Only an Onscreen Ending

No discussion of Family Ties would be complete without looking at Tracy Pollan, the actress who played Alex's girlfriend, Ellen Reed, in season four, and who would marry Michael J. Fox a few years later. I do remember the character of Ellen from when I originally watched the show as a kid, but I had imagined that her goodbye was much more emotional than it seems now. For one thing, although the whole second episode of season five is devoted to Ellen's absence, we don't actually see Ellen leave; we join the story after she's already accepted a dance scholarship in Paris, and we see the aftermath with Alex trying to date again. And we don't get any flashbacks in that episode, either, or montages of Alex and Ellen's relationship. It's an interesting choice, especially since we saw a montage when they first got together, and the show has already begun the process of using clip shows, or flashback-based episodes. (The first use of the clip episode was with Ellen, actually, near the end of season four - the family sits around in the living room telling her stories about Alex's past antics - two episodes' worth, in fact. Maybe I'll write more about the use of the clip show later, but for now I'll just say that it's a shock of self-awareness - this family remembers its own past and sees connections between seemingly disparate events! - that goes beyond mere attention to continuity. Too bad it feels only like an easy way to deliver new episodes and pointless, narratively).

Is this great old tech or what?

This lack of flashbacks and montages is doubly surprising because without them the show relies uncharacteristically on audience memory. For example, at the campus snack shop juke box, Alex selects the Billy Vera & The Beaters song "At This Moment," which played during the school dance where Alex and Ellen first kissed. But the show doesn't replay that scene, and it doesn't have Alex remark on his choice - "This was our song," or the like - perhaps simply trusting that viewers would remember the earlier, pivotal scene, which took place 25 episodes before. (Or perhaps recent summer episodes reminded viewers; the Ellen's-gone episode, "Starting Over," was only episode two of a new season). The show rarely seems to expect us to remember anything about the characters beyond the most important biographical details or relationships, so if it was expecting viewers to remember Alex and Ellen's song, that would indicate a storyline that was unusually popular and therefore memorable.

Another example of a makeover, btw.
Mallory and Jennifer helped Alex look "hip" for a date.

My own memory of this storyline does suggest that it was notable, but then my memory seems to have given it an extra gloss of romance, probably influenced by Pollan and Fox's real-life romance. For example, I remembered the scene where Alex sits at the kitchen table and writes Ellen a letter, but again, I'd remembered it as being more emotional, a plea to return to Ohio that went unanswered or denied. But that's not the case at all; he's telling her that he's moving on and he wishes her well. He considers several joke closings - "Your pal," "Your son" - before choosing "Love." Alex is not over her yet - that date, with Sharon (played by Haviland Morris, who would have been familiar from 1984's Sixteen Candles) did not go well, mostly because he kept trying to get her to order her food, look, and smell like Ellen. But ultimately he accepts that Ellen is gone.

Spraying your ex-girlfriend's perfume on your date? A no-no.

Although the love story didn't end the way I remembered it, there's a lot to like about the ending. The show gives Ellen a good reason for leaving, a reason that fits with her character as an artist. When we meet her, we learn that she's a painter, and in later episodes we see her as a dancer, too. I might write a post specifically about how art is represented on the show - Elyse is a singer; Nick is a sculptor, etc. - but for now I'll just say that I think it's cool that Ellen pursues her art, which she was shown to be committed to, even if it takes her away from her serious boyfriend. She's not gone from the picture because of some other possible reason - her rich father doesn't fall sick, for example. Characters leave to tend to sick relatives all the time, but that kind of reason would have been inorganic to her character.

I also like that she's gone, period. Don't get me wrong; I love the character, Tracy Pollan is great, and the chemistry between her and Michael J. Fox is so good that I find it hard to believe that they didn't actually become romantically involved until they reunited on the set of Bright Lights, Big City. (I recommend reading that New York Times story about Tracy Pollan's guest appearance on Spin City; in addition to the Fox-Pollan information, it's worth reading to catch the before-he-was-famous reference to Michael Pollan). What I mean is, I like that the writers didn't make Ellen stick around just for the sake of Alex having a girlfriend or transform her into the kind of person who would stay in spite of a scholarship offer because she is loyal to him, can't bear to leave him, etc. Of course, Pollan herself may have had other commitments, which could explain why the character was written off the show, but whatever the reason, I like the way the writers handled it.

