Transcript for Episode 6: Blair Warner Is a Homophobe

This is the transcript for the installment of the show in which we discuss the Facts of Life episode “Rough Housing.” If you’d rather listen to Glen and Drew than read what they say, click here. The transcript was provided by Sarah Neal, whose skills we recommend wholeheartedly.

Sue Ann:  Ah, come on. Loosen up, Arnold. Girls don't bite. 

Arnold:  Well, I know girls don't bite. It's just that girls like to kiss, and you take your life in your hands with the ones that wear braces. 

[Sue Ann kisses Arnold]

[audience laughs]

Cindy:  You don't have to worry about me, Arnold. I don't like kissing either. I'm into sports. 

Arnold:  Hey. This one's almost human. 

[audience laughs]

Arnold:  You wouldn't pull my leg, would you? 

Tootie:  Why not? You could use a few inches. 

[audience laughs]

[The Facts of Life's theme song plays]

Drew:  You are listening to Gayest Episode Ever, the podcast that looks at episodes of classic sitcoms that have LGBT issues, which is to say the very special episodes that also happen to be very gay episodes. I'm Drew Mackie. 

Glen:  I'm Glen Lakin. 

Drew:  In case that intro didn't tip you off, today we're talking about The Facts of Life. In fact, we are talking about the pilot of Facts of Life titled "Rough Housing." It first aired on August 24th, 1979, on NBC. And before we get into this, we are going to introduce our very special guest. Glen, would you like to introduce our guest today? 

Glen:  No, but I will. Our guest is Steve Yockey—famous playwright, TV writer, currently on Supernatural, and I know him from my speedball parties. Insert air of mystery. 

Drew:  Speedball is not a drug reference, to be clear. 

Glen:  Well, beer is a drug. Steve, do you want to describe it? 

Steve:  I don't know that I could—I was okay at it. I was pretty good at that game. It's a game. Speedball's a game. 

Glen:  It's like beer pong, but instead of being punished for doing poorly by drinking, you are rewarded for doing well by drinking. 

Drew:  That sounds like my sell of game night. 

Steve:  Yeah. I have to be honest. But the more that you win, the harder it is to continue to win. 

Glen:  Because you get very drunk. Yeah. Last time I think I played, I puked on my partner. 

Drew:  Oh. 

Steve:  Oh, yeah. You play with teams—teams of two. 

Drew:  This is a different style of Glen than I am used to having live with me.

Glen:  Yeah, especially because this morning I complained about being hungover from half a glass of wine. 

Drew:  Yeah. It wasn't very much. 

Steve:  Well, I'm happy to bring a different lens to this. 

Drew:  That is why you're here. As a writer, I'm always interested in how you would approach what we're talking about. But before we get into Facts of Life, tell us a little bit about your work. 

Steve:  As a playwright, I tend to write pretty dark stories. I like to write very intimate personal stories that brush up against larger mythical things, so it's definitely a lot of theatricality on stage—not like theater theatricality, but crazy things happening. 

Drew:  Right. There's a surreal element. 

Steve:  Definitely. 

Drew:  The two of yours that I have seen so far, they were very up my alley in terms of weirdness and people learning about themselves—people learning about who they are against the backdrop of something huge and surreal. 

Steve:  I should have just let you talk about my plays. That's good. You did a great job. 

Glen:  You can also write gay characters without the plays themselves being categorized as gay. 

Drew:  That's true. 

Glen:  But sometimes the plays are very gay. 

Steve:  [laughs] It's true. I sometimes write very gay plays. 

Drew:  Steve Yockey, gay playwright of gay plays only for gay people. 

Steve:  [laughs] That's—yes. Sometimes. 

Drew:  Steve, when is the first time you remember watching Facts of Life? 

Steve:  I watched it when I was young. I think I started watching it after the retooling that happened, and it happened in season two, I guess, but when they got rid of half the girls and added Jo. But I don't remember watching the earlier episodes that I'll see in reruns sometimes, but then I do remember that after I had watched a couple episodes of it there was an episode that I now know is called "The Little Chill." 

Drew:  Oh. We're going to talk about that. We've actually already talked about that on our Golden Girls episode, weirdly enough. But yeah, that's a very important episode to this episode we're talking about. 

Steve:  Well, so what's so great about that episode is that if you're someone who didn't know about the first season of Facts of Life, all of the sudden they're like "And here's all these girls that used to be on the show and are now coming back for a reunion," and I was like, "Who are these people?" I was Jo in "The Little Chill." When they kept being like, "You weren't here for any of it, so you just had to be there," or whatever the girl keeps saying. I was like, "Oh. I missed that." And this was obviously when I was younger, and there was no internet, so I couldn't go watch those episodes that I missed. 

Drew:  Right. So I grew up watching this, too, but I watched basically from late-Mrs. Garrett into Beverly Ann years, when Cloris Leachman took over. And I don't think it was until they started airing reruns on Logo that I ever saw any of the first season, and I was like, "Who the hell is Cindy? And who is Sue Ann? And who are these people?" 

Steve:  And why is Molly Ringwald on this show?

Glen:  Named Molly. 

Drew:  Baby Molly Ringwald playing, I guess, herself? 

Glen:  Yeah, like, "Oh, she can't learn a character name. Let's just call her Molly." 

Drew:  She's tiny. 

Steve:  But then I read an interview with her in The Advocate where she said something along the lines of she was supposed to be the fourth girl that got moved on to the next iteration but that they decided to go with Jo. 

Glen:  I mean, that's a vast improvement. 

Steve:  I mean, it worked out for Molly. She's fine. 

Drew:  Yeah. Molly Ringwald, current star of Riverdale, along with everyone else who was a big in the '90s, and came back to play cool, sexy adults on Riverdale. 

Steve:  And Mädchen Amick, who looks the same. 

Drew:  And Skeet Ulrich looks pretty good. I was impressed seeing him, like yeah, he turned out pretty good. Twenty years later, after Scream, he looks great. Glen, what was your relationship with Facts of Life?

Glen:  Not much of one. I feel like I love the theme song more than I love the show. I was a Diff'rent Strokes—not expert, but I definitely loved, loved that show. And so I experienced the Facts of Life girls through that shared universe first, and I had no awareness of this first season. I knew about, obviously, the first retooling and the second retooling when they bake or whatever—no. They baked with Mrs. Garrett—

Drew:  Edna's Edibles. 

Glen:  Yeah. And then I don't know what those later seasons were about, and my whole experience watching this show was "Are they ever in class? Is this a school? I don't understand what's happening. Are they adopted? Are they orphans? Why are they here?" 

Drew:  Did you not know about boarding schools? 

Glen:  Not really. But I guess, in the second season, the uniforms make everything much clearer, because this whole thing was a mess. 

Drew:  Well, they're not in class. It all takes place in the span of a few hours on one evening that's not a school night. But we will get into all that. So this episode is the pilot to Facts of Life, but it's not the first time we've seen the Facts of Life characters. The season finale of the first season to Diff'rent Strokes is actually where we meet most of the Eastland girls. 

Steve:  That's an embedded pilot, like it's embedded into the season of Diff'rent Strokes, but then—so then they have the freedom to just have the Diff'rent Strokes—the Drummonds just drop by at the frontend of the episode, which is weird. It was weird to me. That was strange. 

Glen:  So did this take place—did Mrs. Garrett leave Diff'rent Strokes that early on? 

Drew:  She did, and that's weird because you would think she had one season of being the housekeeper on Diff'rent Strokes, and then allegedly, it was actually—the actress who played Mrs. Garrett, Charlotte Rae, it was her idea that Mrs. Garrett should get a spinoff. NBC agreed, which is surprising not only because she was a good character, but I would worry that she might have been so integral to the success of Diff'rent Strokes that they wouldn't want to pull her out. And at some point, it was considered that Mr. Drummond's daughter Kimberly, played by Dana Plato, would also be a cast member on Facts of Life because she goes to this boarding school. 

Steve:  Well, isn't that ostensibly at the beginning of the—aren't they there to either pick her up or see her or something? It's that weird thing—there's a couple moments in the episode, and I know we'll get into it later. But just from a purely directorial perspective, there's a couple moments where they don't give you an establishing shot of Kimberly. She appears as if from nowhere. When she leans down to talk to Arnold, she's just there all of a sudden. Just something I noticed. I don't know. 

