I'm totally dressed like a biker chick today.

A few months ago I bought a pair of motorcycle boots. I didn't need them, and I really couldn't afford them, but I bought them anyway. See, the building I work in is across the street from a mall, and for one reason or another I end up walking through the mall at least once a week. Most of the time I'm literally going through the mall to get to someplace on the other side--bank, grocery store, what have you--and I avoid actually going into any stores. The one exception is Nordstrom, because as it happens, the mall entrance that is closest to my building leads directly into it. More specifically, it leads directly into the shoe department. This is dangerous.

I am by no means a shoe freak, especially compared to...well, the majority of women, if you believe the movies. On a shoe-craziness scale of one to ten, I'm a two at best. Still, I am not wholly immune to their charms, and walking through Nordstrom's shoe department on a regular basis means I am frequently exposed to the siren call of footwear. In fact, right now I can picture the exact location on the sales floor of a pair of silver-sequined Chuck Taylors, and can even hear them faintly calling: "Jenny...buy us...buuuuuyyyyyy uuuuuussssss...."

Ahem. So yeah, I kept passing by these motorcycle boots--the real deal, hand-crafted, built to last--for weeks on end, and I'd always wanted a pair, and I finally broke down. I don't regret it, even though I'm still having to cut back on discretionary spending to defray the expense. They're fucking awesome.

I'm wearing them today specifically because I have a hair appointment later and I want to show them off to my stylist. I'm also wearing jeans--my office is very casual--which are being held up by the only belt I currently own, a black one encrusted with silver studs. I have a nice black top on, so I still look professional, especially since I sit at a desk and most people only see the top half of me. Except, it's really cold in the office today, so I put a hoodie on over my top. It's a Harley-Davidson hoodie. It's black and says "H-D Riders" across the chest in bright orange letters. It also says "Live to Ride" down the right sleeve. I just took a walk to the mail room, and as I was waiting for the elevator I suddenly became conscious of the fact that, with the boots, the jeans, the belt, and the hoodie, I totally look like a biker chick right now.

Oh, the hoodie also has lettering on the back: "Chick's Harley-Davidson, Albuquerque, New Mexico". I got it when I took riding lessons there. They didn't go so well.

It all started with Justine Shapiro. Do you guys ever watch Globe Trekker? It's a travel show on PBS. It was inspired by the Lonely Planet series of guidebooks, so it's hipper than the average travel show, and the hosts try to dig beneath the touristy surface of the places they visit to get at the real culture. Justine is one of the hosts. She's also an actor and an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker. She's smart, funny, very cute, a bit of a snob, and I'm totally in love with her.

One of the shows she hosted covered the Southwestern US. She seemed less than thrilled about that particular assignment, and was hilariously bitchy about it at first. Eventually she came around though--it's so beautiful there, how could you not? At one point she rented a motorcycle to drive between Santa Fe and Taos, which I found both really sexy and kind of inspiring. I'd never felt the desire to ride a motorcycle before, but watching Justine do it I suddenly did. I started thinking about how cool it would be to ride a bike through the desert, and the more I thought about it the more I started to really like the idea.

So I looked around for a place where I could learn to ride, and found Chick's, the only local dealer that offered courses approved by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation. Their Basic Rider course is a three-day affair: four hours of classroom training on a Friday evening followed by sixteen hours on a bike over Saturday and Sunday. I signed up, and a few weeks later, ridiculously early on a Saturday morning, I found myself in a huge empty parking lot, astride a motorcycle for the first time in my life (excepting the couple of times I'd ridden behind someone else, which doesn't really count). The bike they use for the course is the Buell Blast, a small(ish), relatively lightweight American-made cycle.

Sort of goofy-looking, but you've gotta start somewhere.

At first everything was great, as we learned to start and stop the bike, put it into gear, and drive slowly in a straight line. Things got more complicated as we worked on turning, using the complex and not-at-all intuitive method called countersteering. Nonetheless, I got a basic feel for it, and started to feel pretty good about myself and my fast-growing skills. Unfortunately, to that point we'd been doing everything in first gear, and the next part of the course was shifting. This was my downfall.

