Meta: Looking back on Cousin Geri itself
Although this blog is about The Facts of Life, i.e., it is not about me, sometimes my life affects the blog. And, of course, I only do the blog because the show affects my life. What I’m trying to say is that I apologize for my posting schedule being somewhat irregular over the past couple of weeks. I’ve been traveling and it’s not always easy for me to blog on the road. Now it’s spring break, though, and I’ve got some down time in my new home in Colorado.
I messed with the design of the blog a little. I don’t really know what I’m doing, so I’m at the mercy of blogger’s templates for now; I’m learning. I also successfully set up cousingeri.com, which I’ve owned for a couple of months, to redirect to the blog. I’m moving up in the world!
As I proceed through my tween years as a blogger, It’s fun to look back on my early posts. I started this blog before the complete series was released on DVD, so all I had to rely on were the seasons 1-5 DVDs I already had and my own memory.
As disturbingly good as my memory is regarding this show, I, too, made some mistakes. Now that I’ve had the entire series for a couple of months and have watched almost all of it (I’m still taking it slowly to draw out the enjoyment as long as possible), I’ve realized that – enjoy these three words, because they’re not said very often – I was wrong.
I’ve already confessed to the fact that I’d been mentally misspelling Lisa Whelchel’s name for 35 years. In addition, I’ve learned that in my review of all the girls’ boyfriends, I left out part of Tootie’s story. I had correctly remembered that she ended up engaged to Jeff, whom she met during season five. But I forgot that they broke up at the end of the episode where she considered sleeping with him! There’s an episode in season seven where all the girls run into old boyfriends, and Tootie reunites with Jeff then.
In addition, there’s an episode in season eight where Tootie dates a boy named Rudy. I want to snicker at “Tootie and Rudy,” but as a Vikki in a relationship with a Victor, I’m not really allowed to. Anyway, the episode is about Tootie and Rudy planning to have sex and Beverly Ann being concerned about it but not being taken seriously because she’s too new. It’s really quite scandalous. And that also means that Tootie came close twice before Natalie legendarily lost her virginity.
In that same blog post, I correctly remembered that Natalie got plenty of dudes, but I actually underestimated the number of boyfriends she had. I could, and likely will one of these days, make a spreadsheet of the boys that each girl dated, and I bet Natalie will have more rows than anyone else.
BUT, Natalie totally got a bunch of bad shit happening to her too. She was the victim of an attempted sexual assault, she caught her dad having an affair, AND THEN her father died a couple of seasons later. Ever since I realized that Jo is kind of a bitch as well as a felon, I’ve been thinking that Natalie might actually be my favorite character. Natalie was also the most consistently politically active.
It is fascinating to re-watch a show that shaped my life this much through necessarily different eyes. I can come up with all sorts of explanations of why I remember specific moments of particular episodes (like Rick asking Jo to marry him by sending a dude in a chicken suit), while there are other episodes that I don’t remember at all. I’d make a great thesis for a psychology graduate student.
Finally, in my very first post, I said that one of my goals was to unite a community to somehow figure out how to get the rest of the series on DVD. And now I have the whole series. I’m sure I had nothing to do with the release, but the timing is quite delightful.
My copyright professor theorized that the later seasons weren’t able to be released for a while because of copyright issues with the music (apparently that’s pretty common). He may be right; season six does have a lot more music going on than the show did previously. That was part of its pivotal season six transition into a full-on ’80s show. In addition, there are songs in the Cruisin’ episode which might have been subject to licensing for distribution.
The cool thing is that my professor and I actually talked about that; moreover, that I have managed to make this thing a serious enough part of my life that I can mention it to federal judges with a straight face (Judge Beverly Martin of the 11th Circuit thought it was cool. The old white men thought it was weird).
So, thank you for joining me on this journey. Plans for the future include organizing the site better, by, e.g., indexing the recaps and labeling my posts. I will continue to recap episodes, though I haven’t decided if I’m going to keep doing it as my fancy strikes or whether I’m going to start recapping systematically, in episode order. I welcome any feedback or suggestions from my readers!