Glen:  This pilot gives no fucks about telling you who these people are, what they're doing—I guess you pick up that it's a school, and then a boarding school, and maybe you get some character names. Cindy is mentioned a lot, but did they ever say Natalie's name? Tootie, who was the darling of the show, at some point just rolls in and out on her roller skates but never gets a character introduction, never gets much to do. 

Drew:  So the season finale of Diff'rent Strokes where the school is introduced and the idea that Mrs. Garrett might be involved with the school aired on May 4th, 1979, and this aired the following August. So it was a very quick turnaround. I guess they were just banking on the fact that everyone would have remembered. And unless I'm mistaken, that season one finale aired immediately before this pilot did. So to viewers, it would have been a continuous thing. That is when you meet—you don't meet Natalie at all. Natalie does not appear in that season one episode. Natalie's first appearance is this episode. But Tootie, Blair, Sue Ann, Cindy—everyone else shows up for the first time in that episode. That's where they get introduced. Interestingly, season one of Diff'rent Strokes ends with Mrs. Garrett deciding not to stay at the school, and then this episode is casually mentioned by Mr. Drummond, like, "Is this a temporary permanent thing?" And she's like, "Oh, I might come back," because who knows—maybe the show wouldn't have lasted, and she would have gone back to Diff'rent Strokes. Also, they maintain the continuity with Dana Plato's character by having a bunch of the Facts of Life girls come have a sleepover on Diff'rent Strokes a few episodes into that show's second season. So this is the shared universe, but you are on your own if you only watch one or the other, I guess, to wonder who the fuck all these girls were. 

Glen:  Dana Plato should have just been on the show. 

Drew:  She might have ended up better off if she was on this show and—

Glen:  Oooh. 

Steve:  That was dark [laughter].

Drew:  So we're talking about Facts of Life, and all those girls basically ended up okay, but it is very interesting seeing how much better they ended up than the kids from Diff'rent Strokes. They had really hard lives after that show ended, and I'm not sure what the difference was. 

Glen:  The difference was most of them were girls, and I think girls just make better life choices, maybe? 

Drew:  Maybe. 

Steve:  It probably also has a lot to do with their parents, whoever their parents were. 

Drew:  Right. Right. Not to say that Facts of Life wasn't a difficult show to be on for a lot of these girls because their weight fluctuated a lot over the course of the show, and they've given many interviews about how the showrunners were very hard on them about their weight. There was an off-screen scale where they were supposed to get weighed on a regular basis to make sure they weren't putting on too much weight. 

Steve:  Which by the way is crazy because after I watched this episode—because it was so jarring to be like, "Oh. This was how the show started?" Because I would have watched this episode in continuity and just thought, "That's a very special episode of—" but instead it's the pilot—or the first episode. And so I went and looked it up, and Kim Fields was nine when they filmed this. 

Drew:  She was very young. 

Steve:  Lisa Whelchel was 15 – 16 years old, and she was the oldest. 

Drew:  And she looks much older than the other girls. 

Glen:  Is that Blair? 

Drew:  That's Blair. Lisa Whelchel was Blair. She looks like a young woman, and most of the other girls on the show look like girls. Tootie was—the reason Tootie is on roller skates all the time is because she was so short they had to account for the height difference, so they were just like, "Put her on roller skates," and that's why she's zooming around in the background the entire time. 

Glen:  Why didn't they have to do anything with Arnold? He's much shorter than Tootie. 

Steve:  Well, so that Tootie could have her joke about stretching him out. 

Drew:  Yeah, which is not a bad joke. So this episode was written by Glen Padnick and Brad Rider, it was directed by Nick Havinga—none of whom I really have anything that super interesting to say about. However, I will repeat that this show as co-created by Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon, who are the writers of the last episode we did, which was the Mary Tyler Moore where Phyllis's brother turns out to be gay. 

Glen:  What!

Drew:  Yeah. We already talked about it, but if you have watched the other seasons of this show, you're going to be surprised that we're talking about a lot of characters who don't really figure into the show, and this includes Nancy; Sue Ann; Cindy; Molly; Mr. Bradley, the headmaster; and also Miss Mahoney, a teacher at the school who is only around four episodes before she disappears. 

Glen:  But she is my favorite character in this episode. 

Drew:  She's well-played. You get a really good sense of who she is, and we'll get to her in a moment. But don't feel bad. The actress Jenny O'Hara went on to do so much TV work. She wasn't hurting for not making it on this show. 

Steve:  And continues to do a lot of theater work. 

Drew:  Oh, really? 

Steve:  Yeah. Here in L.A. She was just in a really long run of a show at the Fountain Theatre here in town and probably a bunch of other stuff that I'm just not remembering. But she's wonderful. 

Drew:  Good for her. 

Glen:  That makes sense. I was telling Drew just last night I was impressed with the level of acting on the show. 

Drew:  Even from a lot of the kids. And I don't really love child actors, but these girls actually do a pretty good job, I would say. 

Steve:  Yeah. 

Drew:  However, in the transition from season two to season three, the showrunners decided that they had just too many characters, which I think that's why characters are just popping in out of nowhere on this show. There's like nine characters on the show. 

Steve:  Was it the transition from season one to season two? 

Drew:  Yeah. It's between those two years where it becomes—Jo, Nancy McKeon's character Jo—Tomboy Jo—joins the show. And then Cindy, Sue Ann, Nancy, and Molly drop down to recurring. They do all appear—Molly only appears once, but she appears on an episode with Jo. It's called "The New Girl," and it's all about jo joining the cast. And then the other two show up again before "The Little Chill" episode, and they just drop from recurring to not really being on the show at all at one point. But they weren't completely absent after this season; they just weren't starting characters anymore. 

Steve:  It felt like they were background. 

Drew:  Yeah. Recurring background. But they had names. We kind of knew who they were. Nancy is my favorite, by the way. Nancy is the pretty, dark-haired girl played by Felice Schacter, who was in that movie Zapped! with Scott Baio, where he gets telekinetic powers. Do you know this? 

Glen:  Yes, of course I know this!

Steve:  And Willie Aames.  

Drew:  Yeah, and she's the female lead in that movie. That's primarily how I know her, but I always thought she was just the prettiest girl. She's much prettier than Blair, if you ask me. 

Steve:  I have to tell you that I could not disagree with you more about the last part of what you just said about her being prettier than Blair. But I do think that if you had showed me a picture of the entire cast right now, I could not point to Nancy. 

Glen:  Yeah. Are you saying she's your favorite as an actress or as a character on this episode—because who? 

Drew:  I guess I liked her over the course of the first season, because I've re-watched the first season and I was always drawn to Nancy's stories. I like the way she looked—and yeah. It might just be because I had a little gay-boy crush on her, maybe. 

Glen:  Is she the one who threw Cindy under the bus in terms of the pageant queen? 

Steve:  That's Sue Ann. 

Drew:  That's Sue Ann. Sue Ann's blonde. Nancy has dark hair. She's the only girl with long, dark hair on the show. 

Steve:  No, I remember her now that you're talking about her, but on the episode Sue Ann's the one that says, "You should run, too," And causes Blair to have that reaction. Anyway. 

Drew:  We're getting ahead of ourselves. 

Steve:  Oh. I apologize. 

Drew:  No, no. That's fine. We'll start at the beginning where we say that the episode opens with Mrs. Garrett helping the girl get ready for a harvest festival-plus-dance, and the Drummond family shows up to check in on Mrs. Garrett and bother her while she's very, very busy. You very quickly get a run-through of everything that's happening, which is a lot, and perhaps the most salient point is that Arnold, played by Gary Coleman—the star of Diff'rent Strokes—doesn't like girls. He doesn't like the attention he gets from girls. He doesn't like the idea that a girl might kiss him. And this is true to his character, especially at that point on the show. He was a little boy. He didn't like girls. But I like the way that this point is woven into these new characters [who are] meeting because that is what this episode is all about, and I'll just say that my subtitle for the show is "Blair Warner is a Homophobe" because she fucking is. 

Steve:  I would like to contribute that my alternate title for this episode is "Gay Panic." 

Drew:  Yeah. 

Steve:  And also, as we go through, I will break down for you why this could very easily just be a staging of the Lillian Hellman play from the 1930s, The Children's Hour—but we'll talk about that as we move through. But it's definitely one of those things where I love Blair, and as a young gay boy before knowing I was gay and only having that instinctive awareness of it, I was obsessed with Blair, and every awful thing that she did I would justify. 

