It’s a special post-Independence Day edition of the PopWatch Confessional, because I’m off like a dirty shirt for the rest of the week. In honor of our ongoing discussion about what it means to be a geek, I thought we could all share the moments that first clued us in — or should’ve — that we’d become general pop-culture junkies. I share mine; you share yours.
• My freshman year biology teacher encouraged the class to "think outside the box" for our year-end projects. You know, don’t just paste some images of the animal she assigns you onto a poster. I wrote a rap about the Cooper’s Hawk to the B-side instrumental of "Parents Just Don’t Understand." I recorded it by holding my boom box up to the record player, and then lip-synced it in front of the class, with three of my friends reluctantly performing as my backup dancers. (Yeah, I’m only still in touch with one of them.)
• During my junior year of high school, I would watch Life Goes On (starring Chad Lowe and Kellie Martin, pictured) with my friend Mark over the telephone. We would only talk during commercials. Luckily for my parents, it was a local call.
• I started writing for Syracuse University’s Daily Orange student newspaper as soon as I stepped on campus. At first I wrote for the news department: a two-part series on hate crimes here, a four-part series on the state of women at SU there. Then one day, I walked down the hall to the Lifestyle office and got assigned a piece on college students who plan their schedules around their favorite soaps. (One of the students I interviewed, incidentally, was Guiding Light devotee James LaRosa, who would go on to to write CBS’ seminal Spring Break Shark Attack.) I was home.
Let’s see, first moment.
I think it was when I noticed that very few people were interested in listening to either volume of the Space Ghost Coast to Coast soundtrack while I adored and quoted it regularly.
SHOUT OUT FOR THE D.O.!
Almost 99% of my crushes growing up were fictional pop-culture characters. My first crush was Judy Jetson. I was so in love with her, and I would tell everyone all the time that I was going to marry her. What’s interesting is that most people complained to me that she had white hair. As if it’s perfectly acceptable to have a crush on a cartoon character! I grew out of that phase obviously. I mean really – who was I kidding? I’m gay – I was clearly more interested in Aladdin.
This one’s simple. When I was 11, thanks to a family insider we were given a backstage tour of the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank. We got to meet a couple of the animators, watch them edit a movie, wander through a couple of sets and the prop house, and have lunch in the commissary. I’ve been hooked ever since.
Here’s geek for you: I actually am one of those girls who plans my class schedule around my soaps. But fortunately, I discovered DVR and this is a problem no more. I’m a General Hospital girl and I defend soap operas so much that I wrote a column in the entertainment section of my campus newspaper defending them and declaring my love for them. It wasn’t until I saw my headshot next to the article the day it ran that I realized I had just exposed myself to the entire campus. But after I won an award for it I wasn’t so embarrassed anymore.
I think when I first realized it was when the only other people I could find that liked Pokemon when I was in high school were a couple of really annoying guys. So I had to befriend a couple of girls and convert them to anime fangirls like me instead!
And I’ll never forget a guy in one of my classes, commenting on the fact that I wore a Pokemon shirt (What? I was a budding anime fan and there was so little anime available at the time!!). He said something about how it was just a fad and it would be gone in a year. I told him he was wrong. I remember this because that boy killed himself that year. And Pokemon, while not at the height of popularity it was back when I was in high school, is still going on.
In junior high, I wrote an essay about how everything I would need to know in life I could learn from tv…pretty sad now that i look back. But I guess it’s genetic – my mom once told me that, as a young girl, she wanted to be a nun…until someone told her that nuns couldn’t watch tv. Again, sad.
No Brand Woman: You will be happy to know that in my house, it’s all Pokemon ALL THE TIME! My two boys are 6 and 9 and they, and all their friends, are completely obesessed with Pokemon. They love the new Diamond and Pearl shows and take their Pokedexes and stuffed Pokemon with them wherever they go!
I first noticed I was a pop culture geek when my sister was amazed that I knew all the words to the 227 theme song. I didn’t realize there was a place where people didn’t know the words to the shows they watched. “I mean no place child!”
I was such an X-files geek that I insisted one of my senior pics be taken with me and all of my memorabilia.
I was such an X-files geek that I insisted one of my senior pics be taken with me and all of my memorabilia.
I won first place in a James Bond trivia contest my the summer after sophomore year of college (Grand prize was a trip, my prize was a free autographed copy of the new James Bond novel in hardcopy.)
This came after I had sat through every movie and read all the Ian Fleming novels, and after I had written a 12 page paper for my history class that discussed James Bond’s first movies in the context of Cold War popular culture (got an A-, thankyouverymuch).
At that point, it hit me that I might be a bit more into pop culture than the average bear.
Incidentally, that was the same year I started reading EW…
7th grade. We had to do a biography book report. I chose Steven Spielberg. Now, I never really enjoyed biographies, but I really had a good time with this one. I was actually interested in his life and movie making. I had to present this in front of the class and it was one of the only speeches I’ve ever done without shaking the entire time. I knew something hit home. Bonus points!: I got to show a clip of Jurassic Park as an example!
In college, I was known for being able to recite the opening theme to Quantum Leap: “Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime…” Trust me, I was a hit at parties.
Apparently my love of ’80s music has made me an afficionado. Whenever anyone I know can’t identify a band or song they’re listening to on the radio, they call me. And frighteningly enough, I haven’t been stumped more than a few times. I must be on their speed dial as ’80s Freakazoid’.