George Eliot has this great passage in Middlemarch where she writes that we don't often discuss how people - well, she's focused on men, but I'm expanding the range for my purposes - find their vocations, even though arriving at work we're passionate about that can make an impact on the world requires "industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires" in the same way that arriving at love does. But instead, Eliot writes, it's love that is the focus of our narrative energies: "We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her." Onscreen, vocation wins out over romance for Ellen, which feels like a triumph, writing and gender-wise; offscreen, acting and love could co-exist. This impulse to recount a love story seems like it would be particularly pronounced with two people like Pollan and Fox, who met in what turned out to be breakout work for both of them and are still together more than 26 years later. We love love stories, and we admire love stories that last.

I once read an interview with Kate Hudson where she talked about how fun it was to watch movies like Overboard to see her mom, Goldie Hawn, and Kurt Russell when they were young. I hope that Fox and Pollan's four children get a similar kick out of seeing their parents on Family Ties, a show that ended up as a home movie of sorts, offering the earliest images of them together.

Enormous Changes Not at the Last Minute

Alex sweaters shouldn't get all the love

I've been thinking about continuity and clothes again on Family Ties, and I think Judith Butler (yes, I went there) would be useful here:

If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial metaphor of a "ground" will be displaced and revealed as a stylized configuration… .The abiding gendered self will then be shown to be structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the idea of a substantial ground of identity, but which in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this "ground." 

The characters on Family Ties present gendered selves through the "stylized repetition of acts through time" - for example, they return to the same outfits, which conform to gender norms (even as some characters are understood to be more fashionable than others). But I would argue that the show uses the "occasional discontinuity" in characters' clothing, appearance, and behavior to solidify the "ground" of identity, gender and otherwise. In other words, on Family Ties there's no surer sign that a character is going through a phase than when he or she makes a big, physical change. All extreme transformations signal the temporary.

Sometimes these transformations are chosen individually, as when Mallory scores higher than Alex on an IQ test and then dresses differently to rub it in:

Or when Alex tries to be part of his girlfriend Ellen's world by auditioning for a dance company:

But more often than not, one character gives another a makeover, as when Alex helps Jennifer prepare for a history presentation on how a bill becomes a law and costumes her in the style of his brand of overachieving student:

Or when Mallory and Jennifer take their little brother Andy shopping:

Or, in the most problematic example of all, when Alex helps Nick change his style so he'll better fit in with the Keatons:

(I'll write a whole post about the show's treatment of Nick, but I want to finish the series first).

On shows like Family Ties, discontinuities don't shake the solid ground of identity; they reveal an anxiety about our true selves and our relationships, concerns that are resolved playfully or seriously in a matter of scenes but that are always resolved in favor of the "real" person. Everyone dresses like themselves, again. In this way, the show flirts with alternatives but comforts its audience with a continued return to age, class, heterosexual, and other norms, all of which can be bought and worn.

I do wish this store existed, though.

The Visible Bridge or What Was Nixon's Favorite TV Show?

In the spirit of Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge (which I'm totally asking my mom to get me for my birthday!), let's look at the transition from Nixon to Reagan on Family Ties, shall we? In season one, Steven's conservative father visits and when the subject of Nixon comes up during dinner, he says, "Nixon was framed, you know." Steven tries to calm down by excusing himself, but from the next room he yells, "HE WAS NOT FRAMED! HE WAS A CROOK!"

Alex also had a House Un-American Activities coloring book.

The scene is played for laughs - Steven returns to the table and mildly asks someone to please pass the potatoes - but the indictment is not itself the joke. That episode aired on November 3, 1982, only eight years after Nixon's resignation, and in the early seasons of the show the serious lessons of Watergate share space with the humorous adoration Alex feels. Nixon is the political Rorschach test and sun; Reagan is practically a distant star. 