Drew:  She's more justifiable in later episodes, but in this episode I think she's a pretty hate-able character because of what she does. But that's coming up very, very shortly. 

Glen:  My subtitle for this episode is much less kind than either of yours. 

Drew:  Is it something you can say? 

Glen:  No [laughter]. 

Drew:  Okay. Well, we'll just let the audience wonder about that. So we meet the Drummonds, and then we meet Cindy. Cindy is played by Julie Anne Haddock. She's basically a prototype for Jo. She's not as mouthy as Jo. She can't hold her own against Blair because she's much younger than Blair, and Blair's kind of just pushing her around. But she's a tomboy who likes sports, and she keeps all of her long, blonde hair tucked up in her cap. She essentially does look like a boy at the beginning, and she's the one that tells Arnold, "Don't worry. I won't try to hug you or kiss you." And his response is very like little-boy girl hating when he's like, "Hey. This one's almost human." That's just—he apparently doesn't view women as being people, even though he loves Mrs. Garrett, who's a very feminine woman. 

Glen:  Almost human could have also been a subtitle of this episode from Blair's perspective. 

Drew:  Yeah. 

Steve:  You guys [laughs]. 

Glen:  She's a monster. 

Steve:  She is not a monster. When we get to the end of the episode, we'll talk about how she's not a monster, but I understand what you're saying. 

Drew:  I will also point out that Cindy reminds me of Kathy Santoni from Full House who we saw very few times over the course of Full House, but something about the actress's look just reminds me of Kathy Santoni. It's this pointy, pretty, blonde girl thing. She's a very pretty girl, she's just in tomboy drag for most of this episode. She is in charge of the games portion of the festival, and this includes athletic competitions—because that's her thing—and tug-of-war, and she's like, "Yeah, you guys. We have to get ready for tug-of-war," and she grabs Blair and grabs Nancy and tries to get them ready for tug-of-war, and Blair makes it very clear she does not appreciate Cindy touching her. 

[audience laughs]

Cindy:  Come on, you guys. Tug-of-war practice time. We got to get on the ball before we get our brains knocked in. 

Blair:  Listen, Slugger. Some of us want to talk about the dance. 

Cindy:  Now, come on. Now you just plant your foot right here. 

Blair:  Would you mind not pawing me? You are strange. 

Mrs. Garrett:  Oh, nothing strange about it. It's her job. Cindy is captain of the games committee. 

Blair:  Yes. Well, some of us girls are interested in what happens after her silly games—the dance, and the boys. Something super jock wouldn't know about. 

[audience laughs]

Cindy:  How would you like me to fix it so you could breathe through your ears? 

Drew:  She doesn't care about the games. All she cares about is the dance after because there's a boy she likes that she wants to make out with. 

Glen:  And he sounds hot. 

Drew:  Based on the description, yes. 

Steve:  And this is all I could think when I was watching that: I kept waiting for them to say "Bates Academy" because I remember that in later seasons all the boys—they were always like—it was Eastland—

Drew:  Eastland is the girls' school. Yeah. 

Steve:  Right. And then Bates Academy is where all the boys are that they would talk about. Everyone was at Bates Academy—her revolving roster of boys. When they do the reboot and Blair becomes just basically—she stops being—there's even a reference in this to her smoking and stuff like that. She stops being the rebellious one because Jo's going to be the rebellious one in the reboot. 

Drew:  Oh, true. 

Steve:  And then she just turns into the snobby shopping one. And once that happens, then it's always a revolving list of boys from Bates Academy. 

Drew:  And I mean, the jokes just write themselves about that. But yeah. 

Glen:  The Boys' School for Murderers? 

Drew:  I was thinking of a masturbation joke, but that works, too. She objects to Cindy touching her, and she tells her, "Cindy, you are strange," which she says more than once in this episode. And watching in 2018, I just view it as being a sitcom code for "Don't touch me, you lesbo." She's uncomfortable with the fact that Cindy isn't feminine, and she doesn't like Cindy touching her, so it reads as homophobic to me. 

Steve:  I feel like the point where it turns, where it goes full Children's Hour—like the little girl that throws the teachers under the bus in the Children's Hour, which—

Drew:  Actually, can you quickly synopsize? 

Steve:  Sorry. I'm sorry. It's just this play from the 1930s, and it was made into a movie. But it's a Lillian Hellman play, and it's about these two women who open a school for girls in New England, and obviously wealthy people send their children there. One of the girls that goes there, Mary, doesn't want to go there anymore because she doesn't like it and she's a troublemaker. So she invents this story that the two teachers are having a lesbian affair, and it destroys the school, and it destroys the women's lives, and then it turns out that one of the women actually does have feelings for the other one, and it brings it all to the surface. And then one of them—spoiler alert—commits suicide at the end of the play, and everything falls apart. So that's why. 

Glen:  My kind of play. 

Drew:  There's a really good movie version with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine? 

Steve:  Shirley MacLaine. Yeah. 

Drew:  Yeah. It's a fantastically done movie. It feels like a play, but—

Steve:  But there is, just to say, there is a moment where I feel like it goes full Children's Hour in this episode. When it struck for me was when—I feel like Blair is just having a normal—this is why I'm saying the evil thing, I think, is a bit much. She's young. I think that she's having a normal reaction to Cindy grabbing her by the wrist and dragging her around and stuff like that, and then it's when Cindy—and I know we're going to get to it, but it's a little bit later in that same sequence when Cindy says to Sue Ann, "I love you," and hugs her. That's when Blair delivers that ice pick line where she's like, "Oh, I just love her," or whatever, and Blair's like—it's something like, "Just bet you do," or something like that. It's got this accusation behind it, and that's where the episode, I feel, goes full gay panic. 

Glen:  Because what was confusing to me—and I don't know girls—but Blair seemed like the type of girl who likes girls and would have been very touchy-huggy with her friends. 

Drew:  She doesn't really like girls. She's very competitive and vain, and a girl is either competition or she kind of is vapor to her, and that's kind of how it is with—the reason Nancy McKeon joins the show and season two, the reason it's so good is that Jo fights back and they have a great dynamic, and that kind of makes Blair make a little bit more sense. But she's a queen bee, and there's no one that's even on her level at this point in the show. 

Glen:  Yeah, but I feel like queen bees are pretty good at masking the disdain and competition of other girls. Like, she'd be fine with a little—not tickle fight, but you know, like hugging and kissing other girls. 

Drew:  She's very feminine. She's a very feminine girl, but she just does not approve of un-femininity. 

Steve:  That's a good way to say it. 

Drew:  Part of my reading of Blair's character I can't separate from Lisa Whelchel as an actual person. So the who actress played Blair is kind of a Kirk Cameron type. She was a born-again Christian from the time she was a very little girl, and she's gone on to be someone who—she's written a ton of books about parenting and having adult female relationships, but they're all from the perspective of a conservative Christian woman. She kind of caused a controversy a few years ago when she wrote a book on discipline where she advocated spanking your child with hot sauce. So if a child says something bad, you put hot sauce on their tongue to teach them a lesson, and that wasn't corporal punishment, but—

Glen:  That's what you do with dogs. 

Drew:  Is it? 

Glen:  I mean, 10 or 20 years ago. That was what we were told how to punish my first dog was like, "Put hot sauce on their tongue." 

Drew:  That is something she advocated as an alternative to physical corporal punishment, and people on both sides were like, "Yeah, I don't know how I feel about that, Blair." [laughter]

Steve:  I will say, I hear what you're saying. But on the actual show—there's a whole episode where we find out that Blair's an atheist. Blair is an atheist because she prayed for her parents to not get divorced and they did anyway, and so she doesn't believe in God anymore. So I don't think that Lisa Whelchel's beliefs even as a child at 15 years old were informing the what I would call very interesting scripting of this character. 

Drew:  Well, so there is the episode where Natalie loses her virginity. It happens years down the road, and it was initially written as a plotline for Blair to lose her virginity, and she objected and said, "This is not something I want to do on screen. I'm not comfortable with it." So Mindy Cohn, who plays Natalie, said, "Fuck it. I'll do it. Make me lose my virginity." So it becomes a Natalie story. Lisa Whelchel does not appear in that episode. They have to come up with an explanation why she's just not there, which is what makes me think of her as being a Kirk Cameron type Christian. 

