Mexico Monday: The TV dinner edition
In which we eschew frozen fish sticks for human companionship
Dear everyone,
Have you ever noticed how in movies or TV shows, two shorthand ways of showing a character who’s lonely and needs to change is that at the beginning, they are 1) popping pharmaceuticals and 2) watching TV alone with a frozen dinner?
Yes, medication and/or frozen dinners seem to be a surefire way to indicate that a character is IN TROUBLE emotionally. Which begs the question - am I in trouble emotionally? Because lemme tell you, I have eaten a lot of frozen dinners in front of the TV lately.
As for the pill-popping, I’ve been doing that for ages already and plan to continue, thank you very much. As some of you know, General Celexa was a heroic character in my novel BreakupBabe, saving the whiny protag from the worst of her own self-pity; for example, when she feels she can’t go into the office and face the ex who’s dumped her.
“Snap out of it!” he said. “You are going to go to work and suck it up. So what if that worm works down the hall! I hate to remind you of this, but you need this job, sister. Big-time! What are you gonna do if you lose it; go live at home with your mommy?”
I hung my head. The thought had crossed my mind just last night. Bereft of a boyfriend and a job, I’d move back to my childhood home in suburban, upscale Palo Alto. Sleep under the Little Orphan Annie comforter my mother had forced upon me when I was eleven. Surrounded by high school yearbooks filled with pictures of me with an ’80s-style mullet, I would have no social life and probably no s*x. I would not be able to produce creatively because of my agonizing boredom. Consequently I would end up living with my mother for the rest of my life and dying an old maid with the Little Orphan Annie comforter as my shroud.
“No,” I said, barely enunciating the word.
“Say it again: I am not going to live at home with my mommy! Louder this time!”
“I am not going to—”
“LOUDER!”
“I am not going to live at home with my mommy!”
“That’s better!
General C is here to stay. If not for him, I would be shrouded in that Little Orphan Annie comforter right now.
But the lonely frozen dinners in front of the TV are definitely getting old.
Dinner, in my family, was the main event of the day. We always sat in our same assigned spots around the table, me across from my dad, where he could glare at me if the occasion called for it, and my mom and sister at either end. I don’t know how we came up with this seating arrangement, I only know it never varied. (The dog was under the table where Erica and I could surreptitiously feed her the lima beans and brussels sprouts we didn’t want.)
No books or devices were allowed, not that there were any devices back then except Walkmans and tape recorders, and we’d probably have been spanked if we’d tried to use one of those during dinner! Watching TV while eating dinner as a family never happened. No, what we did was talk. Or yell, depending.
Frozen dinners were only served when we had a babysitter, and were therefore exciting, because along with eating delicious fried fish sticks, we also got to do normally forbidden things like watch “Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island” back to back - an experience that still ranks as among the most thrilling of my youth.
But I digress.
At this stage in my life, the TV dinners are definitely a sign that I’m in trouble. Not, like, dire trouble. But it’s something that your current protag would like to change. She is a social creature, and life over these last couple years has been a bit too solitary for her.
If the events of the plot function as they should, and we flash forward to the end of this particular movie, your heroine will still be happily popping her pills. However, she will also be eating out again more with those people they call “friends,” or maybe with her family in picturesque places like this.
At home, she’ll dine in with someone she loves, who might even do that thing they call “cooking” for her. Occasionally they’ll watch TV while eating, or use their Walkmans or tape recorders, but mostly they’ll be doing that thing called “talking.”
Life won’t be perfect, ‘cause it never is, but the lack of solo frozen meals will be a sign that our heroine is just a little better off than when the story began.
End credits.
xo
Rebecca
Nice ending. Very Mary Tyler Moore-esque.