7-22 “Big Time Charlie”
I have a very warm spot in my heart for this episode. It sits toward the end of a weak season. Charlotte Rae was checked out; she’s not even in this episode and she bailed at the end of this season. The plots get a little thinner. Even this episode has a facile premise and a subplot so meaningless I’m not even going to mention it, but it leaves fond memories in large part because of the chemistry between Nancy McKeon and Alex Rocco. They work so well together as father and daughter that he played her father in her series The Division nearly twenty years later. They are charming together, and there are some lovely moments that make this episode a standout.
It has just occurred to me that I recently recapped another episode in which Jo’s father is a main character. Both were results of my pick-an-episode-out-of-a-proverbial-hat method, so I choose to believe that Alex Rocco’s ghost is guiding my hand. I would like for Alex Rocco’s ghost to guide more hands toward cousingeri.com, thank you very much.
The painful establishing music opens the episode to Jo setting a flower arrangement on the coffee table. The place looks like they’re hosting a funeral. What’s up with all the flowers?
Blair enters and asks if someone had a baby and didn’t tell her about it. I would bet money that the line originally asked whether someone died but they decided to go gentler. But no babies or death; the flowers are all from Jo’s father. He has big news and will show up later to tell her about it.
Jo hates flowers. She pushed back on flowers from her beautiful, dumb boyfriend Eddie and from her blind date who wrote, directed, and starred in my favorite movie that no one has ever seen. Dammit, Charlie, don’t you know your own daughter?
Natalie comes in the front door and says, “Did someone die and not tell me about it?” Ah, there ya go. It’s not that they decided to make the line gentler, it’s that the decided to save it for my awesome Natalie.
Enter Charlie Polniaczek, wearing a designer suit and a Rolex on each wrist.
He explains that he’s rich. Not flithy rich like Blair’s family, but it turns out he won one of those “magazine publisher giveaways.”
Jo: “You’re kidding!”
Natalie: “Nobody ever wins those things!”
Charlie: “That’s what I used to think.”
The studio audience roars. It doesn’t even seem funny in retrospect. It was just a line from a commercial for the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, which, by the way, still exists. I feel like it was funny just for being a thing that like everyone knew about. Information can travel a lot further and faster these days.
Charlie has won $300,000, which he announces like he’s got lighting-cigars-with-hundred-dollar-bills money. Three hundred thousand 1986 dollars are worth just over 700K today, and while that’s definitely nothing to sneeze at, it’s far from set-up-for-life money. People really tend to underestimate how much it costs to actually live.
Jo agrees with me; she is not pleased when Charlie announces that he quit his job. He says that he showed his boss the check and said, “aloha.” That’s not what he said. What he said was something more like “Take This Job and Shove It” but probably less clean. I’ve always found it fascinating that the singer of that song is named “Paycheck” (that’s not his real name, but he had that name long before he recorded the song (which was written by someone else)).
A telephone rings.
I marvel at how primitive this concept is today, and how the portable phone was once seen as indicia of status. Charlie’s end of the conversation consists of, “Are they good?” and “Buy ’em!” He says that he just bought futures, which Blair explains are a way of buying stock. Tootie and Natalie are more confused by it than they should be.
Charlie: “You know how they say ‘it takes money to make money’? Well, I never had any money, so how could I have money? Now I got money, so I can get money!”
Now that is true, and it’s tragic.
Jo is still skeptical, and Charlie graciously offers to give her time to let it sink in while he takes everyone to dinner.
Everyone thanks Charlie for the pizza, and he insists that he still wants to take everyone out to “somewhere with du jour things.” Jo remains skeptical, and Blair tells her to just get used to having money. Natalie muses that now that Jo has money, she and Tootie don’t have to be as nice to Blair. Ouch.
Blair, Natalie, and Tootie retreat upstairs, leaving Jo alone with her dad. He brought her a present.
It’s a really nice helmet, and this is exactly what he should have done with the money. They have a cute exchange about how the helmet is nicer than her bike, but she doesn’t want him to do anything nutty like replace her bike, unless maybe he wants to for her birthday…which is next month.
And that’s the thing. If Charlie won that money and bought Jo that helmet and maybe even a new bike for her birthday, he would have achieved everything that he hoped to.
But no, he has something more to prove. Charlie wants to take Jo to see the office in New York that he’s thinking about renting. Jo’s all, “the hell? Office for what?” And Charlie’s explanation is that now that he has money, people call him all the time, and he has to be somewhere when they call. But he has his briefcase phone, so that doesn’t really make any sense.
The truth, and he doesn’t say it but I totally get it, is that he feels as though “having an office” is a thing that people he admires do, and now that he has the money to do it (which he doesn’t, but that’s part of the delusion and confusion), he wants to do it. He’s setting up a caricature of the “man he wants to be” without really know what the “man he wants to be” actually does. It’s heartbreaking.
He wants to buy a new car and take Jo to the Knicks game in it. No, not just a car, a Jaguar. As he rushes off to some rich person thing, he makes a joke about calling from the other side of the tunnel to avoid long distance charges. The jokes may be dated, but the message, sadly, is timeless.
Sometime later, in the living room, the girls explore Jo’s latest haul.
Jo’s father has purchased her the same sweater in every color of the rainbow (plus pink), and lavender patent-leather heels and a matching purse. Good Lord, does Charlie Polniaczek even know his daughter?
Oh, apparently not. The doorbell rings with a package for Jo.
Furs are gross.
There is a note that tells her to look in the pocket, where she finds a key attached to a poem:
This is for you; it comes from your pop
It has four wheels and a convertible top
Our next scene has Jo tallying up the expenses and growing more and more concerned. The sweaters and belts and pizza add up to a number that Jo says isn’t too bad, but they haven’t gotten to the big stuff.
Jo: “Office furniture: seventy-eight hundred dollars! He had to have the chair that vibrated!”
OK, but massaging chairs are pretty freaking awesome. Charlie’s vibrating chair is laughable compared to what you can get these days. Today’s massaging chairs are other-freaking-worldly.
Jo: “One graphite motorcycle helmet: three hundred dollars. And worth every penny.
She adds in their cars, which were in the mid-thirties, which was very expensive for a car then. She gestures at the gross fur coat and asks Blair how they figure out the cost: “What, do you weigh it or something?”
Blair says that her mother’s was “twenty-five,” and as Jo expresses disgust at spending twenty-five hundred dollars on that thing, Blair clarifies that it’s one more decimal point to the right. Ew.
Jo calculates that Charlie has already spent $120,000 in a week. See, it adds up! Blair: “That beats my record!”
Blair reminds Jo to calculate taxes, which Jo completely forgot about, and Jo sighs that indeed, there’s not much left at all. Unable to reach her father on any of his sixteen(!) phones, she heads for his office.
Charlie interrupts and changes the subject every time Jo tries to tell him that his spending is out of control. She points out that they don’t need any of that fancy stuff, and he protests that he wanted her to have it because he could never give it to her before. Awww.
He readily agrees that he needs to stop spending. Always the skeptic, she asks him why he didn’t fight her harder on that, and he reveals that he lost all the money. He spent everything that was left on an orange crop, and it died. Oops.
She reminds him that she doesn’t even want any of that stuff; she liked it when they would brown bag tuna sandwiches and go to the park. He says he’s sorry he didn’t listen. He asks about the mink and she says she already took it back, and she also hands him back the keys to the car.
Charlie: “How about the-“
Jo: “You’re not getting the motorcycle helmet back.”
For real though, a super-thoughtful, picked exactly for the recipient gift is very meaningful. I would like one, please.
