Someone on the internet compiled a montage of every time Stan shows up at the Golden Girl’s house and how they completely shut him down. Enjoy:
humor
The Very Special European Vacation
The time has come for another very special bracket challenge!
This time our favorite sitcoms will be facing off to see who took the very best trip to Europe. The contenders are:
Growing Pains: Let’s Go Europe
The Facts of Life Goes to Paris
Sabrina Goes to Rome
Family Matters: Paris Vacation
Taxi: Vienna Waits
Blossom: Blossom in Paris
And the grading criteria, as always:
Overall Plot–2 points
Music–1 point
Vacation Attire–1 point
Integration of European Setting–1 point
I decide to be fancy and make a bracket online (woohoo)! I told it not to seed the contenders, but for some reason there are still numbers next to the “teams.” So just ignore that.
Also, it looks really little in this post, but if you click on the bracket image below, then it will open in a new screen and look normal-sized. Then you can print it and fill out your predictions! The competition will start Monday, so make sure you have your bracket filled out by then! Or don’t fill it out, but you’ll still read all of the posts, right? 🙂
The Very Special Notebook is Missing!
On Saturday, I took notes on the (spoiler alert) 90-minute special The Facts of Life Goes to Paris. Sunday morning, I was looking for The Very Special Notebook so I could take further notes on something else that I’m not going to tell you about yet! As of this morning, The Very Special Notebook is still nowhere to be found! This is really putting a damper on my blog planning…
Oh just kidding…I found it under a pillow & in between the couch cushions. Guess I should have checked there before I sifted through the trash…yuck!
Saved by the Bell: Teen-Line
Warning: This is a Tori episode.
In the alternate reality where Kelly and Jessie don’t exist, new-girl Tori suggests that Bayside implement an anonymous Teen helpline. Basically, these kids just give really bad advice to their peers with no adult supervision. Everything is going okay until Zack gets a call from “Melissa.” (Also, guys. You may have known about the unsightly gum infections smoking can cause, but did you know that smoking can cause sinusitis as well? Thanks to the poster behind Zack’s head, we can all remember to just say no.)
He breaks all of the rules of teen line. He asks for her last name, where she lives, and of course–if she’d like to go out on a date. They decide to meet at the Max. When Zack arrives, he’s found that she’s already sitting at a table, and he’s like woah she’s hot. And then he realizes she is in a wheelchair and he’s like woah that freaks me out.
My first instinct here is to make fun of Zack for being insensitive, yet again. But this was the early 90’s and the Americans with Disabilities Act had only been enacted a few years earlier. For 30 second I tried to be understanding, but then he qualified Melissa’s help with the teen-line as cool because she can give great advice “even though she’s handicapped.” Like wtf, you dick.
Then he embarrasses the hell out of her at their movie-date that night. He gets on a soapbox about literally everything, including asking the dude sitting in front of Melissa to “slump down” because she’s in a wheelchair. I’ll point out that Melissa wasn’t complaining about having trouble seeing the screen. The following day, he gets super defensive when Slater asks him, “how was your date with Melissa?” Zack think that Slater is curious about the date only because Melissa is handicapped. Like okay, clearly Zack is delusional.
No one’s ready to call Zack out on his crap just yet, so we head to the max to plan a way to save the Teen-line. (Oh yeah, I should probably mention that they’ve just learned the budget’s been cut.) Zack says he has an idea and Screech gets creepy, as per usual.
So then they decide to raise money with a wheelchair basketball game. But instead of involving actual kids in wheelchairs, they Bayside gang decides that THEY should play a game of basketball in wheelchairs. It’s kind of like a really offensive version of The Harlem Globetrotters.
At the end of the game, Zack makes a speech about how remarkable Melissa is for living life in a wheelchair. After that, she doesn’t want to talk to him anymore and he’s all like aw man, why doesn’t she like me wahhhh. And Tori is basically like, it’s because you’re an insensitive turd.
