Cheers: Thanksgiving Orphans

November 27, 2014November 27, 2014 ~ theveryspecialblog ~ 7 Comments

cheers2 Sorry Friends, but Cheers has the best friendsgiving episodes ever. Why is that?(fragments for stylistic purposes) Because these people have reached the where friendship truly becomes family. The point where your friends drive you crazy just as much as any blood relative could. The point where you spend the holidays together because you have no one else to spend them with and, even though it’s awful, you would not want it any other way.

In “Thanksgiving Orphans” the gang from Cheers heads over to Carla’s Screen Shot 2014-11-23 at 12.24.24 PM house for a Thanksgiving potluck. Things start off on the wrong foot when Norm (who is supposed to be brining the never seen wife, Vera) ends up having a huge fight with his wife and doesn’t cook the Turkey at all before arriving to Carla’s. And it’s a big turkey. And it takes forever to cook. Meanwhile, Dianne insists that they wait to eat until all of the food is on the table, so no munching on candied yams while the turkey is still cooking. This means everyone gets hangry by the end of the evening. Carla and Norm start insulting each others cooking and everything devolves into a gigantic food fight. And when Vera finally does show up to dinner, we don’t get to see her face. Dianne has hit her square in the face with a pumpkin pie that Sam narrowly dodged.

Very Special Lesson: Things don’t always have to go perfectly to have the perfect Thanksgiving.

Very Special Thanksgiving Activity: Don’t forget to have a little fun this Thanksgiving. In my opinion, everyone should play a game. If you don’t have any standard family games, try this Thanksgiving Bingo that Jennifer Lewis at Flavorwire made a couple of years ago. But I suggest using this idea to make your own Bingo boards, so that you can make sure all of your familial quirks are represented.

Full House: The Miracle of Thanksgiving

November 26, 2014November 27, 2014 ~ theveryspecialblog ~ Leave a comment

It is Thanksgiving morning and Danny’s mom is snowed in and can’t make it out of Tacoma. This leaves the Tanner’s without any Thanksgiving food, so the men decide to take the girls out to a restaurant. But DJ will have none of it. She’s all like Thanksgiving should be spent at home! We always had Thanksgiving with mom at home! (Yep, this is one of those rare episodes where we admit the girls once had a mom and that she died tragically). Also, Joey walks around randomly saying the “Miracle of Thanksgiving” and making a trumpet noise. Was he also the voice of Face on Nick, Jr.?

DJ says that she can handle the meal because her grandma was going to put her in charge of the turkey, so she can handle the whole thing. Plus, last year her mom taught her how to make a “picture perfect pumpkin pie.” So in honor of the late Pam Tanner, the family decides to stay home and let the ten year-old cook.

The first season of this show is just so great. I still cannot understand why Joey is a necessary addition to this family, but at least when the girls were younger it made sense that they needed an extra hand (maybe). Anyway, this episode is super cute because everyone is adorable and dancing around the kitchen while setting the table.

Everything is really shaping up into an excellent Thanksgiving. Only, DJ did not remember to defrost the turkey and so they somehow end up with a frozen yet browned bird. This is amidst a large pre-dinner speech in which DJ asks Danny if her mom would be proud of her for making dinner. And how she wasn’t sure she could do it, but things really turned out great.

So how can they possible tell this little girl who is trying to impress her dead mom that the turkey she made sucks? Well, they don’t exactly…they shove the turkey back into the oven, crank it up as high as it will go, and try to purchase a turkey off of a couple of lost travelers who ask if they can use the phone. None of it pans out though, and the non-defrosted turkey catches on fire. Then Stephanie drops the “picture perfect pumpkin pie” and everything is ruined.

Danny takes DJ aside and tells her that her mom would have been proud of her for bringing everyone together to make the Thanksgiving meal because Pam knew that the important thing about Thanksgiving is family. But the really heart-wrenching stuff (and yes, I’m already tearing up by this point) happens when Jesse goes to talk to Stephanie (who is hiding in her closet because she dropped the “picture perfect pumpkin pie). At first things start off with the run-of-the-mill “everyone makes mistakes” lesson, but Stephanie is very adamant that not everyone makes “pie mistakes.” So Jesse decides to tell her a story about when he was a kid and did something very stupid to show that sometimes kids do stupid things and it is okay. He takes her to his room to show her a childhood photo album, specifically a haircut that he allowed her then ten year-old mother to give him when he was five. Stephanie feels better after hearing the story and enjoys seeing childhood pictures of her mother, but Jesse ends up being very upset by the whole interaction.

