The Mary Ann Effect

Bre Larson is a goddess and the love of my life. Okay, okay, I admit I just recently watched “Captain Marvel,” and yes, I did say the same thing a few years ago about Jennifer Lawrence after seeing her in”Passengers.” Oh, you also remember me blogging about Pat Benatar a while ago and more or less implying my undying love for her?

I do have to confess I seem to fall in love with many women after seeing them in some movie or other entertainment medium. My memory has a few names like Elizabeth Montgomery, Debbie Harry, Kim Bassinger and more stuck in it. You are probably yelling at the screen saying “Jay, guys always fall in love with stars,” but it's really something else.

I figured it out after trying to analyze why I'm in love with Bre Larson. After all, there are tons of super models and glamorous actresses around who are exciting beauties. Oh, she is very attractive for sure, but not what you'd call a raving beauty like a super model. A light went off in my mind when I remembered that I became attracted to Bre after she ditched her super hero outfit and put on jeans, a NIN T-shirt and leather jacket.

Then it dawned on me: It was the “Mary Ann Effect.”

On the TV show “Gilligan's Island” from waaaayyy long ago, among the people stranded were two young women. Ginger was a glamorous actress with sequined, tight outfits and Mary Ann, a wholesome Midwestern girl. I fell in love with Mary Ann, played by Dawn Wells. Of course, it didn't hurt that she wore “Daisy Dukes” and her shirt was tied up to show off her slender waist. I think my infatuation with her was not that bare midriff, which to a young testosterone-laden boy like me is very alluring, but because she seemed more approachable. More like the girl next door you have the hots for, not the cheerleader who only hangs with the star quarterback. 

When I think back to the hordes of women I fell for, and I mean not those in my vicinity, they all had that quality. They were the types you could go have a good time with by just packing a lunch and taking a walk by the lake. They weren't someone you'd like to escort down a red carpet, or pick up after she walked a modeling runway. She was someone who wouldn't mind sitting on the couch with you eating popcorn and watching “Gilligan’s Island” reruns rather than dining at the Ritz with her over-dressed friends.

Rest in Peace Racquel

So I guess what this boils down to, is that my fantasy women are pretty much like the women I really do go out with. Yes, I did have posters of Farrah Fawcett, Raquel Welch, et al hanging on my dorm room wall, but I always went on dates with Mary Ann.

Ahhh, James Thurber

 

 

The Thurber Brigade Clip Show

Often when TV shows have run out of new ideas, or need a break from weekly filming or some other reason to not have an original episode, they’ll run what is called a “Clip Show.”  It’s a show that has some weak storyline but weaves in clips of past episodes.  In other words, the writers took a break and so the producers just ran a bunch of their favorite scenes from the past.

Lately I’ve been engrossed in a couple of other writing escapades and so have neglected The Thurber Brigade.  Usually I try to get at least one blog in each month, but because of this activity, have nothing to show for August.  So it seems like this might be a good time to throw in The Thurber Brigade Clip Show.

For some reason, women seem to believe that men can read their minds and will just magically know when they are interested in a guy.  Sadly, men do NOT have ESP.

Partly because of this odd belief, or more likely, because they’re afraid to face the same possibility of rejection that men must face, women never make First Contact.

Women seem to have a strange form of vision in which when they see a guy wearing a Speedo they go “Ewwwwww”—unless that man is Justin Timberlake.

Angry feminists have attacked this blog multiple times, but they seem to have really been enraged when I discussed women’s driving habits.

Speaking of driving, it drives women crazy to see men go nuts over an attractive female.  However, they can be just as superficial as men, but seem to focus more on the male’s earning potential and status rather than looks.

I wanted to drive to a Pat Benatar concert one time, because, let’s face it, she’s hot, but I couldn’t go because I was coaching at a soccer game.  However, one of my players skipped the game to take his girlfriend to the concert.  It didn’t end well.

Too often women think men are childish when it’s really just our competitive spirit that drives us to certain antics.

Men and women have different views on fashion, plus, women don’t dress to attract men, they dress to impress other women.

In the early days of the blog, I had one about throwing pick-up lines to females, but nowadays, I don’t do that as much as I used to.

Over the years my blood might begin to boil over certain issues and so I’d feel compelled to take a sidestep from “The War Between Men and Women” and blog about the current issue.  One of the best included handy tips for tourists on how to deal with our law enforcement officers.  This one came about because of yet another case of a cop killing an unarmed civilian.

Of course, I’d often hide my sidesteps by using a title and beginning to introduce some hot button issue meant to inflame angry feminists, and then jumping into something else.  Such as raving about the greatness of the USA women’s soccer team.