My dad once tried to teach me to drive a manual transmission automobile, an experience that proved highly frustrating for both of us. My problem was letting the clutch out too quickly, causing the car to lurch and stall. I ended up having the same difficulty with the motorcycle. I started to get really stressed as the other women got the hang of it (I forgot to mention that this particular class was women-only) and went flying around the lot, while I stalled my bike over and over. Eventually I started having trouble even getting it into first, and at one point I ended up falling over with the bike on top of me. Remember when I described the Blast as "relatively lightweight"? Well, when it falls on top of you, you really understand what they mean by "relatively". The instructor had to help extricate me, and I had a couple of lovely bruises the next day.

As the class was winding down for the day, we were called upon to put all of the skills we'd learned so far to use. When I stalled the bike for about the forty-kajillionth time, the stress finally became too much and I started crying. Man, I do not like crying in public, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is because I am an ugly crier. My nose turns bright red, my face contorts spastically...it's gross. It had to be quite a picture, a grown woman sitting on a motorcycle sobbing hysterically. I was too embarrassed and upset to go back the next day, and so I never finished the course and never got the motorcycle endorsement on my license.

Why am I talking about this now? I guess 'cause of the boots. But also because Portland Community College offers rider courses, and I'm thinking about trying it again this spring. I get a little stressed just thinking about it, but I still want to ride a bike through the desert one day.

The Unappreciated Actor Files #2: Busy Philipps

So I had a bit of a health scare recently. I went to the gynecologist for my annual exam, and he found a lump in my breast. I’ll cut to the chase here and tell you that it turned out to be a benign tumor called a fibroadenoma, but of course I had to go through a bunch of crap before getting that diagnosis. First the gyno sent me for a mammogram, and based on the results of that, the radiologist sent me for an ultrasound. Based on the results of that, they sent me to a surgeon for a consult on a biopsy. I ended up having what’s called a vacuum needle biopsy, an outpatient procedure during which they stick a large needle into the breast and literally vacuum out several samples from the lump for testing. This all happened over the course of several weeks, during which, of course, the possibility of cancer was hanging over my head, and it all proved somewhat taxing both physically and emotionally. The biopsy in particular kind of sucked; although I’ve definitely endured worse things, having a giant needle shoved into your boob--and I do mean shoved, as apparently I have very dense breast tissue, and the doctor had to apply considerable force to get the needle where it needed to go--is no fun at all. It’s been about a month and a half since I had it done, and it was only last week that the bruises finally disappeared, although I still have a lovely scar to show for it. I held off on telling anybody about all this while it was going on, because I had a strong feeling it would turn out to be something benign, and why make people worry unnecessarily? And now that it’s over and doesn’t really seem blogworthy on its own, I’m tucking it into this seemingly unrelated entry. Because it does lead into the subject at hand.

Having endured this minor ordeal, I figured I deserved a reward, and I decided to buy myself something from my Amazon wish list. I ended up getting the box set of Freaks and Geeks DVDs. Obviously I cannot tell you that F&G is my favorite show of all time (see previous entry), but I can tell you it’s in the Top Five. Probably also in the Top Five would be the only other shows I own on DVD, The Honeymooners and My So-Called Life. One notable thing these shows have in common is that they all ran for only one season, which means I can own the complete series without spending a small fortune. This satisfies both my obsessive-compulsive side and my miserly side. F&G actually lasted only 18 episodes, while MSCL managed 19, but of course they share more than just the ignominy of early cancellation: both were brilliantly conceived and written shows set in high school and featuring memorable, richly-developed characters. MSCL was more introspective and dramatic in tone, while F&G was essentially a comedy, but both explored the complex landscape of late adolescence, perhaps the fulcrum upon which our emotional lives pivot, with wit, heart, and unflinching honesty. Which one outranks the other on my list probably depends on which day you ask me.