I guess it is easy to forget as the series goes on that Jesse is Pam’s kid brother and spends a lot of the first season being arguably more affected by her death than anyone else. I guess it’s less depressing on a sitcom to show the grieving brother rather than the grieving children or spouse, but nevertheless his performance is very effective. Danny and Jesse realize that they will never get over losing Pam, and that some bad feelings just stay with you. But Danny tells Jesse that it’s important for him to keep sharing his memories with their family because that is what will keep her a part of their lives and is probably the only thing that will ever make him feel better.

Very Special Lesson: Don’t let the children cook the turkey.

Very Special Activity: Share all of your great (and not so great) stories with your families this season. And if they’re driving you nuts, then you can post them here!

Happy Days: The First Thanksgiving

November 25, 2014October 25, 2015 ~ theveryspecialblog ~ 2 Comments

I haven’t watched Happy Days in years and my how I have missed it. The cozy living room, the breakfast nook, the hair scarfs, and how wonderfully Henry Winkler managed to pull off the greaser look with just a brown bomber jacket and a ton of hairspray.

But Mrs. Cunningham is struggling through Thanksgiving to be honest. She’s cooked an entire turkey dinner for the entire family and not a single person has helped her. Not even Joanie and she’s the girl. Everyone is so busy watching football that they have forgotten what Thanksgiving is all about, so Marion Cunningham decides to tell them.

Screen Shot 2014-10-22 at 8.32.57 PM “Now in 1621 the Pilgrims had this wonderful harvest…” (cue ripple screen affect to signify dream/fantasy sequence…)

It turns out that the “womenfolk” of the colony have been talking and would like to celebrate the harvest with a feast that they want to call “Thanksgiving.” But it was Fonzie’s idea to invite them to dinner.

It’s surprising to me that Pilgrim Fonzie literally just used magic to make fire in the hearth, yet none of these witch-fearing folk seem to want to hunt him down. His power is great. But Pilgrim Mr. Cunningham is suspicious of him because he makes all the ladies squeal and kiss in public. For shame!

So anyway, Fonzie gets put in the stocks because he wants to be nice to the natives. And by be nice I mean tread them like humans and not defraud them of all of their possessions/land/livelihood/lives. Fonzie agrees to spend the rest of the day in the stocks only if they will leave the tribe alone.

It’s only when Pilgrim Joanie gets her foot caught in an animal trap that they decide that Fonzie’s special powers can be used for good. It turns out that Fonzie could have magically gotten out of the stocks the whole time, but he was staying in there for civil disobedience and all. He gets Joanie out of the trap and they decide that he is not evil, so they invite him to the Thanksgiving feast. Fonzie says he can’t make it though because he has a reservation with for dinner with the Indians.

Everyone is like “oh no, savages! Agh!” and Fonzie is all like “you guys are racist,” so he and Richie talk them into having a peaceful, lovely Thanksgiving in which everyone is invited regardless of cultural differences.

And that is history. You see, back in the early days, Pilgrim Richie and Pilgrim Fonzie taught us all that every human life is important. And we learned never to be racist again.

That’s how it happened

Then end.

Very Special Lesson: DON’T THINK ABOUT THE TRUTH. THIS IS THE THANKSGIVING STORY.

Very Thanksgiving Activity: Here is a fun printable craft that you can do when your family is driving you crazy. It will help you remember that you like each other. Or you can just list all of the other things that you do like and remind yourself that this is only one day out of the whole entire year.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: There’s the Rub

November 24, 2014November 24, 2014 ~ theveryspecialblog ~ 5 Comments

Carlton and Hilary volunteer at a homeless shelter on Thanksgiving, but they are only doing it to serve their own needs. Carlton wants the volunteer service for his college application and Hilary wants to film the experience for her talk show. Carlton picks a fight with a young homeless Brad from Home Improvement. Brad puts him in his place for being so stuck up, but then he says he was only kidding. I think Carlton is really humbled either way.

Hillary gets annoyed at manual labor and starts clearing plates before people are done eating, then she is totally shocked and horrified when they run out of food. When she finds out that the supervisor who has been bossing her around is not some holier-than-thou volunteer, but rather a homeless woman, she realizes she has been a big jerk.

Meanwhile, Will takes Uncle Phil to a massage parlor after he throws out his back. They get arrested after they’re surprised to learn it’s, erm, not the kind of massage parlor they expected. In jail, Uncle Phil settles in to eat a prison Thanksgiving dinner and is only moved to tell of the detective when Will starts to wax on about the delicious meal that they are missing. He only lightly played the judge card when they were arrested, but missing out on the “little tiny onions” in cream sauce moves him to provide a litany of procedural errors that could cost the detective his job unless he gets the D.A. on the phone immediately. Pretty soon there after, Will and Uncle Phil get to go home.

