“This is Robert. He's going to Harvard.”
“This is Suzy. She's going to the bathroom.”
Rita Sue herself is headed for Princeton in the fall, an institution worthy of a high school valedictorian. Robert is Rita’s prom date and Suzy is Ted’s. None of these four characters are anything close to being major; they show up for the prom and then disappear. This little exchange is worthy of note, however, because—arguably, perhaps—it ends with the single greatest line of dialogue on the entire book. (Again, that is certainly arguable.) One admits Ted’s quick wit and willingness to cut the seemingly snooty smartest girl in school down to size without the expenditure of much effort or venom. His reply gets the job the done.
The exchange is also notable because just before it takes place, the reader learns that Ted had been amusing himself all year by having learned the secret to getting an outside phone line while inside the chemistry lab and exploiting this secret knowledge simply by calling random long-distance numbers and inquiring of whomever picked up the phone on the other line about the state of the weather. One wishes Ted had been more than just a friend of a friend the narrator barely knows.
“First Santa cuts Rudolph from the reindeer team ‘cause he's handicapped, he's got this electronic nose, right, and the next thing you know, everyone's down on Rudolph…So Rudolph runs away and hooks up with the misfits, who are completely excellent, but he has to leave their island because of the Abominable Snowman…after putting Rudolph through all this crap, Santa has the gall to go back to him and beg him to guide the sleigh, because it's foggy out, and all of a sudden the electronic nose is this big bonus item.”
Ed Kelso is a conundrum. A talented guitarist who wastes that ability learning Zeppelin licks. Overweight and too shy to talk to girls, he has a habit of falling in love at first sight with girls he’ll never actually meet. A guy whose idea of a good way to get himself out of the dumps is to get drunk and go bust some windows and yet also one of the few people his age to actually get the fascist message delivered every holiday season dressed up as a feel-good Christmas story about being kind to the misfits of the world. (In fact, some people grow up to become adults without ever realizing what is really going on between Santa and Rudolph.) If the narrator had dared to invited Ted and Ed along on a totally excellent adventure, the book might well have become a classic statement about the 1970’s.
On TV, Mr. Brady lectured his boys on tolerance of the opposite sex. Girls are different from us, he said. We have to learn to respect and love them for who they are, as difficult as that might be. In another room, Mrs. Brady told the girls the same thing about boys.
One thing that someone who did not live through the 1970’s needs to understand: although it certainly wasn’t true in fact, it often seemed as though The Brady Bunch was permanently showing on TV. New episodes aired Friday night while reruns were a staple of afternoon TV. This was true of many shows enjoying syndication heaven, but there was some that seemed more pervasive than others. During the afternoon between when school let out and prime-time began, it could sometimes seem as if the only shows ever produced in bulk were the Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeannie and Hogan’s Heroes. The text reflects an era when familiar television shows became the background noise to life. References are made to Starsky and his car, the Fonz, the Twilight Zone and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. For those who grew up then, this will create nostalgia. For younger readers, it serves as imagery which lends certain scenes a texture that would be missing had they taken place ten years earlier or ten years later.
