* * *
—
Okay. Back to bed. No time to search the darkness for the bend in the moral universe tonight. I turn my phone off. I pause. And then pick my phone up again. Another thought about Mrs. Obama:
“You ever seen someone work this hard to leave a job?”
Now I’m done. Phone off, head on pillow, deep breathing, better life, etc.
My eyes spring open again as if my eyelids are like “Child, who you think you foolin’?” I grab the phone. “On her way to the convention, Michelle stopped by Independence Hall and snatched all of the Founding Fathers bald. And then she rang the Liberty Bell, just because.”
I turn on the bedside lamp and get comfortable. If I’m doing this, I might as well be able to see. Plus, the light keeps that haunted-ass chair in its place. At work the next day, I will explain my sleepiness by muttering, “Sorry. I was up late. Got called into a jokes emergency online. Michelle Obama is Shawshanking through the walls of the Oval Office.”
I don’t exactly know what I’m doing. Or why. (Put that on my tombstone: Here lies R. Eric; he didn’t exactly know what he was doing.)
Nevertheless, I’m trying it.
(Correction: please put that on my tombstone. Here lies R. Eric. He tried it.)
There’s Never Any Trouble Here in Bubbleland
When I was a kid, maybe six, Maryland Public Television (MPT) took Lassie rebroadcasts off the air. My younger brother Stephen and I were incensed. Our youngest brother Jeffrey hadn’t been born yet, but I’m sure he was furious in utero. The Saturday morning following, Stephen and I came marching downstairs and went right to the set of desks our parents had set up for us in the living room. My mom asked what we were doing. Stephen told my mother, in no uncertain terms, that he’d decided I was going to write a letter to MPT and make them turn Lassie back on. Stephen was the spokesman and idea man, even at three, so I deferred to him.
We fumed about Lassie’s removal. We were shaking with anger. It was outrageous. I excused myself and went to scream in another room for a moment. Who did these people think they were?! I was determined to let them have it.*
Even from an early age, my parents imbued in us the knowledge that although life wasn’t just, we could always do something about it. We lived, the soon-to-be five of us, in a big house in the middle of a broken-down neighborhood in West Baltimore, lassoed by red-lining and crippled by the drug trade. My parents’ pleas to elected officials and city agencies, about everything from broken streetlights to increased police presence near open-air drug markets, were constant. Sometimes they got a response, sometimes they didn’t. But they were relentless because they were trying to create the world that they wanted their children to live in. At six, I saw the discontinuation of Lassie as a perhaps less urgent injustice but an injustice nonetheless. I assumed my parents’ mantle and set about to make the world I wanted: a world containing a highly communicative collie with an impressive sense of urgency. At Stephen’s prompting, I wrote a strongly worded letter to MPT on that beige paper with the big blue lines that they give you in first grade. My mother mailed it and we waited. I remember going to the television the next day, turning it on, and being thunderstruck that they were still playing whatever trash they’d replaced Lassie with. “Haven’t you received my letter?!” I bellowed, as I threw a plastic plate filled with plastic food against the wall of our playhouse. “What is this world coming to?”
Eventually, MPT sent us a couple of tchotchkes for our trouble, among them a mug with Disney characters on it. I unwrapped it and poured myself a juice, shaking with indignation. If this was a parable, I guess the lesson would be that life isn’t fair but if you complain sometimes you get free things. Useful.
For much of my childhood, the only television channel we were allowed to watch was MPT, so Lassie (RIP), Mr. Rogers, and Sesame Street were in heavy rotation. This was fine with me, especially considering Mr. Rogers was home to the original dramatic queen Lady Elaine Fairchilde, the fearsome, overly rouged, cardigan-wearing antagonist of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. I was obsessed with her, with her feckless but fangless villainy, with her catchphrase “Toots!”, with her all-business dirty-blond bob. (Lady Elaine would always like to speak with the manager.) And, although I was a very nice child, I absolutely loved the contempt with which Lady Elaine Fairchilde viewed literally everyone else. Her misanthropy was electrifying. To this day I am amazed that someone as chill and Presbyterian as Fred Rogers created someone as over-the-top fabulous as Lady Elaine. She has a royal title and she is constantly in feuds with her brother; she’s essentially a reality star. And like the most successful reality stars, Lady Elaine Fairchilde is the gay icon we need and want. She has all the hallmarks of gay iconography, eighties edition: an old-timey name, frequent appearances in musicals despite a lack of apparent singing ability, eyebrows, no time to date because she is too busy plotting drama, hates people. Why is there not a Lady Elaine float at every Pride? Why can’t I buy a bedazzled tank top that says “TOOTS!” to wear to the beach? Where is the justice in this world?!
I didn’t have as complex a read of Lady Elaine as a child. I just knew that this queen was extra as hell and I was living for every terse line reading. I would frequently turn from a television playing Mr. Rogers and say to an empty room, “I can’t wait until Patricia Clarkson and Sarah Paulson play her at different stages in her life in a biopic that I am currently writing.”
One of my favorite Lady Elaine moments also spawned one of our household’s favorite catchphrases. It came from the episode titled “Mr. Rogers Makes an Opera.” Oh, by the way, because he was relentless in his pursuit of eccentricity, Mr. Rogers cast all of the puppets in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe as characters in an opera that would form the basis of many future homosexual personalities. I really want to tell you, from memory, the in-depth plot of the opera Windstorm in Bubbleland, because, honey, it will blow your wig back. But it would take too long because every single detail is essential. Put this book down right now and google it and then come back. Wait, first grab a snack, then come back. You gotta eat, Toots.
Suffice it to say, Lady Elaine played Hildegarde Hummingbird, a resident of a burg called Bubbleland who sensed that there was trouble on the horizon that would threaten the primary feature of the landscape—bubbles. No one believed her. In fact, they sang a whole song called “There’s Never Any Trouble Here in Bubbleland,” which is the kind of petty, extra shit I live for.
There’s a whole lot that happens—an evil executive who hates the environment reveals himself to be a wind monster! The dramatic reveal is accompanied by a costume change into a silver caftan! It’s EVERYTHING!—but the thing that I was most affected by was the idea that Lady Elaine, despite her eccentric, sometimes antisocial ways, was not the villain. She was the only resident of Bubbleland who saw its weaknesses and therefore the only resident who could save it from destruction.