Carlton and Hillary realize that they really do want to help the homeless, so they return to the shelter with a catered candlelight dinner. When the camera crew finally shows up, Hillary sends them away because she doesn’t want to exploit the homeless anymore. I guess she didn’t think of turning it into a public interest piece that might actually help the homeless. Oh well.

Very Special Lesson: Catering a candlelight supper for one night is far better than feeding the homeless for many nights.

Very Thanksgiving Activity: I have had the opportunity to volunteer at a couple of food pantries in the past. I can say firsthand that food pantries are often the first way to help underserved populations connect with the resources they need to improve their circumstances. Food pantries cannot operate without grants and donations from area food banks, many of which come from individual donations. If you really want to help this Thanksgiving or ever, I suggest finding your local food bank and making a donation: http://www.feedingamerica.org/find-your-local-foodbank/

I don’t like to cook, but I have to

November 24, 2014 ~ theveryspecialblog ~ 8 Comments

For me, the largest struggle of adulthood has been feeding myself. I don’t enjoy cooking, I try to eat as many raw things as possible, and I eat out as much as I can afford to. However, I’ve come to the point where I have to admit that this is not fiscally responsible. And it’s not really healthy either. I do think I make healthy choices when I eat out, but it’s cold and flu season and as much as I trust the health department and general food worker, germs still happen.

First I learned how to cook eggs. And this was how I truly realized that my college days were behind me. I was using my iphone to take pictures when the group I volunteer with was rendered camera-less due to low batteries. The facilitator came over to me and said, “Are you getting the pictures okay with your iphone?” And I quickly said, “Yeah!”and shielded my screen. This wasn’t because of anything particularly sordid in my camera roll, but rather at that moment I realized that my pictures from the last couple of weeks were all a mixture of scrambled eggs and lumps. The eggs being food the lumps being a swollen lymph node and a couple of spider bites on my arm (separate incidences).

I thought something was wrong with this egg because I couldn't crack it. And I am not a bad egg cracker. — I thought something was wrong with this egg because I couldn’t crack it. And I am not a bad egg cracker.

But it looked fine and Google told me that healthier chickens have harder egg shells than less healthy chickens. Yay organic cage-free!

I have now realized that I’m a real grown up.

I may have thought I was before, but I was just kid masquerading as a grown person. And that my concerns are real grown up concerns. “Is this lump normal? Was this bite from a brown recluse? Will my eggs be undercooked and give me salmonella?” Okay, well maybe these are not normal grownup concerns, but they are my grown up concerns.

So tonight, I conquered one of my biggest fears. I touched raw meat. Thus far, I haven’t been able to do that. I have only cooked with soy protein or fish (which I don’t really have to touch). But I used chicken tonight. My roommate witnessed all of this and decided that I should stat a YouTube cooking series for “Girls Who Don’t Know How to Cook.” A blind leading the blind sort of thing. And while I’m too afraid of YouTube to actually do this (too many haters in the comments and alleged rapists in the videos), I did make a list of the things that made her laugh the most. And hey! Maybe there actually are some helpful cooking tips in here for those of you who like me, maybe hadn’t touched raw chicken before tonight. It should be noted that my roommate has also never touched raw chicken.

“It’s starting to smell like food now”

“It’s okay if you cry the first time you touch the raw chicken. I was surprised I didn’t cry.”

“I think the juices are clear. Is it a bad sign if you can’t cut the chicken? Maybe it’s because I’m using a dinner fork.”

“Do you find that the potatoes are a little crunchy when you make this?”

A Very Thankful Blog

November 23, 2014October 13, 2014 ~ theveryspecialblog ~ 2 Comments

Hello Readers! We are nearing that MOST very special time of the year: THE HOLIDAYS! Are you ready? I for one think that the holidays can be stressful (sometimes down right depressing) as much as they can be warm, cozy, happy times. But I’ll be honest, I have been looking forward to the holidays this year in particular because there are so many holiday specials, abut which I simply cannot wait to wax sardonic. That being said, I have noticed that we seem to be living in a world that now begins Christmas immediately following Halloween, totally usurping my long-standing favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. Well, this shall not be in the case on The Very Special Blog! From now until Thanksgiving (which is obviously not far away) I will be exclusively covering Thanksgiving episodes! So start buying your green bean casserole ingredients and stay tuned for some heartfelt lessons about geing grateful. Oh, and thank you for letting me share my loving criticisms with you over the past several months!