I know I’m putting it in writing, but if you throw this back at me I will STILL deny it: I kind of like Tori in this episode…
Anyway, Zack takes Melissa to a dance and manages not to be a total prick. He’s learned his lesson, and grown as a person! Until the next time he’s a jackass and we somehow find it endearing…#teamslater
Very Special Lesson: Melissa is a person who is in a wheelchair not a wheelchair person. Shut up, you know what I mean.
5 Things I Learned from Danielle Fishel’s Memoir
Danielle Fishel’s memoir is super funny and a very quick read! You could probably knock this book out in a day or two, but it took me about a week because I do most of my reading at 11 pm right until my eyelids give out on me. Nevertheless, I did finish this book! And here are some of my favorite moments:
- She played Skipper in a live-action commercial for Mattel. I totally remembered seeing this as soon as I read about it. But when I turned to the internet to confirm my memories, I could not find the commercial. But in retrospect, I feel like they probably cast Danielle because of her really great hair.
- Justin Timberlake called her pretending to be Lance Bass because Lance was too nervous to call her himself. Also, Lance took her to a taping of Celine Dion’s Christmas Special on their first official date. And after prom, he gave her a set of gifts: a Barbie nightgown (referencing the commercial above), a Prada makeup bag, and a book on Taurus Birthdays (they’re both born in early May). And at no point in their relationship did it ever once crossed her mind that he might be gay.
- The BMW cast regularly goes over to Will Friedle’s house to catch up with each other. This was how she and Rider Strong learned that they were most likely getting married on the same weekend. And then Rider leaked that to the media and Danielle’s low-key wedding in downtown LA turned into an paparazzi event so whoops…
- She’s incredibly dedicated to her dogs. Like the phrase “animal lover” would not even being to cover it. This included adopting an aggressive rescue who had to have regular insulin shots (among other serious health problems). For obvious reasons, it’s kind of hard to give an angry dog a shot. And Danielle accidentally gave herself the shot when she pulled away quickly as he tried to bit her hand. I feel like any normal person would have called 911, but she drove herself to class and asked her professor to make sure she didn’t die. And she still takes care of that dog to this day. So I kind of want to be her best friend.
- She really wants people to follow her on Twitter and also has some really great food suggestions if you’re traveling to Maui. So if you have Twitter and are going to Maui, you should reach out to her. I think she’d have some great ideas.
The Waitresses
Look, I’m doing NaBloPoMo right this year. I’m using a prompt: What did you think was the coolest job in the world when you were younger? Do you still feel that way now?
When I was a childlike creature, like most juveniles, I was an idiot. My career of choice from ages three to seven was “waitress.” This ironically had nothing to do with my love of the food service industry (primarily because I don’t have one) was yet again a manifestation of my obsession with office supplies.
I just couldn’t wait to get my hands on one of these:
One time my family ordered Chinese take-out and the delivery bag arrived with like 5 pages left on a Guest Check pad. Instead of calling the store to let them know they’d accidentally dropped a critical piece of the order-taking process, I insisted that my parents let me keep it. This could be nothing other than divine intervention–a serendipitous gift that indicated that my prayers were heard and my dreams answered.
But it wasn’t just the Guest Check pad that lured me into thinking that waitressing was the best job on the planet–one that I imagined paid a living wage and wasn’t too exhausting-hah!–it was my exposure to some pretty cool fictitious waitresses over my formative years.
First there was Carla. I knew Carla before I can remember knowing Carla, having watched Cheers with my dad and laughed at jokes I couldn’t understand at all. Carla had an especially cool job because she didn’t have to deal with greasy food. She got to carry classy drinks to well-dressed people and insult Cliff Clavin all day long. Sometimes she even harassed the customers and no one ever had a problem with it. Plus, she was a barmaid who managed to buy a gigantic house as the primary bread-winner as a single mom of like 4+ children. With literally no knowledge of economics or personal finance, I thought this job sounded like a dream.
