BijouBlog

Oh wow, this summer has certainly been a summer or reading for me, in addition to the process of assembling many of these blogs into a book format. I guess I am lucky, to enjoy such large amounts of time to sit there and read. For hours.

As usual, I am way behind the trends. I tend to get interested in media after it is popular (for example, I only got interested in Seinfeld in reruns). I've known about Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City for some time, I know there was a miniseries in 1993 based on the books, and now there's one on Netflix (I don't get it, yet). But I just wasn't that interested.

Until a friend loaned me a huge volume that contains the first three novels, Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, and Further Tales of the City. I read all three Sunday night through last night. For someone who reads much dense scholarly material, it was a quick read, and I don't imply it is superficial. It actually read much like a screenplay, and I mean that as a compliment; less is more in the description, and the dialogue shapes the characters and moves along the action.
 

The 1978 one, the first one, was most interesting, as it really gave one a slice of the “sex and the city” life in San Francisco during the swinging seventies. The place was certainly comparable in some ways to the “blue bubble” cities (a scary thought in hindsight) of today.
 

But it wasn't just LGBTQ persons who flocked to the city like the young ones did in the 1960s to the Summer of Love; they often were persons perhaps a little more daring than Mary Tyler Moore (who ended up in Minneapolis, not exactly the Babylon of Sodom of the 1970s) trying to figure out how to shape an identity that didn't necessarily conform to that of their Greatest and Silent Generation parents, who themselves, especially if they had the money to do so, were swinging themselves in their suburban sprawl.

But by 1978, the Summer of Love had degenerated into drug abuse, Milk had been assassinated, and Anita Bryant was vomiting her orange juice of bigotry on a national level. Liberation had come at a cost, but Maupin explores these times in a range from biting satire to gentle humor to bittersweet melancholy. Ultimately, the tales are about persons caught up in the wildest and even dangerous escapades (Jim Jones did not die at Jonestown? Oh, that's in the the third one I read) but still, somehow, never losing their ability to laugh at themselves.

One incident in the first novel that happens to the oh so hot straight guy who lives in the wonderful building of Mrs. Anna Madrigal at 28 Barbary Lane (Maupin gives us so many titillating descriptions of him sliding in and out of jeans and various forms of undergear) I found most interesting. Apparently, in San Francisco at that time, “the tubs” or the gay baths weren't the only places to enjoy no strings attached sex. Brian goes to some kind of co-ed bathhoue on Valencia Street. And there was The Party on Monday night, and also that night women were admitted free.
 

He does meet a woman in her private room, (she invites him), but she assumes he is at least bi, and she builds on the fact that most of the guys who go to this bath are bi or gay (but of course!). And I find one ends up feeling sorry for Brian. Yes, he is the heterosexual equivalent of a gay “slut" and he knows it, and he want to get laid, not psychoanalyzed at the baths.

But Maupin's description of the main space is telling, perfectly selective detail, with a real zinger at the end:

There were twice as many men, mingling with the women in a space that seemed strangely reminiscent of a rumpus room in Walnut Creek; rosy-shaded lamps, mis-matched furniture, and a miniature electric train that chugged noisily along a shelf around the perimeter of the room.
A television set mounted on the wall offered Phyllis to the partygoers.
On the opposite wall a movie screen flickered with vintage pornography.
The partygoers were naked, though some of them chose the shelter of a bath towel.
And most of them were watching Phyllis.

Yes, Phyllis, a spin off the Mary Tyler Moore show. Mary's middle-aged friend Phyllis Lindstrom played by Cloris Leachman ends up in San Francisco after her husband dies to start over. And it's got one of the campiest beginnings to any sit com, ever. (Think the big number Hello, Dolly reworked by someone on acid.)
 

But that allusion pretty much says it all about Maupin's take on the topsy-turvy, paradoxical yet also wild and wonderfully campy world that was San Francisco in the late seventies. A world where persons of any orientation could still afford to live in an apartment with a view of the wharfs and where they party with the neighbors and go out to diners at all hours and their landlady tapes a joint to the front door as a welcoming gift.

Now, by turned on, I mean something more wholistic than sexual, but I think you know, if you grew up in the seventies and stayed home on Saturday night to watch CBS' awesome line-up, to whom I am referring. 

Mary Tyler Moore, whom I remember especially in her television incarnation as the character Mary Richards, that midwestern, Presbyterian, single, associate producer of WJM News in Minneapolis, passed away on Wednesday, January 25, 2017. I join the multitudes of mourners (I feel like I lost a best friend), but I also rejoice that she will always be an iconic presence in the lives of so many people. 

Yes, the character Moore created is a true feminist icon, but I think there's so many other facets not just to the character, but the show as a whole. The situation comedy, I argue, was just as much about people as about issues of equal pay, gender roles, sexual freedom, journalistic freedom, and even, in one episode, anti-Semitism. 

And these were people we all to hang with, to laugh with, and in the case of the admittedly boorish Ted Baxter, to laugh at, but recognizing that beneath his bluster, as his wife on the show Georgette said, “Someone has to love him.” 
 

The phrase in the show's theme song, “Love is All Around You,” became in the show not a sentimental cliché, but a dynamic emerging out of relationships where the characters, following the lead of Mary Richards, accepted each other's human foibles with grace and subtle humor but also knew when and where to assert their own self-respect and human worth. 

