"You're not going to say anything too dirty about the video?" asked my Virginia counsel Billy Law Bowen, Esq.
I'm just going to describe the video, I said.
Video in question: "Stacy's Mom," featuring the band Fountains of Wayne. VH1 just played it on "Insomniac Music Theater". It features perhaps junior-high age boy and girl sweethearts. And Rachel Hunter.
When I was fourteen, I had a crush on Rachel Hunter. Oh yes.
Anyway, the video is an unholy blend of "The Wonder Years", "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", and "The Graduate". Our barely teenage Romeo hangs out with his Juliet -- hey, we kept hearing she was only 14 when Shakey-spear put her onstage, so who am I to judge? -- to gawk repeatedly at "Stacy's mom," who's got it goin' on, the band tells us repeatedly.
"I hope you put it in there somewhere that they just ripped off 'Jesse's Girl'. Any band that takes its primary musical cues from Rick Springfield can't be all bad," says my Virginia counsel Billy Law Bowen, Esq.
Uncle Kracker is covering "Drift Away" as I type this.
Jesus Christ, can't anybody these days write an original song?
"Is that Nelson Mandela?"
What?!?
"I'm joking. Do you think Nelson Mandela would ever sing a song with someone named Kracker?"
I think that's Dobie Gray.
"Where were we?"
Stacy's mom. Rachel Hunter.
"Ah, I love this song." I turn around and see "come Away With Me" by Norah Jones playing on the screen and spend this minute with my back to the keyboard.
Rapt I believe is the word.
Who's she picking up in this video? The lost Baldwin brother?
"I don't know, maybe it's directed by Vincent Gallo."
What, "Brown Bunny"?
"Yes!" cries my Virginia counsel Billy Law Bowen, Esq., arms in the air. "You got it!"
Yeah. Where were we?
"Stacy's mom."
Yes! Stacy's mom. The music video. Rachel Hunter. Me at 14. The 14-year-old boy in the video. He holds a bottle of soda pop as he lounges in the pool on an inflatable pool chair.
Orange crush, perhaps.
He holds a bottle of orange crush as he lounges in the pool on an inflatable pool chair. He is watching Stacy's mom. We see him framed through the figure of his 14-year-old sweetheart who is lifting an indentical bottle of orange crush to her lips at a 90-degree angle.
We flash from this to images of Stacy's mom. The 14-year-old boy upsets his bottle of glistening orange crush and the soda floweth over, sparkling in the sun, between his legs.
Am I going to be arrested for accurately describing this video, I ask my Virginia counsel Billy Law Bowen, Esq.
"I don't know. It's accurate."
Accuracy above all, I say. Basic tenet of journalism.
The video shifts indoors. The young lad and his lass are watching TV on the couch. He sneaks peaks over his shoulders. In his mind he sees Stacy's mom in fishnets on stage, on the pole.
The video ends with an extended homage to Phoebe Cates's famous scene in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High". In the orginal, Phoebe Cates, young and wet and nubile, pulls her high-schooler's body out of the swimming pool as our Everyman schmuck Judge Reinhold watches furtively from the bathroom window. He fantasizes she looks toward him, stripping off her top and brandishing her breasts. He stands now by the pool in a business suit, no longer the fast-food employee, having entered the marvelous world of adult erotic fantasy.
This is all interrupted when the real Phoebe, a little too much pool water in her ear, unwittingly opens the bathroom door, catching him, well, not exactly red-handed, but certainly in the act.
Ahem. Coming back to our Shakespeare: "Self-love, my leige, is not so vile a sin as self-neglect." Phoebe seems to agree, shutting the door and leaving poor Judge merely embarrassed, as opposed to richly prosecuted.
Am I going to be prosecuted for this?
My Virginia counsel Billy Law Bowen, Esq., snores in response, having fallen asleep. I am to proceed into the dark cave of fantasy with no further legal assistance.
Where were we? Stacy's mom. In the music video, meanwhile, we have the 14-year-old lad in the bathroom, gaping in awe as Rachel Hunter rises from the hottest pool in the 'burbs like Botticelli's MILF -- but it is the 14-year-old girl who opens the bathroom door, and shuts it laughing.
What am I to make of this? It's been almost 14 years since I was 14 and gazed furiously at Rachel Hunter in the pages of Sports Illustrated. Things don't change. It's been a half-century since Lucy and Ricky couldn't say the word "pregnant" on television. Is this innocent fun? Are 14-year-olds allowed to think like this? Are we allowed to put it on television? Is it our problem? Am I freaking out?
No answer from my snoring lawyer. On the screen is the video for Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle"; the band plays as a houseful of college kids strip to their underwear and sweat profusely.
Dancing.
The worst thing that happens is that a couple falls asleep and gets dorked with magic markers. I note that the lanky towheaded kid in the flannel shirt emerging from the hazy room looks like Jason Schock.
The whole lovely mess takes me back to Isla Vista. Sex and music and beer there produced many things that were not unpleasant. Then there was the night a group of us found a strange girl with her pants half-down collapsed in her own vomit in the driveway; the girls took her inside the house, cleaned her up and called the crisis hotline. I was ordered out of the room since my maleness might freak the girl out.
In the morning, it became clear that her companion had simply abandoned her in his drunkenness and wandered upstairs next door to crash on a couch he might have thought was his.
We don't do a good job of raising boys to be men on this planet.
Later that summer I stood on the balcony and watched the last pre-freshman crowd I would ever watch make its inaugral parade of debauchery down that sacred street of used condoms, vomit and crushed beer bottles, Del Playa.
Hey, watch this, I said. Yell "Jen!" every two minutes and see who looks up.
"Good one. Hey, Jen!"
Blonde?
"Yeah, it worked! Hey, Jen!"
She came up to the balcony eventually. That night I was in mood, strangely detatched, sensing the end of my college days. I was quiet. We spoke of college and I adopted the big-brother tone.
Don't take drinks from strangers, I said. We talked about classes and scheduling and things she should do that I hadn't.
"You're so cool," she said, stars in her eyes. "All anyone else ever talks about is sex."
Five minutes later: "So when did you first have sex?"
Seven minutes later: "Hey, can somebody get me a beer?"
I ninja'd my way out of the party not too long after that. Oh, man.
We don't do a good job of preparing girls for "the college experience" on this planet.
And that's all for today. The sun is coming up. Sex is sex is sex. Fourteen-year-olds get horny, too. I'd rather live in the world outside of VH1 than in the world that existed outside of "I Love Lucy," even though horny 14-year-olds unnerve me now and, I suspect, if I ever shape up and raise one of my own, would terrify me. Free beer and cheap sex are fun and dangerous.
I'm getting older. And that's all right, too.
Good morning.
6:26 a.m. Sunday, August 03, 2003.