Two Two Two Anthologies

Hey there good people of the internets! Right now I have stories in two, countem two anthologies that just came out:

Who Can Save Us Now? A superhero anthology, which features a brand-new (illustrated!) story called Nate Pinckney-Alderson, Superhero



and

Dzanc Books Best of the Web, which features my story Promise from You Must Be This Happy to Enter.

What Would Courtney Do?

I have one record by Hole I may have listened to three times. That’s it.

But I’m obsessed with Courtney Love. I dream of Courtney Love.

I read articles about Courtney Love, I read interviews with Courtney Love, I study photos of Courtney Love.


(I don't know what it means, no.)

Probably, her music would also be a good place to look, but it’s not her music I’m interested in. I want to be Courtney’s friend.

It’s thoroughly transparent, my Courtney obsession, if you know me. Even if you’ve barely heard of me, to know nothing more than that I once loved the Carpenters is to know enough about why I am so fascinated by Courtney Love, why I love even just the sound of her name, but if you still don’t get it, I can spell it out, that’s fine.


(Oh, yes.)

I’m no Courtney Love.

Courtney Love says what she wants and does what she wants and does not seem to care what anyone thinks. I want me some of that.

In my dreams, Courtney is my best friend. She does not think I am uncool. I’m not just talking about daydreams. I have dreamt of her while sleeping. More than once.

I first became interested in Courtney Love by way of a certain hipster I was dating some years back.

(Just say no.)

Certain Hipster didn’t profess to being a fan of hers, in fact, I recall him mentioning he didn’t really even like music much at all, which is actually more mind-boggling to me than if he’d said he listened exclusively to yodeling or zither music or polka or something and which probably should have clued me in to our romantic incompatibility because What? No one doesn’t like music, that’s like saying you don’t like breathing, that’s like, I must have misheard you, you must have said something that rhymes with music, but wait, nothing rhymes with music, it’s like orange, so you must have said it and if you did say it there is something seriously wrong with you because that is not a preference so much as it can only be a disorder that probably warrants medication or perhaps an operation of some kind because the only explanation for someone not liking music would be if they didn’t have ears, maybe, although from what I’m told even hearing-impaired people like music, so it would be more like if you were just missing a critical element of, um, humanity, and as far as I can imagine must lead an utterly joyless, blank existence in which pierced eyebrows and tattoos and ironic t-shirts step in and somehow try to fill the musicless void of your world, either that or now that I think of it perhaps means that if it is not some sort of medical condition that he was an alien. Nobody doesn’t listen to music. Maybe he was just blaspheming, or maybe he was testing me, like I was supposed to say, Ha ha, that’s funny, no music, if so for sure I failed; it was back in the day when I was still more inclined toward polite nodding than openly declaring opinions, which personal era, as you can see, has passed. Sorry – this was a while ago now but apparently I’m still working it out. Anyway, I do remember him mentioning that he knew people who knew Courtney (in retrospect this information alone should have told me I wasn’t cool enough for him; at that time I wasn’t even hanging around people who’d ever heard of Courtney) and after we broke up (he loved me, but not loved me loved me) I got it into my head that if I could understand Courtney Love, then married to about the hippest hipster ever of all time, I could understand what had gone wrong in our relationship and perhaps be a little more Courtney next time.

Look, I’m trying to be honest here, you wanna mock me, that’s fine, but I’m giving you the truth. It’s what Courtney would want.

If Courtney Love has a feeling or an opinion or an impulse to flash a boob, she puts it out there, right, wrong, whatever.


Courtney Love code requires putting any and all thoughts, pretty much whatever comes into her head, however fleeting, out into the world for all of us to consider, with absolutely no regard for consequence and even less for what anyone thinks about it. Courtney Love thinks cheese is satanic. I am not making that up. Could I make up something better? No, I could not. It’s not that I haven’t occasionally said things before I thought them through. I once used the word “awesome” no less than three times at an academic luncheon. Unlike Courtney, I am a person whose day will be ruined by such a thing. I am a person who keeps her boobs safely harnessed inside her shirt. I am a person who writes rough drafts of letters. That may not even be a bad thing, necessarily, but it is very unCourtney-like. I imagine Courtney to be the kind of person who, if she writes letters at all, writes them on whatever happens to be closest, even if it is not a paper product, even if it’s a lampshade, and gives it to her assistant to figure out how to mail, or if she does actually have some sort of expensive stationery product, like nice letterpress notecards with CL running though a little ribbon on the top, would spill coffee on them and probably not even say “Shit” and give it to her assistant to mail out without thought of an apology. Probably with thought of, “This person is fucking lucky to be getting my coffee-stained note!” I began life as the kind of kid who, fearful of any possible controversy, answered questions like, “What kind of cookies do you like?” with “What kind of cookies do you like?” and then when you told me what kind of cookies you liked I would say that I liked those cookies too. Even if you said your favorite cookie was banana oatmeal honey walnut chocolate chip I would say banana oatmeal honey walnut chocolate chip was my favorite too, although I will tell you now without hesitation, after many years of therapy, that although these ingredients are all quite delightful individually, this is way too many ingredients for the good of one cookie and if you know one thing about me besides my Carpenter love you know that I do not mix nuts and sweets. I imagine little Courtney Love answering the question any number of ways involving the word “fuck,” possibilities including but not limited to, “What the fuck kind of cookies do you think I like?” or, “I don’t fucking eat cookies, bitch.”

Not to get too far off subject, but my interest in Elizabeth Wurtzel is similar, if not as epic.

(Note: also flashing boob.)

Wurtzel is probably the literary equivalent of Courtney Love, and I might feel bad about saying what I’m about to say if the entirety of her book Bitch weren’t so, well, bitchy, if it didn’t practically beg me to. In fact, Elizabeth W. has the hubris to describe Courtney’s entire existence as “calamitous” on page seven, and if I had the inner resources to comb the entire four hundred plus pages again for other Courtney references, I would, but I don’t. The fact that I withstood the reading of this book in its entirety even once, is a feat that should merit some sort of acknowledgment. Nevertheless. Although I don’t covet her approval in the same way, or – at all, I have read all of her books with a similar desire to understand – well, something about myself ultimately, via her unlike me-ness, and it’s a safe bet that I’ll read whatever she spits out next. What continues to fascinate me about her is how incredibly bright she is, how observant she can be both about herself and the world, and yet how thoroughly she is just not getting over herself enough to see the traffic accident that is so apparent from this side of the road. To be honest, I am sure that a great deal of what interests me about her is that I do see myself in there, if a few degrees less Cosmo cover goes to Harvard. I have always been a person who believes herself to have a good deal of self-awareness and yet sometimes not quite enough to keep me from making the same mistakes about fourteen times or however many more than once I need to in order not to do it again. But that Elizabeth seems inclined to make her mistakes about forty-eight times, and then to write about them with this compelling combination of charisma, ego, talent, brains and apparent lack of concern about what anyone will think of it. She’s just slightly less in-your-face than Courtney about it, undoubtedly only because she’s not a rock star, and I suspect, is the needy moat to Courtney’s fortress of pain. (It makes sense to me.) When I read Prozac Nation, my overwhelming thought was, Well, she may very well need Prozac but I think she also has a drug problem. When I read Bitch I realized how right I was about the drug problem. Never has there been a book that’s a better argument for an intervention than that one. I imagine relatives and friends and random people in her famously long acknowledgments sitting in a huge circle wordlessly holding up copes of her naked self on the cover of that book as E. walks in, forced to admit it’s time to book a suite at Hazelden. Naturally, when I read More, Now, Again, her book about her recovery from Ritalin addiction, I was hardly surprised, but this time I can’t quite guess what the next book will be. She has one book I haven’t read, called Radical Sanity, filed under “self-help”, I kid you not. There are undoubtedly limitless ways to go on the joke front here, but I’ll just say that I fear for any woman who chooses a book by Elizabeth Wurtzel as a guide to life over virtually anything else in the self-help section. A woman would do better to entrust herself to Chicken Soup for People Who Love Lindsay Lohan’s Soul or whatever random Soup title is on the table this week. Cripes. Do you realize what it takes to get me to use a word like cripes? I don’t say cripes. A peek inside this book reveals some tips from Elizabeth, including “eat dessert,” “be strong,” “have opinions,” “say your prayers,” “embrace fanaticism,” “enjoy your mistakes,” and “be gorgeous.” Cripes again. This is alarmingly close to my own life, but I wouldn’t offer most of it up as advice. I love my life now, but I’m much more inclined to say, “For the love of god, don’t do what I did.”
I’ve always wished Wurtzel would just use her superpowers to write fiction, because I really do think she’s quite talented and could translate that into a real knockout if she wanted to, plus it might actually be a positive step in her personal evolution to write about something besides herself. Ok fine, I’m no one to talk. I am to be sure, my own favorite subject. All I know is that I have known people like her, it is extremely easy for me to imagine being friends with her in that kind of too-close-for-anyone’s-good friendship where the person drives you absolutely crazy because they have everything going for them and yet just cannot get it together, and that in my mind, Elizabeth W. and I get together and I shake her shoulders (because as we know shoulder-shaking is always a surefire method for straightening people’s lives out), and say “Come on, lady! Cut it out!” But the truth is, the few times I’ve (metaphorically) shaken shoulders, it has come to naught, and I’m not really much of a shoulder-shaker anyway. I’m much more of a people-pleaser who would probably meet Elizabeth Wurtzel and tell her only what I really like about her work and ask her where she got her jeans and then try to have coffee with her.