Very Special Movie Bonus: The ‘Burbs

November 22, 2014December 10, 2020 ~ theveryspecialblog ~ 4 Comments

I know I’ve already done a very special movie this month, but The ‘Burbs is on Netflix and I just love it. If you haven’t seen this movie then go check it out now. Tom Hanks plays a burnt-out suburbanite staycationer whose neighbor manages to convince him that the new family on the cul-de-sac are murderers. Much to the chagrin of Tom’s wife (in this case, Carrie Fisher) he and a few of the guys from the neighborhood (Bruce Dern and Rick Ducommun) decide to conduct their own guerrilla-style investigation of the new family and their creepy basement.

You’re probably thinking, this does not sound like a very special movie. You’re probably thinking, “she’s just trying to make this into a very special movie to justify watching and posting about a movie that has nothing to do with anything very special at all.”

Wrong. (Well, maybe right.) But I am going to prove to you that this is a very special movie packed with very special lessons as evidenced below:

Very Special Lesson Number One: Beware the vacation. If your job is already driving you nuts, then you need to be extra careful about how you spend your downtime. Rest and relaxation are wonderful things, but if you’re already on edge then you might use all of that unstructured time to start stalking your neighbors because you think they are running a crematorium in their basement.

Very Special Lesson Number Two: On the off chance that your neighbors actually are serial murders and running a crematorium in their basement, it is very important to be able to rely on you fellow non-psychotic suburbanites. We all need someone we can count on to run a military-grade amateur investigation in the middle of the night. We all need a friend to help us frantically search through the garbage truck for evidence. That’s what being a good neighbor means.

Very Special Lesson Number Three: Don’t do heroin. Okay, this is maybe a bit of a meta-example here, but Corey Feldman is just great in this movie. And the best part is that he’s very good at being a supporting character without being in a kids/teen movie. This could have been a great transitional moment here from child actor to regular actor. Sure, the producers probably stuck him in here to draw in a younger audience, but he really holds his own.

Very Special Lesson Number Four: Don’t doubt your friends (with whom you have just guerilla-style investigated the neighbors’ basement crematorium). Okay, so maybe it looks like you just destroyed an innocent person’s home, but they did have a 5,000 degree oven in their basement, and your dog did find a femur under their fence. I understand that we all get a little stressed out, especially if we’ve got cops surrounding our home and that old man we thought was dead has just returned home from the hospital, but that is still no reason to lash out at your best friend.

Very Special Lesson Number Five: If your significant other has just accidentally blown up the creepy neighbor’s home and nearly killed himself in the process, try to be as understanding as possible.

The Golden Girls: High Anxiety

November 21, 2014November 19, 2014 ~ theveryspecialblog ~ 5 Comments

If you’ve watched The Golden Girls then you have probably heard a lot of crazy St. Olaf stories. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Rose hurt her back thirty years ago pulling a plow to till the soil during plantin goldengirls g season. Ever since, she’s been taking narcotics. That’s why she’s so un-phased and stupid all the time. Rose is always on drugs. When Sophia accidentally knocks the pill bottle into the sink all of the pills go down the drain, and Rose cannot get a new prescription for two days. Things come to a head when she lashes out at a pizzeria owner who has come to the house to film a commercial starring Sophia.

“Excuse me I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I’m very upset”

–Rose Nyland during opiate withdrawal

The girls stage a mini-intervention and Rose agrees to quit cold turkey. She deals with this harrowing endeavor by having her friends stay up all night and playing a rousing game of Monopoly—St. Olaf style. Rose starts to waver as the night goes on and Blanche tells her that she understands how Rose feels because she tried to give up sex cold turkey after her husband died. Then she slept with her sister’s husband. Whoops. Anyway, just as Blanche finishes her story, Rose realizes that the sun is rising. She has made it threw the night without pills, and is thus free forever form addiction! Except she takes one pill later that day…so then she calls a rehab center.

Flash forward 28 days and…okay, now she is really cured!

Wait…if the only problem was that she didn’t get to take her pills for a day and got cranky…hm…that sounds like me without coffee.

Very Special Lesson: Even if you can totally afford your habit, you don’t do anything harmful to yourself or others, if you get a little cranky without your little helper then it’s time to go to the Betty Ford clinic.

Family Ties: Rain Forests Keep Fallin’ on My Head

November 20, 2014November 19, 2014 ~ theveryspecialblog ~ Leave a comment

First of all, isn’t rainforest one word? Secondly, it’s really cool that youngest child Jennifer wants to rid the family home of 80’s toxins. This was before we removed formaldehyde from our hair conditioners, people! But she doesn’t know how to accurately dispose of any of the waste.