I can tell you that while I solidly identified with Angela Chase’s navel-gazing and existential angsting on MSCL, it was F&G’s Lindsay Weir whose life more closely paralleled mine. I mean, just for starters, she was a high school junior in 1980; I was a sophomore that year. She was the “golden girl” who got straight As and always did what was expected of her, until she began to wonder if there was a more vital existence outside the prescribed boundaries and looked to hanging with the “freaks” (or burnouts, as they were called at my school, though the difference was in nomenclature only) as a way to venture beyond them, and ultimately to discover what she wanted from her life rather than what others did. That’s my adolescence in a nutshell right there.

So anyway, I bought the DVDs, and finally busted them out and started watching over the long Thanksgiving weekend. I hadn’t seen the show since it went off the air nearly a decade ago, but I’m happy to say it’s aged very well. (I almost wrote “like a fine wine” there, but that is one dusty-ass cliché. What else ages well?) I’m only four episodes in (I’m concurrently viewing the fourth season of The Wire as well as the British sitcom Spaced, and I tend not to watch more than two episodes of any one before rotating in another), and I may have more to say about the show as a whole when I’ve rewatched the entire series, but one thing that’s become immediately apparent is what a fucking amazing performance Busy Philipps gave as Kim Kelly.

First off, Kim may be my favorite character on F&G. For those of you completely unfamiliar with the show--and if you are, then get familiar! Did I not mention it’s on DVD?--I don’t know that I can do her justice. Some would likely call her “white trash”, most would likely call her a bitch, but if you called her either to her face she’d just as likely tear your head off and throw it over a fence. Loud, crass, ill of temper and sharp of tongue, volatile occasionally to the point of becoming unhinged, Kim Kelly is tough as hell and frequently, unquestionably mean, yet strangely likeable through it all. The show offers glimpses into her home life--the somewhat stereotypical neglectful mom, jerkwad stepfather, and do-nothing brother, the scent of stale cigarettes, liquor, and all manner of abuse hanging heavily in the air--no doubt as a way of explaining her demeanor and earning her sympathy from the viewer, but it isn’t really necessary. Everything we need to find her sympathetic is in the way her character is written and the way she’s played--especially the way she’s played.

All of the actors on F&G did fine work. Standouts for me would be Martin Starr as übergeek Bill Haverchuck and Jason Segel as goofy, rheum-eyed Neil Peart-wannabe Nick Andopolis. But Busy Philipps embodies Kim Kelly so thoroughly that when she’s onscreen I sometimes become conscious that her co-stars are acting. I find this to be particularly so in her scenes with Linda Cardellini. I’m not saying that Cardellini is a bad actor, and this contrast is never so great that it takes me out of the show, but obviously, since I’ve noted it, it’s notable. Maybe it’s the fact that I knew girls like Kim growing up--that I was afraid of them, that I was bewildered by them, that, like Lindsay, I at first disdained but eventually befriended and came to understand some of them, that makes the character resonate so strongly with me. But it’s exactly that familiarity that would make any false notes in Busy’s performance stand out, and there aren’t any. She is totally, scarily real.

I have to admit that I haven’t really seen her in much else. Post-F&G, she was on Dawson’s Creek for a couple of years. Never watched that show. She was on a UPN sitcom called Love, Inc., but it was a sitcom on UPN. No. She was on ER for a while, but do you know that even though ER actually began in the late ’50s, I have never seen a single episode? It’s true! Her filmography is limited, but would make a good start to a list of Top Five Movies I’d Have To Be Clockwork-Oranged Into Watching, including White Chicks and Made of Honor. Recently she had a small part on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which she filmed while apparently about 14 months pregnant, but it was not exactly a juicy role. (She gave birth in August to a girl weighing nine pounds, seven ounces, which…yeah, that’s a big baby.) The thing is, she’s not quite pretty or petite enough to be a leading lady in Hollywood, so she’ll probably be forever relegated to smaller parts and crappy movies. It’s a shame, because I’d love to see her in something really good again.

