Essay: ‘Pride and Prejudice’ Comes Before the Fall (Part 1)

October 20, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

My first New York job made me want to marry a millionaire

This is the next post in an essay collection tentatively titled “Ten Movies that Shook My World”

On one Friday the 13th, even the divine Miss Elizabeth Bennet as played by Greer Garson could not salvage a doomed first big job in New York City

New York City awoke bitterly cold on Friday, December 13th, rolled over and hit snooze. I was sprinting for the E train when the first leather button popped off my corduroy wrap skirt en route to the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. I didn’t see it as an omen. But by mid-afternoon, when I was wrestling with my panty hose in a freezing bathroom stall, first peeing and then hiding, I realized I should have been more superstitious.

“Pitiful,” I grumbled to myself, both because I hated having to wear panty hose and because it was gradually dawning on me that I was a complete failure at my first big-league job in New York City. It was my ‘Devil Wears Prada’ moment before the book or the movie even existed.

Interrupting my pity party was the sound that chilled me like Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart: the determined progress of the director’s pumps in the hall. I prayed that the urgent cadence of Italian heels on concrete would pass the Women’s Room on the way to the Public Affairs Office. [Read more…]

Dark Shadows in Bright Suburbs: Why I Grew up Watching ‘Dark Shadows’

May 20, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Dark Shadows, Johnny Depp, Barnabus Collins

Barnabus Collins: He bites; he scores (Everett Collection)

In seventh grade, I had a routine: go to my friend Katy’s house, do our advanced math homework, play Yahtzee and watch “Dark Shadows.” After the credits, I would run the three blocks to my suburban San Diego cul de sac under the bright Southern California sun in abject terror, unaffected by the sound of the marching band practicing on the football field. The next day, I’d do it again. Algebra. Barnabas. Terror. Supper. “Laugh in” and “All in the Family.”

I had been too young in 1966 to watch from the beginning, so cracking the giant casket of DVD’s of the complete original series that ran from 1966 to 1971 had the feeling of opening an old yearbook, or a photograph album. Just the spooky theme music and the image of the dark waves crashing on the Maine coast, inspired memories of math homework and flat-out fright. When the front door of Collinwood opened, it was a happy homecoming to that formal black-and-white foyer that was straight out of a Hammer horror set.

From the first episode, with the foreboding voiceover spoken by the orphan Victoria, I slipped into the warm bath of the past: the glacial pace of a soap opera that stretched daily from Monday through Friday, parsing out some thrills, letting slip a cookie fortune’s worth of new information, building to that end-of-week revelation that would leave the viewer breathless for Monday. At the end of each episode, there’s often a tease for “The Dating Game,” or that ‘new’ show “The Newlywed Game.”

But, more than nostalgia, the show holds up. It has its surprises — a scene at the local pub bursts into wild sixties frug dancing that could come out of a beach party movie. The characters drink and spew familial bile that goes back decades, if not centuries. A woman cries in the night, inconsolable. Portraits stare down from the formal drawing room walls with bad intent. It’s completely addicting. And I haven’t even gotten to my favorite part yet — the portals in the house between the past and present that allowed the actors to play the dual roles so beloved by more mainstream soaps.

I loved the series when I was young because it showed a world where the ocean wasn’t the surfer paradise of the Pacific, but the brooding, relentless, frigid Atlantic. That unforgiving waves crashing on a rocky coast were where you’d land if you jumped off the cliff. And characters were always standing on that precipice, contemplating bleakness, or discussing in urgent whispers how they want to get out of Collinwood and contemplate jumping themselves. Why had all those governesses leapt from that spot to their doom in the past?

The irony was that, as an oddball teen who shunned the sun, I had those same feelings of foreboding, and the desire to escape a suffocating home, without the external justification. Nothing could have been less scary than those repetitive sunny seventy degree days, my ranch house with the basketball hoop hammered over the garage, the breakfast nook where we ate our meals regularly at 5:30 p.m. while the Vietnam War appeared in nightly installments on the evening news.

I think that was part of the reason that for me, and possibly for director Tim Burton who lived two hours north in land-locked Burbank, the show had such a tremendous appeal and resonance. Wholesome suburbia struck me as so much scarier, and the gloomy, death-obsessed supernatural soap, “Dark Shadows,” provided release.

This essay original appeared on Yahoo! Movies

Desperate Househusband: in honor of the publication of Greg Olear’s Fathermucker

September 9, 2011 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Desperate Househusband

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Thelma Adams

In which Thelma Adams considers the indelicate balance of parenting in a two-career, two-child, too-opinionated household.

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HYDE PARK, NEW YORK-

I can tell you the last straw: I stuffed my 12-year-old son’s chicken pot pie in the garbage disposal when my husband wasn’t looking. The next thing the kids and I knew, Dad was raging like a ’50’s housewife about how he was done cooking dinner every night. “Let them eat Cocoa Puffs,” he said. In theory, that’s a plus from the kids’ POV, but we knew the man in the apron with spatula raised well enough to catch his dis: “Let their teeth rot.”

We had set Dad off, and it was my maternal duty to reel him back and tighten the apron strings around his middle. Granted, the old man had a point. He was tired of the kids rejecting his meals, of cooking multiple dinners, of my eight-year-old daughter’s tears at the prospect of beef stew. He was ticked at not knowing if we’d be home for dinner, or at the last minute after soccer practice pull into the McDonald’s, or join friends at the Fireside BBQ. The only apparent difference between him and our mothers was that he was dressed like Stanley Kowalski, not Donna Reed.

Read the rest of the essay on Greg Olear’s Fathermucker site.

Seeing in the Dark: A Blackout Leads to an Epiphany

February 28, 2011 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Our House by Ryan Dorsett

(October 2007, O, The Oprah Magazine)

Never mind the frozen computers and the rapidly thawing food. When the lights go out, you can find wonder, unexpected clarity, even joy.

Blackouts have their uses. During the New York City blackout of 2003, on the 8.2-mile walk from my midtown Manhattan office to my Brooklyn brownstone (a trek that included two Mister Softee ice cream stops and the crossing of one immense bridge), I had four unmapped hours to take stock of where I stood at 44 and spontaneously consider how my life needed changing.

When I was in my 20s and single, I’d had similar moments in airplanes flying coast-to-coast. On either end of the journey, life flowed in all its chaos and complexity, its conflicting desires and demands. But airborne, in the pause between departure and destination, strapped in beside strangers, I often found myself contemplating my life as a whole and reaching big decisions about it.

After the lights went out in New York, as I headed south in velvet slippers I’d bought months earlier in Chinatown, my high heels tucked into a bag slung over my shoulder, I walked the same streets I’d come to, as a young woman, from California. I passed the Strand bookstore, the Little Italy apartment where a friend had shared a bathroom wall with the gangster John Gotti, the bar where my husband, Ranald, and I floated the brilliant autumn day we declared our love for each other. I passed Beth Israel Medical Center, where I’d delivered Elizabeth (Trevor, arriving early during the blizzard of 1996, hadn’t made it out of Brooklyn). [Read more…]