Good Times - J.J.'s Fiancée

"Liquid nitroglycerin is soluble in alcohols but insoluble in water. In the early days, when impure nitroglycerin was used, it was very difficult to predict under which conditions it would explode." - A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates, 
and the Making of the Modern World by Stephen R. Bown.

Let's have a look at the 17th and 18th episode of the 3rd season of:

Good Times was a sitcom about a black family living in the infamous Cabrini Green housing project (never identified outright as such on the show) in Chicago that ran from 1974 to 1979. It was a spin-off of Maude, which was itself a spin-off of All in the Family.  

The last of Cabrini Green's highrises was demolished in 2011.

Also featured in such films as Candyman (1992) and Hard Ball (2001).
(Note: Candyman ain't real, folks. Come on.)

There's much more to the story than its portrayal in the media, of course, as this issue of the student newspaper of the College Prep School that borders the former projects explores pretty well. But let's stick with the small-screen Cabrini Green of Good Times.

Monte should be on anyone's radar if only as the writer of the classic high school movie Cooley High. He fell out with Lear over royalties and ownership rights not just for Good Times but for his other creations, most notably What's Happening! His career suffered as a result of this, and after a stalled attempt to reinvent himself as a playwright, he moved back to Chicago, where he lives still. (This interview from 2014 is the most recent I could find.)  Mike Evans caught the last train out in 2006. One-man-sitcom-army Norman Lear is, of this writing, in his 90s and still kicking.

Good Times starred John Amos as James Evans and Esther Rolle as his wife Florida, and Jimmie Walker, BerNadette Stanis, and Ralph Carter as their three children J.J., Thelma, and Michael. Walker's popularity as J.J. made him the breakout star of the cast.

Stanis was a model and pageant winner who got the role of Thelma after testing well when reading with Walker.

Most of her and J.J.'s rapport involved their calling each other butt-ugly. A situation that only makes sense in one direction in real life, not that cracking on siblings needs to be be grounded in reality.

Cast departures necessitated changes in the set-up over the lifetime of the show.  

Only the three children and the family's in-show neighbor, Willona, played by Ja'net Dubois, above, stayed for all 6 seasons.

Dubois was 28 when she was cast as Willona, but her character was supposed to be close to Esther Rolle's age (53). Insert white-people-can't-tell-black-people's-ages-at-all commentary here.

Amos was written off the show after season 3 and one too many dust-ups with Norman Lear and the writers about the show's direction.

Exactly when he took up the identity of "Major Grant" is unknown.

Also unknown - when exactly he found time to record this little number, which Blogger won't let me embed for some reason, but there's the link. Wow. I just - wow.

Amos wasn't the only cast member to branch out into music by any means. Ralph Carter had a minor disco hit with "When You're Young and in Love," and Stanis put out a hard-to-find album (Lover) in 1990.

Stanis (also the author of several books) and Carter at the Essence Music Festival 2009.

Esther Rolle left the show after the 4th season.

Both Amos and Rolle grew disgruntled as the show transformed from its original conception - a lighthearted examination of real-world-issues impacting the African American nuclear family in the 1970s - into a weekly showcase of J.J. "in his chicken hat" and his catchphrase "Dy-no-mite!" 

Certainly not the first or last show to suffer that fate.

Anyway! I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole of 70s TV reading and Chicago history looking up stuff for this post, but as it's afield of our Prom expedition, I'll put it aside for now. 

"You're the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time."

As the title might suggest, "J.J.'s Fiancée" is less about the prom and more about J.J.'s misadventures in love. He thinks he's found the girl of his dreams -

Diana (Debbie Allen)

but both his and her family are less than supportive of the idea of their getting married.

Unbeknownst to all except the viewing audience, Diana is harboring a little secret:

When J.J. mistakenly grabs Thelma's purse instead of hers when they leave the apartment, Thelma discovers her works and leaves the prom to come home and break the news to both families.

They also find a number on a scrap of paper in the purse and proceed to call it, luring the pusher over in a plan to confront him. 

Turns out, though, he's just a kid.

The line that gets the most applause in the episode is "You can't tell me a country that can put a man on the moon can't stop dope traffic," spoken by James. 

Meanwhile, J.J. learns of Diana's addiction when she begins to go through withdrawal after they get out of town. When she crawls out the window and leaves him in the hotel, the episode ends with his Dad calling to him through the phone receiver. 

Kind of a sad one.

...

The End. Not a bad episode but had I known how little of the actual prom it involved, I might have skipped it. We don't even see Thelma (or J.J.) at the prom. About the only prom trope we get is Thelma's dress, a minor plot point, as Florida is hurrying to finish it (as she makes it herself) before the big night.

People made their own dresses as recently as the 70s!

I liked that detail. I know a few folks who know how to do these sorts of things, but we're definitely in an age where making your own prom dress would be considered something totally retro or hipster-y rather than a skill born of necessity. Interesting juxtaposition to nowadays, so for that reason alone, I'm happy to view it through the TV Proms lens.  

It was announced a few months back that a movie version of Good Times was being written by Black-ish creator Kenya Barris. Dy-no-mite! Hope it actually materializes. 

~

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The Brady Bunch - Getting Davy Jones

"Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and 
the punishment of talent."

- Emily Dickinson

I've included overviews of all the series we've looked at so far, but it seems ridiculous to do so for this one. Even if you didn't grow up watching it on-air or in syndication, you likely know the set-up. (It's all in there in the theme song if you really need it.) The franchise itself has had surprising staying power, but let's limit our focus to the prom episode of

Season 3, Episode 12.