Still, we’ll always have Kim Kelly. Let’s take a look at a scene from the Freaks and Geeks episode titled “Kim Kelly Is My Friend”, the one in which we meet Kim’s family. This is the end of the episode, when Kim’s boyfriend Daniel comes to find her at the Weirs’ home, after Kim spotted him being a little overly friendly with Karen Scarfoli. Nice work from James Franco here as well.

The Unappreciated Actor Files #1: Corinne Bohrer

Sometimes an actor who is just starting out in his or her career will, for one reason or another, make a big impression on me. Sometimes they go on to great things; sometimes they don't. But even if--maybe especially if?--their careers end up describing a shallower trajectory, I always retain an interest in them, noting whenever they show up in a movie or TV show and wondering why the Fates awarded them their particular destiny.

I first noticed Corinne Bohrer when she co-starred on the 1984-85 sitcom E/R. If you've heard of the show, chances are it's because you read an article about George Clooney, noting the odd coincidence that he starred in the sitcom E/R years before hitting the big time on the drama ER. E/R ran for just one season, but I seem to recall it was a fairly decent show. (It doesn't appear to be online anywhere, so I can't really be sure, and about the only specific things I remember are 1) Lou Rawls sang the theme song, and 2) the obligatory catchphrase was spoken by the intake nurse, who, when people got too close to her desk, would yell at them to "Stay back of the white line!"). Certainly the show had a strong cast; the lead roles were played by Elliott Gould and Mary McDonnell, and Jason Alexander was a member of the supporting ensemble along with Clooney.

But it was Bohrer, playing a pediatric nurse with a thing for Gould, who caught my fancy, with her big sunny smile and goofy charm. I thought she was adorable, and she became the main reason I tuned in to the show each week. When it was canceled, I thought for sure that goofy charm and her considerable screen presence would lead to her snagging a major role in another show.

Sure enough, she turned up a few years later as the star of a sitcom called Free Spirit. If you've heard of that show, chances are it's because you're a fan of Alyson Hannigan and you know that it was her first regular TV job. Hannigan played the middle child of a Saget-esque widower dad (seriously, check out the clip below--dude is totally Saget Lite) who hires Bohrer to look after his brood. Unbeknownst to him, she's a witch! But you know, the friendly, kooky kind. Throw in a hunky older brother and a precocious, bemulleted younger one, and you've got yourself the makings of a TV classic, right? Alas, Free Spirit could not even be called "fairly decent". It was dire, in that particularly '80s way. Mix together every sad, soul-killing sitcom cliché you can think of, throw in an extra handful of hideous hairdos and a retina-scorching fluorescent color scheme, and you've pretty much got the gist of it. Even the combined charm of Bohrer and Hannigan couldn't elevate it, and it was canceled midway through its first season.

There's no DVD set and there probably never will be, which actually bums me a little bit. I'd kind of like to revisit the show and see how it compares with the likes of I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched, as all three series center on magical women, their relationships with non-magical men, and the difficulties that arise as the women attempt to suppress their powers and negotiate life in the "straight", patriarchal world. From a feminist perspective, there's clearly a lot of rich ground to be tilled there. But anyway, that's another post. For now, let's take a look at a clip from the Halloween episode of Free Spirit. This is actually the second act, which I'm showing you because it also includes an appearance by erstwhile child actor and current Rilo Kiley frontwoman and critics' darling Jenny Lewis. (By the way, Jenny: nice job having the same bangs for 20 years.) I thought about explaining the set-up of the episode, but if you've ever watched a sitcom, I think you'll figure it out.



My, Corinne was certainly rocking those tails, was she not? *Ahem* Well, clearly Free Spirit was not the big break it might have been for her, and since then her career has been a string of guest spots, failed pilots, and commercials. In fact, by my estimate she currently appears in approximately 75% of all commercials on the air. There's nothing wrong with that, of course--she continues to make a living in her chosen profession, which is more than most of us can say. But every time she's onscreen, I can't help seeing the wasted potential. E/R demonstrated her comedic skills, and recurring roles as the mother of a terminally ill boy on Joan of Arcadia and as Veronica's alcoholic, absentee mom on Veronica Mars showed she could be equally memorable in dramatic parts. I'll continue to take notice whenever she appears on my TV screen--and I'll continue hoping some producer or casting director will finally give her a role that's worthy of her.

