Today is the last day of the B&N criterion collection sale. Here are my five recommendations if you still haven’t decided to get:
Risky Business, directed by Paul Brickman. Starring Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay. Spine Number 1227.
Risky Business is one of my favorite Tom Cruise movies. In it, Cruise plays a high school student who seems bored with his everyday Suburban life. He meets Lana, who is involved in some interesting ordeals.
Sid and Nancy is directed by Alex Cox and starring Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb. This movie is based on the rocky relationship between Sid Vicious and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.
Claudine was directed by John Berry and starring James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll. Claudine is a hard-working single mother with six kids in New York City and trying very hard to make life work. While trying to hold everything together, she meets a man in the least likely place.
(Pic1. “My little sister, Jaclyn, our Mom and Me.”)
“As a child in the 1980s, I loved growing up in Orange County. There was the sunshine and beaches, Disneyland, and my favorite Mall -The South Coast Plaza. Everything was new, the homes, schools, roller skating rinks, movie theaters, shopping centers, and the man-made lakes. It was where my Mom, a stylish, blond, valley girl, drove her daughters around in a burgundy Datsun 280zx blasting Madonna and Heart. When it was just the three of us, we were happy, and that’s how I liked it. Also, the 80’s just slayed. One cool 80’s thing my mom had was a glass brick. It had a hole at the top. She put transparent glass pebbles at the bottom and stuck pens inside. She displayed it on the kitchen counter next to our cordless landline phone.
At school, the cool things for kids to collect and display were pencils with toppers- a little toy or charm at the top of the pencil. Kids kept their pencil collections on top of their desks held inside a clear, plastic, rectangular container. Most of my classmates went to this stationary store called “LMNOP” to buy their pencils and containers. A talented woman with a steady hand customized your container by writing your name on it with paint pens and adding Sandylion or Mrs.Grossman stickers of your choice. I loved seeing my name written on my container adorned with a Palm Tree sticker. I loved my pencils. Each one was a personal, special treasure.
(Pic 2.“Some of my 80’s nostalgia collection surrounding an illustration of what our plastic pencil containers looked like. The font of the child’s name was written in a connecting dots font using two colors. The stickers were minimal to showcase the pencils inside. In writing this article, I discovered that these boxes still exist and are called “Amac plastic containers”. I will be ordering a few a.s.a.p.!”)
My favorite kinds of novelty pencils were by Russ. Russ pencils had a name or phrase engraved on them with a cute or interesting topper. My Mom would give me one on every occasion like. For Halloween, I got the pumpkin, ghost, and black cat. I had a purple “Good Luck Troll” and a Santa Claus Pencil. The “Ted D. Bear ” pencil had a brown, flocked bear wearing a red bowtie. He was exquisite. I also loved “Putt Putt Putt ”. It had a yellow, flocked car on top with plastic red wheels. My favorite pencil had an actual mini spinning pinwheel on top. My second favorite had a flexible pink hand on top. The fingers could bend to sign “Hang Loose ” and of course “Fuck You”. The Russ pencil designs were so clever, and I got so much joy staring at them because life had been hell. In 1988, my Mom, sister, and I had just moved to a hip apartment complex called Vista Del Lago. We had spent the year before living in a house with her long-term boyfriend, who I hated. In a word, he was “Putrid,” and that’s how I refer to him because if I actually said his name, it’s like what Stewie Griffin says “I would not stop throwing up!” For some reason, no matter what nasty, mean, or violent thing he did, my Mom would always take him back. Maybe she was attracted to him because he was the opposite of my Father, who was a Mensch and the perfect Dad. But even when I was 5, I knew Putird was no good and that we would never be safe or happy as long as he was in our lives.
Finally, when I was eleven, my Mom came to her senses and broke up with Putrid. He stayed in the house we had shared and the three of us ladies moved into Vista Del Lago. It was way better. One school night, my sister and I were excited because our favorite Aunt from L.A. was over to give us dinner and stay the night while our mom went on a date with her newest boyfriend. While my little sister watched TV and played, I had to convince myself to do my math homework. I always hated math, but I hated the feeling of showing up to school without my homework completed even more. I sat at the counter in one of the barstools and forced myself to get it done. When I finished, I placed the papers inside my Supershades folder with a graphic of a toucan wearing sunglasses in the corner. I zipped up the folder and my Math book inside of my acid-washed denim backpack, ready for the next day. Then I joined my sister and aunt to eat tortellini and watch TV until bedtime- feeling relieved and proud of myself.