Steve:  She may very well—I'm not discounting that. I'm just saying that in this particular episode, I don't think Blair was informed by her personal beliefs. 

Drew:  Yeah, because she was brand new on the show. 

Glen:  I have something to say that has nothing to do with anything, but it's about this scene. So before we leave this scene—

Steve:  Well, this is a really long scene. 

Glen:  This is a long scene. Yeah. 

Steve:  This is like old-school multi-cam. 

Drew:  So the next thing I have is the entry of Mr. Bradley and Ms. Mahoney and Molly, but what's your thing? 

Glen:  Was it just me, or was there a palpable sexual tension between Mrs. Garrett and Mr. Drummond in this scene? Like, I wanted them to fuck hard. 

[audience laughs]

Mr. Drummond:  So Mrs. Garrett. This house mother thing isn't permanently temporary, is it? 

Mrs. Garrett:  Oh, no. I'll be back. I promise. 

Mr. Drummond:  Good, because we've been having a rough time. 

Mrs. Garrett:  Yeah? 

Mr. Drummond:  Ever since you left, everything's upside down and topsy-turvy. I think I've been wearing Arnold's underwear. 

[audience laughs]

Mrs. Garrett:  Well, that'll keep you on your toes [laughs]. 

[audience laughs]

Drew:  Was that something that was on the first season of Diff'rent Strokes? 

Steve:  I feel like Charlotte Rae—this is going to sound like a weird thing to say, but she has a very—there's the part where she's talking about her curvy body. There is an energy that she has that's very sort of—

Drew:  She's very feminine. She's sensual. She talks about sex a lot over the course of this show because she's teaching them the facts of life. But yeah. Yeah. Like the joke about—Mr. Drummond, he's like, "We're lost without you, Edna. I'm wearing Arnold's underwear." She's like, "That'll keep you on your toes." I'm like, "Huh. That's a weird response." 

Steve:  I think it's funny that you think that her response was weird, because I think the fact that he said that—that was the part to me that I was triggered [laughs]. I was like, "Don't say that to her, Creepy!" 

Drew:  Right. Don't make us picture that. 

Glen:  He's also not as old as you—the actor is not as old as you might think he is. 

Drew:  And neither is Mrs. Garrett, but in my head they are such old people because they've been old as long as I can remember. So, yeah. The scene keeps going. They keep introducing more characters, and the next three we meet are Mr. Bradley, who is the headmaster of the school. He's a funny character. You get a good sense that he's a goofball and he's a little uncomfortable around girls, but it's a funny energy. They introduce Miss Mahoney, who's played by—

Steve:  Jenny O'Hara. 

Drew:  Jenny O'Hara. Thank you. I think had she lasted on this show, they would have played up some sort of romance between those two. 

Glen:  Well, they both also introduce the only real series conflict I saw in this episode of private school versus public school because he brings in, like, "Oh, their curfew can be 11:30," which is ridiculous. 

Drew:  That's really late. Yeah. 

Glen:  It's really late. And she's like, "What? What is Eastland without its rules and its traditions?" 

Mr. Bradley:  All right. 

Miss Mahoney:  Mr. Bradley, once we make a rule at Eastland, we stick to it. Do you know what that means? 

Mr. Bradley:  Yes. You have sticky rules. Change tonight's curfew to 11:40. 

Girls:  All right!

Miss Mahoney:  Mr. Bradley, I know that you come from the public school system, but Eastland is a private school with its own private rules. 

Mr. Bradley:  Good. Then keep them private. Girls, change that to 11:50. 

Steve:  Can I say one thing? 

Drew:  Please. 

Steve:  As we move through this and we're kind of locking in the beginnings of the conflicts, and there's the conflicts between the teachers, there's the conflicts between—it's not really a conflict. There's Blair bringing conflict to Cindy and these different things, I struggled—and this will be a recurring theme through this entire episode—to land on a point of view character. I have no idea who's side I was supposed to be on because the show makes me feel like I should be on the side of Miss Mahoney, but I did not agree with what she was saying. 

Drew:  No. That's true. 

Steve:  But then I also thought, "Oh. Well, the new headmaster's making a lot of sense," but then he was a jerk. So it was like they kept pulling me on to someone and then undercutting them, and it continued to happen. 

Drew:  That might be a symptom of why the show got fixed in season two is that there's just too much going on for you to focus on any one thing. There are so many characters in this scene. They're all on the screen most of the time, too. 

Steve:  Yeah. Everyone's there. 

Drew:  Everyone's just standing around, waiting for another character to be introduced. How did you guys feel when the conversation between Mr. Bradley and Miss Mahoney, she seems to have trouble admitting that she's 32 years old. 

Glen:  I wanted to throw my computer against the wall. 

Mr. Bradley:  This is my first year at Eastland and my first Harvest fair, so be gentle. I'll be depending heavily on Miss Mahoney to show me the ropes. She's an old pro. 

[audience laughs]

Mr. Bradley:  I don't mean she's an old pro. I mean she's been around. 

[audience laughs]

Mr. Bradley:  Oh, no. I don't mean she's been around. I mean she's been around the school for a long, long time. Not that long. Hardly more than a girl. 

Miss Mahoney:  Mr. Bradley, I'm not coy about my age. I don't care who knows it. I'm 32-whoo years old. 

[audience laughs]

Natalie:  Thirty-two? Wow. So that's what it looks like. 

Miss Mahoney:  Natalie, at 32, a woman is in her full prime, and it's not as far away as you girls may think. Some of you are about to burgeon into womanhood. 

Natalie:  I thought all of us were burgeons. 

[audience laughs]

Steve:  But that line delivery was spectacular. As I said earlier, that line delivery—the way that she chokes out 32 and her eyes have panic for just two seconds. 

Glen:  Yeah. It's [like a] ghost escaped her eyeholes. 

Steve:  But what's great is she gets that line out, and then because the show is evil they have Natalie turn and look at her, "Oh. That's what 32 looks like," in this wistful way, like it's so far in the future, and I was like, "God damn it." [laughs]

Drew:  Get ready for it Mindy Cohn. It's coming your way [laughter]. I can only say that being an unmarried woman of 32 in 1979 is a very different thing than being a gay man in 2018 who's—I'm 35 and was like, "Okay. That's fine. I can move past this." But it is weird to hear 32 being like she's in the danger zone already. 

Steve:  But there's a lot of stuff—I had to keep reminding myself that it was 1979. There was a lot of stuff throughout this that Instawork as like, "Oh. Right." 

Glen:  I mean, the roller derby joke is still pretty solid because of lesbians. 

Drew:  And we still have roller derby today, surprisingly. 

Steve:  Why surprisingly? 

Drew:  I feel like that was a trendy thing back at the time, and then that is something that's come back and become a regular thing. We revived that. Do you guys—I told you earlier, but did you see that M. Night Shyamalan movie Devil where the people are stuck in an elevator? 

Steve:  No. 

Drew:  So there's five people in an elevator. That's the entire fucking movie. And one of them is this older woman, and it's Jenny O'Hara. 

Steve:  As much as I love Jenny O'Hara, I made it to—look. I threw my hands up at The Village, but when The Happening—halfway through that movie, I just left. So I don't know what happens at the end of The Happening because I don't care. 

Drew:  It was plants. 

Steve:  No, I know what it was because they find that out halfway through the movie, then they run from the wind [scoffs]. 

Glen:  There's also a reason that screenwriters especially didn't want to see Devil—because that's pretty much a USC Graduate School prompt. It's like, "Write an imaginary conversation that you'd have with someone in an elevator," and at least 50 percent of writers who applied all wrote a scene about someone in an elevator with the devil.

Drew:  Oh. Okay. Well, maybe it's not her greatest work, but that was the one—

Glen:  It might be her greatest work. 

Steve:  She may very well be fantastic in it. I don't think Glen or I are objecting to Jenny O'Hara's presence in that movie. 

Glen:  Or of her as the devil. 

Drew:  She was also secretly playing the devil in this, but they wrote her off the show before that was revealed [laughter]. 

Glen:  It wasn't so secret. 