It occurs to me only at this late date that my desire for a more Courtney mindset had everything to do with my unfortunate decision to drive across country with a man I barely knew, a man who was against electricity, a man who despised all things money including anyone who had any, a screenwriter who didn’t believe in scripts, a man whose waistband was hitched inexplicably high for someone under the age of sixty-four.

(In real life, not as bad as this from the waist up, but still...)


This was a guy you would never describe as “cool” unless perhaps you too were against electricity, which seems like a small group to me. Was he extremely bright? Yes. Was he sort of cute? I guess. Did I find him moderately amusing? Once in a rare while, he didn’t make me want to cry. But I think the more important questions are: Was I deeply in debt and looking to get out of town any way I could? Yes. Was he as creatively messed up as anyone I’d ever dated? Fo ‘shizzle. Did warning bells go off on or about the time of our first date? Warning gongs, more like. Warning steamships knocked me over as they cruised up the streets of the Upper West Side, sailors yelling off the side, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU OR ANYONE WITH THE LAST BIT OF MENTAL HEALTH IN THEM TRAVEL IN CLOSE QUARTERS WITH THIS MAN. I used to describe myself, often, as a person who made terrible decisions with her eyes wide open, particularly when it came to men. I was never part of the I Can Change Him school. I always know that’s out of my hands. For me it was more like, the But He’s So Cute school or the No One Else Is Banging Down My Door school or, most often, the Well, This Might Be An Interesting Ride school. There was nothing that wasn’t obviously filled with potential for disaster from my first date with… well, why don’t we call him “Mickey Rourke”… ew, no, let’s call him “What’s That Guy’s Name Who Played Buddy Holly?”… scratch that, too long, still not cute enough… what about “Robert Downey, Jr.”… no, that might actually have been fun… gee, maybe I’m in touch with my inner Courtney after all… how about let’s just call him “Bring On The Crazy #468”.

I doubt that the question of what Courtney would do is ever a conscious one, if it is, I invite anyone to admit it. Bizarro indeed would be the life modeled on Courney’s. One is probably enough. So this wasn’t at the forefront of my mind when I got the call from Bring On The Crazy inviting me to go. At the forefront of my mind was, I have no job, I have no money, my rent is late as usual, New York is making me want to beat myself over the head with a mace, and since I no longer drink, my options for distracting myself from all this seem limited. Cut to the telephone ringing and a conversation not unlike this:

BOTC #468: Hey, I just bought a car for forty bucks, do you want to come meet me in LA tomorrow and drive to Florida with me to meet my mom with whom I have a lifetime of unresolved issues?
Me: Why yes, I’d like that very much.
BOTC #468: Wait, this is probably a terrible idea. Forget I said it. I really need to concentrate on the “screenplay” I’m writing. (BOTC #468 makes air quotes even though he’s on the phone.)
Me: Yeah, you’re right. Just the same, I can’t really think of a better way of not dealing with my life right now.
BOTC #468: Alright then. I guess it would help to have someone share the driving. You can drive a stick, right?
Me: No.
BOTC #468: Oh well, that’s okay. I can teach you.
Me: (silent, thinking about the time my dad, who I do get along with, tried to teach me how to drive a stick, and I almost rolled backward down a hill while simultaneously being yelled at by a cop as though I ought to know how to propel the car in a forward motion)
BOTC #468: One of us can just take the bus home if it doesn’t go well.
Me: Okay, then, I’ll see you tomorrow!

Alright, the conversation was a little longer and considerably more fraught with mind-games. BOTC #468 was all but certified in coming up with the exact right thing to make me feel, well, whatever he felt like making me feel, one of which was never “happy.” Nevertheless, I was on a cheap flight to LA faster than you could say, “You may just have made the worst mistake of your life,” and I didn’t take it as a good sign that BOTC #468 was late picking me up when I got there.

Pummeling home the masochistic aspects of the trip (which I suppose implies there were some non-masochistic aspects of the trip, which there weren’t), it wasn’t as though I was even getting any sex out of it. BOTC #468 believed sex was something not to be entered into lightly, like say a trip across country after four dates in a vehicle that cost forty dollars. But as long as we’d made the decision, it wasn’t anything a little unlicensed psychoanalysis couldn’t make worse. Highlights of the trip included arguments about: why having babies was selfish, misguided and wrong, why marriage and monogamy were prehistoric, unnecessary conventions, why my wearing makeup was a mask and showering regularly was a cultural custom the purpose of which eluded him, why he planned to move to Costa Rica to live an alternative filmmaking lifestyle without running water, why I still, in my thirties, had unresolved issues with my mother, why he still, nearing forty, had unresolved issues with his mother, why mothers everywhere were more or less the root cause of everything that ever went wrong anywhere ever (but mostly in the United States, see sub-why, why the U.S. is second only to mothers as the leading cause of anything ever going wrong anywhere), why every single thought in our heads is unoriginal because it’s in some way sold to us by the man, and that advertisers are probably developing new ways to program our heads even as we sleep. And I’d like to say? This is a short list. Sightseeing on this trip was limited to an overnight in Joshua Tree, one hot spring at a quirky youth hostel in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, two hours in the French Quarter of New Orleans (by myself, while he went off to a café to “write”), and souvenirs included whatever I could get at a gas station. I took about three photos during the entire two weeks, knowing this wasn’t a trip I cared to commemorate. Summing up: was this better than staying home? Actually it was, in that worse-before-it-gets-better sort of way. In the absolute most circuitous way possible, via this supremely calamitous road trip, I had come to understand that I had to get out of New York once and for all, which decision, if also made with no backup plan whatsoever, ended up being on my top five list of best decisions ever made, top two or three if you count decisions I made with little or no real consideration. Within months, I was living in Chicago, er, well, in the hipster’s building… but I’ve digressed enough. It all worked out.

I maintained, for some time, that this relationship ended because I wasn’t Courtney enough. BOTC had openly told me about any number of ex-girlfriends who sounded thoroughly out of their minds. What I was at the time was depressed. I correctly predicted that like many of my previous BOTCs, as soon as we broke up (because there was never any question that this would end, and not well – in spite of my poor decision making in this area, I never had it in me to stick with these people for too long) this one would soon be committed to someone else. What I didn’t anticipate was that he would marry rich and bear children. I’m running under the assumption that they have electricity, and frankly, I wonder how he can sleep at night with like, appliances and running water. No matter. I’m happily married now, and we are not ashamed to admit that we likes us some stuff.

Getting back to Courtney, yes, I know she has some issues. Don’t we all? She’s a bright chick, if you haven’t noticed. Plus I saw her on Rosie O’Donnell a long time ago talking about her eBay obsession with Little Kiddles which means we have at least one thing in common for sure even though I only have one and she’s probably missing one if any.

I had all of these:


This is what we had before Hello Kitty was born.

She had a helicopter!

Kiddle Kologne

Wouldn’t it be so much fun to hang out with Courtney and order pizza and smell all her pristinely plasticy-floral scented Little Kiddles and tell each other your life stories all in one day and ask her what she thinks about someone not listening to any kind of music and when she goes off for like forty minutes about how not listening to music is so thoroughly fucking nonsensical it makes listening to Mister Mister and Quarterflash

Take! These broken wings!


