4-22 “Take my finals, Please!” (Part 2 of 2)
When we left our intrepid heroines last post, they were in the midst of an all-night cram for finals. They’d made the mistake of “resting our eyes for ten minutes” and had just woken up two hours later due to an unplugged alarm clock. The pizza they’d ordered three hours earlier had apparently just arrived, and Mrs. Garrett walked through their bedroom door with it.
The girls attack the pizza like they’ve never seen food before.
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They talk Mrs. Garrett into having a slice, and she joins them in a philosophical discussion about the pressures facing the youth of 1984. Mrs. Garrett is certain that finals are harder for her charges than they were for her.
And Natalie seems to be awfully suspicious of the pizza.
Mrs. Garrett muses that since she was in high school, there have been two wars, we’ve put a man on the moon, and Elizabeth Taylor has been married five times. Hardy har har on that last joke, but the whole thing plays quite cutely. It’s five girls, one a bit older, enjoying a late-night pizza together.
Blair complains that her shoulders are killing her, and Mrs. Garrett stands up to rub them. She says that when she and her girlfriends wanted to blow off steam, they had a good old fashioned pillow fight. I swear this isn’t the beginning of a a porn scene.
The girls make Brady Bunch jokes as Mrs. Garrett defends the value of the pillow fight. Mrs. Garrett finally concedes, sarcastically, that the girls are clearly much too mature for something as silly as a pillow fight. She leaves them with a blessing: “May your brains and your pencils always be sharp.” I like that. I’m going to use it.
Tootie, always Ms. Enthusiasm, loves the idea of a pillow fight. She risks life and limb by smacking Jo with a pillow, then follows with Blair. Natalie says if Tootie hits her, she’s going to lay her out. It’s still not the beginning of a porn scene.
Fade to 5:00 a.m. Natalie and Tootie are asleep on Jo’s and Blair’s beds (respectively), while Jo and Blair study in the dark at the table. They have a comic exchange for a cheap laugh before we get to the serious bit. Blair admits she’s scared. Not about graduating, but about what’s next.
The heart-to-heart between the unlikely pals continues, as Blair explains that she’d been to a lot of schools before Eastland, and at all the others she’d call her mother to pick her up after a couple of months. It took a year at Eastland before she realized she hadn’t even called. She also must’ve been pretty young, since she’s been at Eastland since seventh grade (she was in ninth grade in season one, and at that point she was up for her third harvest queen crown), so maybe it’s not a matter of Eastland being special, it’s just a matter of her growing up. Either way, she’s right when she says that when Jo leaves Eastland, she’ll be leaving school, but when Blair leaves, she’ll be leaving home.
Awww. Jo reciprocates the fluffies by telling Blair that if she had to pick one person that she knew was going to love college, it would be Blair. She tells Blair that she’s the girl in front of the brochure holding a book and smiling at the future. She’s not wrong. I worked on university marketing for years, and even though we were conscious about diversity, we always had one cute blond girl with sparkling teeth somewhere in the brochure.
Jo goes on to reassure Blair that everyone is scared. “Even you?” Blair asks incredulously.
Jo admits that yes, she’s scared too. She points out that when Blair goes to college, she’s taking herself. Jo is taking her mom and dad and the whole neighborhood. Yeah, I get that. I wasn’t the first first but I was first generation. Everyone is very proud and you can’t let them down.
Blair tells Jo that if she had to pick the one person that she knew would make it in college, it would be her. Sniff. I love it when they bond.
The alarm goes off, signaling that it’s been fifteen minutes since Tootie and Natalie went to sleep.
We transition back to comedy as Natalie says that she had a nightmare about being chased by little chemical symbols with tiny feet. That’s funny. She notes that the sun is coming up and takes it as a good omen. She asks Tootie to quiz her. Tootie asks for the chemical symbol for gold. “Ag!” Natalie exclaims triumphantly. Wrong. Ag is silver. Au is gold.
Tootie again suggests word-association (mnemonics) to help her remember. She suggests that Natalie remember gold with the following story: she’s walking down the street, and a mugger takes her gold watch. She replies:
“A! U! Come back here with my watch!”
And to this day, even if I got a Flash Gordon style level-six memory wipe, I will always remember that Au is the chemical symbol for gold. It’s a skill that’s good for little but my own amusement and perhaps a lucky bar trivia question.
Natalie, however, fails to be moved by the impact Tootie’s mnemonic made on me. She swears it will never work and presumably keeps studying futilely. Will she take Tootie’s advice?
Well, now it’s 8:00 a.m. and the girls are getting ready for school. Jo practices Spanish with a horrible accent and Blair frets an oncoming zit. Tootie confirms that they’re all meeting back in the cafeteria for lunch (where else would they go? And don’t they have to work?). She says she has her English exam at 9 and history at 11. Is that how we all took exams in high school? All in one day? I don’t remember, but it seems like a lot. But it also seems as though the exams are short, so maybe it’s not that big a deal. I suppose recently completing a program where one exam is typically 100% of your grade and that exam could be anywhere from three hours to eight hours changes one’s perspective.
Tootie quizzes Natalie one more time on the chemical symbols. She breezes through aluminum (Al) and magnesium (Mg) before Tootie gives her the dreaded gold.
Yes! Natalie finally joins me in seeing Tootie’s brilliance, and I like to think that we both take a moment to reflect on how much better Tootie’s suggestions were than those from my bar prep course. In any case, she does apologize to Tootie for belittling her before.
Mrs. Garrett brings orange juice up for the girls and tells them they have a special pre-exam breakfast waiting for them downstairs. I guess they get the day off. They say there’s no time for breakfast, which doesn’t make sense to me since it’s only 8:00 and Tootie just said her first exam is at 9. But Mrs. Garrett made it to go anyway, so even their irrational time pressures are accommodated.
Mrs. Garrett wishes them luck and off they go.
We’ve just spent the entirety of a 30-minute episode (well, 24, minus commercials) in the girls’ bedroom. I think this is the only time that ever happens and it’s remarkable that it is as engaging as it is. We can all sympathize, even if we think our most recent exam trials trump the trivial stresses of four high-school girls. Sorry, it’s been a long time since I was a teenager.
