Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (16 page)

Last year Twentieth Century-Fox released a little film it made for around $18 million, which is lunch money in Hollywood. It was called
Home Alone
, and was about a small boy accidentally left behind while his family went to France on vacation.

You could tell it was a fantasy because his parents flew first-class and left the kids to their own devices in coach without being arrested by customs agents or spat upon by their fellow passengers, and the family lived in the kind of house you dream of owning if you ever win Lotto, with no fingerprints around the light switches.

Perhaps because it bore no relation to real life, except that two guys tried to rob the house just before Christmas, the film became a monster hit, with box-office grosses that are now just shy of twice the gross national product of Grenada. It also became controversial because it contains violence. The sole residue of
Home Alone
for my children has been a tendency to mimic the boy in the film by placing their palms on their cheeks
and screaming, disconcerting those who have not seen the movie and boring those who have.

The movie made a great impression on me.

It reinforced my sense that people who make movies are always to one side of the right track, on what in real life would be called a service road.

There is nothing remarkable about a child taking over the house, eating ice cream, watching videos, and ordering pizza. The concept reminds me of the old question: Why isn’t there a Children’s Day?

Answer: Every day is Children’s Day.

The movie that really needed to be made was different:
Mom Alone
, the story of a woman whose family goes to Disney World and leaves her accidentally in her own bedroom, where she finds inner peace and her manicure scissors.

Scene one: Mom goes into the bathroom and stays there undisturbed for five minutes for the first time in a decade.

Scene two: Mom eats dinner sitting down, without sharing it with anyone, especially anyone who begs to taste it, then spits it out and says, “How can you eat that stuff?”

Scene diree: Mom reads a book that is not by Maurice Sendak.

Scene four: Mom sleeps through the night.

And when the burglars come, Mom says, “If you try that again you will get your head handed to you,” in a voice so terrifying that the burglars flee. In Orlando, unwrapping the guest soaps in the hotel and putting them in the toilet while Dad tries frantically to call Mom (amusing plot twist: Mom has taken the phone off the hook), the children would recognize Mom’s warning as one they have heard, and ignored countless times.

I have other ideas for women’s films:
The Godmother
, in which all the Corleone sons have been gunned down and the daughters take the family legit with small accessories stores and a chain of birthing centers;
Dances with Mom
, in which a woman goes to the wilderness to find herself and discovers she’s already pretty darn evolved, and
Bonfire of the Vanity Fairs
, in which a female investment
banker almost hits someone in the Bronx, puts on the brakes in time, and has an epiphany in which she realizes she is wasting her life imitating crass men and what she really wants is to develop housing for the homeless.

Mom Alone
alone would generate controversy. The Sensitive Men lobby would suggest that it denigrates fathers. This is in direct contrast to television, which has produced a number of shows reflecting those millions of families in which mothers have left to join rock ‘n’ roll bands and fathers are left caring for their children alone, humorously.

The organization that Phyllis Schlafly runs, whose name always slips my mind, would say that no mother would want to spend a vacation alone beneath the down comforter watching
Waterloo Bridge
and eating Oreos when she could grab a plane and be standing in line at the Magic Kingdom that very day.

Uh-huh.

None of that will matter to movie people. All they care about are the grosses and the sequel. They’re already planning a sequel to
Home Alone
and if I know that inventive industry that brought us
Beverly Hills Cop II
, it’ll be a lot like the first, except terrible. (The kid will put his palms on his cheeks and scream again. Trust me.)

Mom Alone—Again
. Scene one: Mom winds up on the wrong plane on her way to Sea World and goes to LaCosta, where she has a pedicure and gets to finish some sentences.

It’s not a reality-based film like, say,
Pretty Woman
. But there’s an audience out there.

BABES IN TOYLAND
July 31, 1991

The news that Barbie had been caught shoplifting sent shock waves through the world of little girls.

“Why did she do it?” said one. “Barbie had everything. She had jumpsuits, business suits, and an astronaut uniform with a lavender helmet. She had a Corvette, a beach cottage, and Ken.”

Quickly I riffled through the newspaper, where there was a sidebar to the main arrest story by a child psychologist: “Barbie’s Booboo—What to Tell Your Children.” It said that petty theft often masked deeper problems and was a cry for help.

“It was a cry for help,” I said. “A manifestation of some need, perhaps unmet in childhood, for affection and a feeling of belonging.”

I thought of Barbie, with her impassive feline face and one-and-a-quarter-inch waist. I wasn’t buying it. I explained that it might have been a mistake, that Barbie might have slipped those pantyhose into her Sun-n-Fun tote bag intending to pay for mem, and then had just forgotten. It occurred to me that Barbie might
have been set up by foreign toy manufacturers who wanted to flood the market with cheap imitations, dolls named Ashley or Melissa with lounge-singer wardrobes and boyfriends named Rick.

Like so many parents, I had learned my lesson from the Pee-wee Herman scandal of 1991. Over the years, the people in children’s television have usually fallen into one of three categories: father (Captain Kangaroo, Jim Henson), puppet (Big Bird, Lamb Chop), or animated (Daffy Duck, et al.). Despite the suggestion by the Reverend Donald Wildmon some years back that Mighty Mouse appeared to be snorting cocaine in a cartoon, these characters rarely get in trouble with the law.