By season four, while the show hasn't abandoned its references to Nixon, they've increasingly become linked to objects, relics of Alex's childhood that serve as signifiers of his precociousness and early political affiliations. There's his Nixon lunchbox, his Nixon rattle. Reagan isn't totally immune from such treatment; Alex uses a framed photo of the president as an educational tool for his infant brother Andrew:

"74 years old, he still has his own teeth. I mean, this is everything you'd want in a president."

(This world-leaders-education-for-babies joke would be used to great effect two years later in the film Baby Boom. In that movie, the babies get actual flashcards!)

But beyond such visual gags, by increasingly focusing on Alex and making him mostly likable, the show served to make Reagan more palatable, too. Alex liked Reagan; therefore we could, too.

Yet while this conflation of character and president was occurring, the show nevertheless had an "ambivalent relationship with the value system of the Reagan era," as  Bambi L. Haggins notes in her essay "There's No Place Like Home: The American Dream, African-American Identity, and the Situation Comedy." Haggins also argues that Family Ties exhibited "self-conscious parodying" of these values.

You can see some of that parody in this season four dialogue between Alex and Steven. Alex is watching CNN footage from a Reagan press conference:

Alex:  He was just talking about this new Star Wars defense system, Dad. It is great. We're going to build these, these space weapons that can shoot down Soviet
missiles. Now, if the Soviets build space weapons that can shoot down our missiles,
we're gonna build bigger space weapons to shoot down their space weapons. And
if they build bigger space weapons to shoot down our space weapons, we'll build
even bigger space weapons to shoot down their space weapons that shoot down
our space weapons.

Steven: Finally, something sensible is happening.

   

"Well, uh, either you got that bank job or Richard Nixon has re-entered politics."

Dialogue like this troubles the simple picture of the show delivering a sunny, good-looking White House proxy and makes it seem kind of incredible that Reagan called Family Ties his favorite TV show - did he actually watch it? Or was he just aware that it had an avowedly Republican character who was played by that actor who was in that cool time travel movie that also mentioned him?

It's also easy, re-watching this show, to forget that Nixon was still alive when it aired, that as much as Nixon the Character haunts and guides the lives of the show's characters as a figure from the past, a real man sat at home…probably not watching this show.

The logic of "the only way"

It was page 38 in The Grapes of Wrath before I snapped to attention. Here's what's happening right before this scene: the bank is telling Oklahoma tenant farmers that it's taking their land away, land they've lived and worked on sometimes for generations. The man hired by the bank drives up on a tractor and begins to plow. On his lunch break, the farmer recognizes him:

75 years later, I could feel the anger, desperation, and personal, divergent logic of both men's calculations: three dollars, fifteen or twenty families, five thousand acres. With the words "got to think of my own kids," I thought about how, as old as our country's sense of public duty is, the ideology of "my family first" is not brand new, either. And there are reasons for this that can go beyond the solipsism created by a consumer-focused society, as this passage reminded me: economics and fear continue to drive people to focus on the needs of their immediate families instead of the larger world or even their neighbors. And the face of the powerful institution is often still a worker trying to get by where their ability to do so is dependent on an inability to be moved to act by another person's math.

Where They Were Calling From

The well-received new novel Landline makes this seem like a good time to discuss the function of the phone on Family Ties. When I first started re-watching the show, the use of the phone to advance the plot jumped out at me; it rings in nearly every episode. But the one-sided-conversation as delivery system for exposition is hardly unique to old tech; cell phones accomplish the same thing now, even as they've allowed television and film to convey information in new ways, such as making text messages or social media visible.

What's different about the landline is what the shared status of the phone makes possible. People are waiting to make a call and threatening their little sisters if they hog the phone:

Or fighting over who should have answered the phone when it rang and rang earlier. (It's not clear to me if the Keatons have an answering machine). Then you get to reconcile when the phone rings again, this time fighting to see who can answer it first:

Which leads to make up kissing, courtesy of AT & T:

Who called? Who cares?

