Seventeen Again

Last night, when I got home from work just past 11:00, I turned on the television in my bedroom before getting into bed for what I had hoped would be a long night's sleep, or at least as close to seven hours as possible before my alarm was to wake me at 6:00 the next morning.

Unfortunately, the fates had different plans for me and I could not fall asleep. (Before you even think it, turning the TV off doesn't help -- I've tried it. It's harder for me to fall asleep without noise to distract me.) At 12:00 I tuned my television to WGN to watch "Will and Grace," and was pleasantly surprised to see that one of my favorite episodes was getting ready to air. (Okay, so I like W&G. I am that gay. I do not, however, like "Sex and the City." No one should be that gay.)

In this episode, Grace has just been dumped by her boyfriend Nathan (played winningly by Mr. Woody Harrelson) at a point in their relationship where Grace assumed marriage was the next, nearly immediate step. Understandably, this puts Grace in a depressed state as manifested by her lying in bed for days on end without any -- ANY -- attention to personal grooming. Although Will, Jack and Karen are successful in arousing Grace from her Boudoire of Sadness one time, she retreats there immediately upon hearing a travel agent on the answering machine asking Nathan for the correct spelling of his travel companion, Suzie's, last name. Apparently this eager-beaver travel agent has worked extra hard for her commission by booking Nathan and Suzie in the most romantic accomodations possible on the cruise ship where they have booked passage. Devastated by the realization that Nathan has found himself another girlfriend in the time it took her to sleep that man right outta her hair, Grace sinks even deeper into depression.

Her friends (well, Will's her friend; I think Jack sees her as a non-returnable gift-with-purchase that came with Will, and I believe Karen thinks of Grace as something akin to a pet) try to arouse her by placing her -- still clothed in what I can only imagine to be the funkiest smelling pajamas in the western hemisphere -- into a cold shower. While trying to soap her down, an act they must have done as much for their own olfaction as for her sanity, Grace finally snaps. She then reads each of them in turn, Will for having lost his lover of seven years, Karen for losing her husband to the penitentiary, and Jack for being content to flit from one relationship to another without any emotional investment whatsoever. Imploring them to let her handle her situation in her own way, Grace stumbles back to her bedrom, soaked head to toe. Will, Jack and Karen realize that Grace is right, and that maybe they too should be in bed, sleeping off the pain and disappointment in their own lives. So, dripping wet, the three of them in turn get into Grace's bed and fall asleep together, one big old wet dogpile of misery loving company. While these shenanigans will undoubtedly lead to premature mattress rot, they seem not to have been in vain. When Grace awakes the next morning in the embrace of her friend(s), the sun is shining brightly through her window (eastern exposure in Manhattan? Yuck!), and the dulcent tones of Annie Lennox's "Seventeen Again" begin to play. She arises almost majestically from her catatonic catacomb, depression over, end scene.

Wow! is television ballsy to put shit like that on the air.

I know, I know, I said it's one of my favorite episodes, and it is. The idea is utterly intoxicating -- sleep away your blues surrounded by friends (I could do without the wetness), awake refreshed and revived. Maybe that happens in the real world, but I tend to doubt it. Just as I had to realize that, in actual prisons, most of the prisoners are not nearly as hot as Mr. Chris Meloni was on "Oz," resolutions on television shows like "Will and Grace" don't reflect the intricate realities of day-to-day living. Situation comedies are able to solve everyone's problems in 30 minutes or less because they only have 22 minutes to tie everything up into a nice package. Once you've been on for a few seasons, you might get an occasional one hour special because the new series they slipped in after your time slot has tanked in the ratings and more people are watching Golf TV in that half-hour so the network is desperate.

By and large, television makes us want to believe in the fiction it presents. We may not really buy into the notion that depression goes away after sleep, or that putting your down-in-the-dumps friend bodily into the bathtub is a good idea, but we want to believe that it could work, perhaps if more of us tried it. The cold hard reality of life is that it's not a cakewalk. Eventually, people whom you adore will treat you like used Kleenex. Your boss will overwork and underpay you and dare you to find something better to do with your life, like anyone else would have you. Friends you thought were your closest confidantes will betray every ounce of trust you've invested in them, with interest.

The great reality of life is that every morning the sun will come through the eastern sky and life will begin again. That sun may be blocked by clouds, tall buildings, trees, or any variety of physical non-translucent objects, but it's still there. I think one of the goals of everyone's life should be to remember that the sun is there, even if it can't reach you. The luckiest among us, myself included, have people in the world sending us love that is just as constant. That love stretches out to reach us even if we can't feel the embrace or hear the words. Remembering that love, strong and fierce as the sun, exists is what helps me to feel safe when I'm alone, scared and hurting. That love gets me out of bed in the morning.

Of course, having Annie Lennox in my bedroom to herald the day and get me to my feet would be pretty sweet, too.