Drew:  Very different show. Natalie doesn't get a whole lot to do in this episode, which sucks because I love Mindy Cohn. I think she's fantastic. But I will say, number one, she was the voice of Velma Dinkley in all the incarnations of Scooby-Doo, from 2002 to 2015. I was like, "Yeah. That's really good casting. She has the perfect Velma Dinkley voice. Number two, she might be the godmother to Angelina Jolie's children, which is a weird thing. And people have asked her about it, and she's like, "Oh, I've seen that rumor out there. That's not something I talk about." That's her response, like, "I'm not going to tell you." But I'm just like—how the—why would—okay. I'm trying to process why that would happen. I don't have a reason. But what an interesting little asterisk on her biography. 

Glen:  Natalie gets one of the better lines in this scene, when she's talking about lending Cindy a dress. 

Cindy:  I don't even own a party dress. 

Natalie:  You can wear the one my sister gave me. I grew out of it before I grew into it. 

[audience laughs]

Mrs. Garrett:  It happens to the best of us, dear. 

Glen:  Whatever. She owns it. 

Drew:  Yeah. So what leads up to that is that the headmaster asks the girls, "Is anyone but Blair going to be running for Harvest Festival Queen?" And Blair's like, "I don't really think so." And then Sue Ann, who's the other blonde girl who is not super memorable in this episode, volunteers Cindy. And I don't think she does it maliciously, and I think Cindy does not want this because this is not something she's cut out to do, but I think it's interesting the way everyone bands together around her to be like, "Oh, Cindy. We'll help you out." Natalie offers her the dress. Mrs. Garrett offers to tailor the dress. Nancy says, "You don't know how to dance? Come up to my room. I have Donna Summer records. We'll show you how to dance." 

Steve:  Nancy also—I think Nancy's the one who says, "Oh, it would be so great." When Sue Ann first says it, Nancy's like, "Oh, it would be so great to have an athlete," like it'd be so great to have someone besides Blair," basically. She doesn't say that, but—

Drew:  Anyone. I think they all fucking hate Blair because she's—

Steve:  I don't think it's a show where they hate each other—is my two cents that I would put in. It feels very positive with the exception of Blair. 

Glen:  I'm going to reboot it, and my version is going to be they all hate each other. Facts of Hate. 

Steve:  I hate to be contrary about it, but—

Drew:  Well, welcome to our opinions. So I should—

Glen:  Welcome to Our Opinions is the other name of this podcast. 

Steve:  [laughs]

Drew:  I have a relative who I grew up with who is very Blair-like in the way that she would always point out things that she thought were different and point them out as "If they are different they are wrong, and I'm going to make fun of this, and I'm going to call everyone's attention to something that's different." And she acted like Blair does in this episode, and maybe that's a little triggering for me because it fucking reminds me of Blair, and I never put my finger on it until right now. So maybe that's why I want them to just dump pig's blood on Blair's head at the end or something. 

Glen:  Well, they have a pig. 

Drew:  They do have a pig!

Steve:  Well, metaphorically, we're not there yet. Mrs. Garrett does that. That scene is terrifying, which we will get to in a little bit. 

Drew:  Oh, it's so good. So everyone leaves, essentially, for—all the adults leave the room, and Cindy has come around to this idea of "Okay. I'll run for queen." She's like, "Sue Ann, thank you very much. I love you," hugs her. Blair watches this happen, and Blair—fucking Blair—doesn't think it's normal. 

Cindy:  Sue Ann, thanks a lot for nominating me. I love you!

Sue Ann:  Come on. 

Blair:  Cindy, what's wrong with you? 

Cindy:  What do you mean? 

Blair:  All this touching and hugging girls, and "I love you." Boy, are you strange. 

Cindy:  Oh, it didn't mean anything. 

Blair:  I'll just bet. You better think about what you mean [scoffs].

Steve:  She says, "I just bet you do," and she says it with this—that's not the exact line, but it's something like that, and she says it with this cutting eye thing that is very—it's very "I'm pointing a finger at you." 

Glen:  Because she's—of all the girls, she's come into her character the fastest, and that gives her a power in this scene and in this episode that the other actors just don't have yet because they're still finding their footing, and she is—she is Blair. 

Drew:  Right. She also says, "You better think about what you mean." Yeah. This scene cuts to Mrs. Garrett's room where she's tailoring the dress, and Jenny O'Hara's there, and Arnold pops in for a little scene. And there's not too much going on until the girls come in and be like, "Cindy locked herself in her room. She doesn't want to run for queen anymore. She won't come out of her room," so Mrs. Garrett very sweetly, in a very Mrs. Garrett way, shows up in Cindy's room with milk and a brownie, was it? 

Steve:  It's a cupcake [laughs], and she pretends to be the cupcake, which she ventriloquists—[laughter].

Drew:  She voices—yeah. She narrates for the cupcake. 

Glen:  But the milk is in a chalice of sorts. It's a very odd milk glass. 

Steve:  It's a fancy school. 

Drew:  Yeah. They're fancy. 

[Mrs. Garrett knocks on Cindy's door]

Cindy:  Go away. I don't want to talk to anyone. 

Mrs. Garrett:  But I'm a little chocolate cupcake and I got no place to go.

[audience laughs]

Mrs. Garrett:  Oh, just in time. I was about to do my imitation of a glass of milk. 

Drew:  And she talks to Cindy about why she doesn't want to do this, and Cindy's like, "Yeah. I'm not feminine. I only like sports. I don't have feelings for boys." 

Cindy:  Thanks, but I don't need that dress. 

Mrs. Garrett:  What? You mean you're going to go to the Harvest Ball like that? I mean, whoever heard of queens in jeans? 

[audience laughs]

Cindy:  Now you know they need a real girl for Harvest Queen. Mrs. Garrett, look at me. I like football jerseys and pants. There's nothing about me that's feminine. 

Mrs. Garrett:  Now what on earth do you mean by that? 

Cindy:  See, this dress isn't me. I'm not Blair. I'd much rather have a baseball glove with a good pocket. 

Mrs. Garrett:  Yeah, but that doesn't prove anything. Even Blair would love baseball—if Gucci came out with a catcher's mitt. 

[audience laughs]

Cindy:  Nothing would make Blair like baseball, and she was right about me. 

Mrs. Garrett:  Right about what? 

Cindy:  About me hugging and touching girls all the time, not caring about boys. Mrs. Garrett, maybe Blair is right. Maybe I'm not normal. 

Drew:  And then it cuts to Mrs. Garrett's face, and that is where you go out to the ads. And it's weird to think, like, "Fuck. Is she going to come out? What is she going to say next?" 

Glen:  Because it comes back. 

Steve:  It's a long take, by the way. They hold on Mrs. Garrett. She has to react to that line three times before they cut to commercial. It's sort of amazing. 

Drew:  Well, she does well because if nothing else, Charlotte Rae has some great reactions to everything. 

Glen:  Also in this scene—I forget who says it, but someone says, "Queens in jeans," and I just forgot everything around it because I just held on to "queens in jeans" for dear life. So that might be a nicer name for this episode. 

Drew:  "Queens in Jeans"? 

Glen:  It's also the name of my roller derby team. 

Drew:  That's a great name. Yeah. When it comes back—now I can't remember. But I did—

Steve:  What a direct pickup. It comes back on Mrs. Garrett. 

Glen:  Yeah. What does happen after the act break is Mrs. Garrett's curves speech. 

Mrs. Garrett:  Just because Blair said something thoughtless and insensitive doesn't mean that you have to let it knock you for a loop. 

Cindy:  Yeah, well how many girls are built like a boy and think only about sports? 

Mrs. Garrett:  Well, none that I can think of—except for Billie Jean King, Nadia Comăneci, Wilma Rudolph, Dorothy Hamill—

Cindy:  Okay. Okay, I get the idea. 

Mrs. Garrett:  All right. And as far as looking like a boy, when I was growing up on our farm in Wisconsin, they used to use me for a bean pole. Yeah [laughs]. Well, only for one summer. 

[audience laughs]

Mrs. Garrett: Then that little time clock inside my body took over, just like yours will, and I started to get curvier and curvier and curvier. 

[audience laughs]

Glen:  Curves!

Steve:  The clock speech. 

Drew:  So it's handled well in some respects and not well in other respects. She says, "There's probably a lot of women who cared more about sports than they cared about boys when they were your age," and she names off Nadia Comăneci, Wilma Rudolph—but she leads with Billie Jean King. I was like, "Okay. Well, that’s… [laughter]

Steve:  Yeah, but at that time, in 1979, Billie Jean King wasn't out. 

Drew:  Right, right. It's just something that reads a little bit different now. 