And of course it never seems to occur to anyone that the phone can be left unanswered - even if you're in the middle of, say, gluing a broken plate back together with two other people - which allows for physical comedy too:

And while we're on the subject of old tech, let me close with a little love for the newspaper. I've written before about my love for newsprint, so I'll just say that you can imagine my joy at images like this one, from the opening credits of season one:

The newspaper is also pretty ubiquitous on Family Ties, but it's more of a prop and less of a plot-advancer (with a few exceptions, like the episode where the calling hours for Aunt Trudy coincide with the family's yard sale because Alex forgot to pull the ad in time). 

I might write more at another time about other examples of great old tech - tape cassettes and rolls of film come to mind - but for now I'm going to take a break from that subject and from the show itself. I realized that not only do most of four seasons remain for me to watch, but also from the episode guides on Netflix it looks like I haven't even reached the halfway point for the series. So I'm going to gather more data and will probably write again when I'm done. In the meantime, I might write about The Grapes of Wrath, which I have finally started and which looks to be amazing, obviously a different kind of portrait of the U.S. from Family Ties but one that, from the 2014 vantage point, shares its compelling mix of the gone and enduring.  

The Clothes Make the Continuity

If you Google "Alex P. Keaton sweaters" - and I know you've, like, been dying to - you'll find articles and blog posts about how he epitomized preppy style, the APK monogram, and readers' identification with or replication of his wardrobe. 

I'm primarily interested in something else: sweaters as sign of continuity and income status. On some television shows, characters seem to never wear the same outfit twice and/or what they do wear is always expensive. On the one hand, this makes sense; if a production has money, why not spend it? Audiences like to look at nice things. But when wardrobes are enormous and enviable, clothes become a sign of affluence even if the characters aren't presented as wealthy, and although those clothes may be as inanimate and unspeaking as a large house with expensive fixtures, still they loudly proclaim, "These people have money!" There's something about the silence of all this adornment that can feel insidious; wealth, sometimes extreme wealth, is presented as being as natural as air. But of course it's not, and television has not always operated this way.   

On Family Ties, for example, not only do characters wear clothes that are normal-looking and wear them more than once, but also those clothes stick around for years. Here's just one example:

Don't you wish you owned this sweater? 

In real time that represents a sweater that was on set from November 1983 until at least March 1985, if not longer. (I've just started season four, so the joy that is this particular sweater could continue). In regular-people time, wearing a sweater for a year and a half is normal; on TV, it can seem radical.

Now this is not to say that Family Ties doesn't have some continuity or presentation-of-class issues. Near the end of season one, Elyse, who has been working as an architect from home, goes back to work at an office, but the episode before she's hired has Jennifer referencing mom being back at work. Huh? As great as the actor Earl Boen is, doesn't anyone else notice when he's both selling airline tickets in season one and showing up at the Keatons' when Alex turns the house into a hotel for a weekend in season three?

And yes, that is Jeff Cohen of Goonies fame in the hat.

There is also the question of whether the incomes of an architect and a PBS station owner could support three children and a new baby, even in 1985 Ohio. But the family doesn't go on lavish vacations or own fancy cars (despite Mallory's lobbying for a Maserati near the end of season three); the house is big, but the furniture is modest. They own one television.  

On the bigger-picture level, for all the lessons Alex learns about valuing his sister Mallory (as when he cuts short his college interview at Princeton to comfort her during a breakup) or caring about people instead of money (as when he volunteers at a hotline to fulfill a college humanities credit and ends up helping a suicidal man), he continually makes fun of Mallory and derides nonprofits. Some of that feels normal - a brother is going to tease a sister - and some of it feels like the writers have decided these characters will conform to certain types with nods to lessons learned but minimal actual evolution. 

Maybe as viewers in 2014, some of us have become accustomed to both continuity and growth. We want our fictional worlds thoughtfully and intricately constructed, consistent, and evolving, conducive to weekly visits and schedule-busting binge-watching. On that measure, Family Ties mostly fails. A detail dropped in a joke or a minor character met in season one is rarely mentioned again, let alone brought to developed life two seasons later; there is no Jesse Pinkman and the lovingly handmade box here.