I'm gonna harden my heart... I'm gonna swallow these te-ars...

cool just by comparison which is freaky like she’s reading your mind’s record collection and you find a small opening to say “Right?” and feel totally validated when she describes the person your hipster said he knew as a “bitch-ass ho” and that she totally kicked that girl’s bony ass once and if you wanted she’d totally be into going out and kicking his ass right now, which you pass on because he’s actually become a friend and you’re not especially into ass-kicking even though you feel like it sometimes when people don’t use their turn signal. Also you try to think of any celebrities Courtney would care about that you even almost slept with which you can’t because there are none and so you skip the part about making out with a Baldwin because you know she wouldn’t care which one it was anyway, and totally become super codependent on each other instantly and ask her if she was always like how she is now and she says defensively Like what and you say Cool and unafraid to say whatever you think and show your boobs randomly and stuff and she actually admits to a bit of false bravado and even tells you a tiny bit of her private fears and insecurities which blows your mind both because she has any and because she’s bestowed this information to only you, and you become her new entourage maybe even and go shopping and gossip, ‘cuz you know she’s got some good gossip, and find out how big some movie star’s penises are or are not because she’ll for sure tell you and make something up if she has to and do each other’s hair and let her put red lipstick on you all messy-like and rock out a little bit and let her teach you how to scream-sing and maybe even fight because you let it slip that you used to love the Carpenters and she gets all pissy when you remind her she said any music was better than no music and she says well not the fucking Carpenters or because you lied and said you tried heroin once but didn’t really like it which Courtney and anyone else who’s ever done heroin once knows is a lie because they agree that there’s nothing not to like and she calls you on the lie and you get your feelings hurt because you both know that you’ll never be as cool as her especially when she asks you if you want to try the heroin now and you almost make up another lie before you realize it’s pointless at which time you make up and eat giant raw cookie dough slices with Courtney? Or better – just each have your own whole thing of cookie dough and eat it like it was an ice cream cone? And then get super sick to your stomach and have to sleep over? And stay in her totally fluffy guest room and call up your friends and tell them you’re at Courtney Love’s house and Courtney thinks you’re at least one whole percent of cool and that hipster made the biggest mistake of his life cause the guy you finally married is awesome and Courtney Love is your new best friend?

I so want Courtney Love to like me. There’s a small part of me that actually thinks Courtney Love would like me. Let’s see: What do you think Courtney would do if someone wrote an essay about wanting to be her best friend? Well, she’d probably a) have no idea about it, she gets written about way too much to keep track, or, being Courtney, to care. So I’m guessing that if she’s in the mood, she’d probably just b) show her boobs to someone.

Like I said, I’m no Courtney Love.

I Have Learned Two New Tricks

Today I learned, all by myself, how to use both our scanner and photoshop. I'm not saying I'm an expert in either of these areas, just enough for you to reap the benefits very soon with all kinds of goodness from photo albums gone by.

This is going to be fun.

I Dreamt of Danny WIth the Bright Red Hair

Watching reruns of the first season of The Partridge Family recently, I remembered why I loved that music so. In spite of almost completely thorough lyrical corniness, they had, um, you know – melodies. Kick-ass – no, outtasite melodies. Okay, one or two of the slower songs, er, don’t work as well. Somewhere along the line a couple of my records disappeared, so currently I only have two, but I’ve been listening to them and thank god for eBay because I will get the others. If anybody thinks they don’t rock, they do. I defy you to listen to a song like “I Can Feel Your Heartbeat” even one time and not be singing along by the end and not have it rock you for the rest of the day. Yes, it has a bit of a seventies-porn wocka-wocka groove, but here it’s a total plus. I can’t even give them grief on account of only two of them singing on their songs. There was a clearly readable note at the end of every show saying that some of the vocals were “enhanced” and my recollection is that it was openly talked about. (Not on the show, of course, but in the press – which here means publications like “Tiger Beat” – they may have been the Milli Vanilli of the seventies, but at least they didn’t pretend otherwise.) Yes, I was always a little troubled about the fade-out. At the end of most shows, the Partridges would perform “live” at one place or another, but most of their songs fade out on the record, and since they were unapologetically lip-synching, this would always result in the group sort of appearing to sing over the applause and then fading out (whereas at a real live show, a song would actually, you know, end). So I always wondered – how does the audience know to anticipate the exact point at which the song is about to fade out? Or – does the group just really start to sing more and more softly until the audience percieves the beginning of the fade-out begins to clap? I dunno, it just sort of always put me in the mind of, what if one time there was no clapping, and they were forced to audibly fade out? Wouldn’t they be super embarrassed? I shouldn’t have had to think about these things.


(Played 'til it scratched)

In general, there’s a lot to recommend about this show. It was one of the first shows featuring a single mom; granted there’s not a lot of discussion about her dead husband, but it was a comedy. And it was actually pretty funny. Unlike most sitcom families up to this time, they weren’t all happy-sunshiney. They were all kind of gently sarcastic with each other, which was the beginning of a more realistic tv-family model. There’s actually one episode where Keith’s “coach” (I don’t recall Keith being on any teams) overhears Keith and Danny insulting each other and takes Keith aside and tells him he needs to be more of a role model for his younger siblings, since they’ve lost their dad, and so Keith stops insulting Danny and starts taking the kids to classical concerts and art galleries (there’s actually one really great, still-relevant art joke in this scene) and sightseeing and then the kids start to get totally annoyed by it and at the end they’re in the kitchen talking about how annoyed they are by it and Keith overhears them and is hurt, but then after they apoligize he realizes he was taking himself too seriously and of course in the end they go back to being sarcastic and insulting. When I was a kid, I didn’t give a lot of conscious thought to why this show was so different, but looking at it now, almost everything about it was different than other sitcoms. One major difference was that it was all shot on film, so they had lots of exterior and location shots, resulting in a significantly better quality than other shows then or now; much more real, with you know, actual shadows n’ stuff. I’m sure now that they only stuck with the laugh track just to appease some higher-up muckety-muck somewhere. I have to say I was a bit disconcerted to discover, in the course of my research, not that the Partridge house itself was more or less only an exterior, but that it was on the Warner Brothers lot, and was later painted blue used as the house for the family from “Life Goes On.” (How I missed this, having watched LGO fairly regularly – oh for crying out loud, I’m already talking about my love for the Partridge Family, I’m gonna be embarrassed about “Life Goes On?” – shames me more than admitting I watched either of these shows.) Furthermore, the Partridges actually lived next door to Major Nelson and down the street from Darrin and Samantha Stevens, and at various times these and other TV houses could be clearly seen on The Partridge Family and yet curiously it was never addressed that both a genie and a witch lived on their block. Not to mention an astronaut. Plus, I just think the least the “Life Goes On” family could have done was to mention once or twice that the Partridge Family used to live in their house. I don’t think that would have undermined their credibility at all.

I’ve also been experiencing a bit of deja-vu in that the feelings I had for a certain Partridge are coming back to me with the added bonus of understanding what it was I once felt.

I loved Danny Partridge.


(C'mon. He's cute.)


That’s right. Danny Partridge (b. Dante Bonaduce). The funny, freckled, redheaded one. The very not-Keith one. Actually I loved Danny Bonaduce as I interpreted him through the character of Danny Partridge. I loved him so much that when I was in Japan for a month at the beginning of fifth grade, I watched reruns of The Partridge Family in Japanese. Only the songs remained in English, and despite my lack of fluency in Japanese, or okay, anything past “konichiwa”, forced to watch more closely, I was only made that much more aware that our love transcended not just words but entire languages. I read Tiger Beat and Flip and I’m pretty sure I subscribed to The Partridge Family Magazine and anything else that might have Partridge-related information so I was not confused. I knew Danny B. was his own person and he was the one I wanted.



I imagined our relationship. In spite of having no acting experience whatsoever, I would meet him by being cast on the Partridge Family as the new smart-alecky next-door neighbor girl who doesn’t get along with him at first but then shyly kisses him on the cheek and runs away at which time he turns beet-red and then punches her in the arm, pretending he doesn’t have a girlfriend because his troublemaking friend Punky Lazaar tells him it’s not cool to like girls but then they still meet in her treehouse for long soulful talks and then I don’t know what happens after that but probably Keith and Laurie find out and tease him really bad because that’s what always happens. Actually, I’m pretty sure some of this storyline is mentally cribbed from one of the Gloria Hickey episodes (she was Danny’s “girlfriend”), or maybe the one in which Jodie Foster appeared or maybe both; it’s fuzzy. There was one where this girl Danny’s age has a crush on Keith and Danny has a crush on her but then Keith breaks her heart and in the end she realizes Danny is more age-appropriate (and um, cuter). Anyway, after I get cast as a guest star in this one episode, I move to Hollywood because I am so dazzling in the part that I become a series regular, and Danny and I become best friends and hang out in my trailer and slam the Brady Bunch which we agree is so not as funny and real as The Partridge Family in spite of the them-not-all-singing thing and plus how totally lame it is of them to totally steal their idea of being a musical act and what a suck-ass song “Sunshine Day” is, not to mention how seriously retarded their choreography is and how lame their orange polyester outfits are (surmising that they if couldn’t afford Partridge-quality velvet and didn’t have the talent anyway, they might as well go bright?), and plus how the Partridges would never like, dance, and he openly calls me his girlfriend even though all we do is kiss with our mouths closed (well, he tries to stick his tongue in my mouth and his hands up my minidress but I’m not up for that just yet because I’m only eleven and he’s thirteen and super horny) and gives me presents all the time like a white rope bracelet and puka shells and for our four-week anniversary, purple suede hot pants with a matching fringed vest. Tiger Beat calls to interview me about our relationship which I describe as groovy and of course they want to know my favorites:

Color: Purple
Food: Macaroni and cheese
Drink: Grape soda
Candy: Lik-m-aid
Song: Anything by the Partridge Family, duh!

