Dear American High posters:
I sincerely apologize for the lateness of this recap, but I believe you're all fully aware of my continuous problems with my VCR. If it's any consolation, I will be shooting it with poison arrows immediately after taping tonight's episodes.Dear PBS:
Um, whatever happened to repeating the episodes fourteen times between new airings? I was pretty much all over that. I have fond memories of the early days when I could accidentally screw up a show taping (and believe me, it was always an accident -- perhaps an alcohol-fueled accident, but an accident nonetheless) and rest easy knowing that the missed episode would appear on my screen no fewer than three hundred times over the week. You disappoint me, PBS. Please return my subscription of ten dollars immediately.Dear Sars:
Please don't fire my ass.Dear Symphonic Electronic Products:
Your VCR sucks corn nuts.
Ahem.
And now a word about Spring Break:
It's stupid. It's retarded. It's lame. It's infantile. A bunch of semi-emotionally-backward children head down to sunny lands for a heavy dose of sand, surf, and spillage. Wow. That sounds SO entertaining. Yeah, I want my parents to drop a couple paychecks on an unsupervised trip to Daytona so some Neanderthal can snort Cuervo Gold off my exposed belly. Yeah. I'd rather have natural childbirth. Twice. In ten minutes. With no epidural. And a guy named Rocco giving me multiple nose piercings. WITH A DULL ICE PICK.
All righty.
As we come out of the white-on-black opener, some mother is trying to lecture her daughter on the perils of spring break festivities. We learn later that this is Shanna and her mother, but I'll just save us the time and emotional breakdown and tell you now: this is Shanna. And her mother. "I hope that if you do drink, and you do get drunk," her mother says, "you get so sick that you'll never do it again." Wow. Did she get that from Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care? That is damn fine advice. Note to self: tell future children to get extremely wasted as much as possible in the hopes that they will eventually keel over on the bathroom floor with their faces shoved into a toilet full of puke in an effort to educate them on the evils of alcohol. That reminds me. Where's my Amstel?
Hey. Cheerleaders. That reminds me. Where's my gun? Suzy comes onscreen and says that she wants to interview some of the popular people to find out what life is like for them. Empty? Careless? Irrelevant? Asinine? I'm just guessing. Other students come onscreen and talk about cliques and being popular or not popular, and then some kid says something about how he's not a geek or a popular person but just a band person, which segues nicely into the geeks, erm, I mean "band members" convening in the rehearsal room with their various instruments. No, not THOSE instruments. The ones that make music. Dirty birds.
Scott says that everyone loves being in band because they're a group of kids who love making music and they've built a family around that fact. Yeah, a family of geeks. Dammit. There I go again. Pigeonholing a group of people based on my distant high-school biases. Bad me. Especially bad considering that I once played the flute in band. Shut up. No. I mean it. SHUT UP.
Then the kids from Fame are on the band bus and their band teacher tells them that the trip to China is still on. China? They're going to China? The hell? I went to fucking Bloomington with the theatre group. That's it. BLOOMINGTON. As in ILLINOIS. What a rip-off. I should have transferred to HPHS. Cheap Lake Forest bastards.
Kaytee's all excited about the trip. "I'm goin' to China with my band friends!" she crows. "I'm gonna...read books on the plane and...see the Great Wall!" In that order.
Scott explains that their band leader, Dr. Hiles, has been putting his heart and soul into this band trip, which is why he's been a mite cranky of late. "This is basically his life right now," says Scott. Dr. Hiles looks kind of like a football coach gone wrong. He says in an interview that there's something about being in the band group that the kids see as being very special. "It's the striving for the perfection that I think those kids feel," he says while driving his reasonably priced car down a desolate highway. "At least, I hope they do." Yeah. Dr. Hiles is counting on this China trip. He's counting on it to give him meaning in his life. His sad little life. Wow. I am rife with bitterness tonight, aren't I?
And now on to the part of the show that makes me want to claw at the screen until my fingers are just bloody stubs.
"The Group of 21," says Abalone, "we're probably known as one of the more popular groups." She says this in a voice-over while sitting at a table with six other girls who not only have the exact same haircut as Abalone, but also the same hair color, the same makeup, AND the same outfits on. Sandy blunt-cut blonde hair, frosted lipstick, pale eye shadow, black t-shirt, black pants, black coats. Which one's Abalone? Which one of us cares? Not me, that's for sure.