Into That Good Night

The Brown prompted me to watch Roseanne last night as I was headed to bed. It happened to be both parts of the final episode on TV Land. I think Roseanne deserves as much credit for those last ten minutes of her sitcom as anyone who has ever done anything in television. Thinking about it gives me goose bumps and watching it always makes me cry.

“Everyone wonders where creative people get their inspiration. Actually, I've found it's all around you. Take Leon for instance... Leon is not really as cool as I made him. He's the only gay guy I know who belongs to the Elk's Club... Then there's Scott. He really is a probate lawyer I met about a year ago and introduced to Leon. I guess I didn't get too creative there... A lot of kids have called my son a nerd but, as I told him, they called Steven Spielberg a nerd too. A lot of times nerds are really artists who just listen to the beat of a different drum... My mom came from a generation where women were supposed to be submissive about everything. I never bought into that, and I wish mom hadn't either. I wish she had made different choices. So I think that's why I made her gay. I wanted her to have some sense of herself as a woman... Oh yeah, and she's nuts... My sister, in real life, unlike my mother, is gay. She always told me she was gay, but for some reason, I always pictured her with a man. She's been my rock, and I would not have made it this far without her. I guess Nancy's kind of my hero too... Cause she got out of a terrible marriage and found a great spiritual strength. I don't know what happened to that husband of hers but in my book I sent him into outer space... When Becky brought David home a few years ago I thought, "This is wrong!" He was much more Darlene's type... When Darlene met Mark, I thought he went better with Becky... I guess I was wrong. But I still think they'd be more compatible the other way around. So in my writing, I did what any good mother would do. I fixed it...

“I lost Dan last year when he had his heart attack. He's still the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I think about before I go to sleep. I miss him... Dan and I always felt that it was our responsibility as parents to improve the lives of our children by 50% over our own. And we did. We didn't hit our children as we were hit, we didn't demand their unquestioning silence, and we didn't teach our daughters to sacrifice more than our sons. As a modern wife, I walked a tight rope between tradition and progress, and usually, I failed, by one outsider's standards or another's. But I figured out that neither winning nor losing count for women like they do for men. We women are the one's who transform everything we touch. And nothing on earth is higher than that. My writing's really what got me through the last year after Dan died. I mean at first I felt so betrayed as if he had left me for another women. When you're a blue-collar woman and your husband dies it takes away your whole sense of security. So I began writing about having all the money in the world and I imagined myself going to spas and swanky New York parties just like the people on TV, where nobody has any real problems and everything's solved within 30 minutes. I tried to imagine myself as Mary Richards, Jeannie, That Girl. But I was so angry I was more like a female Steven Segal wanting to fight the whole world. For while I lost myself in food and a depression so deep that I couldn't even get out of bed till I saw that my family needed me to pull through so that they could pull through. One day, I actually imagined being with another man. But then I felt so guilty I had to pretend it was for some altruistic reason. And then Darlene had the baby, and it almost died. I snapped out of the mourning immediately, and all of my life energy turned into choosing life. In choosing life, I realized that my dreams of being a writer wouldn't just come true; I had to do the work. And as I wrote about my life, I relived it, and whatever I didn't like, I rearranged. I made a commitment to finish my story even if I had to write in the basement in the middle of the night while everyone else was asleep. But the more I wrote, the more I understood myself and why I had made the choices I made, and that was the real jackpot. I learned that dreams don't work without action; I learned that no one could stop me but me. I learned that love is stronger than hate. And most important, I learned that God does exist. He and/or She is right inside you, underneath the pain, the sorrow, and the shame. I think I'll be a lot better now that this book is done.”

Those words destroy me every time; especially when she gets to “I lost Dan…” The image of her alone watching TV at the end of a long day is so poignant in that context. Then she had the nerve to hire Phoebe Snow to sing the theme song over the closing credits.

“If what doesn't kill us is making us stronger,
We're gonna last longer
Than that greatest wall in China
Or that rabbit with the drum
If there's one thing that I've learned
While waiting for my turn,
It's that in each life some rain falls
But you also get some sun
And we'll make out better than okay
Hear what I say
Hey, any day”

Beautiful. And then the quote by the real Lawrence of Arabia,

"Those who dream by night, in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible."