the slack daily

Say Goodnight, Gracie.

In the late 70s, George Burns starred in Oh God and Oh God, Book II. The movies were in a constant loop on cable a summer later. My brother Jeremy and I watched them over and over (and over and over) until we could recite them from memory. One day, my mom had had enough.

It wasn't that we were spending our summer inside, planted on a scratchy wool cushions of the sofa and slurping back Pepsi Lights, but that George Burns was so much more than what we were seeing.

That evening she took us out for our favorite candy (chocolate covered raisins for me, something gummy-ike for Jer, I think) and then we crowded around the glow of the TV for the "Burns and Allen Show." During commerical breaks Mom told us about  Gracie Allen and George Burns rose through the ranks of vaudeville, then radio, then television.

It was in black and white and it looked old even on our new TV, but I remember being so awed at the fact that something that was written so long ago could still make me laugh and Gracie Allen was probably the first truly funny woman I had ever seen.   

Later that year, our 4th grade teacher at Ben Franklin School (Mrs. Keen?) taught us how to write formal letters. The assignment was to pick people you looked up to, and ask them for an autographed picture. She would take care of sending the letters off.

The year was 1982, and most kids chose to write the cast of Star Wars.

My mom told me that Gracie Allen died before I was born, so I chose to write to George Burns.

Over the next few months, letters would come back in care of Ben Franklin School. Autographed photos of Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. And then one day, an envelope came for me.

I forgot about the letter until yesterday, when a package arrived on my doorstep from SlackMom. 

 

Dear Nina

Thank you for the nice letter. I'm just sorry I couldn't get around to answering it sooner. I'm very honored that you chose me. I thought a letter would be nicer than a picture.

It's nice to know that today, kids still look up to someone. It's a nice feeling. I had my heroes when I was young. Abe Lincoln. Thomas Jefferson. I knew Jefferson personally. That's a joke.

I'm not really that old. I'm older. Anyway, sweetie, stay happy and healthy.

Love

George Burns

 

He sent it from Hollywood Center Studios Which is not far from where I spend my days writing comedy now.

Thank you, Mr. Burns. And goodnight, Gracie.*

*Lizzie McGuire won a Gracie Allen Award for comedy in 2003. How cool is that?

Things I Learned While Watching Pretty in Pink.

• That first outfit that Andie wears was my dream outfit that I attempted to recreate (poorly.) I don't think there re pictures, although I rocked the vest CONSTANTLY and did a lot of boxy jackets with pins.


• If you didn't want to be Annie Potts character Iona in Pretty in Pink when you grew up, then we wouldn't have been friends in High School.


• Iona talks about her friend missing Prom... "She realized nothing was missing...it was side effects from missing the Prom." WHICH IS WHY I WENT TO PROM STAG.


• I coveted that pink Kharmann Ghia. I now drive a pink Mini Cooper.


• I met director Howard Deutch at a party a couple of weeks ago. I tried not to fan out, so I turned to talk to the person he was with. His wife.


• Watching Andie listen to her messages from Duckie reminded me what a big deal it was to get a phone in my room. The phone jack was there...I just wasn't allowed a phone of my own until I was in 8th grade.

• I modded my gym suit my freshman year. I think there were boxer shorts with a ruffle that I wore under my gym shorts.


• I'm still a Duckie girl. (I married mine.)

It Gets Better.

He used to tell me that I smelled like diapers.

He sat behind me in nearly every class in Junior High due to the cruel nature of the alphabet. He whispered sweet nothings into my ear.

You're fat. You're ugly.

You smell like diapers.

I n Miss Stebel's homeroom I ran for Homeroom President. It wasn't the top job - that was Class Representative*.  I didn't think it would make me popular, but I thought it was something.  A position. Maybe it would come with a little respect.

He decided to run against me.

I ran a campaign. There were posters and 3-minute speech written on index cards. I wore a skirt and my hair in a bun and felt presidential.

He went up there and said "Vote for Me" and sat back down and continued his barrage of insults as I sat, smiling back the intense feeling of shame that I could feel radiating out from every pore.

He won.

...

He ran into someone I know recently.

He is balding and paunchy and imagines himself a writer.

He doesn't do anything even remotely writer-like.

When my name was brought up, he said "oh yeah, I remember her."

He would love to do what I do.