Then there was Alice. Alice was okay, but my personal favorite was Vera. She was a total idiot. Yet no one ever fired her and she still made a living. So it made seem working in a restaurant seem like a laid-back, nurturing environment where the other waitresses are your bff’s and never try to steal your tables or pocket your tips.
I even briefly considered a return to my original passion after I was Waitress with my long-time idol Keri Russell. It was the pies and the cute outfits that clouded my vision, but I quickly snapped back to reality and got a college degree.
And then I graduated and every entry level job required 5 years of experience and I rued the day I chose not to get any waitressing experience.
But hey, I definitely know my way around a Guest Check pad, though sadly I know there are many other requirements.
Double, Double Toil and Trouble
Double, Double Toil and Trouble is a movie about two little girls who have to undo an evil spell on Halloween night. It involves a moonstone and Cloris Leachman.
Other than that, there are two very important things you should know about this movie:
- It’s the Olsen Twins finest work.
- It gives me the heebie-jebbies.
I know it’s just a kids movie but here is a list of things that still creep me out in this movie:
- All of the kids in the pumpkin carving contest except for Charles Pfeffer. Charles Pfeffer looks like he’s suspicious of this crap. The other kids look like they’re up to something shady. See for yourself 38 seconds into the movie’s trailer
- The Olsen Twins accidentally almost killing a clown because they’re witches and they don’t know it. (See also: the clip above)
- Scary Cloris Leachman dressed in black. Thank God for Cloris Leachman dressed in white or we would never make it through this movie
- The sallowness of this gravedigger’s skin. Didn’t your parents teach you not to talk to strangers, Mary-Kate & Ashley???
- These creepy wigs.
- Good Cloris Leachman being trapped in a mirror by her OWN sister! I get it. It’s hard to be a twin, but that’s some seriously evil stuff.
- The length of Cloris Leachman’s hair.
- The fact that these parents leave their seven year-old children unattended long enough for them to switch costumes with total strangers. And then they wander around with children who are not their children for several hours.
- The fact that they all just abandon a man with a pumpkin stuck on his head! If you see a stranger with his head stuck in a large squash, you stop and you offer assistance.
- This mascara hair die and that she theoretically dies her entire crown of freakishly long hair with that tiny little mascara wand. Also, she is a witch, so why is she even manually dying her hair??
- The creepy pig-tailed mouse-creatures the twins turn into when they attend the witches gathering.
- The inept cop that doesn’t take the twins’s parents seriously. “They’ve only been gone a couple of hours.” THEY’RE SEVEN!
- But ultimately it’s okay that it’s a terrifying movie because it’s also really sweet:
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: Someday Your Prince Will Be in Effect
This is a two-part Halloween episode. That’s serious business. But Amazon lied to me and told me Part II was really part I. So what follows is Part II plus what I’ve filled in from Part I:
Carlton and Will have some kind of a bet over who can be the first to find a date for Hillary’s Halloween party. This all boils down to them fighting over the same girl. That feels pretty unrealistic, but we’ll go with it. This mostly consists of them insulting each other in front of this poor girl who should not be considering either one of them at this point. Carlton even uses the R word as an insult (my, how far we have come since the 90’s).
Meanwhile, Hillary has been falsely arrested for shoplifting while she and the rest of the family attempt to find Halloween costumes. It seems pretty ridiculous that fashionista Hillary would wait until the day of a party to find an outfit, but whatever.
Will and Carlton have reached a stalemate in trying to win this girl’s affections, so they start flat-out lying to her. Will describes a “typical” night with him, which involves hanging out with Bo Jackson and Heavy D. Plus, Malcolm Jamal-Warner calls him from the set of The Cosby Show and asks for dating advice. Oh and then Quincy Jones shows up and begs him to sing on a track. But the Fresh Prince is too busy, so he calls his buddy Al B. Shure to fill in for him. Just as Al B. Shure and Quincy Jones are leaving, they talk about how they have to be sure not to miss A Different World–which is so convenient because Kadeem Hardison just happens to be hanging out at Will’s house!