But there are small, consistent rewards. Jennifer has a best friend, Chrissy, whom we never see but who is referenced throughout the show. The same treatment extends to the next door neighbors, the Obecks. Alex will always beat Steven at chess; Mallory will hate films with subtitles. Details like these help create the fabric of this world. And sometimes there is a wonderfully resurrected detail: in the opening scene of the pilot episode, Steven and Elyse show their kids slides of their anti-war protests from the '60s, but the kids collapse in sighs at the prospect of looking at Peace Corps footage, too. Two seasons later, after a long day, the kids are begging their tired parents to hang out to no avail. Then Alex says, "All right, all right. You win. Get your old Peace Corps films. We'll watch those." In this moment, a viewer could have jumped from episode 1 to 54 and laughed with recognition, firmly in the same comfortable old home. 

Tom and Judith and Geena and Daphne

Despite my previous posts' focus on serious political and social issues, Family Ties was very funny at times and, more to the point, concerned with never straying too far from comedy, from the attempt to be funny. What's fascinating to me is that, given just 20-odd minutes to tell a story, comedies like this persisted in trying to tackle difficult topics at all.

Take the story of Uncle Ned, played by probably the most famous guest actor on the series. We meet him in season one; it turns out he's on the run after embezzling 4.5 million dollars from the corporation where he was vice president. When he comes back to visit in season two, he has a drinking problem brought on by how his life has unraveled. He downs a bottle of vanilla extract and ends up hitting Alex. Not funny stuff.

Here's Uncle Ned calling AA. More on the character of the landline phone in a later post.

Yet even in these social issues with a capital-S episodes, there are lots of jokes, most of which land with at least some of the studio audience. But when Ned finally calls AA for help, and opens with, "Would you be interested in subscribing to the Columbus Express?" the studio audience doesn't laugh, and it's not supposed to. In that moment, the show performs the neat trick of holding a mirror up to some of its own comedic impulses.

Tom Hanks's character also has a purple problem, or rather, the whole episode does.
But then again, this aired in January 1984, just a few months before Purple Rain. 
Maybe purple was the zeitgeist. 

Other guest stars are enlisted for similarly serious parts, as when Judith Light plays the new production assistant who propositions Steven in season two.

Who's the boss? This happily married father of three.
Also, who knew PBS could be the site of such intrigue?  

Even Geena Davis's story arc as the beautiful-yet-inept housekeeper ends on a serious note when she quits the gig to focus on the personal problems she'd been running away from.

"Do you have any references?" Alex asks during the interview.
"No," she answers brightly. Hired!

The guest star whose role surprised me the most though was Daphne Zuniga, playing a classmate of Alex's. She's the smart girl who has had a crush on him from afar, and he asks her to the senior prom when the girl he really wants to take says no. But then that girl changes her mind, Alex has two dates to the prom who don't know about each other, etc., etc.

Glasses were just really big in 1984, OK?
I love you Daphne, but I'm really waiting for Tracy Pollan to show up.

What surprised me is that Alex chooses Rachel, Daphne's character, just because she's the kinder, smarter, and funnier of the two. I've been so conditioned to expect certain kinds of romantic narratives that I kept waiting for her to take off those glasses so he could recognize her beauty. Not only does Rachel keep her glasses on, never once taking them off, but also in a later episode she becomes valedictorian instead of Alex, and, after he overcomes a sexist and jealous reaction, their relationship survives. That's what we're to believe anyway, but we never see her again. Ah, the unpredictable life of a guest star.  

Our TV, Ourselves

In the season one Family Ties episode unfortunately titled "Oops," Mallory's friend Cindy finds out she's pregnant and struggles with telling her mother. First, they confide in Mallory's mother, Elyse.

"I'm so confused," Cindy says. "I don't know whether to have an abortion or put the baby up for adoption or keep it."

It was December 22, 1982, only one month away exactly from the tenth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, and the extent to which this decision had become an established fact in American lives seems reflected in the structure of Cindy's sentence; she lists abortion alongside adoption and becoming a mother as a possible choice. It's X or Y or Z, each possibility given equal weight.