I am a writer so I also had to take a sidestep now and then to promote my writing.  Such as the time I talked all about SEX.

My personal favorite blogs though, concern matters of my own heart.  In other words, stories about that special female in my life who got away.  I always call these close encounters, partly because I love sci fi and so like alluding to that movie.

So from nearly five years worth of blogs which was the best?  Well, of course, it’s whichever is the most recent one.

 Ahhh, James Thurber

The Thurber Brigade apologizes for stooping to a "clip show."  They're not that great on TV, but we hope you've enjoyed this slight review of past whimsical blogs about men, women, dating, well, any and everything.  We promise to get back into the swing of things next time.  Maybe.

In(k) Excess

Back in the 80s a great bar to hit in Austin was The Back Room. A gigantic place divided into two halves. One side a game room with pool tables, video games, air hockey, etc.; the other a music venue. The bands that played ranged from headbangers to blues. I saw all sorts of groups from The Genitorturers, Anthrax and The Cramps, to Al Stewart, The ThunderBirds and Tragically Hip. For the most part though, I'd say the flavor was hard rock. The Back Room was popular with bikers after all.

I mainly hung out on the music side, but between sets or if I didn't want to pay the cover I'd hang in the game room. Although it could be loud in there too, it was the place I often tried to pick up women because I could hear them.

One night I stood along the wall, slowly drinking a beer while scouting out the night's targets. At The Back Room women often dressed much more provocatively than at some of the other haunts of mine, such as Liberty Lunch or Steamboat. This night I spotted a really hot female with painted on latex pants and a backless blouse. Her Pat Benatar-esque eyes and shapely body drew a lot of attention, including me.

However, she turned to look at someone playing pool and I noticed that she had a gigantic tattoo on her back. I casually moved a little closer and discovered that it was a panther. It's head on her right shoulder and its tail snaking off somewhere below her waist underneath those latex pants.

Although she had seemed intriguing, that gigantic tattoo turned me off.  Back in those days most women didn't have much in the way of ink. Well, unless they were biker chicks.

I also had a double-hit mindset against it because I had grown up as a youth in the middle-American Midwest. Us God-fearing whitebread kids were taught by our elders that men who had tattoos were either old sailors (which was deemed acceptable but you could still smirk) or else criminals or carny folk (not acceptable).  Obviously, to these people, it was impossible to think that a female would sport a tattoo.  Tsk, tsk was the phrase used when you passed a person such as this (people back then were PC—not prone to being jerks—before that became a way of behaving).

However, besides my youthful brainwashing, I had another reason I didn't like the idea of tattoos. Way back then a horrible man named Richard Speck butchered eight young nurse trainees in a dormitory. I distinctly remember the police saying we'd be able to identify him if we saw him because of a “Born to raise Hell” tattoo on his shoulder. Oh, it wasn't the tattoo that caught my attention, it was that a tattoo was a way for you to be found.

Now before you say that I obviously had been thinking about a life of crime and so didn't want to give myself away, it really was because I was slowly getting radical ideas. I also realized that ideas often scared people, and so radical ideas could get you into trouble no matter that we lived in the "land of the Free."  Yeah, the Vietnam years.  My ideas weren't really anti-war thoughts though, but that's for a later discussion.

(Yes, a youthful Jay at a civil-rights protest looonnnngggg ago)

This anti-tattoo concept also followed me into the army.  There was tremendous pressure to get a tattoo or two if you were in the military. I had a friend who went nuts about them, even had a contest of sorts with another of his friends to see who could get the most. This was before the day when you could get full arm tats. They were all individual things. So I got a lot of pressure from him as well as my other army buds. On several drunken nights I almost succumbed to the most common (in my unit) "82nd Airborne" insignia tattoo. But I resisted.

In the army I really had become a big radical threat to the establishment because I dared to advocate for enlisted people's rights. I figured that any day some general would decide I must be incarcerated on some trumped up charge, so no way would they ID me by a tattoo.

So I escaped the military tattoo-less and carried those same concepts well into the 80s, 90s and 00s. A gigantic Panther tattoo could only mean trouble and just didn't spur my sexual desires enough to give me the courage to throw a line her way.

Nowadays tattoos are the rage with today's hipsters. It's a common sight to see men AND women sporting complete arm/leg/body ink. Where in the old days even a peek of ink under the shirtsleeve could result in the job applicant getting shown the door, now it's accepted—or at least tolerated.

Even I have slowly come around to accepting some tattoos on women. I often get involved in rousing discussions over beer with male friends about what is acceptable. They usually have absolutely no qualms about any ink on a prospective date (okay, a lot of my friends are younger and avoided that middle-American brainwashing), while I argue for discretion.

