The Family Girl #005: Gonna make it after all

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The Family Girl Blogs
(aka "The New Working Girl Blogs")

Blog #5: Gonna make it after all

To see all of Bobbie's Family Girl Blogs, click on this link:
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I'm sure you've had one of those. You know - one of those songs that refuse to go away, that keeps on rolling around in your head and you keep on humming or singing it for days on end. And, sometimes, you even end up "infecting" those around you, and they end up with the same song in their heads, too? I've had my share of those kinds of songs. And I have a new song to add to this list.

A while back, the Blockbuster store near my old apartment closed, the one right where the CVS drug store was. Even after they quit renting out videos, they kept the place open for a while in order to sell off their stock. The prices were really low, in the $5-to-$15-per-title range, and I bought a few, but didn't buy too many. After a couple of months, though, the store closed up finally, and I didn't have much of an opportunity to buy more movies.

I was chatting with some BCTS folks quite a while back, and the topics of discussion ranged up and down different topics, as usual, and somehow we got to talking about favorite movies and TV shows. One show that was mentioned was The Mary Tyler Moore Show, from the seventies. I haven't seen it before, but I've heard about it, as I'm sure most have. It came highly recommended by Aunt Andrea and a few of the others, so I decided to rent or buy it. But, as I said, the video store had closed. A person from CVS gave me a number to call, though.

It turned out to be an enterprising gentleman that was in the video store frequently, and he apparently bought up a lot of the store's DVDs during the sale. It wasn't for his collection, I eventually found out, but for business - he bought the videos to eventually sell later on.

When I called, I asked if he had a copy of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He quoted me a very reasonable price for the complete set (and an even more reasonable price for, ummm, shall we say, a... less than original copy... wink wink). I said I preferred the real deal, though, and we met at Soho, my favorite coffee place, nearby the following day. I dragged my friend Nikki with me, though, as I haven't done this sort of thing before.

As we waited, we looked around surreptitiously. It's like we were a couple of junkies waiting for our connection... heehee.

It was a bit of an anticlimax, really, as our "connection" turned out to be a fairly old gent, neatly dressed, very polite and smelled real nice (sort of like tobacco and Old Spice). We talked with him a bit and it turned out he was buying a lot of DVDs from other video stores that were closing down, not just the Blockbuster in Dupont Circle. He would have bought their entire stock if he could, but the store clerks wouldn't have liked that. Besides, he said, since he was on a fixed income, he couldn't afford to, so he just picked out what he thought people would buy, or were unavailable anymore.

Anyway, we got the original set of the original Mary Tyler Moore show, as well as a few others (we politely declined his offer to sell us the... unauthorized copies he... "remastered"), and went home.

The DVDs have remained untouched until recently, when a little talk with Aunt Andrea sort of brought it up again, and my house mate and I decided to start watching them.

We saw the first four episodes of Season One, and, surprisingly, the show still holds up. The references were a bit archaic now, and the story was a trifle slow and very... tame... (compared to How I Met Your Mother or even Friends) but it was pretty good.

Some of the references went over my head a little bit, and people seemed pretty sensitive about propriety. But I found it okay. Being a girl overly obsessed about clothes, I couldn't help notice what people wore. I liked Mary's outfits. I suppose they were a little dated. Actually a lot dated, but some of the current fashions look similar to some of the stuff she wore. Like color-block clothes, for example, which were sorta what the girls in the office were into now. Pantyhose and stockings, too, seemed mandatory for girls back then, but they were making a resurgence now, thanks to Lady Catherine. I read recently that the new trend was mismatched tops and bottoms. Sounds like something Mary would wear. I guess my still-fledgeling clothes sense will need a bit more time assimilating all of these, though I have to say, the few color-block outfits I had rocked.

Still, I guess I liked the TV show not because of the retro feel of it, but because of the optimistic kind of world it lived in. And, yes, I know it's dangerous to look back through nostalgia, at a better time and place, and to want to go back to a more innocent time. My therapist has often said that we should look forward instead of wanting to escape your present by obsessing about the past.

I guess the difference here is that the era wherein Lou, Ted, Rhoda, Phyllis, Mary, Murray and Marie lived (cute, huh? Mary, Murray and Marie...) - I wasn't alive then, so I never really knew that era. So how can I have nostalgia for it? But there were things there that resonated with me a lot. And it makes me wonder a bit, and it makes me think that, wouldn't it have been nice to have lived in that time. I suppose that's something to talk with my therapist about next month.

