Glee 1.05&6

[hazelk]

I didn’t discover fandom until about ¾ the way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s first run. Before Buffy my main fandom was old Hollywood movies, especially musicals and before that it was books. Say you like musicals and often the first thing people seem to think of are stage shows but when I say it I’m really just talking old school film musicals, the ones with happy endings however ridiculous the plots. With virtuoso tap dancing and songs that were already hits back in the day. Those movies are like family, I could sit stone-faced through the greatest performance of Wicked or Les Miz but find the good in the crappiest RKO or MGM non-classic.


I know Glee has its faults but it’s still like coming home. Plus this weeks episode was utterly hilarious and a Bechdel triple threat to boot. Last week’s jumped through all kinds of cheese hoops to service its guest star but what a star! Kristen Chenoweth played a musical comedy drunk finding unlikely redemption. It was utterly unbelievable but then she opened her mouth and tentatively began to sing “Maybe This Time.” The accompaniment rises, the lights go down, the spotlight comes on. It’s that inevitable transition from the mundane that I love most. The unreal that makes it all real. That and virtuoso dancing which hasn’t really been Glee’s thing, it’s been a singers’ show until this week. Mighty Harry Shum! I’m home.

Comments

[hazelk]

Things have probably changed since the seventies, I think schools run after school clubs now but apart from the sporty people in my day most of the kids went home as soon as school finished.

The days are different - in the UK school is a 9-3.30 thing so there aren't vast acres of time to fill before parents come home from work. Schools are smaller, there's not the critical mass for a lot of these things. There's also not the competitive infrastructure, no sectionals/regionals or nationals to work towards. People did do drama and in the 6th form (16-18) we did have occasional 'creative' assemblies organised by students. One of the stars went on to have a half decent career (Rupert Graves). But the school didn't push it and for most people there wasn't any incentive beyond the joy of it - extracurricular activities don't count for much in university applications in most subjects.

[thirdblindmouse]

Yeah, extracurriculars do count toward college here, and sometimes there's pressure on teachers to oversee clubs. Maybe teachers are less overworked in the UK...

Schools are smaller, there's not the critical mass for a lot of these things.

Afterschool programs in the Boston area are city- but not school-specific, even when there are multiple programs. Similarly, the schools don't have individual instrument teachers, but there are teachers who go around from school to school during the week.

Looking back at my childhood, I didn't have a lot of unstructured time, unless you count the weeks in between summer camp sessions when I would wander the halls of my mother's workplace. I remember one year when my summer job expired a week and a half before school started, and to fill the time I ended up watching roughly 5 movies a day (no, really) from the library. Then after I dropped out of college, I marathoned TV series every day until I found a job. I guess I never learned how to sanely structure my free time. ;P

[hazelk]

I remember lots of practice with unstructured time but I don't know if it helped. I do think London schools are different, there's so much going on in the city people think it's normal. In the small seaside town I grew up in nothing much going on was like the default state of existence. Even so TV American High Schools always look orders of magnitude more structured than anything here. Homecomings and Proms and marching bands and May Queens. Cheerleaders and Jocks. Sure, I remember hierarchies and tribal affiliations but it was much fuzzier and less global. My brother was a rugby player but only other rugby players respected that.

[thirdblindmouse]

My brother was a rugby player but only other rugby players respected that.

Heh. At my high school, only other rugby players (not that we had rugby) would have known that. (Funny story: at one point the soccer coach tried to bribe her calculus students with extra credit to attend her team's home games, because it embarrassed her players that the visiting teams always had more supporters in the stands.) I am of course quite aware that whatever my tiny high school was, it was not typical. We did have a clear separate-but-equal division between the geeks and the non-geeks (with a few ambivalent individuals), but who among us had time (let alone motive) to care about or interfere with the Other Group?

I don't know whether I'm more upset by the idea that TV American High Schools do or do not resemble many American (suburban?) high schools, but either way, the setting bugs me.