Just woke up.
Got that “just barely made it to shore after a shipwreck”feeling. I’m very dizzy and disoriented. Just focusing on the screen for more than a few moments in a row takes effort. The words are not coming to me very easily. My mind keeps (and gaze) keep wandering off and I have to force my attention back to the screen.
Which isn’t fun. I get the feeling this is going to take a while.
But I soldier on. This too shall pass. Eventually my sinuses will drain [1] and the pressure in my head will go down and the blood will be able to move around in my brain properly and things will go back to their usual background level of crappiness.
Plus, I might just get work in my field. So there’s that.
I had a tantalizing but improbable thought : As part of the writing samples they requested, I sent them the pilot and one other episode of the animated series Sam that I developed when I was a student at VFS.
It’s the story of a very smart little boy named Sam whose very nerdy parents decide that, after homeschooling him for his whole life. they are going to send him to public school for the first time at the age of ten.
They do so because they are worried he will end up autistic/Asperger’s like a lot of children raised by geniuses, and they don’t want him to suffer socially like they did when they were brainy kids.
So the series revolves around Sam struggling to deal with elementary school and the real world in general.
It draws heavily on my own life, while in no sense being biographical. I am not Sam, Sam is not me.
But I was a very brainy but socially clueless kid once, and the mission of the show was to make something that kind of kid can identify with and that can put across the message that the brainy little kid who talks like a tiny professor and is smarter than most adults is still just a kid, and needs the same things all kids need : love, attention, validation, understanding, guidance, patience, and support.
Anyhow, my fun little fantasy is that the people I am dealing with are so blown away by my Sam scripts that they decide to chuck the whole project they are working on and make my Sam show instead.
Highly unlikely, but it’s a nice thought.
I mean, I’d love to make the show. I think it could be a big hit. Sam’s unusual perspective on being a child would keep the show fresh and provide many opportunities to poke fun at the parts of childhood that make no sense and a lot of other mutually agreed upon social conventions as well.
And who knows. Maybe the connections I make doing this gig will let me pitch Sam to the right people some day.
Assuming I get the gig.
Which I totally will.
More after the break.
Everything I Needed To Know I Learned From Norman Lear
It just occurred to me now how much I learned from the Norman Lear sitcoms of the Seventies, which is of course where I spent my formative years.
Being between the ages of 0 and 7, I had no real filter between me and the world of the television. Anything I watched, I absorbed in its entirely, and it became a part of me.
This was especially true of sitcoms. When I was a kid, I only cared about sitcoms, game shows, and cartoons. Any other kind of show had to do a lot to keep my attention.
Obviously, game shows were pretty light on social and moral lessons. And cartoons had moral lessons but they were not exactly complex.
But Norman Lear type sitcoms had so much meaty content in them. They taught me to look at things from more than one perspective,. To be tolerant and understanding and gentle and joyful. From them, I learned that everyone has a story, everybody matters, and that everyone has their own perspective that is as valid and real as my own.
In short, they taught me humanism. They took me out of my own point of view and let me see that even a racist asshole like Archie Bunker is human and vulnerable and trying to make sense of the world just like anyone else. And that there are women like Edith out there, mousy and unsure of themselves and subservient to their husband’s ego, so unlike my mother and my sister.
And then there was their daughter Gloria, who taught me that a person can be both sympathetic and irritating.
So much of how I see the world and how I feel about tolerance and respect and understanding for all people came from those early lessons.
By showing the humanity in all people, Norman Lear taught me the value of resisting snap judgments in favour of examining a situation and trying to figure out what the real situation is as opposed to the superficial bullshit people tend to fixate on.
That’s why one of my favorite sitcom episode formulas is “angry mean kid turns out to have a truly horrible home life”.
I am, to put it mildly, disposed toward hating bullies. So as a kid to learn that even the category of human beings I hated the most acted how they acted for reasons that made sense to me was a real eye-opening consciousness-raising thing.
That by no means lets my childhood bullies off the hook for their abuse. What they did to me was still really fucking wrong.
But I do get it. I understand how hate and violence can transmit from one person to another and then another and another, all the way down the status totem pole until it got to someone on the bottom, like me.
Norman Lear taught me that. He taught me to understand everybody, to never assume a situation is how it feels, to always try to see the bigger picture, and to stand up for what is right no matter what.
Not bad for a bunch of sitcoms.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
[[1] Clearly my “Reactine Complete Sinus and Allergy” ain’t getting the job done.[[1]]