Steve:  Yes. 

Drew:  It's another very tomboyish super athlete. 

Steve:  But I will say, Mrs. Garrett's trying to encourage her that it's okay that she's not feeling a certain way about boys yet, and that it's okay that she feels more comfortable in this tomboy persona, and she makes this speech because Cindy says, "My dad explained sexuality to me," and she says this thing about a garden that I couldn't even follow. 

Drew:  Everyone has a flower, and then someone else has to come fertilize your flower. 

Steve:  Yeah, but somebody help her. Right? And so then Mrs. Garrett steps in to help her, but she gives her this speech. And it's good advice. I understand it. But it oddly conflates sexual orientation with becoming a woman, because what her speech is about is "Then you'll develop curves, and you'll start to like boys, and all these things." But she's sort of not addressing the thing that Cindy is asking about. 

Glen:  Because that is what the show didn't have in its arsenal yet that we now in this current day have. We can separate gender from sexual orientation, and they couldn't do it. And so yeah, it seems like a nice, heartfelt speech, but what Mrs. Garrett is saying is, "Don't worry. You'll change." 

Drew:  Right. 

Steve:  She actually takes her hat off so that her hair falls, and she's got a lot of hair. Her hair falls down—lovely—and holds the dress up to her and is like, "Look in the mirror," and it's the weirdest—

Glen:  Yeah. Mrs. Garrett doesn't say, "It's okay to be who you are." She says, "It's okay because the change will come."  

Drew:  Right. She doesn't take into account that this girl might actually be a lesbian and might not ever get those feelings for boys. Also, she might be heterosexual, but she might never become any more feminine. She might be a tomboy all her life. 

Steve:  That's what was interesting to me. Yeah. What if she's just that girl? 

Drew:  Yeah, any of those would be fine. Yeah. But it seems to help Cindy, nonetheless, and she decides "I'm going to go ahead and do this thing, even if I'm still pretty uncomfortable with it. But I will get to show off my beautiful blonde hair, which I would say is prettier than Blair's, but I'm biased. 

Glen:  It's not. 

Steve:  It's not. 

Drew:  Ugh. 

Steve:  Blair's hair is a force of nature. 

Glen:  Blair's hair is like when gods weave [laughter]. It's like what Rumpelstiltskin makes out of hay. 

Drew:  Cindy's hair is a brighter shade of blonde than Blair's hair. Blair's very—

Glen:  But that doesn't make it better. 

Steve:  It's 100 percent about body [laughs]. 

Glen:  Yeah. It's body. I would run my fingers through Blair's hair, but I wouldn't touch Cindy. 

Drew:  It's all sweaty. It's been under a cap. 

Steve:  The waves in Blair's hair are hypnotic [laughs]. 

Glen:  That's hair made for a Harvest Queen tiara, and Cindy's just isn't. 

Steve:  You can hate her until the end of the day, but—

Glen:  Until the pigs come home. 

Steve:  —her hair is unassailable. 

Drew:  I will have to agree to disagree on this one. 

Steve:  [laughs]

Glen:  That's like disagreeing that the sky is blue. 

Drew:  I will say, at the very least, before the conversation with Cindy and Mrs. Garrett ends, Mrs. Garrett does forbid her from ever feeling like she shouldn't be allowed to be affectionate with her friends. She says, "By all means—"

Cindy:  You know me. I'm always hugging and all that junk. I got to stop that. 

Mrs. Garrett:  Don't you dare. Up here at the school, these girls are your family. There's nothing wrong with hugging and touching. It's shows that you're a loving person, and that's good. The only people who'll tell you it's wrong are the ones who can't reach out and do it themselves. 

Steve:  Well, an important point of that speech, which I think really lands it is that she basically says, "People who call you out for being affectionate are people who they themselves are not capable of demonstrating affection," which I think to the point about Blair's not a girls' girl, and she isn't that "Let's all hug and be lovey and stuff." I just thought that was an interesting thing for her to point out before she goes downstairs to decimate Blair. 

Glen:  Yeah. Mrs. Garrett got game. 

Drew:  Oh, yeah. 

Glen:  What this episode does—it may not introduce people well, but it does sell Mrs. Garrett as a figurehead who can wrangle these girls and take them to task. 

Steve:  Is it the next scene? Can we talk about the scene? 

Drew:  So going to the next scene, you see Blair in her dress looking very pretty, and she's getting ready to go to the competition part where they find out who's going to be queen. And the headmaster comes in briefly—

Glen:  Goober. 

Drew:  —tells her to button her top button. She's like, "It doesn't have a top button." He's like, "Make one." I'm just like, "Stop staring at Blair, you creep." And he wants to go talk to Cindy because he heard about the kerfuffle, and Mrs. Garret's like, "No, no. We're all good. We don't need you," which is absolutely true because he's off the show in a few episodes, too. And then it's just Blair and Mrs. Garrett. How do you guys take—

Glen:  Well, it's important to know that Mrs. Garrett comes into this scene with one objective, and that is to get an apology out of Blair. 

Drew:  Yes. 

Steve:  I don't even think it's to get an apology. I do think she wants Blair to apologize, because coming out of that last scene, Cindy said, "Blair will never apologize," right? And Mrs. Garrett's like, "We'll see about that." But then she goes downstairs and does—now please remember as we describe this, this is an adult dealing with a child, okay? You might not like Blair, but Blair is ostensibly 15 or 16 years old at this point. Mrs. Garrett comes downstairs, and she wants Blair to have empathy, and the way that she earns this is by telling Blair—in the sweetest, nicest way—"You look so pretty. You look so great. You must have sex with a lot of boys because you look like a slut." And you might think, people listening at home, that I'm exaggerating—

Blair:  What do you think, Mrs. Garrett? 

Mrs. Garrett:  [whistles] Wow. 

Blair:  Now, I know you might think it's cut a bit low, and the eyeshadow a bit heavy, but this is the look that's selling. 

Mrs. Garrett:  Oh, no. No, no. I think it's just right for you, Blair. After all, you're the expert on tricks to attract men. 

Blair:  I guess so. 

Mrs. Garrett:  Oh, golly. I bet you could have any man you wanted. 

Blair:  Yeah, probably [laughs]. 

Mrs. Garrett:  And I'll bet you have. 

Blair:  Where'd you hear something like that? 

Mrs. Garrett:  Oh, no. It's pretty obvious you've been around. 

Blair:  No, I haven't been. I don't do those kind of things. 

Mrs. Garrett:  Oh, come on. The way you get yourself up, you're so sophisticated, you smoke, and you talk a good game? 

Blair:  That's just talk. Honest. 

Mrs. Garrett:  You know what they say. If you're advertising, you must be selling. 

Blair:  I'm not that kind of girl! You can ask any guy I've dated. I'm a tease. 

[audience laughs]

Mrs. Garrett:  [laughs] Oh. A tease? Boy, oh boy, oh boy. You sure could have fooled me.

Blair:  You just can't jump to conclusions about people that way. 

Mrs. Garrett:  That's right. It's all just appearances, isn't it, Blair? And you're absolutely right about jumping to conclusions. I'm sure Cindy would agree with you. 

Blair:  Cindy? 

Mrs. Garrett:  It seems you jumped to a conclusion about her. 

Blair:  But you've seen her, Mrs. Garrett. She looks more like a boy than a girl. 

Mrs. Garrett:  Ah, ah, ah. Appearances. 

Blair:  You mean like what you just thought about me? 

Mrs. Garrett:  Mm.

Blair:  Okay. I shouldn't have made that crack about her being strange. 

Mrs. Garrett:  That was the crack. 

Blair:  I didn't mean it. I just said it. 

Mrs. Garrett:  Mm-hmm. 

Blair:  I should apologize. 

Mrs. Garrett: Mm. 

Steve:  That's not okay [laughs]. It's not okay. 

Glen:  It was devastating. 

Drew:  I mean—I'm not going to say she was not deserving to be devastated, but that is—it is an inappropriate conversation for an employee of the school to have with a student of the school. That's the kind of thing that would get you fired had this took place in 2018. 