Here’s what it comes down to. I felt he understood me. Already. No, for real. Before my fictional TV-star discovery. Through the TV, Danny’s understanding of me was palpable. Being understood was, dating back sometime B.D. (before Danny), something I perpetually felt I wasn’t, and something I desperately craved until about ten years ago (at which time, amazingly, I moved into being at least slightly more interested in understanding others). I felt certain that Danny would understand me if we met, and I felt it was entirely possible that we would meet. (If I am to be 100% honest, I would subsequently have this feeling for quite a number of famous people over the years. A few I can think of: Tony deFranco – don’t even think of saying “Who?” [okay fine, maybe you’re twenty-five or whatever - TdF was the extremely foxy frontman-boy of The deFranco Family, who apparently were really related and all sang for real, on their one hit “Heartbeat, It’s a Love Beat”] the Fonz, Billy Joel, Eric Roberts [I’m not lying – I saw him on Broadway in Burn This, having missed John Malkovich in the same part or his name might be here instead and realizing only now that it was probably Lanford Wilson who really understood me], Robert Downey, Jr., Steve Martin, James Taylor and of course, Owen Wilson. I did finally meet Henry Winkler [aka Arthur Fonzarelli] decades later, who was so nice, and quite married.)


(For those of you who have no idea about TdFF)


It was no surprise to me that Danny would have his issues over the years. This only served to prove to me that he really had understood me all along. One of the things I’m coming to understand now, which was in my childhood only something I felt as a psychic connection, is exactly why I felt this way about Danny. It wasn’t just that he was the funny one. It wasn’t that I thought he was so cute, although I did, think that. It was more that he was the obvious misfit in the family, and I swear, I could feel his pain. He was the one who got picked on, he was by far the least typically telegenic of the bunch, he was the one who was always trying. Yes, this was his character, but I am not confused. This was something that was utterly visible to me as being entirely distinct from his character. A lot of his storylines seemed like they were written with both of us in mind. I want to interject here that I sense you’re not believing me right now, but I want to tell you I am 100% serious. Judge me if you will, but I’ve worked through my Danny-loving issues and if you have something to say about it, I’m prepared to fight. It’s what Danny would want.

An episode guide to prove my point:

Episode 4: See Here, Private Partridge
Okay, and so, in this episode from the first season, ten-year-old Danny is drafted by mistake. At first he imagines himself a war hero, then believes he gets rejected for being too short, saying the experience has made him wise beyond his years. I knew I was wise beyond my years at age ten as well.

Episode 9: Did You Hear the one About Danny Partridge?
Here Danny becomes a comedian but doesn’t know the audience is laughing at him/not with him, and suffers embarrassment.

Episode 11: This Is My Song
In which Danny hears Keith writing a song while he’s asleep and then when he wakes up he writes the same song thinking he wrote it and his pride is hurt when he finds out the truth.


(Obvious.)

Episode 13: Star Quality
Wherein Danny decides to “go out as a single” (I guess this was in the days before people left groups to go “solo”, because this “going out as a single” concept comes up more than once in the series) after a columnist says he has personal magnetism and star quality but then it turns out she was mistaking Danny for Chris (with all due respect to Chris number one or two, um, this was a stretch obviously for the sake of a joke, because everyone knows that Chris and Tracy were kind of just the filler of the family – allowing for the fact that at no time in the entire four years did Danny, Chrisses #1 or 2, or Tracy actually play or sing, but Danny at least had you know, lines, and he really did have personal magnetism, just ask Vincent Gallo (scroll down for more on that). Well, guess what, I wanted to go out as a single myself, and I actually could sing, but see

Episode 1: What? And Get Out of Show Business?
in which the entire family suffers from stage fright for why it didn’t happen to me.

Episode 24: A Partridge by Any Other Name
So and also Danny’s birth certificate gets lost and he thinks he’s adopted and goes around looking super sad and looking for his birth parents and calling his mom Mrs. Partridge. I had a brief period where I thought I might be adopted too. Sure, my mom had mentioned the agonizing pain of her only childbirth more than a few times, and sure, I looked exactly like her and sure, there was that whole birth certificate thing, but I have felt like a misfit from day one, and in my ten-year-old mind, that was evidence enough.


(Deep.)

Episode 30: Anatomy of a Tonsil
This is the one where Danny is supposed to get his tonsils out but Punky Lazaar (the Eddie Haskell of the 70s) tells him horror stories about surgery which freaks him out plus he also watches an episode of Marcus Welby and decides he will die from the operation and then when he doesn’t die he’s still afraid to sing. One more time: me = afraid to sing.

Episode 43: I Am Curious Partridge (a very risque choice for a g-rated sitcom, I might say, as this references a popular sexy book/movie of the era)
In which Danny writes slanderous pieces about Keith and Shirley for the school paper. I started writing slanderously about everyone I knew starting in third grade but had the good fortune that no one read it. (I took Danny’s experience as a cautionary tale, and ended up becoming a fiction writer.)

Episode 71: The Partridge Connection:
In this episode, Danny and Punky Lazaar get caught stealing. I stole a bracelet from a hotel drugstore in Ohio where my mother was performing, and didn’t have the good sense to consider that my mom might ask me where I got it, and had to go back, just like Danny, and repent.

Episode 84: A Day of Honesty
Not to forget the one where Danny gets brought home by the police for lying about sneaking into the movies and the day of honesty where he points out that everyone is somewhat dishonest so they all agree to tell the truth for an entire day until he learns at the end that a white lie is sometimes okay if it means not hurting Laurie’s feelings about a guy rejecting her.

And then there were all the episodes involving Danny’s love life, including:

Episode 46: Promise Her Anything But Give Her a Punch
Episode 55: You’re Only Young Twice
Episode 67: The Eleven Year Itch
Episode 91: Danny Converts

I’m not sure anything was illuminated in any of these so much as it was a place to live vicariously though Jodie Foster (who gives him a punch in the eye in episode 67 – clearly a recurring theme), or Gloria Hickey, his recurring steady, or that Jewish girl where he goes to her bat mitzvah pretending to be Jewish. (I would later have a long history of dating Jewish boys, and when they called me Craneberg in college, I would say “Ha ha ha!” but not go to any great lengths to deny it. I thought my decidedly Aryan looks would speak for itself in the end, but I had people ask me seriously if I was going home for Pesach.) In my school around this time, kids were playing Spin-the-Bottle after school (not me of course, since I was at this time waiting for Danny), and at no time would anyone be satisfied with a punch in the arm. I did of course relate to the tales of unrequited love. I’d had one or two real-life crushes by this time (proving that I had at least some grounding in reality), on boys who probably had little or no information about my existence. And there was one entire episode (#53: Each Dawn I Diet) about Danny being shall we say chubby, which I was, and could definitely relate to. I filled out my Danskin shorts a little too well. In episode 55, Danny acts out at school because he identifies more with older siblings Keith and Laurie. I watched Laugh-in at age six. Eventually they use reverse psychology on him, letting him stay up late to watch talk shows (I watched Johnny Carson beginning when I was around ten) and double date with Keith and his girlfriend at Muldoon’s point (the makeout spot) and in the end he decides he’s tired and not so much into making out and really only wants to play with Gloria Hickey. Which really was what I wanted, although I’m guessing Danny B. would just assume make out. (Let me also add that this is not even a comprehensive list of the Danny episodes. He was heavily relied on throughout the run of the show.)

So let’s review the character description: wise, embarrassed, prideful, going out as a single, possibly adopted, afraid, slanderous, thieving, lying, shall we say chubby, mature for his age. Check, check, check, check – if there were a universe in which this were someone’s personal ad, let’s just say I’d answer it and leave it at that.
I kept my secret love from everyone. I knew he wasn’t the one I was supposed to have a crush on. In a moment of weakness mentioned it to my dad without thinking to pinky swear him to secrecy, and when it came out in conversation extremely casually over dinner or something, I felt a shame I’m not sure I’ve felt since, and was teased by my stepbrothers, although I’m sure now that they would have teased me even if it had been Keith. That’s just part of the brother job description. I made the mistake of mentioning the subject of this essay (then in it’s incubation) over dinner one night and one friend’s reaction was so violent, so horrified, I fought the ancient temptation to pretend I really meant to say Keith, but instead found the courage to defend my Danny. I told him I had been in the closet about this for thirty-five years and I wasn’t about to go back in now.