In the morning, my Mother was back. I went downstairs to give her a hug. She had a stack of developed pictures to show us of where she had just been. It turns out her date had been a 24 hour trip to visit a 100-acre ranch in Texas. She smiled while she showed us pictures of the animals, goats, swans, and a llama, the two lakes, the wooden bridge, and an enormous white house which sat at the top of the property. Then she asked in her soft, calm voice, “Do you girls like this place?” My sister and I were like “Yeah, it looks nice.” “Well”, she continued, “that’s going to be your new home. And we’re going now. So go pack some things because a limousine is on its way to take us to the airport!” My sister and I were shocked and disturbed. We didn’t want to go to a ranch in Texas, even if it was in a limousine. And now? Why now? Our Mother’s behavior, the smile, the pictures were just a ploy to introduce her next bad idea revolving around a man. I felt betrayed. Our Mother had found a rich boyfriend who wasn’t Putrid. But rich or not, why did she think it was a good idea to impulsively rip me and my little sister away from everything we had known to be with him? I was angry, but I was a compliant child. I had learned that my opinion or feelings never mattered when it came to adults. They were going to do what they were going to do. My Mother would consider me ungrateful and ridiculous if I told her how I really felt. That this was wrong. That I had heroically forced myself to finish my math homework the night before, for what? What about turning in my homework? What about my school? What about my friends? What about my Dad, my Step-mom, and my baby brothers? What about our clean, fresh start at Vista Del Lago? On that random weekday morning in 1988, I left California without a word to my friends, school or Dad- with only a few belongings in a bag. My heart ached. And my precious pencil collection sat abandoned on my desk at school. When we made it to the ranch in Texas, we saw the land and the animals and picked out our bedrooms in the humongous house. Then our Mom and her boyfriend had us come into the office with a Marlin Hanging on the wall to call our Dad. They told us not to tell him where we were. Not just because it was against California Child Custody laws to take a child out of the state without permission but because this was all so wrong on so many levels, and they knew it. I spoke on the phone cautiously to my father, and I felt like a liar and an obedient child at the same time. But when my little sister got on the phone, she couldn’t help herself. She was brave and took the only chance she could to tell our Dad we had been taken away to Texas. She got on the phone and said, “Hi Daddy! We’re in Texas!” The events that followed after that phone call were filled with so much confusion, heartache, and trauma that my sister and I only need to refer to this time in our lives as “Texas.” In Texas, our Mom and her boyfriend constantly fought, partied, and left us for days on end with strange people who were not fit to look after children. And while I was there, I felt the child in me die. I couldn’t play pretend anymore. I didn’t remember how. I started having panic attacks on
the way to school, but I didn’t know what they were. I just knew I had to handle it. I started daydreaming. Maybe that was my new form of play, but it wasn’t for fun. It was for survival.
(Pic 3. “Me, age 11, dissociating on my Mom’s Texas boyfriend’s yacht in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico”.)
After a few months in Texas, we were taken back to our apartment in California, just as abruptly as we had left. It was scary to leave the small amount of stability I had known in Texas whether it was stable or not, but I was relieved to go home back to California. I returned to school the next day, to everyone’s surprise. My teacher had me come inside before the rest of the class to speak with me. She said “Lauren, unfortunately we didn’t know if you were coming back, so the class auctioned off all your pencils.” I just stared at her face processing the information. What was she saying? An auction? We never had an auction in class before. How did that even work? Like rabid scavengers they bid on my special pencils? I couldn’t find the words to express my feelings because I had never really done it. Inside my mind I was thinking very clearly, “Ok, so then I should be given my pencils back, right? Because I’m back. Give the kids back their money or whatever they used to bid on my stuff and return my pencils to me!” My teacher just gave me a dumb look like “Gosh yeah, they’re gone. So… sorry.” But they weren’t gone. They were at different desks in different pencil containers around the classroom. My heart was honestly broken. Those pencils were mine. They were one of the few things left that made me smile. Objects I loved had become my home, a focus. After all I had been through they represented the last of any happiness I had left inside me to feel. My teacher did not have the students give back my pencils