July 12, 2009:

The Great Parables of the Brady Bunch

About two years after I quit drinking I decided I'd had enough fun for one life and joined a 12-step program for fat folks. The program was actually for anorexics and bulimics too, but is that as fun to say as "fat folks?" Didn't think so. Apology accepted.

Anyhoot, during the early phases of what I now call the "food cult," I became so anxiety-ridden that I spent most of my time holed up in my parents' house watching TV. My social skills went down the tubes but my TV-watching skills remained unimpeachable. Or impeccable. Impenetrable. I don't know which word captures how mistake-proof my TV-watching was but I can tell you that if they gave out medals for it, I would have stayed home and watched TV during the ceremony.

Speaking of television: for a while I turned into Oliver from the Brady Bunch. The only difference between us was that the Bradys found Oliver endearing, whereas none of the people I went around annoying welcomed me into the fold via dressing up in old timey clothing and hitting me in the face with a cream pie.

Another Brady Bunch parable I relate to is the one where they build a house of cards. They go boys vs. girls to see who gets to use the stamp collection to buy something from the department store. Midway through the competition Carol and Mike can see how stressed the kids are getting and they realize that the house of cards is literally tearing their home apart. Not really but there is one shot of Marsha dramatically adding a card and you can tell that she and everybody else just wishes the house would fall so that they could put an end to the terrible tension and suspense. That's how I feel whenever things start going well in my personal and/or professional life. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the Bradys for accurately telling the story of my complex inner life.

What other Brady parables apply to me? Funny you should ask. I also have some firsthand experience with what it's like to become the "new Jan Brady." The essence of the new Jan Brady is that she is meant to be an improvement on the old Jan Brady, but for reasons everyone but Jan understands, she is actually worse. When I was in the 7th grade in the early 1980s there was a short-lived trend among adolescent girls of wearing decorative shoe laces in their hair. The shoe laces had hearts and fruits and flowers on them and you would thread them through a barrette so that they hung down with your long hair.

I couldn't get my parents to buy me some hair laces but I had a pair of laces in my shoes that were pretty fancy. They had apples on them and what not. They looked like the kind the popular girls were wearing in their hair. So I took them out of my shoes and wore them to school in my hair one day, excited that I was finally catching up with the latest fashions. This story ends the way all stories of hopeful, vulnerable adolescents end: with some diabolical 13 year old boy's triumphant mockery. He pointed out that the shoe laces in my hair had been on my shoes the day before and then the whole class laughed at me. If only the bigots who cry for sending all gays to an island or all immigrants back home would yell instead for all 13 year old boys to be expunged from society, we might have ourselves a great country on our hands.

Sorry fellas. I know you were all 13 once. You've got to admit that you were dicks though. I'm not saying 13 year old girls are any walk in the park either. Let's face it: it's a miracle that any of us survived adolescence, based on our murder-ability alone.

Well, as my old mentor Sam the Butcher used to say: Alice I can get you a great deal on a beef shank.

Love,

The One Where Alice Quits Because the Kids Were Dicks to Her

Added July 12, 2009

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