I suppose people as screwed up as us always find it great to escape our troubles once in a while, whether into the make-believe world of a Mary Richards, or into one of the stories here in BCTS. Once, someone commented that my stories weren't any special, and were simple stories of escapism. Well, of course they were. What else?

I guess I think we need to escape our troubles from time to time. Maybe by watching a nice TV sitcom or reading a nice BC story, but I think the trick is not to obsess about them or get lost in them, so we will still be able to come back.

The theme song of the show was also pretty nice. A peppy tune whose style you could tell was from that earlier era. Listening to it as you saw the images of Mary Richards driving makes you feel so much more optimistic. It was like Mary was driving to somewhere better. You couldn't say Mary was escaping - it was more like Mary was moving forward, trying to look for something better. How can one not feel that optimistic? "You're gonna make it after all" the song goes. Oh, how good that makes me feel. Makes me want to be like her, and all the other make-believe characters on TV since then. Wonder if I'd look as good as Mary in a seventies-era print dress as well. And maybe I can practice tossing a hat while walking down Old Georgetown Road. Although maybe the people downtown will start wondering if I was crazy or not...

Now all that's left is to get the song outa my head...

                     
   
How will you make it on your own?  
This world is awfully big, girl this time you're all alone  
But it's time you started living  
It's time you let someone else do some giving  

Love is all around, no need to waste it  
You can have a town, why don't you take it  
You're gonna make it after all  
You're gonna make it after all

Love Is All Around
(theme from The Mary Tyler Moore Show)
by Sonny Curtis

   
   

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Comments

The Family Girl #05: Gonna make it after all

The Mary Tyler Moore Show was fun to watch. and thanks for posting the cute MTM logo. love that kitten.

    Stanman
May Your Light Forever Shine
    Stanman
May Your Light Forever Shine

Who can turn the world on with a smile?

Andrea Lena's picture

Well, it's you girl, and you should know it, with each little blog and every story you show it!

....I thoroughly enjoyed the show when it aired originally. My first wife always looked askance at me when we viewed this ; she didn't realize that I wasn't lusting after Mary Tyler Moore so much as wanting to BE Mary Tyler Moore...(ask me sometime about Mary AND Rhoda)...ah well. Saturday nights at nine back-to-back with the first Bob Newhart show. She was the epitome of the 70's woman. That moving forward that you talk about; optimism...great idea! Thanks for the nice reminder!


Dio vi benedica tutti
Con grande amore e di affetto
Andrea Lena

  

To be alive is to be vulnerable. Madeleine L'Engle
Love, Andrea Lena

Different Times, Different Worries

joannebarbarella's picture

Old TV shows can give you a warped perspective of their times, since most of them focus on the happier aspects of their age.

I was a child of the 50s and 60s, which most people now label as an age of relative innocence, but a lot of us then thought the world would end in nuclear holocaust (refer Bob Dylan songs). President Kennedy was assassinated and the race issue in America looked as though it might lead to a bloodbath.

The seventies brought Vietnam and generally depressed economic times (called stagflation). Terrorism started to rear its head...Munich and hi-jackings.

Every decade has its hard times, but somehow those who come later don't seem to remember them.

I don't have to dwell on our current problems but they too will fade and become something that only old farts (like me) talk about,

Joanne

what I do miss about those times

... is that there is still more an underlying civility then we seem to have now. Politics will always exist but the inability to bend and compromise and not to act like a child and sit and pout that it must be my way or the highway and take their marbles and go home has made me sick in the last decade and a half.

Personally, I think we are all going to pay for the follies of our belief that people we send will always compromise despite the talk. I have a bad feeling we will default and will as voters have to analyze our candidates for governance and not dogma.

Kim

Ummm

Umm... I used to watch the MTM show... LOL...

What would you have given up back then? The Internet, PCs... Heck, the first Scientific Calculator was sold back then... (HP-35)... You might have been lucky enough to find someone that knew what you were/believe you were a girl... In my case, it was HIDE, HIDE, HIDE! Pretend to be the guy!

All bad? Far from it. We did get our first video game (Super-Pong) after I went off to Uni in '76.

My kids enjoy a LOT of the old TV shows. (Hogan's Heros was a special favorite, but Mission Impossible isn't far behind). Something to many of them that just doesn't seem to be there in many today.

Glad you got to experience Mary... You really want to see something dated - go find the old (original) Dick Van Dyke show - MTM's in that too... (Another show I watched was the "Doris Day Show"... Que' Sera' Sera'... :-)

Anne