and none of the students even offered them to me. There was just an awkward silence at my return. Things only got worse before they got better. After school I was disgusted and extremely disappointed to find my Mother and Putrid together in the car. I had thought we had gotten rid of him. They took me and my sister to Frozen Yogurt. As we sat there, I told my Mom about my pencils. “Oh well, honey. I’m sorry.” was all she said. And Putrid, who had no business being there anyway just stared at me, observing me with his smarmy self-satisfied smile. He never smiled out of joy or kindness, always when someone was feeling badly. I felt so alone. The injustice of everything was beyond my scope of rationalizing. I imagined an invisible grown up there in the yogurt shop with me. She knew this was totally fucked. She knew I was right about everything and everyone. That all of these adults who never had my best interests at heart were completely messed up. I wasn’t the ridiculous one. My feelings about wanting my pencils back were valid. Feeling livid and defeated at Putrid being back in our lives was valid. Feeling traumatized about having to leave my Daddy to go to Texas was valid. Feeling ostracized at school because I was now “the girl who disappeared and returned mysteriously” was valid. I was amazing and I didn’t deserve any of this. Over the next year, our Mother bounced back and forth between Putrid and her Texas boyfriend, dragging me and my little sister along. Every departure was abrupt, fueled by my Mother’s passionate love or anger towards her partner. She took us back and forth to Texas twice before she finally got rid of her Texas boyfriend. After that we moved to Los Angeles for my Middle School years. Then one night in L.A. he came back- Putrid. Our Mom told us she was taking us back to live with him in the same house we had escaped years before. I felt like I was slipping down a slide into a sea of lava. But this time, I couldn’t hold my emotions or words back. I was 13, but I screamed and sobbed like a 3-year-old. I begged, and pleaded. As I sat in my chair, my legs shook and bounced up and down, tears and mucus dripped down my face, and I did not care. I didn’t care that Putrid was observing me and smiling sickly. I didn’t care if I was going to be called ridiculous or if I was disobedient. I could not live with him again! And like all the times before and what I had already known was that crying, screaming, and begging did not change things. Grown-ups were going to do what they were going to do.
Finally, one day, I became a grown-up too. A grown-up who is so effing rad! My Mother and I have since made peace, and she’s grown a lot. She left Putrid years ago. I’m so grateful for the relationship we have. I’m also grateful for the grown-up I turned out to be. I got a Film degree from Calarts and I love to make movies with my Best Friend. But my day job, my career is being a Nanny. I get to be the person I always wished was there for me, like the invisible person I imagined supporting me in the yogurt shop when I was eleven.
(Pic 4. “Me as a rad, grown-up who understands kids. I am an Auntie or have been a Nanny to all of these children!”)
Last year, I was looking at vintage pencils on eBay. Surprisingly, I found my old favorites. Ted D. Bear, The Pinwheel, My Good Luck Troll, Putt Putt Putt and the rest. I hesitated about spending money on pencils, but then I spoke to my sister. She said, “Lauren, if it’s going to heal a part of you that you lost, Treat Yo’self!”
My sister gave me permission to buy my pencils back. So I did. When I finally had them all collected, I put them in a glass brick with transparent glass beads. My heart swelled. Unlike other nostalgia I’ve collected that simply made me happy to look at, these 1980’s Vintage Russ Pencils represented justice. Justice I never got. That I now have given to myself.”
This week’s post is by my friend @bigfunbeth, who is the co-owner of one of my favorite stores: @GreenwichLetterpress
“My So-Called Life, 30 Years”
“My So-Called Life debuted on April 25, 1994. It was the summer before I started high school and I was fourteen years old.
On that Thursday night in 1994, a small group of my friends convened at Jessica’s house. We all crammed onto her couch to watch the pilot debut. “An honest look at growing up in the 90’s said the ad that ran in TV Guide. Wait, we were growing up in the 90’s and who were all of these people that kind of look like people who could know? Plus, the show already had its own scandal- the main girl wants to stab her mother in the first episode, we heard? “Wait, is she really going to say that?”
After the pilot ended I remember immediately thinking, “I don’t know if I’m the same person I was an hour ago.” I looked around me. None of my other friends had liked the show very much.This felt like something that had separated me from them irreparably. We never got together to watch it again, and my hair was dyed orange by the end of 8th grade. I was Angela Chase, and at the time, it felt like I was the only one.