We don't learn what Cindy chooses to do - the main point of the episode is about establishing open communication with her mother - but even that unresolved ending feels different from how this same subject matter would be handled on later television and film, where the point often feels like an avoided abortion  - whether that's avoided through miscarriage, as on Party of Five in the 1990s or adoption, as in Juno in 2007. The prevalence of these alternatives makes stories where a character actually has an abortion, as on Friday Night Lights or The Obvious Child, rarities and news. And not knowing the outcome of a pregnancy, as in the case of Cindy? Other than the 1996 film Citizen Ruth, I can't think of another example off the top of my head, although I'm sure there are more. Still, the dearth of such examples seems telling: in most mainstream TV and film, women's bodies need to be resolved.

"Did I really look like that when I was born?" Jennifer wants to know.

Before Cindy comes over to the Keaton house, 10 year-old Jennifer sits down on the couch with the copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves that she's taken from Mallory's room. Alex, the conservative teenager, objects to "a book like that being in this house," but Elyse sets him straight: "There's nothing wrong with this, Alex," she says. "It's just a health and sex manual for women."

This scene, and much of this episode, amazes me and makes me a little sad, too. I love that it's "just" a manual, just another day for this family, but it makes me sad that their ordinary day, 30 years later, feels more than a little extraordinary now.
 

Those Other Ties Beyond the Family

In re-watching Family Ties, one of the elements that has struck me the most is the political content. Some of it is played for laughs, as in a season two episode when Alex considers taking amphetamines to cram for exams and consults with his framed picture of Nixon.

"Would you do something you knew was wrong?" Alex asks the former president. Cue studio audience laughter. 

But other times the politics are more serious and the ideas behind them not as easily encapsulated in one image or joke, as in the season one episode where the parents, Steven and Elyse, are arrested at a Thanksgiving Day protest of nuclear weapons. All the other jailed protestors sign a piece of paper agreeing never to protest again and are promptly released, but not these two, even though it means they'll be apart from their family on a very family-oriented holiday. The First Amendment means just that much to them.

I was transfixed with this story line. I couldn't imagine a 2014 comedy being so civic-minded, though in fairness I've been far more devoted to dramas recently. Even comedies that center on the workings of government, like Veep, are primarily focused on the shallow and manipulative hijinks of the individuals wielding power; few characters are funny and have laudable, public-minded convictions.

And a show not about a workplace but an actual family, like Modern Family? I've stopped watching it, but from what I did see, I can't imagine any of those characters going to jail for justice. As others have noted, Modern Family is problematic for a number of reasons, one of which being that it presents affluence as normal. Another is that it views family ties as The Most Important Thing.  

In Stephanie Coontz's phenomenal The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap,  she busts the notion of a "return" to private life as the cure for societal problems. She writes, "the idea that private values and family affections form the heart of public life is not at all traditional. …John Adams argued that the foundation of a virtuous republic must be 'a positive Passion for the public good.'" (The academic in me is fighting the urge to give you a page number right now :) She closes that paragraph: "The passion to have a baby or spend more time with one's family was not high on the founders' list of public virtues." Zing!

Seriously, though, there are times when all of that is easy to forget, when a person can feel crazy or blasphemous for not wanting children herself or for valuing something in addition to her family. And so I was surprised to find you're-not-crazy backup in a 1982 TV episode with the word "family" in the show title.

The nukes episode ends with the kids and grandparents bringing Thanksgiving dinner to the jail.

The family that goes to jail together stays together.

One could argue that ending this way seeks to reassure viewers that the family is The Most Important Thing on the show after all. But I think it's significant that the parents are prepared to stand up for the public good with or without the others; public virtue comes first and spending the holiday with one's family, second.

Are there current TV comedy episodes that I'm forgetting/unaware of that similarly value democratic values in action? 

