4-11 “September Song”
Sorry for the delay in publishing! I’ve been doing a lot of hiking, and I’m just now back in civilization. The Facts girls have also been getting a lot of exercise.
They’ve got Jane Fonda in the cassette player and while Jo and Tootie are having a ball, Blair and Natalie are not enjoying themselves. Every muscle in Blair’s Body hurts, while Natalie is shocked that Jo can still talk, let alone breathe.
Jo chews them out because they’re in their prime being couch potatoes while Mrs. G has been out jogging all the time. Natalie protests that people Mrs. G’s age have to jog to stay young; they are young, so there. Blair intimates that the reason Mrs. Garrett has been jogging is to hang out with Professor Clayton, whom she hooked up with started hanging out with last episode. The girls are divided on whether to be unconditionally supportive of Mrs. G or worried that her new beau is older than she is. Tootie speaks about the allure of older men, which she knows all about, because she just wrote a letter to Rick Springfield. She speaks dreamily of Rick Springfield in another episode that ends up as her opening credits shot for a while. I’m going to have to find that.
Enter the happy scrappy couple. Professor Clayton has an English accent, because English accents are indicia of education, sophistication, and culture.
Natalie is very subtle in trying to tease out Professor Clayton’s age:
“Hi, I’m Natalie. I’m fifteen. How old are you?”
He makes a dumb “name, rank, and serial number” joke in reply, and Mrs. G grossly cracks up over this weak attempt at comedy.
Professor Clayton finally allows it to be known that he’s 70, and the girls express surprise that he can still run. Mrs. G says that he’s been a runner all his life, including marathons, and when Jo asks him how he keeps up, he says, “I rotate my legs every five thousand miles.”
I groan. Mrs. G cracks up. The girls judge.
Tootie informs Mrs. Garrett that “United Parcel Service” delivered her new curtains. UPS being referred to by its full name is as weird as me being referred to by my full name, and I can’t remember whether it was common to do so at the time or if it’s just product placement here. Actually, I’m not sure there was product placement at the time. I remember a time when I believed that you couldn’t use a brand name in a show without paying the brand for the rights to use their product, which is hilarious in retrospect. Layperson understanding of intellectual property law is sort of adorable. If I were forced to go back to legal work, I would try to work in IP. But the law is terrible no matter what area a person works in, and it remains the case that the people who can afford to pay for your work are not the people that you really want to help. In sum: I still don’t want to be a lawyer.
Mrs. G asks Professor Clayton if he’ll help her “hang her new curtains.” Yeah, sure. In a hilarious sign of the times, Professor Clayton asks Mrs. G if there’s a phone there so he can call his answering service.
While Professor Clayton – does this guy even have a first name? – is occupied on the pay phone in the lounge, the girls gently rib Mrs. G for her shrewdness in getting him up to her room (I told you this “hang the curtains” business wasn’t on the up and up). Mrs. G talks about how wonderful a man he is, having taught at Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford and having his books published in seven languages. She’s clearly smitten.
While it’s true that my recent betrayal and divorce bias me against becoming smitten with anyone, I don’t think it’s unfair to caution Mrs. G against deciding that he’s the bestest ever when she’s only known him for a couple of weeks. Natalie is concerned that the fact that he’s taught at so many places means he can’t hold a job. That’s not true – academia takes professors to weird places – but I am concerned about a decorated professor taking a job at a high school. It is entirely possible that he’s just a good dude who cares about secondary education (I had a wonderful high school math teacher who had a Ph.D.), but more evidence is necessary before I can trust him. And any way you slice it, Mrs. G is getting too deep too fast.
Natalie remains the biggest naysayer against their relationship; as the daughter of a doctor, she is concerned about Mrs. G dating someone old enough to be her father. Hmm. I’m confused. He’s 70, and I thought Mrs. G was in her 50s, which is still a substantial gap but not father/daughter kind of gap. In real life, Charlotte Rae was not quite 60 when this episode aired, which makes her not only not young enough to be his daughter, but probably not too young to date him. Is Mrs. G only supposed to be around my age? I don’t know if I’m OK with that, and I’m definitely not OK with the idea of dating a 70 year old at my age. I talked a bit about so-called May/December relationships when I recently talked about the time that Jo’s dad went out with Blair’s friend. My reservations about being involved with someone that old do not include Natalie’s biggest concern, specifically that he’ll have no libido. Heh. Natalie is so amazingly, consistently sex-positive, and I love this consistency in her character so much that I’ll even give her a pass for her gross gender-stereotype about how when men are old, they’re the ones with the headaches.