Then something occurred to me. Although I have felt so alone in a million ways in my lifetime, I made the somewhat late discovery that everyone feels this way, at least at one time or another, and also, we now have the internet to search for kindred spirits on nine magillion topics, at least eight magillion of which I probably don’t want to think about. (I’ve posted on my blog about subjects like Girls Gone Wild and Winnie Cooper being in Stuff magazine, and have received a surprising number of hits on those pages even though the content was I’m sure not what those readers were looking for. I’ve also received numerous hits on my pages about hating to wash their hair – people actually typed this phrase into Google – and as many on Landon and Shavonda – and I still don’t know who they even are – so I’m just saying I’m aware now that people have interests in things I’ve never even heard of.)

So, I proceeded to Google, in various forms:

“Danny Partridge fans” - over 100,000 hits (quit after searching 20 or so Keith-or-entire-family-related pages)
“Danny Bonaduce fans” – same
“I Love Danny Partridge” – 0 results
“I Love Danny Bonaduce” – 0 results

The sole result of this unscientific search being a snippet from an interview with Vincent Gallo, he of Buffalo ’66, a great movie, as well as The Brown Bunny, a notorious movie in which if you sit through three hours of scenes of empty highways with no dialogue, you get to see Chloe Sevigny give Vincent Gallo a supposedly real blow job. If that’s something you in fact want to see. Now, if you know anything about Vincent Gallo, he seems like an interesting guy, interesting being a euphemism for complicated and weird and sexy in a creepy unclean kind of way, not to mention a staunch Republican, so I’m not sure what it says about me that Vincent Gallo was the only person I could find on the web who openly admitted to being a Danny Partridge fan. My husband expresses vague concern that the logical conclusion is that I am also soulmates with Vincent Gallo. I don’t know. All I know is, apparently I really am alone, but with Vincent Gallo.

Excerpted here, from “The Book, LA, Winter 2001,” for your edification:

The Book: Is it true you are a fan of Danny Bonaduce?
Gallo: I became an actor, because of Danny Bonaduce on the "Partridge Family". He's tremendous, so funny and brilliant, and we seemed around the same age, I felt I should be on a show with him. We could have done a good spin-off, "the Danny Bonaduce, Vinnie Gallo show", da-da-da-da- da di da da (sings theme show music)
The Book: Would you still like to work with him?
Gallo: I never lose my heart for anyone. Ever. I would do anything with Danny any day of the week.

You go, Gallo. I suppose if I am to be thoroughly honest, he does impress me as the kind of guy I would have felt understood by if I’d known who he was twenty years ago, and who we can probably all feel grateful that I never met. I was doing a little acting at that time and a lot of drinking and I might have thought it was a good idea to give him a blow job in a movie for the sake of art. And not even my art. If I really gave someone a blowjob for my art, at least no one would have to see it.
What’s weird is that I am now married to someone I am sure I understand, and who I am sure loves me like mad. I’m pretty sure he understands me too – but perhaps more interestingly, I’m inclined to mention that my ongoing prayers in more recent years “to understand than to be understood” have actually been answered, and it’s a relief. Trying to be understood is exhausting.



My best friend Nina claims she liked Danny too, which makes me question the Google search. When I mentioned that he bore a slight resemblance to someone I knew, I didn’t have to finish the sentence before she knew which ex I was talking about. An ex who any number of his exes and current wife would agree on as being empirically cute. Could it be that no one is willing to admit their Danny love, even now? Until very recently and for many years, Danny had a wife, and she’s actually pretty hot. And what about all those five hundred women he’s claimed to have slept with? Could they all have been on drugs? Don’t answer that.

It’s been a couple of decades since I’ve read a celebrity memoir, and having temporarily put down Francine du Plessix Gray’s elegant memoir of her parents, “Them,” reading Danny’s book, “Random Acts of Badness” left me feeling a bit like I’d been on a two-day drug binge myself. I’m obviously not going to recommend it unless you’re the only other person out there besides Vincent Gallo and me who has an interest in Danny Bonaduce. But know in advance that he’s no dummy, in spite of his odd use of exclamation points (one or two every couple of pages, including, “Pow!” “Hey!” “Groovy!” “Gasp!” “I just didn’t know!” “It’s not like my hair should be wet!” and “Thinking of one’s mother at a time like this is just wrong!” I feel compelled to mention that there are probably an equal number of question marks, but I think one will make my point well enough: “Do you see the dwarf?”), plus as many of you know, I’m hardly one to judge when it comes to creative punctuation. He also seems overly fond of the phrase “Don’t get me wrong,” nevertheless, there’s an interesting story here. He’s opinionated and totally self-deprecating, extremely willing to poke fun at himself all the way through. (I’m sure he knew someone else would do it if he didn’t. He claims to have lost count of how many times he made Letterman’s top ten list.) I’d also like to go on a minor tangent here about the fact that his given name is actually Dante, because one of my real-life crushes of my junior-high school days, post-Partridge, was on a family friend also of Italo-American descent and also named Dante who was a few years older than I and the second-cutest thing I’d ever seen, first if you count people I’d actually met. He actually got married pretty young, crushing my hopes for our future, while I was still in high school, but fortunately this particular Dante had two redheaded cousins around the same age named Adonisio and Vittorio (real names), who were extremely funny and paid attention to me when no one at my own school was looking (and they were in college! I was only sixteen!); I’m trying to point out that I’m sure that Danny had everything to do with the origins of my love for Italian guys, which would recur again for a period right after the Nice Jewish Boy years. Anyway, Danny seems to know that he wasn’t considered the cute Partidge and claims that even Brian Forster (Chris #2) had more female admirers than he did, which seems preposterous to me. He seems to have appropriate remorse for the way he’s treated his loved ones during druggier times. (He also admits to being a liar, so take that for what it’s worth.) He doesn’t blame show business for his problems, which I appreciate, because I’d personally hope to god my kid didn’t want to be a child actor, although contrary to popular opinion, I don’t believe it’s show business that causes addiction. For every Danny, there’s also a Jodie Foster, for every Dana Plato, a Ron Howard. Okay well maybe there are also a few who are not drug-addicted or dead but just living happily in obscurity. He has a great overall attitude, considers himself the luckiest guy in world to have been on the PF and to have an ongoing career in radio, and does not overestimate his talents.

That said, I still kind of want to shake him. He doesn’t seem to think drinking heavily is a problem even though he’s entirely willing to admit he’s a big drug addict. And I admire him for essentially saying that that drug addict is very much alive in him (this was written four years ago, before his recent return to rehab, so I guess he was right) and that he didn’t know what would happen in the future. But mostly what endeared me to him, in the second half of the book, was his admiration for his wife. The end of the book is very bittersweet, made me really sad. He's describing a conversation where some people get sort of personal about who they really are and he doesn't know what to say because in some ways he doesn’t really know. The best answer he can come up with is, “I’m Gretchen’s husband.” This woman has obviously tolerated more than a wife should ever have to, clearly helped him in a million ways, and I pray to god she goes to Al-Anon. Of course, I don’t think there’s a single soul out there, including Danny, who can be summed up in one three-word sentence, especially one that defines you by your relationship to another person. But you know what? I thought it was really sweet, and you know, even if I didn’t know myself as well as I think I do, I’m happy to say that “I’m Ben’s wife” is way up on my top ten list of who I really am.



(Never saw this in my life, unbelievably)

Thief of My Old Life (2005)

So lately I’ve been doing “research” for my new project in the form of watching a lot of old TV shows and movies I was once a big fan of. Some of them fall deeply into the cheese category, others more on the fence; the ones on the non-dairy side of the cheese fence are not of interest at the moment. I am looking to explore the emotional and possibly artistic value of cheese.

Yesterday the good people of Netflix sent Thief of Hearts, a movie from the late 80s starring Steven Bauer and Barbara Williams, with a guest appearance by Norm from Cheers. If you’d happened to ask me the day before if I could recommend a sexy late-eighties movie (I would concede this was a seemingly unlikely request if I didn’t have the internet to tell me that people have an extremely wide range of what I consider to be unlikely interests), I would have enthusiastically encouraged you to put this on your queue. Having watched it again mid-2005, I must amend my possibly enthusiastic recommendation with something along the lines of “I guess I can’t.” Nevertheless I will attempt to tell you what you need to know about this movie, both so you never have to see it and in the interest of regaining some small bit of self-respect along the way.



