The-Really-Bad-Made-For-TV-Movie

It was raining, and it started raining after I had battled with myself to put my sneakers on, grab the Ipod newly loaded with Pretender songs, and brave the boardwalk with the Saturday yahoos…so, turned around, did the stationary bike for awhile and gave myself a huge headache. I get these tremendously pounding, nausea producing headaches that require some sort of medication depending on the intensity, propping up on pillows, or for really bad ones, pacing, and putting something mindless on the tube until the pain becomes bearable. So, I came upon a little golf movie with Robert Urich, rest his soul, and Meredith Baxter, no longer Birney, called “Miracle on the 17th Green.” And I let it wash over me in all its cheesy splendor…It’s amazing how you can almost hear the pitch for this movie – “It’s got everything: the Rocky formula, older man wants to join the senior Pro tour, gets fired from his advertising job, wife feeling neglected and putting all her energy into a Catholic day care center filled with rascals who have no daddies or good shoes…a funny (their words) priest who hears a confession in a lavatory stall (I think my head is hurting more now), a cigar smoking African American buddy who doesn’t qualify for the tour but agrees to caddy Urich when he does, and many, many, many Christmas scenes, one of which includes Urich in a Santa suit charming the poor unfortunate rascals. When you ask yourself, “Who watches this stuff?” that would be me and anyone whose head hurts so much that they can visualize their basal ganglia exploding.

The bottomless pit of bad TV is somehow reassuring to me. It helps me feel superior to the lowest common denominator of the American population and gives me hope I might write something that would appeal to even a small portion of that population. I’m hoping L calls soon to go to dinner because I’m starving and I really don’t want to get involved in the next offering from Lifetime, “She Waited a Month to Schedule Her Mammogram” or some other compelling melodrama.

Update on the painters: The rain, no painters.