When snobbery bites you on the ass
Once upon a time, there was a revolutionary new show called “The Real World”. It was trainwrecky but really unusual compared to everything else on TV, and at that particular (urban, young, underslept, slightly impoverished) time in my life, it was deeeeelicious brain candy, when grad school consumed so much brainpower I would burst into tears if presented with something as complicated/detail laden/rage inducing as, say, Lost. So if it was on, I would watch it. And then they went to Seattle, and I stopped watching.
To say that we are not a ‘reality tv’ household is an understatement. I have never seen an episode of ‘Survivor’. I’ve not watched America’s Next Top Model, The Bachelor, The Apprentice, So You Think You Can Dance, Big Brother, Dancing With the Stars, Biggest Loser, The Great Race, or even any of those $10,000 competition shows on Food TV- Food tv, for god’s sake! I’m their target audience! The closest we get is ‘iron chef’, and that is sporadic at best and hardly ‘reality’ (of course, neither are reality shows, but that’s neither here nor there). But Sean’s teacher- and several of his classmates- are hardcore into American Idol. The girls sing the songs the next day. There are in depth discussions of hairstyle choices amongst the same set of girls. The teacher, desperate to find some means of relevancy and getting the kids involved in thinking through numbers, voting, counting, etc, put up a poster on the classroom door of all the finalists and is putting a ’sadface’ under each as they get, er….what the hell is it that happens to them on this show if they’re not final 3? Voted off the island? Thrown to the lions? Stripped of their hairstyling products and thrust back into the cold hard reality of life in a small town in Tennessee? Miss T knows Sean does not watch the show- that no one in our house does- and that we are a tivo, pbs and noggin and fast forward over commercials on nick and disney and oh look FOOD DETECTIVES on Food Network family, and so has been careful to include him in other ways, without making him feel like a luddite or pointing him out for ridicule on the playground for being the progeny of such a pair of unrepentant culturally snobbish opera-watchin nerds.
One of the parents of a kid in the 3 year old room saw the poster the other day, and cornered the teacher, indicating his workplace thinks this is awesome and would like to involve the kiddos in a little something. And so, yesterday, Miss T carefully told me that F@x news is going to be at school TODAY shooting a filler piece for their afternoon local news since Dad in Room 7 is a Fox newscaster! on the Kindergarteners of X School! who loooooooove American Idol! And was this okay? And while I was trying to formulate a polite way of saying ‘Er, well, given he’s never seen it….’ Sean piped up in his angelic little voice.
“We don’t watch American Idol, because it’s junk food for your brain.”