The Fame Game

Hollywood is a town that can twist facts and figures so quickly that it boggles the mind, and the sad part is that they are believed so much..but my students quickly alerted me to many a person on t.v. who they saw as looking like me. Some of them I never recognized or saw at all, but one was an attorney who was on some soap opera, and my students would tell me about her, and how I should have been an attorney.

Eventually, I did take notice and heard sounds rumbling back at me from the t.v. as well, and recognized that some of those had been said by either faculty members in closed sessions or some of my students themselves...I finally began to notice that we were being recorded and enacted by Hollywood sitcoms and soap operas. Eventually, I turned on a few shows to see for myself, and as one of the principals had told me, it was with the ability to recognize and laugh at ourselves.

It began to appear to me that every t.v. show in town was imitating each of us at this school district, and while in downtown L.A. one time, a man told me that this is a one horse town...all shows are the same and all are based on the same situation and situation plot...they are called situation comedies.

I am not going to elaborate on any of these shows at this point, because it was the entire media and all three networks at different hours of the day. Room 222 was an obvious one since it was based upon a school system and is about a school, Walt Whitman High, and I recognized easy enough that Karen Valentine was playing a role similar to what I had done in a few of the many schools in which I had taught...starting with Bay City...but there were many others. All in the Family which I have already mentioned..LaVerne and Shirley is a very definite and obvious inside only show that was all too obvious to most of us, the Mary Tyler Moore show even more inside and more obvious...and so many others that it is ridiculous to the point that I called myself King T.V., likening myself to King Midas, and indeed, the t.v. kept up with me, even on Designing Women, which at that point I became very irritated and agitated...but like with all these shows, my uncle had said about a woman he had liked, if everyone else was getting some, why shouldn't he too, and that is exactly how Hollywood thinks. It should be called Screw You town as I was finally told they are f***'ing you over.

But hey, I didn't feel the love that night!