Upstairs, Mrs. G admires her new curtains, and Professor Clayton says they remind him of the curtains he and his late wife had at their place in Tahiti. Mrs. Garrett says she’s never been, and Prof C suggests that they go together the following summer, because it’s a great place for couples to go, and it could be, in fact, a honeymoon.
Oh hey! Mrs. G’s shock finally gives us Professor Clayton’s first name! It’s Henry. She wisely protests that it’s not a great idea to get engaged to someone she’s only known for three months, and he argues that it doesn’t matter when you “know.” I was with my ex-husband for five and a half years before we got married on my 41st birthday, so apart from a great big “harumph,” I’ll go ahead and keep my mouth shut about that. Mrs. G does insist that she can’t say yes without serious thought, but that doesn’t stop them from making out.
Mrs. G takes the news to her closest confidants, specifically, the four teenage girls she rescued from school expulsion and legal prosecution. They are also surprised, some more pleasantly so than others.
Tootie thinks it’s romantic, and Mrs. G agrees. She wonders how often someone as brilliant and worldly and special as Henry comes along in a lifetime, and this is my biggest concern. A person can get so smitten with someone who seems so very impressive that they totally miss the things that will be responsible for the breakdown of their relationship eight years later, and then in retrospect that person realizes how many times there were big flashing warning signs that could have saved them lots of heartache and a torpedoed career. Hypothetically.
The discussion is interrupted by what sounds like a beagle wailing nearby. But the girls don’t have dogs and they never will, so Mrs. G quickly deduces that the sound of torture is coming out of Henry’s mouth.
Ol’ Henry Clayton injured his lower back when he reached to take down Mrs. G’s old curtains, and daughter-of-a-doctor Natalie correctly diagnoses him with a degenerating disc and gives instructions for pillow placement to relieve the pain. Mrs. G offers to get in touch with Henry’s doctor, but he protests that it’s happened before, and the only thing that works is for him to lie in bed and not be moved. In that case, Mrs. G insists, he’ll stay right exactly there and not move for as long as it takes which, he explains, should be around a month.
Blair gulps and asks if there’s anything they can do to help, and Henry says the best thing is to leave him and Edna alone. Jo reminds us how silly cultural norms of the 80s were as she explains that they’ll set up the rollaway for Mrs. G in their room, since it’s clearly far more appropriate for a woman over 40 to sleep on a cot in a room with four teenagers than to share a bedroom with the man she’s dating. Especially when she’s already invited him to help hang the curtains.
Now alone together, Mrs. G says she feels guilty, and instead of insisting that it’s not even close to her fault like any decent man would, Prof C says that she should feel guilty, and if she wants to assuage that guilt, she should agree to marry him. She says she’s thinking about it, and declares that all he needs to get healthy is some Edna Garrett TLC. She hands him this weird horn that she just happens to have hanging on her wall, and encourages him to honk it whenever he needs something.
He wastes no time using the horn; she’s barely left the room when he honks it to ask for wine. Heh. That’s Blair’s department.
Our next scene is in the hall, where Tootie assesses the situation as romantic, while Natalie has had enough of the goddamn horn, which repeatedly bleats from Mrs. G’s doorway. Mrs. G comes running, and based on her appearance, I’d say that if she doesn’t think she’s had enough of the goddamn horn, she’s in denial, and I would very much like Natalie’s help in ripping her out of it.
This time, Clayton is honking because he can’t find his fingernail clippers. Mrs. G hands him some clippers and he condescendingly declares that those are his toenail clippers, not his fingernail clippers. So she shuffles through the other items on the table right next to him, immediately discovers them, and hands them to him.