For the next handful of months, I was obsessed, and then, as suddenly as it had exploded into my life. It was over. There were rumors. Poor ratings. The lead actress wanted to pursue movies instead. I remember asking my mother about it like she wrote for Premiere magazine or something and had the inside scoop. There was no social media to turn to, there was no 24 hour news cycle. What had just happened to the thing that felt like my actual life just spread across nineteen episodes of TV? There was an online petition to bring it back, which at the time was groundbreaking. Then, just nothing…until MTV.
When MTV got the right to syndicate the show, I got to see my old friends again. They would cut the promos in fun and clever ways. There were all-day marathons, and one was hosted by Claire Danes and Jared Leto. I can remember the very 90’s dELIA’s looking shirt Claire wore. Her hair, OMG, it’s kind of strawberry blond now and shorter, and OMG, Jared’s hair is short now, too. I was so thirsty for content. I was starved for it, or whatever.
When the “Self-Esteem” episode come on it was like, everyone please stop talking and leave the room. He’s about to grab her hand in the hallway. For me, this was the epitome of love on screen, and I yearned for that love to happen to me in real life. As did every single person I have discussed that scene within the past thirty years. In fact, we all screwed up countless relationships holding out for that exact moment.
MTV gave the show a new audience and anyone who had missed out the first time had a chance to watch it. I remember meeting new kids in high school who now loved it and watching repeats with my sophomore-year boyfriend. There was a community growing around this show and it was like, cool. It was actually just cool. People were connecting with something that felt honest, inspired, and real. Only if it now only existed in reruns.
I recently showed the series to my husband for the first time, who was in his 20s, when it premiered. He was so taken with how dark the show was. Not the mood, he said, but the literal lack of actual light, which he thinks impacted how it was received for the first time around. I’m like, yeah, babe, that is the light that you bask in as a teenage girl filled with angst, lust, emotion, and uncertainty.
Since I own a shop, I have to comment on the merch. MSCL had virtually nothing to offer its obsessed fans. There was an early VHS set and soundtracks on cassette and CD. My sister and I of course had the soundtrack on both mediums and were horrified to discover that “Late At Night” by Buffalo Tom was missing. Nooooo. In 2002, there was a DVD set (no bonus content) and then a deluxe version that came in a lunchbox. By 2007 there was yet another DVD set, but this time there were extras. Finally, something else we could grab onto. Creator Winnie Holzman and Claire Danes sat down together and discussed what might have happened in season two. When I first watched this conversation, I felt like crying and then passing out. It was 1995 all over again. A love triangle between Angela, Jordon, and Brian!? Sharon pregnant?!? Graham leaves Patty?!? The agony was unbearable. It honestly still is.
All of these years later, despite just that single season of TV and lack of physical ephemera, this show doesn’t just quietly linger on (cue the Cranberries) – it has a foot firmly planted in the hearts of everyone who fell in love with it thirty years ago. In fact, it’s a barometer. I use for when I meet new people. The second someone can have the MSCL conversation, I think, “This is my person, and I am their person.” Countless times I’ve acknowledged with friends and fans about how this show made us realize we were transitioning into adulthood. How, with every rewatch, you start to connect more with Patty and Grahan and drift a little farther away from lockers and boiler rooms. When I was a teenager, I thought it was gross how much sex her parents had on the show, and now I think it’s hysterical. What 40 years with kids and careers has the energy for that much sex? Plus, now, I am four years older than Patty Chase was on the show, Hold on, I’m calling my therapist…
“Patty, we’re forty!”- Camille Cherski
As for someone who lives and breathes nostalgia and often wonders if it’s a mistake, I never feel like rewatching MSCL is a waste of my time. The things that made me laugh or cry all those years ago still do, and I feel like I learn something new about human nature every time I revisit. There is so much that has already been said about this show and, what its place was in the 90’s and how it might resonate to young people today. This is not that. This is just my little ode to a time and place that was for me, My absolute So Called Life.
Stray Thoughts
Was the Chase’s cat name Lady Di?
Tino is the JAWS of the 90’s, much more powerful to never see him
Shit ok, Brian IS cute!
It’s insane that Graham tells Neal about his affair in the kitchen while Patty is within earshot.
Andy Cherski is probably a babe.
I love that Graham is shocked Patty can make curtains and she’s shocked he can hang wallpaper.
“Brain Krahow?” “I like Buffalo Tom, I do!” “Stephan Dieter guy. Still funny.
I want to be friends with Vic Racine and Mr. Katimski and share coffee with them in the teacher’s break room. I also desperately want to be invited into a teacher’s break room, anywhere.