Carlton can’t follow Will’s story at all, so he’s just like “come to the party with me.” And the girl is like well, I’m just more attracted to Carlton. So there you have it. Carlton won out over Will for like the one time ever in history. They all head to the party, and Hillary (who has been released from mall-jail) has invited the mall cop to party with them. Everything seems great for Carlton and crappy for Will (he invited a waitress from the mall to be his date, but she hasn’t shown up). But Carlton can’t really win anything, so it turns out that his date is actually the shoplifter that the mall cop was searching for. She’s also a kleptomaniac who was about to rob them out of house and home.
And then Will’s date shows up as this gorgeous, perfect, real-life but also dressed-up as Cinderella. She lives in Encino with her step-mother and step-sisters. They have a great time and Carlton is miserable. Balance is restored to the Fresh Prince’s world. But the story isn’t over yet. A group of trick-or-treaters show up after they’ve run out of candy. They’re so late because they’ve been watching Matlock. So Will just invites a random group of children into his home and tells them a “scary story” about the “Bel-Air Beast,” which is clearly a description of Carlton. Then all of the children run from the house when Carlton walks into the room. Poor guy, he must have developed some serious self-esteem issues when Will moved-in.
Halloween Lesson: Don’t pick up randos at the mall, be careful not to be mistaken for a shoplifter–and if you’re going to a 90’s Halloween Party, always remember the best costume is grapes.
The Baby-Sitters Club: Dawn and the Haunted House
Things start off ominously in this episode of The Baby-Sitters Club. There’s a sketchy haunted house and Claudia is being super cryptic about something. Actually, it turns out she’s failing out of middle school. Her mom’s set her up with a tutor but she’s going to have to miss out on some BSC meetings. No big deal though, she can just explain the situation to her friends.
Except she doesn’t plan on doing that, she makes some big dramatic deal out of this and says, “I can’t live without The Baby-Sitters Club and The Baby-Sitters Club can’t live without me.” Geez.
Anyway, Dawn and Stacey end up babysitting for this kid who is obsessed with dinosaur fossils. He wants to go hunt bones in the backyard because there are a lot of them by Mrs. Slade’s house. Dawn and Stacey are like wtf?? And this kid is just like, “She’s a witch lady. She talks to animals and turns people into dogs.”
So the baby-sitters decide to take the kids outside to investigate. Yep, that’s right, the people you trust to keep your children safe while you are at the mall are taking them on a literal witch hunt. They evacuate the woods when they find a sick looking dog and a hear strange noises coming from the general vicinity of Ms. Slade’s house.
Then they go to the hardware store to meet the other babysitters! “I just love hardware stores,” Stacey says, “next to Bloomingdale’s there’s no place I’d rather be.” Uh, yeah. Okay. As it turns out, Mrs. Slade is also shopping in the hardware store. She’s purchasing some really creepy stuff too: a lantern (for working late at night) and a shovel (for digging deep). I mean I think it’s pretty obvious that she’s burying bodies in the night.
That night at their spooky sleepover party, they all tell stories about the scariest thing that has ever happened to them. Mallory’s story is about how she was walking home with a group in the woods and THEY ALL LEFT HER to take the road instead. Seriously, I wonder if they make her super sad intentionally.
Then they start talking about how creepy Mrs. Slade is and Claudia tells them all that her behavior is probably perfectly normal. When they bring up the shovel incident, Claudia says, “so she gardens,” and Dawn calls that the “dumbest thing [she’s] ever heard.” Well, no, it’s definitely the only intelligent thing anyone has said about this poor woman. But Claudia gets her feelings her and storms off. They’re all like geez, I wish I knew what was wrong with her! And I’m just wondering how NONE of them have managed to notice that Claudia has been reading a textbook for the entire duration of this slumber party. They are terrible detectives.