Steve:  My whole thing is just—the thing that was mind-bending to me about it is this is someone who obviously Blair—and through the course of the show, Mrs. Garrett is the person who can shut her down or get her back on the right path if she's having one of her "I had another amazing idea," or whatever her catchphrase is later. And it was just really, really shocking as the scene was unfolding because even after Blair learns that lesson, theoretically, right—because she realizes "I shouldn't have said that to Cindy," so there's going to be an apology scene, right, that they go right into. But outside of the story, what Mrs. Garrett has just said to Blair is "You look like a slut, and here's what people think about you." So that remains true, even if Blair learns her lesson [laughs]. 

Drew:  And Blair's like, "No. I'm not a slut. I'm just a tease," which is another weird—

Steve:  That was an amazing line, though. 

Glen:  Well, it's also weird that what Mrs. Garrett wants her to realize is that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. She's never getting Blair to accept the cover might be okay, too. 

Drew:  Right. They always treat Cindy's tomboy look as if it is a flaw that has to be fixed, which it does get fixed by the end of the episode, but—

Steve:  Well, "fixed." This is why the episode should be called "Gay Panic," because everyone—well, we won't go to the end. But at the end, everyone gets to relax because nobody's gay. 

Glen:  Yeah. Let's just go there. Why not? The ending is—

Steve:  Well, we should do the—because the apology scene is next. 

Drew:  So Cindy comes down and Blair's like, "I've never done this before, so I might not be very good at it." 

Blair:  Look. I'm going to do something that I've never done before in my life, and I'm not going to be very good at it. I apologize. I was really rotten. 

Cindy:  Guess someone who can admit they're rotten really isn't. 

Blair:  Now, I want you to run against me for Harvest Queen—because the truth is, you could give me a real battle. Now how about it? Woman against woman? 

Cindy:  Well, since you put it that way. 

[audience applauds]

Steve:  Importantly, just to jump in—importantly, it's that Cindy holds out her hand to shake her hand. Blair takes her hand and then Blair pulls Cindy into the hug, which—

Drew:  That's a good point. Yeah. 

Glen:  It's contagious!

Drew:  Yeah, now Blair's gay, too. So they go off, and then shortly after they're coming back—is there an interstitial scene between them leaving and them coming back? 

Steve:  No, I think it's—because it's a tag scene, right? 

Glen:  Gary Coleman gets a moment, and my note just says, "Gary Coleman was a real fucking star." I don't know. He's just so charismatic. I can't get over it. 

Steve:  Oh, yeah. He comes in from the dance, because all the girls wanted to pinch his cheeks and dance with him. 

Glen:  He was a dynamo. There was a reason that the show was a hit and that he became a thing. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm, and why the show could persist without Mrs. Garrett, because Gary Coleman was enough to keep that show going—although they got Dixie Carter, so that worked out, too. 

Glen:  There was a middle maid, and Dixie Carter wasn't a maid. 

Drew:  No, but she's the replacement matriarch figure that came in after the second maid leaves, right? 

Steve:  No, because there was a—

Glen:  Pearl. No. There's the middle one, then there's Pearl, then Dixie Carter. 

Drew:  Oh. Okay. Yes. 

Glen:  And then Dixie Carter leaves. 

Steve:  Which one is the one that catches the kids making fun of—

Glen:  That's Pearl. Are you talking about the milkshake episode? 

Steve:  The milkshake episode. Yes. 

Glen:  That's Pearl. 

Steve:  But I remember Pearl as the housekeeper on Diff'rent Strokes. 

Glen:  In terms of devastating takedowns, that's Pearl's slut-shaming moment where she makes Arnold and, I guess—was it Sam?—make feel like absolute shit for making fun of this girl who has a seizure. 

Steve:  Was it Dudley? 

Glen:  It may have been Dudley. 

Steve:  It was Arnold and Dudley, I think. 

Drew:  It's a weird subgenre of kids learning life lessons by adults who have to devastate them and just tear their soul apart to realize how wrong they were. 

Steve:  It worked on me. 

Drew:  Yeah. It totally works. 

Steve:  But I would say in that instance, those kids were being monsters and she came at them emotionally, and then sat down and said, "You have to think about—" That was different than what happens in the pilot of this show [laughs]. 

Glen:  It's true. Pearl has to say, "I suffer from epilepsy. Would you make fun of me like that?" 

Steve:  Yeah. "You don't know who you're talking about. You have to be thoughtful." I just feel like there was probably 70 ways Mrs. Garrett could have communicated that to Blair without that scene because it was just really intense. 

Drew:  Yeah. Maybe that's what she had to do to break through Blair's hard exterior. She never had to do anything quite that devious again, unless I'm mistaken. I'm trying to run through hard life lessons she had to teach the girls, and she usually does it in a gentler way than that in every subsequent episode. That is the writers not quite getting a hang for how Mrs. Garrett works. 

Steve:  I will say, it also had—while that scene was very intense, the entire show felt more adult and more grounded than I remember The Facts of Life being. So once they did the retooling, I think it sort of got lighter. But it made me want to go watch that first season because there's got to be more of that in there, and I was like, "Oh, lord." 

Drew:  They did a lot of dark episodes later in the show. But I have that saved for the last discussion. We just need to finish it off where they come back from the dance. Cindy did not win. She's fine with it. She came in second. Blair won. Blair gets the crown. They both look pretty in their dresses. 

Steve:  Third year in a row. 

Drew:  Third year in a row—

Glen:  Sophomore Prom Queen—what—five years?

Drew:  "Sophomore Prom Queen, five years running. Go Lisa!" That is a Simpsons reference that you will not understand if you don't watch The Simpsons as much as we do. She gets to dance with the boy she likes, but then she finds out that the boy winked at Cindy, and her biological clock started ticking, so she's a healthy heterosexual who looks like a girl now, so it's all good. In subsequent episodes, Cindy is sort of still a tomboy. She wears her hair in braids—kind of like Cindy Brady, actually. And she's never that tomboyish. She kind of actually loses her characterization—because of all the new girls who don't end up becoming long-term girls, she's the one we get the best feel for in this episode. 

Steve:  But also because they corrected her character—the thing that made her character unique got corrected in the pilot. I'm saying corrected—you guys can't see me at home, but it's air quotes. It's like this whole—

Glen:  No, Steve believes in this. 

Steve:  [laughs] This is why I said the episode at the beginning should be called "Gay Panic" and not "Rough Housing" because everyone is so deeply concerned, but then the world of the show conspires to turn this girl into a girl—like a girl stereotype. And she acquiesces to it by the end and becomes just another girl on the show, and it feels very much like—when you said you wanted to do this episode, I was like, "Oh." And then I watched it, and I was like, "Ooh. Eh, I'm not sure this is really a gay episode." 

Drew:  So it is probably the only show that we're going to do in this first season that wouldn't show up on a Top 10 List of Famous Gay Episodes of sitcoms, but that's why I wanted to do it—because it is an approach to talking about queer issues that falls short, and it happens in a pilot, and it's something that people who might be huge fans of Facts of Life wouldn't remember ever happening. 

Steve:  Absolutely. 

Drew:  There's a lot going on there. That's why I wanted to talk about it. So, yeah.

Steve:  But I'm glad we are because it's a remarkable episode of television. It's just when you get to the end of it you're like, "Oh. That's the lesson?" 

Glen:  So in the lens of 2018, is Cindy—she identifies as a—in the world of 2018, wouldn't she be—if she deeply believes she is more—

Drew:  I don't know how—I don't know much about kids, but I think it would be a really interesting conversation for parents to have today, being like, "Do I have a tomboy daughter, or is she going to grow up to identify as trans?" That's something parents probably have to talk about now. I don't know how that conversation would go. 

Glen:  Because I think if this episode was done today, that would be the discussion. It wouldn't be "She's a tomboy lesbian." It would be "Is this classmate of mine trans?" 

Drew:  Yeah. That's something kids might get told. It's like, "Hey, some people grow up to learn that they identify with a gender that's opposite what their biological gender is, and that's fine, too. That's something you should know about. You got to figure it out, but we love you either way." 

Glen:  I think that's why this episode struggles is because it's conflating the two issues. 

Steve:  It conflates a lot of things. 

Drew:  It's 1979, and even though this would have aired after the All in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore we discussed, it falls short, I think, because it was targeted at a younger demographic than those two shows did from actually talking about real queer issues. It's also worth noting that in "The Little Chill," which is the episode that aired the same night as that Golden Girls episode that we already talked about—"Isn't it Romantic?" with Dorothy's lesbian friend—you find out Cindy grew up to be a famous fashion model. She's like a CoverGirl pinup, and she's very glamorous and very feminine. 

