Thirty years ago, Claire Danes was 14 years old. She starred in a short-lived TV show, even before she got famous for Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio (when she was 16).
I had a new baby and two older children thirty years ago. I used to teach high school so I liked watching a bunch of high-school kids and their goings on. The show was cancelled after one season.
Much later, I watched Claire Danes in Homeland. By then I was divorced with one kid in college, one working and one in high school. Claire had the same expressive eyes and the same red hair.
A week or so ago, I read an article that mentioned My So -called LIfe as one of the best ever shows on TV. I Googled how to watch it, and Hulu came up. But I had the wrong kind of Hulu account. Disney+ would let me watch Hulu premium shows for an extra two dollars a month.
I signed up for the Disney+/Hulu package. I’m mostly done with the twenty episodes. It has been a time capsule to watch how we lived in 1994, with phones hooked to the kitchen wall, kids using huge camcorders to videotape anything, and all those baggy pants. Claire is the central character, and we see her home and school life, and her huge crush on a guy with a nice chin. Who is he? I had to Google it, but I could’ve paid attention to the opening credits to discover it is Jared Leto.
The other characters had unfamiliar names except Bess Armstrong, who plays Claire’s mom. The husband is adorable but not familiar. The show is progressive for its time. There’s a gay English teacher, and Claire’s good friend Rickie is gay. Of course, they never say they are gay, but it’s implied. It would be three years before Ellen DeGeneres would say on national TV that she was gay (correction: in episode 19 which I watched after I wrote this, Rickie Vasquez tells Delia that he is gay after she asks hi if he is).
The nineties were good for breakthroughs. Thelma and Louise in 1991 was a breakthrough buddy movie starring two women, a rape scene and Brad Pitt’s film debut as a hitchhiking cowboy. Millennials know about Thelma and Louise, even if they’ve never seen the movie.
The beauty of bingeing/streaming shows in the summer is because network TV is a desert of reality TV, game shows, bachelor shows, and other boring stuff. When I go to the beach house, I don’t have any streaming unless I hook up my laptop to the TV set. I’m usually so tired by the evening that it’s too much to go to all that trouble, and I end up watching Animals with Cameras on PBS instead.
Yesterday at the beach house, I decided to get the firewood off my front porch. I’m buying into the five feet of space around the house foundation as our best defense in the event of an urban fire. We’ve seen two urban fires in the past seven years. The entire town of Paradise burned down in one day. It’s up in the pines, and a PG&E power line sparked on a windy day in 2018. The Santa Rosa Coffey Park neighborhood fire was on a windy night in 2017. PG&E has passed on the cost of its liability to the customers, us. It sucks, and the state of California will have a law on the books soon about the five-foot rule.
Keeping firewood on the porch is a dumb thing. I filled up three yard-waste cans with firewood yesterday, one too heavy to move. I kept the best wood in a tarp away from the house. I swept the pine needles and sent two Black Widow spiders packing.
Then I watched network TV and fell into bed.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 