Then Stacey goes back to babysit for fossil kid. This time she has Mary Anne with her. Fossil kid is all like hey look, I can see Mrs. Slade through my telescope! And Stacey is all like,” it’s not nice to spy on people,” but then she pushes him out of the way so she can spy on Mrs. Slade herself. She sees Claudia through the telescope with Mrs. Slade. Mrs. Slade is rubbing some kind of herb on their faces, and even I have to admit that’s weird.
Stacey calls Dawn to get the BSC over to the Slade house to rescue Claudia. Basically, their plan consists of Stacey telling Mrs. Slade that there is a wounded dog in the woods. So Mrs. Slade is going to go looking for the dog, and the girls will seize that opportunity to “rescue” Claudia. Well, this seems extraordinarily cruel but okay.
So the BSC goes out looking for Mrs. Slade. They’re calling for her and nothing works, so then Claudia has a great idea. “I bet she’ll hear us if we bark like dogs.” So then they all howl and it works. Omg. This is the weirdest episode ever. Then they all have to tell her that they thought she was a witch and that they lied about the dog. But it wasn’t a total loss because Mrs. Slade found a bird who needs to have his wing mended.
Halloween Lesson: Don’t call old ladies witches. That’s like breaking a cardinal rule of feminism or something.
Home Improvement: I Was a Teenage Taylor
Halloween is a BIG deal to the Taylor family. Tim and Al prank each other on Tool Time and the Taylors prank each other around the house. Basically, they all have to spend the entire month of October looking over their shoulders.
After Randy and Brad freak their mom out by preparing dinner a.k.a. a gory-severed head (not real, don’t worry), some creepy man shows up at the door. He hints at an awful incident that happened when he lived in the house and wants to see “the basement,” which is now Randy’s room. Brad thinks it’s just their parents trying to get even with them, but Randy is not so sure.
They decide to talk to Wilson. If Wilson knows about “the incident” then it’s true. If he does not, then their parents are playing them. While Randy and Brad are walking over to Wilson’s, Jill and Tim pay off the creepy man. It turns out that Brad and Randy have been picking on Mark AGAIN and they’re enacting revenge.
Wilson plays along and gives them this awful story about how the creepy man was long-ago suspected of killing his brother, Ezekiel. However, it’s also possible that Ezekiel simply ran away. Either way, the creepy dude was locked away in a mental institution. Wilson hints that he should still be there but Randy and Brad tell him that he’s out and trying to get a look at their basement.
Wilson even has a fake newspaper article from the “time of the incident,” suggesting that Ezekial is buried in the basement. But Al shows up at the Taylor home and sees the boys reading the newspaper. Al’s never in on any of the secrets, so he innocently identifies Larry (aka Creepy man) as “your dad’s Halloween guy,” having met him earlier at Tool Time.
So now Brad and Randy are in the revenge business, and they want to bring Al into the fold. With Al on their time, Brady and Randy start weaving a web of intricate lies. Al goes to Jill and Tim “concerned” that Randy is now terrified of the basement. In the meantime, Brad is trying to make Randy look like he’s crying by squirting Visine in his eyes. In the process, he pokes him in the eye with the bottle, so the tears quickly become real.
Then Larry shows up at the house again and he’s pissed because Jill & Tim didn’t pay him the full amount for his services. He looks like he’s ready to destroy Brad and Randy over $100 that they don’t have, so they head up to the attack to look for their parents secret money stash. (But he’s playing them again.)
Jill and Tim have basically turned the attic into a haunted house. Just when Randy and Brad start to get really jumpy, Jill/Tim/Mark reveals themselves as the ultimate prank victors. And Larry walks up the attic stairs to let the boys know he wasn’t really plotting to shake them down for $100.Then Al gets them back by trapping them all in the attic. Good for Al. Al needed a win.
Halloween Lesson: The family that pranks together stays together. (Unless you’re a Brady. Then that shit is strictly forbidden.)
The Very Special Blog 