In Praise of Nerdy TV and Certain Canadians

What to do when you've just finished teaching a summer course and haven't yet regained the mental bandwidth to pick up The Grapes of Wrath, a book you've promised your friend that you'll finally try to read?  For me, the answer appears to be watch Family Ties on Netflix... and write extremely after-the-fact observations and cultural criticism! I'm inspired by my friend Moxie to begin what I think will be at least a few posts. She has also re-watched TV shows (and Randy Newman videos) and written astutely about them. (Spoiler alert: I am definitely planning a post on Alex P. Keaton sweaters)!

I watched Family Ties when I was a kid, on re-runs and, near the end when I was old enough, as it aired. So I already knew that 9 year-old me liked it, that alongside Peter Jennings, Michael J. Fox was an important Canadian in my early life. But I wasn't sure that I would like it again, that the me of 2014 would have enough in common with the me of 1989. I'm only about two-thirds of the way through season 3, which puts me a little less than halfway through its 7 season run and early in 1985, episode-airing-wise, so my thoughts are still evolving and my views could change as I keep watching. 

But at this early date, I am happy to report that there is a fair amount in Family Ties to sink one's teeth in to and a lot of enjoyment to be had in spending time in this fictional, 1980s Ohio. Chief among these pleasures is the sheer nerdiness of some of the references and plots. 

What to do when your dad is Thomas Jefferson and you find yourself a mere stable boy? Make sure he sits down and gets to writing. 

In one season 3 episode, for example, Alex P. Keaton (played by Michael J. Fox) falls asleep trying to write a paper about the Declaration of Independence for a college course. In a dream, he is transported back to those pivotal days in Philadelphia and has to convince an uninspired Thomas Jefferson (played by his father, Steven, the wonderful Michael Gross) to put pen to paper (preferably cool-looking, crinkly paper). Elsewhere I've read about how this episode seems to openly anticipate Back to the Future, which Fox was filming around the same time and which would be released in theaters later that same year, in July of 1985. But what interests me just as much is how it's a whole episode of a mainstream, live studio audience comedy that revolves around a piece of American history. Yes, it takes a ton of liberties with that history for the sake of making jokes - Jefferson probably never considered writing that "we hold these truths to be pretty obvious, even to a dope" - and in this way is an older, sober cousin to Drunk History. But it also has its 18 year-old character name-checking John Trumbull and his painting and pinning a copy of it and the Declaration of Independence to the kitchen wall for inspiration. 

The whole episode is devoted to the Declaration of Independence. How cool is that?

It's not afraid to be smart or to care about history, in other words, while at the same time being a network comedy. 

I'll write more about the show's sense of history and politics in a later post. I think I'll also write about cameos by famous and later-to-be famous actors, how abortion is represented, and, of course, the aforementioned sweaters. Hope you'll keep reading!

Harry Potter and the Audacious Author

Over (non-butter)beers the other night, a friend and I discussed the recent ending of the "Harry Potter" franchise and sundry related topics, including J.K. Rowling's 2007 outing of her Dumbledore character as gay. I remember that at the time I was outraged that an author would impose a vision of a character retroactively; if it wasn't explicit in the book, I railed to my roommates (designated innocent bystanders to my rants, 2002-2007), it by definition couldn't be declared true. A gay Dumbledore was a legitimate interpretation, based on the text, but nothing more.

Reading Edward Rothstein's appraisal of the situation made me feel instantly calmer; I wasn't alone (and he thought of perspectives I hadn't considered). For example:

The pure-bloods here are blinded by their pride, but Harry and his friends see something more profound, a threat that goes beyond self-interest and identity. This is why Dumbledore’s supposed gayness is ultimately as unimportant as Ron’s shabby clothes. These wounded outsiders recognize the nature of evil, and finally that is what matters.

Whatever you think of Rowling's statement, it does feel like a particularly noticeable piece of a larger picture. Now not only do authors add to their works by producing new books, but between those there are infinite opportunities (and, some would argue, necessities) for self-promotion and production: multi-media interviews, articles, columns, blog posts, and more. And sure it helps to be a Rowling if you want people to pay attention, but anyone can seek (and find) an audience, however small. And if your job (as mine is about to be) is to analyze a work, how much of this extra information do you incorporate - or leave aside? If your assignment is a book published in 2009 and you find a blog entry by that author from last week - is that relevant?