The Awesome List: A Top Five

Here is a list of the Top Five Cultural Artifacts I Currently Think Are Awesome. Rather than listing them numerically, I'll be choosing one winner in each of five categories.

TV Show: Mad Men.
Are you watching? If you're not, then stop. Stop not watching right now! With Battlestar Galactica on hiatus, MM is the best-written show on television. The casual misogyny and racism can be off-putting at first, but...well, a quote from Chandler Bing fits here: "OK, but you have to push past that, because it's about to get sooooo good." Seriously, we all know that in the early 1960s it was a white man's world, and MM wants nothing so much as to immerse you in that world, to envelop you in a gin-soaked haze of Lucky Strike smoke and Brylcreem fumes. And as I've watched, I've realized that the struggle of the female characters--strong, intelligent, ambitious women who today would be CEOs and Senators instead of secretaries and trophy wives--to carve a place for themselves in that world is, for me, the most engaging aspect of the show. Mad Men's backdrop is fascinating and its characters are richly rendered. The acting is top-notch, and the production design and art direction are nothing short of sublime. I actually look forward to Sunday nights now.

Music: Duffy.
I'm sort of putting myself out there with this one, because lately Aimee Duffy's songs have started to turn up in the kind of places--cosmetics commercials, chick flick soundtracks--that could lead to her becoming the next KT Tunstall or Natasha Bedingfield, i.e. a ubiquitous, vaguely "girl power" (yech)-identified pop singer whom I want nothing to do with by virtue of her ubiquity and girl-poweriness. But I'll have you know that I jumped on the Duffy bandwagon early, essentially the moment I heard her brutally catchy single "Mercy". After listening to "Mercy" at least two or three times a day, every day, for a week, I plunked down my fifteen bucks for Rockferry, her debut album. (At least, it's her debut album as Duffy. Apparently she made a record before under her full name, but I don't know anything about it, nor do I want to. I suspect it might be on the order of Alanis Morissette's pre-Jagged Little Pill work.) She's been compared to Joss Stone and especially Amy Winehouse (and all three have been compared to Dusty Springfield simply because they're British lady soul singers), but of that trio I think Duffy's the standout. I like Stone okay (really dug her re-working of the White Stripes' "Fell In Love With A Girl"), but something about her seems false, and I really don't care for Winehouse--her vocal affectations grate and her songs strike me as cynical pastiches. On the other hand, Duffy's tunes sound like lost classics: while I was initially disappointed that nothing else on the record has the uptempo intensity of "Mercy", I was quickly won over by soaring, string-drenched soul ballads like "Warwick Avenue" and "Stepping Stone". While I was listening to my mp3 player on random today (something I only recently started doing), the latter song came on after the Shirelles doing the glorious Goffin-King number "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", and it didn't totally pale in comparison. That's pretty high praise from me.

Foodstuff: Julie's Organic Chocolate Ice Cream Bar Dipped in Dark Chocolate.
One of the things I miss most about smoking pot is eating while stoned. Even if you've never smoked marijuana yourself, you probably know that one of its effects is a perceived intensification of sensations, including taste. Put another way, pot makes food taste better. Since it also increases focus, when you're stoned and you eat something, you are all about eating that thing. I guess it's fortunate that I don't smoke anymore, since I'm sure my metabolism could no longer handle digesting a whole pint of Cherry Garcia or an entire loaf of toasted raisin bread, both of which I have eaten while baked. Anyway, I picked up these ice cream bars one day when I was upset about something and felt like I deserved a treat (they're kind of spendy), and they are insanely good. They are so good that, even though I have not smoked pot in well over a decade, I feel like I'm stoned when I eat them because the chocolate flavor is so intense. Unfortunately for you non-Oregonians, Julie's is a local company and they pride themselves on making ice cream in "small batches", so you probably can't find it anywhere else.