 
I still would prefer to just see a small butterfly above a breast (an homage to "Papillon"), and even find it a little seductive to see a small sun barely peeking above the back of the belt. Ironically, this latter one is called a “Tramp Stamp” which got its name through similar brainwashing/stereotyping as what I experienced but in later decades.

However, it will take some major adjustment to ever get me excited about a prospective date who has tattooed her entire life's history on her back; or have a dragon shooting fire on one arm toward a knight on the other; or a gigantic cobra slithering up one leg and a mongoose on the other. Yes, a little too much ink for me.

Some brainwashing just can’t be undone.

(okay, you young readers may not have gathered that the title of this blog is a play-on-words referring to INXS. Yes, another 80s band; yes, I know I'm in a rut. No, they have nothing to do with tattoos although I'm sure they had one or two).

Pat Benatar is Hot

Back in the 80s, I coached the Johnston HS soccer team.  Let me brag a little here. Each year I coached, the team got better.  The year before I arrived they didn’t win a game. My first year we only won 2, but it was a step up. After that it was 5-6 and then 7-5.  So sure, we didn’t blaze the league but we were moving up. 

However, I really want to mention something that more relates to what the Thurber Brigade is about. Women and men.  Such as how women can pretty much get us men to do anything, even when we know it may be wrong. Also, how we men can become obsessed with women. 

As for the latter, well, okay, I admit, I was obsessed with Pat Benatar.  What single, straight man in the 80s wasn’t?  

(cover photo from her memoir)

She came onto the scene as a Janis Joplin-style singer (rock, not pop) but with Katharine Hepburn looks.  As she wailed her angst-driven rock songs on the stage in tight spandex pants , we guys were  drooling and swooning in the stands.

Yes, I was obsessed.

So when her tour announced it would make it to Austin, I became driven to see the show, no matter the cost.  Sure, we teachers/coaches were paid peanuts, often working second jobs to put rice and bolgna on the dinner table.  It would be worth it to see this rock goddess prance across the stage.  Unfortunately, shortly after learning about the show, I also learned about my soccer team’s upcoming schedule.  Yes, a game on the same night.

I was depressed, but I was also a typical coach and driven by my passion for the sport (oh, and my job).  So I resigned myself that I would just have to give up on the woman of my dreams for this season.

As for my first point, that would be in relations to one of my top wingers.  He would do anything for his girlfriend, who admittedly, was quite attractive. It didn’t hurt in my book that she was one of those who dressed like and used the hair style of Pat Benetar (as seen in Fast Times at Ridgemont High).  In high schools across America at that time this was a quite prevalent look. In her case, she carried it off very well. 

So the day of the game arrived and my star player was nowhere to be found.  I discovered that he was out sick.  Missed all of his classes, and apparently, it was even excused by the school assistant principal. So I and my team accepted the absence and still managed to go out and win our game. 

However, it was the next day that I learned from my student manager—yes, we coaches do have our own spy network (we didn't have Facebook back then)—that the winger actually had not been sick, but acted so in order to take his girlfriend out that night.

Out to see the Pat Benatar concert!

As you have probably guessed by now, my obsession took over and in a rage, I not only screamed at him at practice that day, I kicked him off the team.  Oh sure, I may have been obsessed with Pat Benatar, but that wasn’t the reason I kicked him off. Trust me. No coach could allow such a deception to stand and expect his team to respect him and to follow his instructions.  So there really was no choice. And quit thinking to yourself, "no Jay, it really was your obsession."

Anyway, I kicked him off and so we played the next game without him too. It was a tie.  So we managed to not lose a game without this guy who betrayed the team all to try to get in better with his girlfriend—who, like me, really was obsessed with Pat Benatar.  As a side note, I think they broke up during the summer.   

Several of the winger’s teammates and friends finally approached me and convinced me that the punishment was too severe. They admitted he had broken the rules, but as a senior, this was his last year to shine, he also was contrite (they assured me) and that he would accept some other punishment. Such as running a lot of extra laps around the field, my usual punishment when I got mad, er, when some player performed poorly. 

Yes, I got over my disappointment at missing the show, at being stabbed in the back, at being lied to.  I let him back on the team.  I think we split the final few games and celebrated at least having a winning season.  It was my final season and probably the most memorable because of this incident.

To this day, I still think Pat Benatar is hot.  I still like her singing. However, every time I hear her, for at least a few seconds during the song, I drift back to that soccer season.  I think about the games, the crowds and all the hoopla that surrounds playing high school sports. I also think about how women can make us guys do the strangest things.

The 1983 Johnston High School soccer team