One of the nice things about a series ending is that you can look back on it, whole, and see patterns and themes and know it's complete. You can talk about it as an entity in a way you can't while it's still in progress. Even with a single work, editors can insert new or restore old material into it in later versions and those can both inform and exist separately from the earlier editions. (You see this in everything from E.T.'s 20th anniversary edition replacing police officer's guns with walkie-talkies to the 1995 edition of The Diary of a Young Girl restoring entries dealing with sexuality that Otto Frank had omitted from the original). But when an author says after publication, "My character is X," well, what should we call that? Pulling a Rowling?

Iowa Imposter

Today I wore my IOWA t-shirt, a gift from a friend who grew up there and knows without being told that the black and gold of my shirt are Hawkeyes' colors. As I neared the hub that is my local post office, an elderly gentleman walking past me said, "Go Iowa!"

"What?" I called back, not sure if I'd heard him correctly.

"I grew up in Nebraska," he explained, "right next to Iowa."

"Nice!" I said, because I like pleasant interactions with fellow pedestrians even when they turn into unsolicited educational moments, and turned back toward the post office.

This conversation was another example of quietly letting someone - usually a stranger, usually during what promises to be only a brief exchange - assume something about you that you know to be incorrect. I was born in North Dakota, grew up in Connecticut, went to college in Illinois, and have lived in Washington for almost 10 years; I've barely even visited Iowa. But I didn't yell this to the man in front of the post office; I let him believe that we were former state-neighbors.

Nannies and babysitters have a lot of these moments, and the challenge is in deciding when to tell that complimentary or chummy mom on the playground that this kid? Not mine. Sometimes it's clear-cut, as when a woman trailing behind me and a toddler-age charge announced, as we all entered the bathroom of a fancy restaurant, "These years go by so fast! Mine are teenagers now."

I smiled and said, "I'm the babysitter," and that was that. But other times it's not so clear what anyone is thinking, and it can feel awkward to halt the flow of a conversation to vocalize a distinction that might change everything - or, conversely, nothing - for the other person.

The best-worst example of this for me was on a playground two years ago. I was hovering near the little girl I nannied for, and a woman said, "I love her haircut."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Her mother did a great job."

"Her mother?" the woman asked, clearly confused. "You're not her mother?"

"No, I'm her nanny," I said, in a tone I hoped sounded cheerful.

"But you're so good with her!" the woman exclaimed.

Well. You can be good to a kid without being his or her parent. And strangers - and even family and friends - don't need to know everything about you. Go Hawkeyes!

If You Don't Like This Word...

I get together with friends every two weeks to talk about art: pieces we're working on, questions we're grappling with, etc. Last night, one of my friends told us that he's reading Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way but that he was initially uncertain if he would read it because the word "God" is used frequently, and he wasn't sure if he was comfortable with that. He decided to keep going after reading the introduction; in it, Cameron suggests that people uncomfortable with "God" substitute any other word that means creative spirit or force.

I heard similar instructions a few years ago when attending someone's exit interview from in-patient rehab. I asked the counselor essentially, "How are they supposed to go to AA if they don't believe in God?" I was told that it could stand for "Good Orderly Direction" and that AA is a spiritual, not religious, organization.

Sometimes pushing past or reconfiguring meanings in order to learn skills or receive larger messages is understandable. Sometimes re-framing the debate makes politics clearer (or at least more entrenched)! And I don't want to dismiss the power of groups reclaiming names that previously were only uttered as invective. Language is amazing, people! But when other than with "God" do we need such thorough contextualizing and explaining for a broader way of seeing, whether it's Cameron's creative force, Alice Walker's ecospirituality, or many Unitarian Universalist sermons? When else are we told, "Oh, just think of another word for that"?

December? That's Far Away!

It's the 29th of November, but December, with its intimations of holidays and school breaks, might still seem like a long way off. What happens to our brains when contemplating calendar changes? Why does December sound farther away than Tuesday?