Tod Goldberg

Letters to Parade: 3rd Person Same As The 1st Unreal Person

All I can figure is that the world has gone topsy turvy. How else to explain certain world events? Michael Jackson moonwalks from this mortal coil. John Hughes goes off into the great Some Kind of Wonderful. Parade Magazine runs a feature story for children, "written by" Bill O'Reilly, praising President Obama. (I encourage you to follow the link if only to see the photo of Bill with a veritable United Colors of Benneton collection of America's liberal youth.) It's a startling story of intriguing depth and clarity and rivals only the great work of the late James Brady for its shear level of excellence. I learned a lot about America reading the article and thus was under the impression that perhaps a new morning had dawned at Parade. I turned to Walter Scott's Personality Parade filled with unbridled hope and optimism. If Bill O'Reilly can admit that Obama is actually the duly elected President and not, you know, an Al Quaeda sleeper agent originally born in Burma, well, then anything is possible in this topsy turvy world, right?

And then the oxycontin and the glue I'd huffed finally wore off.

Just to recap for those of you joining the discussion late, Walter Scott is not a real person. Or, well, the Walter Scott who answers questions about world politics, the nature of Jennifer Aniston's affairs and settles bets on whether or not any of the people on Hogan's Heroes were actual Nazis is not a real person. No one named Walter Scott has ever written for Parade. It might as well be called Pink Power Ranger's Personality Parade as the person answering the questions does not exist. Oh, sure, Edward Klein purportedy "writes" the column but I find it impossible to conceive that anyone actually writes the answers to the fucktarded questions, particularly since the majority of the questions are created in house by the Parade staff based on press releases and the availability of Mischa Barton to provide an inspired quote about her sobriety and sanity. So, with all of that being known, I bring to you the following question from one Evelyn Dolly of Kaufman, TX (who, according to Google is an actual person and not the manifestation of a Parade staffer stuck in the Advance Magazine offices late on a Tuesday doing the forced labor of Personality Parade question generation):

Q For years, I’ve tried to find out more about the blue-and-white takeout coffee cup I’ve seen in movies like Men in Black. Could you help me, please?

I'm sure Ms. Dolly is a very nice person, but good christ what the fuck is wrong with a person who spends enough time obsessing about a fucking prop that they finally decide that they must contact Parade? I mean, this is a person who isn't obsessing about a celebrity. This is a person obsessing about a cup. A cup in a movie that came out over a decade ago. This is a person who has pondered the origination of a fucking cup since 1997. Here a few things I've done since 1997:

1. Written nine books, including three good ones.

2. Googled myself 10 million times. (Included in these numbers are the times I Infoseeked myself, too.)

3. Eaten approximately three thousand Brown Sugar Pop Tarts.

4. Cried at least ten times watching My Girl at 4am on HBO.

5. Gotten married, returned several wedding presents for cash. (Note: put the rice cooker on your registry, people.)

6. Read far too many student manuscripts that involved that involved talking dogs.

7. Been screamed at by Ed McMahon.

8. Saw Rick Springfield and Air Supply in concert together.

9. Two words: prostate exam.

10. Sat through Men In Black and Men in Black II and never once pondered the fucking cups.

Surely since Parade has changed the world order with Bill's essay on that nice man in the White House, the mythical -- in this case, literally -- Walter Scott will let Ms. Dolly know that she need some ack right:

A.Glad you asked! Walter Scott, a proud New Yorker, has the answer right in his hand: The cup you saw on Linda Fiorentino’s desk in Men in Black and elsewhere was designed by the Sherri Cup Co. of Kensington, Conn., in the mid-1960s. Made specifically for New York City’s hundreds of Greek coffee shops, this once-ubiquitous artifact is quickly growing scarcer due to the rise of various mega coffee chains.

So, a person who does not exist is now speaking of himself in 3rd person while holding in his nonexistent hand a cup that is notably hard to find, which is a combination of events that just ripped a hole in space. I've tried in the past to figure out why Parade would even bother pretending Walter Scott was a real person and not a loose collective of under paid staffers who must now repay Columbia and NYU student loans by answering the questions they usually make up and decided that by doing so they are allowed to, you know, just make shit up when the spirit moves them (like, say, when Jennifer Aniston's fucking dog was a source for an answer recently) without fear of being branded, you know, fucktards. Nevertheless, I find this shift into 3rd person a sad state of affairs -- will Walter Scott soon respond to everything in 3rd person? -- and wonder if it's only a matter of time before Walt begins to answer questions like your average pro athelete: "Walter Scott thinks it is what it is."

Don't You Forget About Me

John Hughes is dead, which seems inconceivable. I could probably go on for pages and pages about what his films meant to me when I was a teenager, and in fact I did in the anthology Don't You Forget About Me, and even expounded on the points I made in that book in a documentary called, not surprisingly, Don't You Forget About Me, which hasn't been released yet, but has a trailer up now that I'll post below and features all sorts of interesting folks from Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Simple Minds, Kevin Smith, Alan Ruck and everyone else you might want to see talk about John Hughes. Anyway, I went back and read my essay this evening and here's the bit that is perhaps most salient now: 

The problem is that women don’t want to be romantic with someone they consider their shoulder. Eventually, even The Shoulder would break their heart and then where would they turn? I was about as sexy as a chew toy.

This was not a future I wanted. Hell, I don’t think it was a future Jon Cryer wanted – a career of playing the roles Tony Randall got too old for, until, for all intents, he became Tony Randall – and neither of us wanted to be so nebulous sexually that people either thought we were gay or had missed a tremendous opportunity to be so. Not only did I want to eventually get the girl, as Duckie obviously did, I wanted to deserve her as well: If John Hughes ever made a misstep in his writing career (apart, obviously, from Weird Science), it was giving Molly Ringwald’s Andie Walsh to Andrew McCarthy’s Blane McDonnagh at the end of Pretty In Pink. He should have known better: In Sixteen Candles, everyone, even Long Duk Dong, found their perfect somebody, the one person who would love them into celluloid forever. In The Breakfast Club, everyone, even Anthony Michael Hall’s uber-dork Brian, who fell in love with his own words, ended up in the arms of a person who could take them places emotionally or physically or through pawning the diamond earring they were given for a pack of smokes and the gumption to call child protective services. John Hughes established that the marginalized would find their margin, that those truly in love would not go about life in a fit of unrequited yearning, that if you were decent and capable of epiphany, you would be rewarded with your fondest hopes. Adult reasoning suggests that most of the relationships Hughes put in motion were actually destined for bone crushing failure.