”
You know what I mean? Friends.

I suspect nobody ever said to Michael, “You might want to re-think that glove/nose job/skin bleach/inappropriate marriage/ridiculous child name/pet chimp idea.” And maybe he would not have listened if they had. Not that there’s anything wrong with eccentric, but there is a difference between eccentric and sad. Bjork is eccentric, but bizarrely delightful. Cloris Leachman is out of her mind, but also spewing-water-out-of-my-nose hilarious. Coming from Michael, the eccentricities translate as sadness, loneliness and it conjures an image of him simply chucking random things into a gaping emptiness but never quite filling it. He just seemed lost and vacant, and that’s why his passing is so sad.

As I tried to return to my copy of Entertainment Weekly this morning, I couldn’t help but overhear CNN, in its infinite attempts to fill the silence by rambling on and on about the minute details of the most trivial angles of every story, trot out its resident medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, to extrapolate about what might be discovered in Michael’s autopsy. Really? My immediate reaction was, of course, disgust. Me, on my high horse about the news, as always. But why should I be surprised, or even disgusted? We allow, and even demand, this culture of nosiness, disguised as sympathy and public grieving.

Yes, we really are going to dissect the man, the myth, the legend, until there’s nothing more to discuss. Because after all, the media owns, Sony Music owns and the world owns Michael Jackson, a man who never owned himself.