Glen:  Oh. 

Drew:  Yeah. So Sue Ann, Nancy, and Cindy all come back. That was that episode. It's a really good episode. 

Steve:  One of them is the CEO of a company. I can't remember which one. 

Glen:  How old are they supposed to be? Or is this a flash-forward thing? 

Drew:  They're in their 20s. 

Steve:  They're in their 20s, but she's already the CEO of a company. I just remember that part [laughs]. 

Drew:  And one of them is lying, though. I can't remember—it turns out that one of the three of them has not done anything with her life, and she makes up a story and feels bad about it. 

Steve:  Because the point of the episode, other than them—there's Jo, who wasn't around for season one feeling left out of all the stories—is that all three of them have seemingly achieved great things, but all three of them are wrestling with—

Drew:  Issues. 

Steve:  —issues. Yeah. 

Drew:  Also, there's a weird continuity error in that episode because Jo shows up in season two, and those three girls and Molly are still around. They have overlap. So it's not—she would have met them while they were still at the school, but they kind of just gloss over the fact that they didn't have that connection. 

Steve:  And Molly doesn't come back. 

Drew:  She comes back in one episode of season two—

Steve:  But she doesn't come back in "The Little Chill." 

Drew:  No. They mention her. I think they allude to some reason why she doesn't show up. But of course, Molly Ringwald was like, "I'm too famous. Fuck you guys. You fired me." 

Steve:  That's probably not exactly how it went down, but yeah. Sure [laughs]. 

Glen:  I think that's exactly how it went down. 

Drew:  Do you guys know about Cousin Geri? 

Steve:  Yes. Blair's cousin, Geri.

Drew:  So an interesting thing—if you're looking at Facts of Life, you would say, "This is a show that dealt with a lot of issues. It was a life-lessons show, and they dealt with some really dark stuff." There's one where Natalie almost gets raped. There's one where Tootie almost ends up in a prostitution ring. She meets a prostitute who tries to get her to join. There's the episode where Natalie loses her virginity. There's a drug episode. They didn't shy away from big topics. They never went back to homosexuality. This is the one episode that comes closest to being a gay episode, and it's the pilot, and they never brought it up again. And gay people was not something they ever learned about on this show, subsequently. But one maybe exception is Cousin Geri, who is Blair's cousin who has cerebral palsy. She's a standup comedian, and she's played by Geri Jewell who was an actual standup comedian who had cerebral palsy. And the episode is interesting because there's a Kristy McNichol quality to Cousin Geri where it's like, "Oh. She's kind of tomboyish. This girl might be a lesbian." Her whole thing is that she's disabled and it doesn't bother her, and Blair is uncomfortable with—she's embarrassed by her cousin's disability, and Mrs. Garrett has to get her to admit to it. So if you know that Geri Jewell came out as a lesbian eventually, it's an interesting lens to the show of being like, "Oh, she's uncomfortable with this aspect of her cousin that she just doesn't want to confront, and she's embarrassed by her." That kind of has a gay aspect to it, but that's as close as they ever come to getting back to it. 

Steve:  Have you watched that episode recently, with Cousin Geri? 

Drew:  Yes. Yeah. 

Steve:  Because isn't it—the way I'm remembering it, and maybe this is through my skewed perspective of not thinking Blair is a monster, is that Blair actually doesn't have a problem with her cousin. It's that she's concerned that the other girls are going to be mean to her. 

Drew:  Right. 

Steve:  It's not that Blair is embarrassed of her illness. It's that she's worried. I'm pretty sure that Blair is fine with her cousin.

Glen:  But that could be—that's projection. 

Steve:  We are led to believe that Blair is embarrassed of her cousin, and what we come to discover—the reversal in the episode is that Blair's not embarrassed of her cousin. She's being protective. I think that's the arc. 

Drew:  But she is the one who is most likely to be judgmental out of the four main girls. Jo, Natalie, and Tootie are all fairly accepting people. It seems weird that she would worry that they would make fun of this disabled person because they're the nice ones. She's the one who's quickest to be judgmental. So I would agree with Glen, that you could say maybe she's projecting a little bit. But that is the explanation that she gives over the course of the episode. They patch it up. Cousin Geri comes back at least one other time. She almost got her own spinoff. That was something that they talked about for a while. And then she was randomly on Deadwood. Geri Jewell had a recurring role on Deadwood. I was like, "Good for you, Cousin Geri." 

Steve:  Isn't it fascinating how—and I guess they still do this to a certain extent. But it was like spinoff-palooza with these shows. It's like every character got a shot. 

Drew:  And it doesn't happen as much anymore. There's very few spinoffs on air, I guess. 

Steve:  We just reboot. 

Drew:  We reboot. But Black-ish got a spinoff. The daughter's in college now, and that one's pretty decent—Grown-ish. 

Steve:  And Joey got a spinoff from Friends. 

Drew:  Two whole seasons. 

Steve:  Did he get one? 

Glen:  I have a lot of thoughts. No. It got two seasons? 

Drew:  It got two seasons. They retooled it. 

Glen:  That can't be. 

Steve:  I'd be very happy to get one season of a show, so I'm not going to be mad at them for—[laughs]. 

Glen:  The only takeaway I have from the Joey spinoff is that they made fun of Pepperdine a lot, and whenever I see guys on Tinder or Scruff who go to Pepperdine, I'm just thinking, "Joey made fun of that show." 

Drew:  Two seasons. 

Steve:  [laughs]

Glen:  I hope you’re proud of yourself.

Drew:  I am. I try to do my research on these things. 

Steve:  You do it very successfully. 

Drew:  Thank you. Any closing thoughts on the pilot of Facts of Life? 

Glen:  I mean—Blair's a monster. 

Steve:  Blair needed to learn a lesson because she's young and thoughtless, and if Blair had not been on the show there would have been no conflict or dramatic action at all, except for the one scene between the teacher and the headmaster. So hate her if you want to, but I think Blair's great. 

Glen:  Oh, I don't hate her. But—

Drew:  She does mellow out over the course of the show, and her prickliness and her difficult-ness is—you come to love her even though maybe you wouldn't have if you just saw her in this episode [laughter].

Steve:  I appreciate that begrudging—[laughs]. 

Glen:  Hey. At least Blair was able to see Cindy as the monster she was as opposed to everyone else who pretended that she'd grow out of it.

Drew:  Right. Yes. That's the right takeaway. 

Steve:  Ugh. 

Drew:  I felt an unreasonable amount of anger watching Blair in this episode, but your points do make sense. This might just be a weird personal thing I have. Steve, where can people find you online if they want to find you online? 

Steve:  Oh. I don't know. 

Glen:  He doesn't want to be found online. 

Steve:  I guess I'm on Twitter, @SleepyPanda76, but you're not going to get anything out of that. It's just--

Glen:  No Facts of Life hot takes? 

Steve:  [laughs] 

Drew:  No insight to the world of Supernatural? 

Steve:  Sometimes I post about Supernatural, but—

Glen:  You're a good Supernatural hype man. 

Steve:  We don't give—I would never spoil anything, so it's not deeply entertaining. 

Drew:  Right. And the next play that's being staged, where is that being staged? 

Steve:  There's going to be a couple things next season, but nobody's announced their seasons yet. 

Drew:  Okay. Fingers crossed. 

Glen:  We'll update people. 

Drew:  Yeah. 

Steve:  I'm sure everyone's chomping at the bit. 

Drew:  Glen, where can people find you? 

Glen:  I always forget, but I'm @BrosQuarts on Instagram, and then @IWriteWrongs on Twitter, and that is "write" with a W.

Drew:  And I am on Twitter, @DrewGMackie—M-A-C-K-I-E. If you want to subscribe to Gayest Episode Ever, you can do so on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, SoundCloud, most other places you would ever find a podcast. Please subscribe. If you've already subscribed, thank you. Please write us a review. It helps other people find these gay nerds talking about old TV shows and why they're gay. This is episode six of our first season. Episode seven is coming up. It's going to be a Simpsons episode. I'm very excited about that. So hopefully, you'll understand why I think steel mills are funny to this day. Yeah. That's it. 

Glen:  Bye forever. 

Drew:  Bye forever, thank you. Podcast over! 

Steve:  Was that okay? 

Drew:  Yeah. 

Glen:  It was great. 

[“Laisse tomber les filles" by Fabienne Delsol plays]