Maybe when he pops up, I won't remember him.

Life has a way of working itself out.

I'm 38 years old...and it gets better.

 

*I ended up winning Class Representative in Seventh Grade because there were no popular people in my class. I would go to Student Council meetings early so I could pick out my seat before the popular people got there. Because if I got there after they did, the only choice I would have was to sit down next to them. And then they would proceed to slide their chairs to the other side of the room. 

I ran for Vice-President of Student Council at the end of Seventh Grade, hoping still that I could change things from the inside. When I lost...again...I decided that I would stop concentrating on an group that truly didn't want me and start devoting my time to friends who did.

 

(Crossposted to my Tumblr.)

Twenty Years Later.

I never did write about my high school reunion.

Sure, I mentioned it. There was an anecdote. I posted some photos here and there.

People always ask me how I have such a good memory when it comes to middle school and high school. More than half of my professional career has been dedicated to writing - and rewriting - those years, that it's never been all that far from my mind.

Tug at one small silvery filament of memory and the whole thing is bound to unravel.

At my ten year high school reunion, I was looking forward to connecting with my high school friends (Facebook was but a gleam in young Zuckerberg's eye?) and coming back a Capital-S Success. I found that people still kept to themselves, for the most part. Groups clung together with the same magnetic force that they did in high school.

But then came Facebook.

And suddenly I was planning our 20-year reunion.

There was the joke that i heard not once, not twice, but over and over - are you friends with the popular people? (To be fair, I may have been the first one who made it.)

While everyone went on and grew up and Did Things Adults Did, I work in a business that's been caled "High School With Money." I'm writing pilots about high school wrongs, about rumors, about first kisses, about who your friends really are.

Planning the reunion, I pored over yearbooks and tried to match names and photos with email addresses and friend requests. I dug up old journals and looked through everyone else's friends' list remembering boys that I liked and girls who were mean to me.

I talked to new friends - people I knew in high school, but wasn't friends with - about the whole process.

I mean, I'm not an idiot. I know that high school is rife with reverse narcissism - that belief that it's all about you, and it's all bad. I had braces. I had glasses. I had a bad perm (is there such a thing as a good perm? Not in the 80s.) I was chubby and dark in a school filled with skinny blonde girls. I was smart and I was funny and I could be prone to fits of bravado to mask the fact that I was painfully shy and totally self-conscious.

(I definitely didn't date.)

All of this, swirling in my head while I decided that I was going to confront the girl(s) who were mean to me. I had one in my sights, specifically. I wasn't going to be cruel (erm, that would defeat the purpose,) but I just wanted to say you did this and that wasn't cool.

Except that I didn't get a chance to, because when I ran into her it didn't really matter.

Because she wasn't the person I thought she was, either.

When I write characters I try not to make them one-dimensional.

Yet I had painted all the "villains" in my life in precisely that way. 

There was no grand moment. I just realized that I didn't know them and they didn't know me. That was it.

But I was no longer shy. I was no longer self-conscious. I was no longer worried about what people thought.

And that's why my high school reunion was a hell of a lot of fun. 

(And I'm looking forward to someone else planning the next one.)

 

The Answer is "NICE TITS!"

Thinking about yesterday's post.

(You guys know I have a Tumblr now, right?)

In sixth grade, my music teacher made me sit next Joey S., a young delinquent in the making. He used to whisper lewd comments under his breath, trying to get me to cry. Each day I'd sit that and suck back the tears until finally I broke down and told the teacher.

She told me I should try and be a good influence.

The next time he laid into me, I tried to laugh it off. But he continued. So the next time Joey snickered about my tits, I stamped on his foot and elbowed him in the stomach.

He called me a fucking bitch, but he left me alone.

(I used to imagine he was in jail, but I heard he got married and had a family. I wonder if he has daughters?)

It was so embarrassing and awkward, being eleven, twelve, thirteen years old and having a part of our body define you. I didn't have the benefit of being mind-numbingly beautiful, or popular. I was a geeky girl with big boobs. Although I tried to blend into the scenery, it was hard not to miss me.

But at a certain point, you grow up. You put your bullshit behind you and you get over stuff.

A couple of years ago, I was playing Pictionary with my then-boyfriend and some  friends of his. Instead of selecting clues from the game, we'd make up clues of our own. One of the teams was having a problem with a particular clue. The guy drawing, who I didn't know very well, looked uncomfortable. Time ran out, and everyone wanted to know what the clue was.