But Pee-wee Herman was none of these. Suddenly that summer there were stories everywhere telling parents how to explain to children that the weird little guy in a bow tie and lipstick who appeared on Saturday-morning TV with a talking chair and a pet pterodactyl had wound up in the clink, charged with exposing himself in a triple X movie theater.

At seven one morning, looking at the tabloids, I knew that before my first cup of coffee I was going to have to face two small boys and explain the difference between cartoon characters and real life, a difference I was a little fuzzy on myself, having lived through the Reagan years. So I did what anyone would do under the circumstances: I hid the papers.

“If they don’t get their questions answered by their parents, where will they?” one child psychologist said to a wire-service reporter.

Simple: They’ll get their questions answered on street corners and in the back of the bus to day camp.

After archery, I did explain the difference between characters and the actors who play them, the difference between being arrested and being convicted, the difference between private and public behavior, as well as the rules for keeping your pants on, which I can assure you we’ve been over a hundred times.

I explained that even grown-ups make mistakes, and that
despite published reports, what the actor who played Pee-wee was accused of doing was in no way comparable to mass murder, although in his mug shot he did look like a member of the Manson family. This made it easier for the kids to separate television and reality, although for a long time afterward they kept asking who played Peter Jennings on the evening news.

Pee-wee, of course, was history. This is a very unforgiving country, particularly after you’ve been famous enough to be made into a doll and sold at Toys ‘R’ Us.

So when the Barbie story broke big, it occurred to me that I might be witnessing the twilight of a career. I was not sorry. I had never wanted American girls to have a role model whose feet were perpetually frozen in the high-heel position.

Well, as you know, that’s not the way it turned out. The next day Barbie’s agent started spin control, and before you could say “dream house” there was a Sad-n-Sorry Community Service Barbie, with the navy blue shift and the open letter about how even dolls make mistakes. Little girls read it in the toy aisles and their eyes filled. “It wasn’t a cry for help,” I said. “It was a public relations stunt.” But by that time the little girls I knew had gotten Community Service Barbie from their grandmothers, and they didn’t care.

MOMMY DIMMEST
May 10, 1992

I think sometimes about a girl I met in Brooklyn. She was fourteen, and pregnant, and philosophical. “If Vanise does it, I can,” she said, Vanise being the neighborhood dim bulb, the girl whose conversation ranged from a giggle to a shrug, whose own mother said that if you looked in one of her ears you could see daylight.

Vanise had had a baby, and she was so dim that it was commonplace for her to order a slice at the pizza place and then discover she had no money and be obliged to cadge a buck from a boy. (There was some suggestion of a causal relationship between the slice, the cadging, and the baby.) The bottom line was this: if Vanise could do motherhood, then motherhood couldn’t be too tough.

I guess the girl is nineteen now, and the baby five, and Lord knows what happened to Vanise. I thought about them both, and about all the rest of us who produce hostages to fortune, when some manufacturer unveiled a pregnant doll called Mommy-To-Be,
a Barbie wannabe with country-western hair and a swelling midsection. What do you think it means that mine was delivered barefoot?

The doll reminded me of Vanise for two reasons: because it shows the world is full of people who don’t have good sense, and because it suggests that having a baby is easy. It has a removable belly, and when you take out the baby—anatomically correct, which is a whole lot more than you can say about the mother—a nice flat stomach pops up in its place, thereby reinforcing the belly-button theory of birth so beloved by five-year-olds.

The process is a cross between a C-section, a tummy tuck, and an Easter-egg hunt. This isn’t the way I remember it, but I guess there wasn’t a big market for a sweaty wild-eyed doll with a hospital gown up around her armpits shrieking. “The next person who tells me to breathe is dead meat!”

It’s always been this way. Our toys taught us that being a mother was simple. Betsy Wetsy, Tiny Tears—what easy babies they were. Today dolls are more sophisticated, but no more realistic. They have a baby doll that crawls and falls, but it does not fall against the leg of the coffee table, gash its little head and need to go to the emergency room at the same time that the twins are in the tub.

No Colicky Cathy, who wails all night unless you walk her. No Adolescent Alex, who does not speak for six months and then breaks the silence with a call at 1:00
A.M
. informing you that he’s gotten popped on a D.W.I. No real-life Mommy games.

(I never knew any boys to play Daddy when I was growing up. What kind of game would it have been to walk out the front door and make yourself scarce for ten hours?)

The job that seemed so easy when the babies were plastic turns out to be the hardest one you’ll ever have when they’re flesh and blood. The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and torturous, involving and utterly tedious, all at the same time. The world is full of women made to feel strange
because what everyone assumes comes naturally is so difficult to do—never mind to do well.

No doll teaches this. The best exercise in understanding it is one sometimes given high school kids. They’re handed an egg on a Friday and told that they have to take care of it all weekend. Most of them start with enthusiasm, naming their eggs, dressing them, drawing little faces on their blank whiteness.