Blair has arrived, and she inquires as to how “we’re” doing today. Clayton barks that Blair’s cutesy use of “we” in that manner is one of his pet peeves. Mrs. G tells him to “be cool” and he announces that that’s another of his pet peeves. Oh yeah? Well 70-year-old men who can’t find their own nail clippers and then bark at teenagers who are trying to be nice are my pet peeve, and the girls agree.
Natalie, my brilliant, awesome Natalie, suggests that Clayton is looking a lot better. So much better, in fact, that he must be close to getting up and getting out … into the world, that is. To experience life, natch.
Clayton mocks that it’s not graduation day, and then he cements his place as a crotchety old man by saying that being there is like being at a slumber party and the girls’ music is dumb and doesn’t anyone around there know any Mozart?
God, that look on Mrs. G’s face breaks my heart. It’s the look of, “I don’t have any power here” and she’s giving it to the girls, who are annoyed that Clayton, who is invading their space, is being rude to them. Mrs. G, I love that you have Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr. on your wall, and they would not approve of this behavior.
We fade to the crotchety old man crotchetily honking his horn. Jo enters, wearing her denim jacket and carrying her helmet, so she has clearly come in straight from being out somewhere on her bike. She jokes that Henry does a great Harpo with his horn, and then she does a Groucho impression. Henry continues to grump and Jo gives up and hands him his newspaper and tobacco. Ah, so she was conscripted to do product delivery for him, including of tobacco, which he complains about being fine cut instead of course cut. He’s the worst.
Then he complains that the financial section is missing from the paper, and initially accuses Jo of stealing it. Snerk, but also, yet another red flag. The type whose initial thought is, “they stole it to spite me” are not marriage material. Jo explains that she wiped out and some of it blew away, and without asking if she’s OK, he gripes and grumps and accepts her sarcastic offer to go back and look for it.
Enter Mrs. G and Natalie, to let him know that they won’t be around for a couple of hours because they’re going to the Save the Whales rally.
The curmudgeon mocks political activism and says that if “kids these days” cared as much about their grades as they care about whales, the world would be a better place. Besides the fact that he’s being a douche, he’s just wrong. The “Save the Whales” kids of the 80s became environmental activists and are our only small hope of battling climate change. It is possible to care about more than one thing at a time.
Tootie comes in, and tells him that she thinks they’re the best couple ever and they have her blessing to get married. He kvetches that his life is on the 6:00 news and will Edna have to get their permission for everything?
Mrs. G tells the girls to go save the whales without her and closes the door behind them.
Mrs. G begins to defend the girls to him, he interrupts her to snap at her to straighten the a picture that has been driving him crazy. We learn that his apartment is immaculate, and he alphabetizes the contents of his refrigerator. I’m not quite sure which was the last straw, but I’m glad there was one. She deserves so much better than this and now she realizes it too. She acknowledges that they’ve had a good time as jogging buddies, and doesn’t laugh at his dumb joke about how that means they should keep running around together. She tells him that she doesn’t think she can take care of him in a way that will ever be satisfactory to him. She pictured their future, and they were arguing about “whales, seals, and the ACLU.”
I learned in Charlotte Rae’s autobiography that she influenced Mrs. G’s politics. She explicitly says she’s a democrat in at least one episode and I feel like there’s consistent evidence that she’s progressive. And she continues her badassery here when she asks Henry what he thinks about union lettuce, and he says it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to him. She says that in her house, they look for the union label, and he mocks her for filling her head with clutter.
Yeah that shit ain’t gonna fly.
She’s already done with him, but she goes on to talk about how they haven’t even discussed the most important thing: love. He tells Mrs. G that she’s been hanging around the girls too long and mocks love as something that you do when you’re their age.
I’m in no position to defend the respondent’s side to that argument, but I’m not the one he asked to marry him, and Mrs. G informs him that the answer to his marriage proposal is no. She tells him that she’s going to try to catch up with the girls at the rally and hurries out of the room. He honks his horn, and to my disappointment, she doesn’t keep going. He asks her for a kiss so that he can see what he’ll be missing. Gross, but also strange since they’ve already sucked face.
Huh. So after all that was made of his advanced age at the beginning of the episode, Mrs. G breaks up with him not because he’s old, but because he’s a dick who doesn’t share her principles and values. I can get on board with that.