Website: Stuff White People Like.
Instructions:
1) Read.
2) Laugh hysterically.
3) Start to notice how many things actually apply to you.
4) Stop laughing and become concerned that you are too white.
5) Decide you don't care and go back to laughing hysterically.

Advertisement: Those commercials for Progressive starring "Flo".
At first I, like any human with a functioning cerebrum, found these ads annoying. But the more I saw them, the more they grew on me. (Ah, the insidiousness of advertising. Don Draper would be proud.) The fact is, it's all about Flo. There's just something ineffably sexy about the way she says "tricked-out name tag." And underneath all that clown paint, she's pretty cute.

No one out here seems to know how to pronounce "Schuyler". What's up with that?

When actors from a TV show I really love appear in other projects, I'm always compelled to watch, for better or worse. Thanks to my abiding love for (the late, lamented) Gilmore Girls, not to mention my enduring crush on her, I've suffered through some pretty terrible movies for the sake of the beautiful and talented Lauren Graham. On the other hand, Scott Patterson's new sitcom on the CW, Aliens in America, has turned out to be surprisingly engaging, even a bit subversive, if not in the same league as the other comedies on my current Awesome List (to wit: The Office, which breaks my heart as frequently as it cracks me up; 30 Rock, whose wicked smart and incredibly dense episodes more than fill the void left by Arrested Development; and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is just fucking funny, though its season is now sadly over).

I've always found Alexis Bledel, the youngest Gilmore Girl, to be rather modestly talented, and her roles outside the show have betrayed a lack of onscreen charisma; nonetheless, it was because of her presence that I recently watched a movie called I'm Reed Fish. It's a pretty standard indie quirkfest that also stars Jay Baruchel (of Judd Apatow's short-lived TV series Undeclared, the follow-up to his equally short-lived Freaks and Geeks, which in case you didn't know is one of the best shows ever). Baruchel, with his skinny limbs, sunken chest, pasty skin, and hipster doofus hairdo, looks like he might have been hired as a low-rent Zach Braff, but is actually a lot more likeable and a lot less douchey than the Braffster. I went into the watching experience with zero expectations, which may be why I actually found the movie kind of charming, though I'm not saying you should watch it. You could get pretty much the same experience by putting Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite in a blender, plus there's a "twist" that the screenwriter clearly thought would lift his film above the indie pack, but which merely deflates its emotional tension.

Baruchel was good as the titular character and Bledel was a dud as his fiancée, but the standout performance belonged to Schuyler Fisk as his erstwhile sweetheart, newly returned from Texas to their quirky Northern California town. The only thing I'd ever seen Fisk in was The Baby-Sitters Club (shut up), which she made as a pre-teen, so this was my first time seeing her as an adult, and she was kind of the anti-Bledel, lighting up the screen with some serious presence. Baruchels' character was supposed to be torn between his two loves, but to the viewer it didn't seem to be much of a contest, unfortunately. I'll definitely keep an eye out for Fisk in future roles.

Anyway, what I really wanted to bring your attention to, gentle (and patient) reader, is not Schuyler Fisk's acting, but her singing. I was sort of peripherally aware that she'd been putting a music career together, in a "that girl from The Baby-Sitters Club movie plays music now? That's kind of weird. Is she doing the acoustic-y singer-songwriter thing? I can't imagine that's going to be any good" way. I have a low tolerance for acoustic-y singer-songwriters as it is, with their solemnity and their introspection and their mellowtude and their acoustic-yness. An acoustic-y singer-songwriter needs to be pretty awesome to catch my ear. So I was quite surprised to be watching an indie movie with zero expectations about anything and to have Schuyler Fisk sing a song in that movie and turn out to be pretty awesome.

Like I said, I'm not recommending you rent the movie, but I am recommending you watch the scene with Schuyler singing on YouTube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=YhpuI8-Ew7g. I've watched it a bunch of times and I cry every time, not because it's a sad song but because it's a really good song, and because her voice is really lovely and pure like a church bell ringing across a wildflower meadow on a May morning, and because she smiles so sweetly when she sings. I'm a little bit in love right now.