This film had, at one time, at least a semi-profound impact on me in that it brought to life something I had always wondered about: What would happen if a sexy art thief stole my diaries, read them, and decided to make all of my sexual fantasies come to life? Okay, well, what I’ve wondered is actually closer to what would happen if anyone at all read my diaries. In fact, nothing about this movie bears any resemblance to my own life except that I keep diaries. (Well, yes, I did have quite a few items in my closet with shoulderpads.) I have at no time been a wealthy but horrifically untalented even for the eighties interior designer living with my dull husband in a San Francisco townhouse with sweeping ocean views. Nor have I ever written much in my diaries or anywhere else about sex of any kind, real or imaginary, beyond “I had sex with him” or more frequently “I’d like to have sex with him.” Maybe “I had hot sex with him.” But boy I was sure worried that someone might read pages and pages expounding on why that year’s He didn’t call, or the meaning of the one call that that particular He did actually make, or the meaning of the one message that particular He actually left, or what the meaning of a look/hand gesture/hairstyle had to do with me and our nonexistent relationship, ad infinitum.

But I digress. It has been of great import to me that my diaries not be read, and given the fact that I don’t even like to read them myself, it should seem unlikely that anyone else would ever want to. Even in the future when historians open up my musty six hundred volumes, very little of literary import will be found in conjunction with my oeuvre. (I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I will ever be able to refer to my own work, unseriously, as an oeuvre without italics. Although frankly, I defy you to use a word like oeuvre in any context without italics.) In fact, they could do a great deal to diminish whatever tiny file I might have in literary history altogether. So maybe I should be worried on that front. I tend not to worry about things that might or might not happen several hundred years after my death though, maybe that’s just me.
Part of the appeal of the movie at this time was that I thought Steven Bauer was the bomb, and there’s some semi-explicit sex that at the time I thought was hot.
Watching it again was a huge disappointment.

The soundtrack alone will be a clue for anyone staying past the title credits. I’m not sure I have words to describe that late-eighties movie song; it’s sort of Giorgio Moroder synthesizey meets Eye of the Tigerish that says “sex, but with danger”, for what that’s worth.

Steven Bauer’s Members Only-style jacket, with the collar turned up, is another corner you’re either going to turn or you aren’t, although for me Barbara Williams’ wardrobe of double-wrap belts brought back fond memories.

David Caruso with a freaky fade haircut may be the point at which 80% of you will be forced to turn away.

By the time Williams um, bold, redesign of Steven Bauer’s loft apartment makes its appearance, few of you will have hung in, as well you shouldn’t.

Part of what I see now is that Steven Bauer is not so much a sexy art thief as he is a stalker, which has never really done much for me. He keeps her diaries, he stares at her portrait (one of the stolen paintings), he “bumps into her” at the market, twice, and poses as a mysterious rich businessman who needs his apartment remodeled. And when Williams finally realizes the ruse and says something indignant, like “How dare you” (after she’s had mind-blowing sex with him that she hasn’t been having with her husband, because he wears glasses and a bow tie) and Bauer angrily says something like “You invented me, lady! I love you!” there’s nothing to do but cringe and reexamine your entire life.

Which brings me to the part where I reexamine my entire life.

I really really loved this movie once. And a lot of movies I once loved I still love. But this time around, Thief of Hearts was painful. There was fast-forwarding, or whatever you call it now that it’s on DVD.

The question now is not so much what would happen if a sexy art thief read my diaries, but what happens when twenty years go by and something you once thought was so super-sexy makes you question who the hell you are? Further evidence that the brain I was operating with in 1988 is no longer in service is another film I enjoyed from that very same year: Two Moon Junction.



Oh, don’t even try to tell me you haven’t seen it if you were a girl child born before 1970, but just in case you were living in a video-free zone at that time, basically, this movie is in many ways interchangeable with Thief of Hearts, including excessive use of shoulderpads, although I think it leans more overtly toward the porn side. Or, just this side of porn. Very stylized porn, in this case about April de Longpre, a repressed southern rich girl (we know she’s rich because of the “de” in front of her vaguely French-sounding name) about to marry a rich boy in order to maintain status quo, and a sexy, sensitive and insightful carny (we know these things because he loves his dog and wears glasses and no underwear) instead of a frustrated writer’s wife and a sexy art thief. There’s a slightly more complex plot that includes Burl Ives (no lie), Herve Villechaise (well, it is about carnies), and lesbian undertones involving Kristy McNichol of all people (who, as America’s onetime sweetheart/tomboy Buddy from Family, should not have been allowed to show her breasts, which is like Tootie from the Facts of Life showing her breasts, it just should not happen, I don’t care how much these people want to stretch, in fact, K McN was actually kind of adorable in this part as a gum-chewing sexpot, but went one step too far in allowing the director to give her a scene in which she cheerfully applies rouge to her nipples).




I was trying to explain about the lesbian bits to Ben and mentioned, without enough explanation, I realize now, that Kristy and the heroine traded tops in one scene – what to me was clearly a gratuitous but obligatory hot lesbian scene (not that the entire movie isn’t gratuitous, of course) – to which Ben said, deeply confused, “They… trade… tops?” (Since I can assume now that you may be as confused as he was, Kristy convinces April (aka a platinum blonde pre-Twin Peaks Sherilyn Fenn), that it would be fun and sexy – for the carnie of course – to trade blouses with each other, and in a whispery voice-over says, “Don’t worry about me. Tomorrow I’m takin’ a bus out of here. I don’t know where I’m goin’, but I can’t wait to get there.”) There are also a couple of references to AIDS, which seem to have been thrown in for no other reason than that it was 1988, I imagine just in case anyone was worried that the filmmakers were endorsing unprotected sex with carnies. TMJ has a similar soundtrack to TOH plus a few more slow-playing saxophones to south it up some, and in case we aren’t sure it’s the south, all the rich people dress only in white because, I’m pretty sure, the costume designer once saw a play by Tennessee Williams. The only significant difference between the two films is that in the end, April does get married to the rich guy, but decides to have it both ways and keep the sexy carnie on the side, proving that money is important, but not without hot carnie sex. If this means anything to anyone reading, it’s written and directed by Zalman King, and I don’t know what he’s up to these days but in the late eighties and early nineties he was um, the king, of this sort of entertainment, this sort of art-meets-everything-but-a-cum-shot. I could practically hear him behind the camera saying, “More fog… no, no, you have to really thrust, like this… yes, and you, what’s your name with the gum, I want your lesbian desire for her to burst off the screen… what?… I don’t care if you flew out of an empty nest… yes, fantastic, from behind, just like that, yes!” Even the housekeepers at a seedy motel are backlit to ensure our ability to see that they have no panties on underneath their uniforms. There’s once scene where Perry, the Fabiolike carny, yells at April outside of a motel that she’s only scared because she’s just discovered her libido, and I couldn’t help but suspect that Zalman, in addition to wearing the writer/director hat, was also an unlicensed shrink, like so many of my exes. It may have been the only believable bit of dialogue in the film. One essential difference for me personally between TOH and TMJ was that TOH spoke to this particular fear of having my diaries read and threw in Steven Bauer, and TMJ was about pure fantasy, not that I recall ever harboring any fantasies about sexy underpantsless carnival workers, which may explain why I wasn’t quite as horrified watching it again as I was watching TOH. But if memory serves me right, as I mentioned, it was sort of a known secret, if you will, that TMJ was the sexy chick flick of it’s day – everyone I knew had seen it, and it was generally thought of as, well, hot.

Of course, I realize I’ve changed in many ways, everyone changes for better or worse, and also of course personally I like to think I’ve changed for better, but at the same time, I guess what perplexes me here is that it’s not as though I don’t have a good corner of my entertainment life these days devoted strictly to cheese. I check in on Jezebel. I watched Beverly Hills, 90210, I watched Dawson’s Creek, the O.C. and when the time comes, I will watch the next show about beautiful teenagers. (Note: Perhaps I misspoke here, when I originally wrote this. For what may be mystifying reasons, I haven’t been able to fully immerse myself in Gossip Girl.) I watch a lot of reality shows, everything from the relatively classy Amazing Race to the supremely low rent Cheaters, although I don’t see as many cheesy movies as I once did, actually not any I don’t think, if you don’t count the occasional Constantine, which I can assure you was not by my choice, and I watch very few sitcoms anymore. I just think they should be, you know, funny. But so anyway then why is the cheese I loved in the eighties so unwatchable now? It might make sense if I had morphed into an exclusively NPR-listening sort of person, but that’s just not the case. So I’m having trouble figuring out if it’s just this one movie that was bad, or if it was my taste that was bad. And if it was my taste… who the hell was I then? Surely I must have had some awareness that these were not art films (sorry, Zalman). I certainly knew this walking into Roller Boogie. There was one more movie I also really liked around this time, maybe a little earlier, it had Darryl Hannah as a moody misunderstood teenager (misunderstood because she was so beautiful, I’m pretty sure) who dreams of leaving town and Aidan Quinn as a moody rebel with a motorcycle and I’m pretty sure the last scene in the film is them riding past the factories out of town to a similarly Moroderish song. I don’t remember it all that well except for that I saw it in New York one afternoon when I should have been out looking for a job, and that I so wished an Aidan Quinn would come and ride me out of the town he and Darryl were probably coming to, preferably to a town with factories. What I’m trying to get at is that I feel different, happier and smarter, a little anyway, and interested in better books and music and movies for the most part, but I also feel like there’s a certain core of me, perhaps in everyone, that doesn’t change, and at the same time, seeing this again boggles my mind. It’d be easy for me to write it off as pure escapism, but my cell memory knows it was more. Because it feels like whoever that person was that was lusting after a stalking art thief was someone else entirely. Actually now that I think about it, I do sometimes feel like I’ve lived several lives, like there are these eras I went through, like I’m looking back on it now having retained a certain amount of memory but also as though it was someone else’s life entirely. I should start naming these eras. This one could be called Thief of My Old Brain.

