By the time I discovered The Brady Bunch, the all-too-sweet comedy TV series featuring a
widow with three girls who marries a widower with three boys it had already
been cancelled. It was a few years after 1974 and I remember how I used to
hurry home from school to catch the latest episode in rerun which aired weekdays
at 4 in Canada right after reruns of One
Day At A Time (a contender for a future blog entry, for sure). Of course I found
the series to be so moralistic and silly but all I wanted was to connect with
something that was the opposite of my miserable life (an alcoholic dad, a mean
mom, a delinquent brother, a bullied school environment). And if I needed, say,
Mike and Carol Brady and their squeakily clean kids to help me achieve this,
then so be it.
When all America was going gaga for Marcia, Marcia,
Marcia! I, on the other hand, had a soft spot for middle-child Jan. She had a
thing about her that made me relate to her even more. It was probably the fact
that she kept playing second fiddle to everyone, a bit like I felt all the time.
Anyway, to make a long story short if I could have had one curl on each side of
my face like she did (for a while anyway) I probably would have done so in a
jiff. With my luck I would have looked more like a Rabi—a gay-bashed Rabi (!),
mind you—but I sure would have felt even closer to that character.
So imagine my happiness when I happened to discover
sweet insecure little Jan in a late night TV-movie a few months later. In it
she played a hooker—yes a hooker. It
was called DAWN: PORTRAIT OF A TEENAGE
RUNAWAY (1976) and it told the tale of a 15 year-old who flees from her
troubled home (like mine?) to end up on Hollywood boulevard where she meets sweet
Alexander (played by Leigh McCloskey from TVs DALLAS) who unwillingly introduces
her to prostitution. Alexander is also a fellow runaway who sells his body but
(here’s the big kicker, especially in those days) to lonely or not-so-lonely middle
aged men. Witnessing this part (though it is mostly if not totally suggested) was
a first for me, since homosexuality was barely visible on TV during those days.
Though it was viewed as a bad thing, the
lost little guy in me was pretty satisfied being able to peek at a world far
from his own yet still close enough to resonate with him.
I saw both movies back to back that summer night in
the late ‘70s. I wanted the story to continue on as a weekly series which, come
to think of it, would have been entirely impossible on account of the heavy subject
matter of the time. Yet I connected with these two characters and I spent the remaining
year looking out for other TV plots resembling the Dawn and Alexander duo movies
or something in the same vein. I found many like LITTLE LADIES OF THE NIGHT
(1977), DIARY OF A TEENAGE HITCHHIKER (1979) BILLY: PORTRAIT OF A STREET KID
(1975), I WANT TO KEEP MY BABY (1976), BORN INNOCENT (1974), CAGED WITHOUT A
KEY (1975), SARAH T. - PORTRAIT OF A TEENAGE ALCOHOLIC (1975), THAT CERTAIN
SUMMER (1972), NIGHTMARE IN BADHAM COUNTY (1976) which I already reviewed here.
Most of these made-for-TV efforts sound like bad After School Specials but you’d
be surprise at how effective some of them actually are. But that’s for another couple
of blog entries. So stay tuned.
Until next post—Martin
