The Nylon Hurtin'

In the movie Steel Magnolias, Dolly Parton's character, Truvy, claims she hasn't left the house without pantyhose on since she was 14 years old. To this her friend Clairee confirms, "You were raised right!"

Does this make you cringe, or raise your white-gloved fist in prim solidarity?

Generation X women came of age on the cusp of the change in dress code attitudes, balancing on the cotton crotch of the Great Pantyhose Divide. We grew up when hose were still the norm, but we entered the professional world realizing we weren't so keen on spending our paychecks on clothing that had a life span of about 2 wearings. When casual Fridays became popular the first thing we tossed were the pantyhose. And yet, I still struggle with "appropriate" times to wear them, much as I struggle just to put on the blessed things.

On Friday I had a job interview, and while dressing I once again pondered my bare legs with apprehension. My stylish-yet-conservative dress fell just above the knee--the norm for me at just shy of 6 feet tall. I worried it was too informal this way. Surely the second skin of some L'eggs would solve this problem and make my ensemble more...respectable.

This is where it gets weird.

Why do pantyhose equal "respectable"?

Why did I think that going bare-legged would somehow negate the validity of my master's degree and corporate experience? Why did I place so much weight on the power of an ounce of woven nylon? Years and years of condemnation from older generations, that's why. Gen X girls were taught that to be perceived as mature, professional, and/or proper we must wear pantyhose. Without question.

I worked my way through college in about 20 different retail jobs. Most of them required me to wear pantyhose. At least one even prohibited us girls from wearing pants. That was 1992.

But we have a powerful woman on OUR side now. Our own First Lady, Michelle Obama (by broadest definition a member of Generation X herself), has been quite vocal in her disdain for pantyhose. As a guest on The View she said, "I stopped wearing pantyhose a long time ago. They're painful...it's inconvenient."

She garnered some vitriolic backlash from this comment, being called everything from "unfeminine" to "vulgar" because of it. Crazy, isn't it?

So I'm taking a stand, a bare-legged stand. Those pantyhose I wore to my interview, the ones that caused my shoes to fit too loosely and hence fly off my left foot in the lobby of said interview, they are history! Those fancy silk-like pantyhose that cost $8.95 a pair and still rip when I barely bump them with a hangnail...history! I'm done with you, you antiquated casings of synthetic torture. I refuse to allow my character to be judged (real or imagined) by the presence or absence of some Underalls. The debate continues, but I'm standing with the First Lady on this one.

The Aging (but still hip) Role of GenX on TV

Somehow I missed watching FOX’s new comedy series Raising Hope until this week, even though it’s aired since September. I did a cartoon-like double take at the opening credits when Martha Plimpton was listed as the grandmother character on the show.

Martha is only two years older than me and smack in the middle of Generation X. She can’t be a grandmother yet! It wasn’t THAT long ago she was a teenager in The Goonies, was it?

But my stumbling upon the show was serendipitous, because I ended up really liking it. The plot is strange on paper, but in action it works. Main character Jimmy Chance is a 23-year-old single dad living at home with his slacker GenX parents (who conceived him on their prom night, thus making them meemaw and peepaw so young). Jimmy’s raising 1-year-old Hope by himself because his baby’s mother—with whom he had a one-night stand—is on death row. Like I said, in theory it’s a head scratcher, but on screen the hijinks ensue nicely.

Plots center around Jimmy’s struggles with parenthood, the generation gap, family dynamics, friendship, and fitting in…but not in a "very special Blossom" kind of way. These aren’t the Keatons or the Seavers of yesteryear. These folks are more like what would happen if Punky Brewster got knocked up by Ben Seaver, they moved into the apartment above their parents’ garage, got hourly manual jobs, and then became grandparents at 38. They’re good people at heart who just happened to get caught up in life.

I love that Jimmy struggles with the frustration of living with GenX parents. When he’s unable to delete an awkward and nervously-delivered phone message because he’s calling from a rotary phone, he exclaims in agony, “WHYYYY do we live in the ‘70s?!?!”