She forces Mallory to stop using her conditioner. The results are not pretty.

She gets depressed and ends up talking to a parakeet about the Brazilian rainforest. Her parents try to help her relax by watching a baseball game on TV, but there is a breaking news update on the Exxon Valdez (ripped from the headlines!) and she runs upstairs on the verge of tears. Jennifer gets like super, super depressed and decides that life is pointless because the environment is in danger.

Jennifer sporting her post-industrial look.

Her parents convince her to see the school counselor and she ends up freaking him out. By the end of their session he totally agrees with her and feels like there is nothing they can do and that life is over and depressing.

Luckily, Jennifer has two ex-hippie parents who know how to rally a depressed activist. They tell her that things seemed bleak and hopeless when they tried to save the whales. They encourage her to join Greenpeace or Sierra Club. They also use the pet parakeet to makes sure there’s no Radon in the basement.

Very Special Lesson: Don’t freak out. Join a club.

21 Jump Street: 2245

November 19, 2014November 19, 2014 ~ theveryspecialblog ~ 8 Comments

This episode starts off like a slasher movie. It’s a prison break, but it looks like a horror film version of a prison break. A picture is worth a thousand words so: Screen Shot 2014-11-15 at 7.59.07 PM

But it turns out that it is all just a dream and the horror movie villain is really a guy named Ronnie who is on death row for killing an undercover Jump Street cop. (It’s not someone we have ever seen before, unless you watched the two-part episode with the original murder, so don’t worry about your favorites being killed off.)

And at this point, the episode actually manages to subvert its very special trappings and become a really intense social commentary. I wish I had a pint of cookie dough ice cream right now so that I could eat my feelings is what I am telling you. This episode is genuinely sad.

We flash back to the night of the murder and basically the Jump Street cop showed up at this dude’s home while he was busy chilling with his girlfriend (Rosie Perez) and tried to push him into supplying him drugs immediately. The cop is so heavy handed that it’s surprising that Ronnie doesn’t make him, but he’s so into defending his turf he flashes his gun (still in his waistband). It seems more like posturing than anything, but this Jump Street cop is a rookie, so he immediately goes to grab his weapon. The drug dealer is a faster shot and fatally wounds the Jump Street cop.

Then eighteen hours before his execution, Officer Hansen (Johnny Depp) tries to convince him to make a video encouraging other teens not to commit crime.

So it turns out that Ronnie and his girlfriend are both illiterate (guess they never saw that episode of Jem) and they can’t read the newspaper article about the Jump Street cop murder. But Ronnie recognizes his name in the paper and they see the cop in uniform, so they put two and two together. Well, sort of. Ronnie doesn’t seem to realize how bad killing a cop is. He thinks he can easily hide from the cops as per usual. He’s wrong. Obviously.

He and Rosie Perez commit and armed robbery in order to be able to finance their new life together. This is probably the exact opposite of laying low. However, the clerk at the store they rob has already alerted the cops via a secret button. It’s odd that he has a secret button since this is convenience store, not a bank. Then Rosie Perez shoots the clerk as he is trying to reach for the key to the register because Ronnie is trying to bust it open with a screwdriver.

Oh man, then things get really sad when Ronnie has to have a corrections officer write a final letter to Rosie and just hope that someone can read it to her. Then we flash back to Rosie confessing to killing the guy, but she only did it because she thought that he was reaching for a gun. So really they both only killed because they feared for their own lives!

They don’t have any evidence on the cop murder, and they decide to pin the convenience store murder on Ronnie because they know Rosie was just scared and that Ronnie has a lot of prior arrests. They decide that it’s ultimately his fault because he orchestrated the entire thing. Johnny Depp tries to tell the DA that it’s possible that Ronnie killed the cop in self-defense and never intended for Rosie to kill anyone. But Peter DeLuise and the DA want to get Ronnie on other things that they do not have evidence for. The justice system is so flawed!

Ronnie supposedly has a lot of drug money, but he must have a shitty lawyer. The DA is able to try him as an adult (ugh) and then he ends up on death row with Johnny Depp trying to get him to make a PSA about crime. He refuses to do it though, and I think this episode becomes more of a PSA about the poverty/crime/disenfranchisement cycle than one meant to deter teens from criminal activity.

But in a heartwarming twist, Rosie has learned to read and is able to read the final letter herself. I mean I guess that’s as heartwarming as an utterly depressing episode can get.

If this episode made you sad and you want to do something, here are some resources:

http://booksthroughbars.org/

http://www.innocenceproject.org/