One of the men, a guy in his mid-40s, a short, balding overweight man who I'd always gotten along with and found quite funny, yelled

Nina's Boobs! The Answer is Nina's Boobs!

And there I was all over again, back in Mrs. Wilgocki's music class, humiliated, with a big smile on my face. I thought to myself, you pathetic little fuck, I'll tear your balls off and feed them to you.

But there wasn't anything I could do.

So I laughed along with everyone else. I made an even bigger joke. I acted like I didn't care.

I could have hit him, I could have cried, I could have left the game. I didn't do any of these, because sometimes you've got to just suck it up and be a good influence.

But I never played Pictionary again.

 

Related: Nice Tits

Sick in the Head.

I've been sick for the last couple of days.  Unfortunately, life as a freelancer means no sick days, and my various amalgamation of part-times jobs don't offer PTO or otherwise, so being sick borders on a nuisance to a full-on financial crisis if I'm Unable to Get Stuff Done (thankfully this hasn't happened yet, as I'm always able to shackle myself to the computer in any state.)

Yesterday at the gym I was sniffling like an Olsen twin leaving the bathroom at Mood when a friend said to me don't you miss being sick as a kid?  Your mom would tuck you into bed and bring the TV in the bedroom and feed you chicken soup and crackers all day?

Apparently I know people who were raised by the Cleavers.

SlackMom didn't work outside the home, so when we were sick, she was there to take care of us.  Or I should say, when we were sick, we were there. All. Day. Anyone who's ever worked at home knows what it's like to have the place to yourself all day. You dress in the clothes in the pile closest to the bed, which sometimes results in your grocery shopping in PJ's and combat boots.  Hair brushing is optional. 

Another friend of mine, a working actress, confessed to me that she was worried she and her fiance would break up after he was on hiatus from the show he was working on.  He'll be...here, she told me.  HERE!  This is my apartment!

At the first complaint of a scratchy throat or a febrile forehead, SlackMom would call our bluff and suggest that we should just try to walk it off.  Go to school, she'd say, and if you still feel bad, go to the nurse.  Going to the nurse was a major pain in the ass, so you'd usually just suck it up and make it through school.

As I reached high school, I suddenly found myself attending school when I was sick because I had things to do.  There was play practice and set building and costumers to talk to, there were Forensics (Speech Team) coaching sessions and honors classes and staying home just wasn't an option.  So I'd head in, attend the classes I'd need, sleep in the Student Council office for classes I didn't (Mrs. Bennett had us reading Le Petit Prince for six full months.) 

However, this eventually caught up to me - not that I got in trouble, mind you - even though my high school took attendance in every single class, you only needed to be an honor student with an honest face and handwriting that looked just like your mother's to release you from the bonds of World History. 

No, my senior  year found me hocking up a lung on the day that my Honors Calculus class was to take some sort of standardized test that was going to prove we were smartypants and supposedly get the school additional funding.  While I didn't always enjoy my high school experience, I didn't hate it.  I pulled on a pair of combat boots over my PJ bottoms and was ready to go.

SlackMom handed me a large commuter mug on my way out.  Whatever you do, don't drink this while you're driving.

I sniffed the mug.  Is that...?

Yup.  Just sip, she instructed me.

I hopped in my black and red '84 Firebird (yes, my actual car) and drove the mile to school.

My fellow math nerds congregated in front of Glenbard West's auditorium, where we were scheduled to take the test.  I gingerly sipped from my commuter mug.  The liquid first burned my throat, then was oddly comforting.

SlackMom had made me a hot toddy.

A friend of mine (I don't remember who, so speak up if it was you) asked is that...?

Before she could finish, the Calculus teacher - who once told me to "tap dance up to the blackboard" to solve a problem - swooped down on us.

What is that? 

I'm sick, I croaked.  It's medicinal.

I waited for her to threaten to send me to the Principal's office.  Or call my mother. 

But instead she said

No drinks are allowed in the auditorium, she warned me.  So finish it.

I looked at my friend and shrugged.  If you insist.

I chugged the hot beverage as fast as I could.

And took the Illinois State High School Standardized Math Test half in the bag.

 

Cheers!