I also love the hidden bits of nostalgia in the show’s set. When Grandpa Chance sits at the kitchen table, hanging behind him is a 1972 linen dish towel calendar, the exact one I am sure my own mother had in our kitchen when I was a kid. Basically Jimmy is living in the house WE all grew up in, and it frustrates the hell out of him. (For all I know it IS the house his mom grew up in; I missed the first 11 episodes so that may have been covered at some point.)

The Chances are people you’d totally want as your neighbors. They freely share their box wine, they take great delight in tiny bits of clever humor, and Granny Martha never fails to capture special moments on her breadbox-sized VHS camcorder.

Raising Hope probably won’t win any Emmy Awards for writing, but who cares. I laughed out loud multiple times. It’s worth the 30 minutes if only to play How-Many-Things-in-Their-House-Were-Taken-From-My-Mom’s-House. It airs Tuesday nights at 9:00 on FOX, and is also on Hulu.com, which is where I am headed now to catch up on the first 11 episodes.

Movie Review: Greenberg

“My shrink said I have trouble living in the present, so I linger on the past because I feel like I never really lived it in the first place.”

Such was the response by main character Roger Greenberg in the 2010 film Greenberg, when a 20-something girl matter-of-factly tells him, “you like old stuff.” The gravity of his response was lost on the girl, too young to possess the life experience necessary to fathom it.

Co-written by Gen Xers Noah Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh, the movie spans six weeks in the life of Greenberg, played by Ben Stiller. He has just turned 41 years old and was recently discharged from a mental hospital after experiencing a nervous breakdown. Spending this time house-sitting for his much more successful brother, he half-heartedly attempts to connect with his brother’s 25-year-old personal assistant, Florence. Their 16-year age difference shines light on the generation gap between Gen X and Gen Y, much to the chagrin of both characters.

While this movie has been described as “Gen X Hits Middle Age,” that’s hardly an accurate summation. This is not Hot Tub Time Machine, nor is it Fast Times on Suburbia Lane (which would be an awesome sequel…). It’s one man’s question of where his life was, is, and is going. He just happens to be Generation X.

Personal relationships are the heart of the script, which often flips from past to present to cover the changes in relationships between the decades. Reconciling life imagined versus life realized is the antagonizing co-theme.

The interaction between Greenberg and his old friend and former bandmate, Ivan, made me imagine what the interaction might be like between Ferris Bueller and Cameron Frye 25 years after their day off…if Ferris was now working a 9-to-5 and separated from his marriage to Sloane, and if Cameron never got past his daddy issues and really tried to drown himself in the pool. I wanted clever banter when they reminisced about the old days, but the smiles were limited and were overshadowed by regret and missed opportunity.

When Greenberg meets for a drink with former girlfriend Beth, the ambivalence of one-sided memories was exquisitely displayed by Leigh’s less-than-nostalgic character.

While she reminded me why I love her as an actor, I had hoped for something a little stronger from Leigh as a writer. I found the script to be disjointed but sporadically emphasized by a handful of profound quotes that were too good for the scenes in which they were used. I did appreciate that the pop culture references so commonplace in Gen X-oriented movies were subtly infused and not gratuitous. They were always used to illustrate a point and not simply for the sake of inclusion.

The finest scene involved Greenberg attempting to blend his current 41-year-old self with the lives of partygoers in their early 20s. His rant on what’s wrong with Gen Y was both hilarious and spot-on, and the subsequent reaction by the young’ns further demonstrated the frustrations X has with Y.

The role is a complete change from what we’re used to getting from Stiller, so it was nice to see him not Fockering things up yet again.
Roger Greenberg is not a likable person, though I found myself applauding a few of his brutally honest reactions. This is not a happy movie in any way, and you'll probably want to go to bed after you watch it. But if you're in the mood to take stock of life a little, it's worth the 2 hours. With any luck you'll actually feel better about your own life afterwards.

(Greenberg is out of theaters, but available on Netflix.)