As I mentioned above in the case of Ted, even characters like Phyllis and Sue Ann Nivens which could have become caricatures of narcissism and nymphomania, were not, because they were ultimately viewed from the perspective of Mary, and the brilliant actresses who played them understood the show's unique dynamic. 

So many moments on this show exemplify what I am trying to say. One episode that stands out include the first episode where Sue Ann appears, “The Lars Affair.” This predatory “other woman” whose public persona is the Happy Homemaker has an affair with the unseen husband of Phyllis. What makes this episode so interesting is that it's clear Phyllis is the wronged woman, but both Mary and even Rhoda (Phyllis' enemy), actually find an interesting, humorous insight into the situation: Phyllis, who is always trying some newfangled, ephemeral scheme (even encouraging Ted to run for public office at one point), seems to be, because of her quirkiness, more the “other woman,” while Sue Ann with her mom, apple pie, frilly apron persona, looks more like the cliché of the wronged wife. 
 

At one crisis point in the episode, Phyllis tries to emulate Sue Ann by baking an apple pie (with disastrously funny results), bemoans her husband's clothes are cleaner after his nights with Sue Ann. We see Phyllis' combination of narcissism and vulnerability here, and also, the show's emphasis on a community of friends that transcend conventional views of family to whom she can turn in a time of personal crisis. 

Phyllis gets her revenge (a brilliant move using food), but only after Mary intervenes. Mary, always tactful, tried to stay out of it, but she finally took action, telling Sue Ann that Ted knows about the affair, and thus everyone knows, and that an extramarital affair would not exactly be the best image for the Happy Homemaker. Mary does this on the spur of the moment, and her intentions are not vicious (she does not spread the rumor), but she knows that it is time to hopefully do something to preserve everyone's self respect. 

I could go on even more, emphasizing what so many others have done the evolution in Mary's relationship with Mr. Grant (I just knew on the next to last episode when they dated that they would never finish that kiss without laughing), and the show's brilliant use of belly laugh humor in the Chuckles the Clown episode to wrestle with the usually unfunny death and mortality. Ah, that scene at the funeral. Young lady … askes the minister. Young lady … Mary looks back. And then her most perfect Mary Richards (so consistent to the character when she was torn between not making a scene or saying her mind) flustered, plaintive moan. 
 

I mentioned earlier the unique sense of community that the show revealed, in the interactions of Mary with her her neighbors who were also her friends and with her coworkers who were also her friends. I always envied that dynamic, especially later in life when, like many other LGBTQ persons, I had to create my own family, when, like Mary, I moved to the big city to be on my own and hoped to find love all around me. 
 

Yes, Mary Tyler Moore and her character of Mary Richards, you made it after all with an amazing combination of strength and sweetness (and intuitively knowing when to use either one or both), and you gave hope to so many that they could do the same. 

I guess maybe the whole adult bed issues ties into marriage. You know, the marriage bed, and dowry chests often contained linens and other items to furnish the bed. And this bed would be for the couple only, a major rite of passage, as for many centuries siblings and unmarried family members routinely slept together in the same bed. Why? Most people were poor. Privacy was lacking. Bedding was expensive. 

Of course, in the United States, most young adults live with each other, cohabit before marriage. In fact, I even remember when I was living in the dorms, the sign when a guy and a girl (two guys was of course taboo at that time) began to cohabit was the double bed. Sometimes two beds pushed together, and usually in the guy's room. Apparently the guy's dorm was a more acceptable place for sex than the girl's dorm. The few times guys even visited the girl dorms was for let me eat with or even fix dinner for you in my room. Sexist, oh yes! 

I've often wondered if a certain type of bed makes better sex. I mean, some bed sex fantasies involve frills and canopies and flowers but also rough sex. Really rough. I think of those bodice-ripper historical romance novels, where the guy who ends up being Prince Charming, but not after some often an often mind-boggling I love him, I hate him, I love her, I hate her, and the result of this confusion is a heroine deflowered before the wedding, sometimes on the same bed where she ends up after the marriage. 

In contrast, the man-eating, predatory Sue Ann Nivens on the Mary Tyler Moore Show ended up doing the deflowering on her indescribable bed. We see this bed in one episode, where the WJM-TV gang congregate to comfort her when she realizes her sister will be staying in Minneapolis to host a rival cooking show. Erosville, USA. Cupids, flowers, pink satin. It vibrates. And when the climax occurs (and in Sue Ann's world, her climax is the goal), the florid theme from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet sounds forth. 
 

I'm not entirely sure how LGBTQ persons fit into this dynamic, because for ages they were banned from participating in traditional heterosexual rites of passage. In the days of the closet, when lovers had to present themselves as “roommates,” I'm sure a double bed would more than raise eyebrows. But then, those were the days when heterosexual icons Lucy and Ricky had to sleep in separate twin beds after the first season of I Love Lucy as a double bed was too risque. 

I just bought some bed risers for my futon frame. I sleep on a futon, which used to be on the floor, then on a low wooden frame, then on a black metal sling frame (still low). Now the sleeping structure resembles a bed, at least the height. Have I grown up? Maybe, but the best sex I've had occurred on the floor of a van.