Weekend, Life of Brian, The Substitute and Self Esteem are my favorite episodes.
If you can find a friend to tell off Jordan like Rayanne does, you’ve arrived.
With the new spring season, I am always interested in what books come with it. Here are five books I am looking forward to reading this spring season:
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal. Professor Kathleen DuVal teaches early American and American Indian history at North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is her second book, and this new book discusses how Indigenous Americans made multiple cities way before North America was founded.
Bugsey and Other Stories by Rafael Frumkin. This collection of five stories brings funny and creative tales that break away from your regular reading material.
The Swans of Harlem by Katen Valby concerns five ballerinas from the Dance Theatre of Harlem during the Civil Rights movement. This absorbing book finally tells the stories of endurance, dance, and friendship.
Husbands by Holly Gramazio. Lauren goes to her house one night and sees a lovely, fully decorated home. She is greeted by her fantastic husband. The only problem is that she is not married!
Joyce Carol Vincent was born on October 19, 1965, in the London part of Hammersmith. Her parents were from Grenada and moved to London shortly before Joyce’s birth. Joyce’s mother died when Joyce was only eleven years old. And her four older sisters took it upon themselves to care for Joyce while she was growing up. Joyce did not have the best relationship with her father because he was unemotional and distant from her.
She went to school at Melcombe Primary School. And Fulham Gilliatt School for Girls, but she dropped out by the time she was sixteen years old without graduating. She was well-liked and had a lot of well-known friends in the music business.
In 1985, she worked as a secretary at OCL in London and later at Ernst and Young. She spent four years in their treasury department. She worked there until 2001 when she quit for reasons that were not known. Throughout that period, she spent some time at a domestic abuse shelter in Haringey while working as a cleaner in a budget hotel.
It was during this time. She stopped talking to her family even though there was no fighting or any disputes between her and her sisters. She just simply decided to stop talking to them. Her family was aware of the relationship that Joyce was in had a history of domestic violence. There was some theorizing that perhaps Joyce had shame that she was a victim of domestic violence or that she did not want the person who abused her out where she lived.
In February 2003, Joyce moved to a bedsit flat above the Wood Green Shopping Center. In November of the same year, she noticed that she was vomiting blood and went to the North Middlesex Hospital for a couple of days and was diagnosed with a peptic ulcer.
Joyce was at her apartment when she died. Some speculate that she passed away in December 2003 due to having asthma and a peptic ulcer. Some theorized that she had an asthma attack or had some prolonged issues surrounding her peptic ulcer that led to her death. However, there was no determined definition of how she passed away.
The weirdest thing about this was that Joyce’s body was not found until three years after her death. Her surrounding neighbors thought that her apartment had no one in there. They also believed that the odor of decomposing was the smell of trash because the trash cans were so close to their residence on the bottom floor. In addition, no one ever questioned the noise of the television being on all the time, and it was just a noisy neighborhood. The neighbors never assumed that they had a deceased neighbor in the bedsit for three years.
Regarding her rent and utilities being paid, she had set up an automatic payment from her bank account for the utilities. And half of her rent was produced by the Metropolitan Housing Trust for about a year. It was not until two years after that it was noticed. The back rent of 2,400 pounds was when the officials in charge of housing went to Joyce’s apartment to repossess the property.
When they entered the property in January 2006, they were shocked to find Joyce deceased. They located her in the living area on the couch while the tv was on. The pathologist at the scene noticed that the refrigerator had expired food as far back as 2003. Joyce was found on her back with a shopping bag next to her and Christmas presents that looked like she had wrapped them but had no labels for who they were. Joyce’s body was severely decomposed. And could no longer have a post-mortem conducted. She was only IDed by her dental records and a photo of her.
It was also speculated that she had a boyfriend at the time of her death, but no one was able to locate or find him. The police concluded that Joyce died of natural causes, and no foul play caused her death. Her sisters were notified of Joyce’s passing and all the details surrounding it. They, in return, told the police that they had been trying to contact her for a while and had even hired a private detective to locate her. However, they had no idea what happened to her and decided Joyce had broken all their connections with them and did not want to be bothered by them.
A documentary about Joyce called Dreams of a Life contains interviews with people who knew her and some of her friends. I was able to rent it and watch it for a better understanding of Joyce Vincent’s life and tragic ending. The trailer is below:
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