There's not too much to "Getting Davy Jones", so to help pad things out, I've included some thoughts on Celebrity and American Culture by our old friend Ian Svenonius. I trust you'll be able to make out which sections are describing the episode and which are from Svenonius's The Psychic Soviet (2006).

For example: 

"Like an offish breed of show dog, celebrities's bloodlines intersect at a thousand points. 

"As their family trees criss-cross more and more, the telltale totems of incest appear: idiocy, hemophilia, even madness.

"The wagons have been circled too long."

That'd be Svenious, not plot summary. And not necessarily reflective of anyone on The Brady Bunch, specifically, or even this episode. Although when I did a word-search for Brady Bunch/ Svenonius, this essay ("Scion-tology") came up, as he mentions its 90s big-screen remake as further evidence of the decadent West's cannibalizing itself. So, tenuous though it may be, there is a connective thread.

Marcia and her friends are in charge of putting together the entertainment for their Junior Prom. But time's running out, and they've got nobody lined up.

Jan barges in with an idea to save the day:

Who?

Not the underwater-locker guy, then.

He's in town, and Marcia is convinced she's got an 'in': she's not only the President of the local Davy Jones Fan Club, she's also the bearer of a handwritten document from the man himself pledging his aid to her in case he's ever in town.

"He wouldn't say 'If I'm ever in your town, I'll be happy to show you my appreciation' if he didn't really mean it."

'Twas a simpler time.

"He's the hottest thing around here since pepperoni pizza." - Mrs. Brady

Marcia tries everything she can think of to get through to Davy but to no avail. This doesn't stop her from prematurely announcing the news to her friends, who quickly spread the news. 

"Movie stars had bewitched audiences globally since the medium's initial appearance, and film was widely recognized as a fantastic disseminator of ideology (...) While actors had been thought ruffians and rogues in Shakespeare's time for their shifty ability to become other people, they were now exalted icons of the culture (because) they enact the unfulfilled promise of the Enlightenment and American Revolution, the ability to radically change one's situation: to transmute lead into gold. 

"The workers long for the ability to metamorphose as these alchemical entities do. (This) constellation of celebrity - like royalty - serves to re-enforce their un-worth."

The Brady kids brainstorm.

Peter calls up the hotel and pretends to be the manager of a band ("The Three Desperadoes" - one for your local Pub Quiz) but even this amazing bit of espionage nets no result. Finally, Greg comes up with a plan: he and Marcia will pose as room service and go up to Davy's room directly.

 

The scheme works, but Davy's not there. He's down at the studio cutting an album.

Marcia heads down there and strolls on in.

Davy's manager played by Britt Leach, a familiar face of 70s and 80s TV.

A quick word here on the contemporaneous popularity of Davy Jones. Despite Marcia's and Mrs. Brady's assertions, Davy struggled to establish himself as a solo artist after the Monkees broke up. Says Glenn A. Baker, author of Monkeemania: The True Story of the Monkees: "for an artist as versatile and confident as (he was) the relative failure of his post-Monkees activities is puzzling. For all his cocky predictions to the press about his future plans, Davy fell into a directionless heap when left to his own devices." 

Thanks to performing the song on this episode, "Girl," is probably his best-known solo tune, but it sold poorly and didn't appear again until Davy Jones was re-released on CD. 

"The ideal of the everyman who could grow up to confound expectation and achieve greatness had been, though, largely fantasy, a defining American archetype. (...) Everyone, rich and poor, envied the Americans for their freedom from etiquette, and their apparent class mobility. Then, somehow, everything reversed. (...) Now the inheritors of wealth, name, and power are everywhere."

"When the neophytes do manage to crash the palace gates they are outfitted with various surgical corrections (...) These surgeries are always grotesque, a self-mutilating penance for impure blood."

The idea of a pop star appearing as him or her self on a TV show was not invented by The Brady Bunch, of course, but the practice became increasingly widespread as corporate mergers intensified over the 70s and 80s. By the time the 90s rolled around, the idea of a company's TV production branch showcasing product from its music and clothing branches was commonplace. I don't know if any of this applies to "Getting Davy Jones" or not, but I suspect it might.

Anyway, Davy overhears Marcia telling his manager about the promise he made her via this letter Marcia has framed and decides he can't let a little girl down. He follows her home and gifting her a copy of the album he was still in the process of recording (!), asks if she would accompany him to the prom. She says yes, of course.

Whereupon they are catcalled by the younger Bradys.

The episode ends without showing us Davy and Marcia at the prom, so it's not quite a real prom episode, really, but then again was The Brady Bunch a "real" show? That is, was its aim to realistically explore blended family dynamics?  Of course not.

But I'm a Structuralist at heart, and I feel that media is more than just a form of entertainment; it is the entrails of our culture. If you want to learn who and what a society is, deconstruct its pop art. Even when its meaning is unintentional or hidden unto itself, we can, like pagan priests poking through sacrificed guts on altars of old, observe much more at work than mere plot dynamics or marketing concerns. "Getting Davy Jones" takes place against the American New Wave, for example, and can certainly be viewed as a reaction against it. 

In Brady's case, it is perhaps the artificiality of its premise - a blended family just as happy as a nuclear one that never has a disagreement without a happy ending - that's worth considering. In the midst of unpleasant truths about the collective family (country), many Americans preferred to contemplate the Bradys. 

"Initially, the Bolsheviks had longed to abolish the family, recognizing its intrinsically antisocial character, that its motivation was for its own well-being and security above all others. (...) Unfortunately, poverty forced the USSR to abandon its futurist scheme in favor of the old, faulty model of familial child rearing. Their failure has wrought this abomination of celebrity bloodlines that wreaks its terror on us all."

"Their failure translates into our terrible and urgent responsibility." 

~

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