Ben says if a movie has shoulderpads in it it’s just not going to hold up. And I would add, especially if that movie is trying to be sexy.

In conclusion: cheese from the eighties very often spoils, and I am not the person I once was.

Printer's Row Book Fair!

Hey, come see me on some panels on Sunday, June 8 (near Dearborn & Polk):

11:00 AM
Heartland Stage, with ELIZABETH BERG, author of “The Day I Ate
Whatever I Wanted,” in conversation with Amy Krouse Rosenthal.

4:00 PM Other Voices finale reading with BILLY LOMBARDO and AUDREY
NIFFENEGGER, hosted by Gina Frangello

For more info and a map, go to printersrowbookfair.org.

Ben's Website!

Lookit! My hunny has a website now. Check out the arts!

How To Be Lloyd Dobler

Note: I have a bunch of non-fiction pieces I wrote a while ago that have been languishing on my computer in nowhereville, so I'm going to post them here over the next few weeks before they become utterly obsolete. This is the first.





Lloyd Dobler is real.

Unfortunately, Vince Vaughn from Swingers is real, too. Vince Vaughn from Swingers is half the reason a lot of us can’t find our Lloyd Doblers. One time, in a restaurant, a guy came up to me and said, “I think you should go out with me because you’re cool and I’m cool and we’d be cool together.” Putting aside my awareness that this might be the single most uncool statement ever made, the only reason I finally agreed to a date with him at all was because it was clear he wasn’t going to let me enjoy my dinner with the girls until I agreed about our mutual coolness. This was a mistake. If a guy ever comes up to you and tells you he’s a dentist and an actor, and that he’s cool and you’re cool and you’d be cool together, turn right around and walk briskly in the opposite direction. The Vince Vaughn from Swingers of the world might very well be able to pull this off, but I am sure it’s only because he isn’t also a dentist. If Vince Vaughn from Swingers had been in Say Anything, I’m sure he would have tried to messed with Lloyd Dobler’s head just like he messed with Jon Favreau from Swingers’ head (“You have to wait a week before you call”) just like the Vince Vaughn from Swingers of the real world are out there messing with the heads of a lot of other perfectly nice guys inclined to call whenever the spirit of calling moves them and not at some predetermined calling time. But it took four whole dudes at the Gas n’ Sip to try to convince Lloyd Dobler that he had to “go out, find another girl who looks like Diane, you gotta nail her, and then you gotta dump her, man,” and since they failed, I doubt Vince Vaughn from Swingers could do it either. That’s the difference between Lloyd Dobler and Jon Favreau from Swingers. Lloyd Dobler knows who he is and he knows what he wants.

I know Lloyd Dobler is real because he lives in my house. He also lives in Sue’s house, and Megan’s house and Anne’s house and also in Caren’s house and a lot of my other friend’s houses, which leads me to believe he has residences all over the country as well.

I didn’t always believe this.

I wanted to, but I didn’t really, not until he moved into my house. In my house he goes by the name of Ben Brandt, but I am not fooled. He is my own personal Lloyd Dobler.

My Lloyd Dobler never gave me a blue letter, never held a boombox playing In Your Eyes outside my window and knows better than to try to teach me to drive a stick. My Lloyd Dobler is tall, though, and he doesn’t sell anything bought or processed and doesn’t process anything sold or bought. I can’t say for sure if he’s ever bought anything processed or sold, but I know he doesn’t do it for a living. Also, unlike Say Anything Lloyd Dobler, he knows what he wants to do for a living, and I am not it. But he has a spectacular talent for making me feel as though, like movie Lloyd, being with me is what he’s good at.

Okay, let me sidebar for a while here. If you’re a guy, like a lot of guys, I am sure you have strong opinions about how Lloyd Dobler has ruined your life. I just read an article that argued that Lloyd Dobler was a stalker on account of the boombox moment. Mmmm, I don’t think so. One boombox does not a stalker make, and if that’s stalking, sign me up. This is at best, a weak example of a guy trying to excuse his unDoblerness. Deep down, I am sure most guys know that Lloyd Dobler is every girl’s dream, and that they are not that, and many of them are probably right. This is not just any romantic comedy. This is a romantic comedy with the model for what a guy should be. And let me say that with all due respect to John Cusack (whose name I hesitate to use here, because I want to be clear about differentiating between Lloyd Dobler, who I know a lot about, and John Cusack, who I know nothing about except for he’s from Chicago, which is definitely in his favor, but which in and of itself tells me very little about John Cusack’s character, and of course does not account for the fact that plenty of non-Lloyd Doblers are from Chicago, most of whom drink MGD and call it MGD and hang out at places like the Cubby Bear and put shorts and flip-flops on on the first sixty-degree day in March and can quote most of Caddyshack at will), Mr. Cusack, who is plenty cute, is certainly not the cutest guy who ever lived. Lloyd Dobler, however, just might be, and although they do bear a striking physical similarity, if this hasn’t occurred to you already, it is his Lloyd Doblerness that makes him supremely cute. Let me also add that although I know nothing about John Cusack, I would imagine he must find himself in a dating conundrum of epic proportions due to having played Lloyd Dobler, because it seems that almost no girl on the face of the earth has not loved Lloyd Dobler, and so imagine if you’re the guy who played Lloyd Dobler, knowing that you are really John Cusack but that women want you to be and believe you to be Lloyd Dobler, it would seem to me that he, like every other famous actor, would be left with only one option romantically, which would be to date other celebrities who “understand” him, although I can’t think of even one movie in which there was a female equivalent of Lloyd Dobler (which is not to say that there isn’t a long list of excellent female characters, just not any that are equivlent to Lloyd Dobler and frankly if there were, it might not be such a good thing, because a woman who was uniquely good at loving a man might be considered a step back, feminism-wise, although frankly, as I write this, it certainly seems noble enough to me, and perhaps I will write that story myself). Although I suspect that even other celebrity women have their feelings about Lloyd Dobler, leaving him in the truly unique situation of having to weed out a lot of women who don’t want John Cusack for John Cusack the person and not the Lloyd Dobler. That said, he has the best possible chance anyone could have for becoming Lloyd Doblerish if he so chose, if he doesn’t already happen to be the best guy ever, for obvious reasons. I’m not saying I feel sorry for him, and maybe he has that other thing I never understood, where people don’t care if other people like them for the right reasons, like men who attract women because they’re “powerful?” What’s that all about? If Donald Trump singlehandedly erased AIDS, poverty and terrorism worldwide, yeah, I might rethink him as a human being, but I still wouldn’t want to have sex with him. I’m just saying that if let’s say John Cusack would kick the glass away from your path but he wouldn’t call you by Wednesday for a Saturday night date, it’s not like he couldn’t decide to call by Wednesday. That’s the whole point. Anyone can. It’s just not that hard to be like Lloyd Dobler. I’d almost argue it’s easier to be a nice guy than it is to put the effort into being a poser or a full-on Vince Vaughn from Swingers. (I feel the need to mention right now that I have been referring to him as Vince Vaughn from Swingers not just because I don’t know his character’s name, but because unlike Lloyd Dobler, his character was so fully the anti-Dobler that I don’t want to know his name.) If they had cast, let’s say, Brad Pitt or Jude Law as Lloyd Dobler, I doubt I’d have any awareness of the name Lloyd Dobler at all, much less the concept of Lloyd Dobler. It would be theoretical, and I might have little hope at all that anything resembling a nice guy I wanted to have sex with existed. By now you have surely realized that I will use the name Lloyd Dobler as many times as possible because listen to it, it’s positively musical.

What I’m saying is that anyone can be Lloyd Dobler. (Okay, I’m ruling out serial killers and child molesters, obviously.) It’s a choice. You know how Lloyd says to his sister near the beginning, “Get in a good mood! How hard is it to just decide to be in a good mood and be in a good mood?” It’s as simple as this. Be Lloyd Dobler! How hard would it be to just decide to be Lloyd Dobler and be Lloyd Dobler? It turns out, bad boys are overrated. No, for real. My friends and I, with a collective ridiculous number of frequent flier miles on Angst Boy Air, enough to circle the globe ninety bajillion times, have unilaterally turned the corner on this. Well, okay, let me say those of us who are over twenty-seven, and speaking for myself only, it took me a little bit more research, like about another decade than everyone else, but I’ve always been slow. Like Lloyd’s best friend Corey (played by the brilliant Lili Taylor), we have all been with our share of Joes, although our songs may not be as memorable. Joes do lie when they cry. They do like gi-hirls with names like Ashley. They may not hang out at the Gas n’ Sip, but do not be fooled. If they do not kick the glass out of your path, if they do not look at you like you are Diane Court in the flesh, move right along, friends, nothing to see there.

Lloyd Doblers are layered. I could quote pages of the dialogue in Say Anything, which is, I daresay, genius, but really, that would require way too many pages. Half of what’s amazing about this movie isn’t even in the dialogue, it’s in Lloyd Dobler’s eyes. Think about the iconic scene where Lloyd is holding up the boombox. Visually, it’s a striking one, even from a distance. But take a good long look at his face. There are a million things going on on Lloyd’s face in this scene. Heartbreak. Longing. Fear. Regret. Determination. This scene alone, even a still shot from this scene, I propose, warrants an honorary Oscar for John Cusack somewhere down the road when the Oscar-giving people come to their senses. Lloyd Dobler knows he isn’t in Diane Court’s league, but he also knows that very few people are at their age. He knows he’s nineteen and that everyone doesn’t have their life mapped out at nineteen and that he’s not a college kind of guy but that he’s looking for a “dare-to-be-great situation” and in the meantime he’s just gonna hang with Diane.

I realize a lot of people will argue the exact opposite of what I’m about to say now, but hear me out. Romantic movies, comedies more than dramas, often, I agree, have probably sent a Cinderella-ish message to the women of our culture that sets perhaps unreasonably high expectations in terms of what we want in a man (although as with the power thing, I’m not going to start on women who want rich men or giant penises, because I have no idea what that’s about beyond what it seems to be about, which I can’t really process), which is basically – everything. Looks, charm, brains, humor, success, kindness. Yes, we don’t necessarily choose men who meet more than one of these criteria at a time. Some of us are easily distracted by someone with only one of the above, if it’s outstanding enough, and we’ll overlook a penchant for excessive pot-smoking if let’s say the guy in question plays bass for our favorite indie rock band. Or we’ll pretend we’re okay with the relationship being “undefined” if the guy sends especially funny emails every other day even though he doesn’t make plans more than one night a month, usually at four-thirty on a Saturday afternoon for the same night – to just “hang out.” Poor choices aside, more than anything, we want to be romanced, to be swept off our feet, as they say, and a lot of us find ourselves single longer than we planned to be because it hasn’t happened yet, because life isn’t like a movie. There is an argument to be made that moderately nice and successful are enough. But many of us hold out and as we hold out, our grandmothers and other people tell us we’re too picky.

Which is so wrong on a million levels. I have always thought that a lot of us aren’t nearly picky enough. I have seen more than a few good friends of mine date men who stop just short of hitting them, and frankly, the verbal abuse dealt out by these people is no less brutal. I myself have dated one in particular who was given to unkind words, but even at my lowest point I had very little tolerance for this. Me, when the “c” word comes up, I tend to hang up the phone. I have, however, enjoyed any number of boyfriends who were emotionally unavailable. For years this seemed to be the only way I could classify my “type.” I’ve always said that if I were somehow able to gather everyone I’ve ever dated into one room, after getting over the initial shock of the vast number of mistakes I’ve made, I would defy anyone to say that I had a physical type, or what it was that any of these dudes had in common. I hoped against hope that at some point these men would avail themselves emotionally, but no. They had a unique inclination to avail themselves emotionally to someone else, however, disconcertingly often the very next girl who came along. So I waited. I waited while relatives undoubtedly wondered if I was gay (and if so, why didn’t I have a girlfriend?), seriously messed up, or neuter, I waited through a lot of loneliness, I waited through life moments wonderful and terrible, I waited through dry spells heretofore unimagined, and the wait was worth it, but I will say forever, I will never know now how long I would have continued to wait, when the loneliness would have been too much, enough for me to settle in some way, but I know I had at least a few more years of waiting in me.

Okay, I’m coming around to the rest of my point. This is what I’ve learned from Lloyd Dobler, which is a concept I formerly opposed rather vehemently. Need is good. It was once a source of extremely misguided pride on my part that I could take care of myself and that I needed no one, thank you very much, which is pretty funny I’m sure if you even just ask Nina for one, about what I like to call “The Codependent Years,” which ran approximately from eighth grade, when I scheduled all my classes to match hers because I was terrified of being in a class without her, ending sometime in the early nineties. I once briefly dated a guy who told me that if a girl said to him the words “I need” or “I want” it didn’t matter what followed, that it was the biggest possible turn on. This stuck in my craw for a long time, but I always had a hard time differentiating between “need” and “needy,” which drives me insane. It turns out they are not the same. Needy is not what I’m talking about. Lloyd Dobler made me understand the difference. There’s a scene in the kickboxing studio where Diane Court comes back to Lloyd after she’s broken up with him and finds out her dad has been embezzling money from old people. Appropriately wary, he says to her, “Are you here because you need someone or because you need me? Nevermind, I don’t care.” Thankfully, she says she needs him, which is a crucial distinction. In real life, if you only need someone? You can always find someone. Someone is a lot of people. Eight million dating websites indicate as much. Here is what I have learned. We all need someone, but it’s much better to need the right someone. We do not live in a vacuum. People who do not need people, not to go totally Streisand on you, are few and far between and tend to make bombs out of sagebrush and write manifestoes on their plans for the destruction of humankind. Everyone needs help. We all have friends, we all ask them for favors, we all pay someone to do things we don’t know how to do or couldn’t possibly do without making costly mistakes, like filling out tax forms. Relationships, it turns out are no different. I didn’t realize this until after I got married, of course, actually I didn’t realize it until I watched Say Anything again for the twenty-fourth time the other day. I do not need my husband to brush my teeth for me, although he did it once, and although there’s some chance in the hopefully distant future where one or the other of us might need to help the other do so. As for the difference between need and needy, I also do not need my husband to stand next to me for the duration of a dinner party, I do not need him to tell me he’s stopping at Stanley’s for a bag of apples on the way home and I do not need him to tell me the exact longitude and latitude of his location at any given moment. I do not need him to wash my dishes or do my laundry (although I suspect he might need me for those things) or even take out the trash and mop the floors (although I am grateful that he does) and I do not need him to read my mind (although he’s uncannily good at it anyway) and I do not need him to be anything he isn’t already, because, well, because he’s my Lloyd Dobler. I need him because he’s Ben Brandt. I need him because he fills my life with love and joy and giggles and art and goofy songs and I need him because he’s that thing that being Betsy Crane just isn’t quite enough without.
Wait for Lloyd Dobler. Lloyd Dobler would beat Vince Vaughn from Swingers in a fight in like, one round and that’s even if you put an eyepatch on him and gave Vince Vaughn from Swingers the weapon of your choice and maybe a superpower.

As an alternative, The Pickle Man from Crossing Delancey is close. He may not have hit it quite as big as Lloyd, but he’s from the same school. They’re out there.

Roger, Joyce and Ken

Once upon a time in 1976 there were three friends with nothing to do. One afternoon they were drinking some Boone's Farm Apple Wine listening to Tony Orlando and Dawn and as the apple wine flowed, it began to seem like a very groovy idea indeed to make a record of their own. Roger, Joyce and Ken began as a trio, 'Like Peter, Paul and Mary!' Joyce said. 'But with a disco beat!' was Roger's idea. 'I was thinking more like Mark Spitz...' Ken said, dismayed at Roger's insistence that Mark Spitz was not a singer.

Things went downhill from there.

Joyce, initially in a long-term relationship with Ken, was easily seduced by Roger's many facets (versus Ken's mere two), and though the group did endeavor to record as a unit, their discord on the direction of the band coupled with Joyce's reluctance to choose between the men, quickly led them to pursue solo careers.