“Mammy Dearest”/”Cats in the Cradle”

My adapter’s broken. Again. So for the time being, these reviews will be pretty ugly (visually) and pretty damn brief until I get my adapter.

“Mammy Dearest”
After watching this travesty of an episode again, I realize that the (other) weakness in this episode is the bombardment of ideas and the lack of connection between them. Whitley decides to dictate to the others how to perform her ceremony. Whitley decides to (illogically) include mammy in her show and chastize Lena for not reading slave journals she should have been reading herself. Kim gets upset because despite a well-publicized article in Ebony magazine about Charnele Brown’s weight loss, she thinks she is a mammy. Mr. Gaines then supports an illogical basis on why mammy is important before standing up to Kim after Dwayne and Ron do some snaps. Cut to Lena somehow finding out about the dozens in one of the archivial books. Then (the best part of the episode) Kim quits Whitley’s monstrosity. Whitley meets up with Dwayne (this was mandatory) before discovering her family owned slaves. Then Whitley goes on a guilt trip for the sins of her “great-great-great granddaddy Jeremiah.” Gaines goes back to his first theories of mammy to make Kim, a victim of ignorant school officials calling her African princess outfit an aunt Jemima outfit, feel better (suggesting that Kim has always been overweight, but even this is a bit contrived). Finally Gaines helps Whitley get over her guilt trip and we have to endure a very factually inaccurate mock minstrel show/African dance segement (courtesy of Debbie Allen. If you ever wonder how her Oscar show dances must’ve felt like back in the day, look at this episode–you’ll know the reason why) where everything is magically healed except for Dwayne and Whitley’s relationship, which thankfully did heal (in a horrendous manner, but it did heal).
When I was watching this, none of these story elements did not seem to make sense to me–probably because the theme of race was too broad and was easily too solved by Berenbeim.

“Cats in the Cradle”
And the silver spoon, something something something and the man on the moon…
Okay, this is the episode where Ron, insta-bookie galore, bets money on a Hillman/Virginia A&M game (BTW, there is no A&M school in Virginia, just a buncha Yahoos, Turkeys, Pirates and two possibly corrupt religious right schools…and Sweet Briar University [for women!]) and then swindles three white dudes out of their money when he hears Hillman would win the football game because the A&M quarterback is sick. Okay, I take “three” back automatically–we all know Dean Cain is 1/4 Japanese (his last name before his mother remarried was Tanaka), so it’s two white dudes and a quarter-Japanese guy. Cain’s character, Eddie, and his equally racist buddy J.C. (the initials of…Jake Carpenter!), decide to put the word NIGGER in black spray paint on Ron’s already ugly Geo, the one that he supposedly lost because he refused to follow his father’s footsteps and become a car dealer. (Jake, played by Richard Murphy, is probably the most racially tolerant of the three, he’s just scared.) Unfortunately, they only get NI on the car. (Later somebody, possibly a stagehand, puts gger on the car.) A fight ensues between Dwayne, Ron and the two white dudes and a quarter-Japanese guy. They all end up in the stadium jail where the sitcom device of retelling a story in a character’s point of view is used…again. (One example of this is the Good Times episode where the Evans’ ugly couch is burned and we have to see the same story four different times in four different viewpoints until we find out that Penny burned the couch and subsequently put out the fire. In this ADW episode, you see the story once and two retellings, thank God. This is the only truly weak part of the script.) Of course, Ron, Dwayne, the two white dudes and a quarter-Japanese guy endure punishment from Ernie Sabella’s stadium-cop dude until the truth is revealed and J.C. the Stoned (hold on) and the quarter-Japanese dude have to paint buildings at Hillman…like Dwayne and Ron did in the first season.
The racial stereotypes are much more defined here than they were in that mess that should NOT had gotten Berenbeim a promotion “Mammy Dearest,” and the humor is much more memorable too: Whitley’s “Go Hillman, go Hillman” comment, the scalping joke (The role of the Native American scalper was played by G. Adam Gifford), the klepto A&M wolf mascot (Wayne Federman). Dawnn Lewis’ Star Spangled Banner is okay as well, but it’s a bit oversung (leading to J.C. the Stoned’s comment “I hate it when they (African-Americans) butcher the National Anthem”).
Overall the script is well written and the direction is wonderful–kudos to Gary H. Miller for writing this script and Peter Werner for directing. The one performance I didn’t like, however, was Carpenter’s–he sounds like he’s stoned, not intimidating, and I bet that if you had a five-year-old in the script of the show, the five-year-old could have beat J.C.’s ass. I also thought Ernie Sabella’s accent was a bit stong, but keep in mind his character did march with King in one of his Southern marches, so the accent could work in Virginia. And Jasmine Guy could have taken some pointers from Murphy–his Southern accent sounds so much more genuine for someone in Virginia than that destruction of a Georgian Southern accent she used for Whitley.

Next up: Prisoner of Love
Sadly, I cannot review “Bedroom at the Top” due to the lack of videotape I might have…I mean, I get paid tomorrow, I can buy a new one…

“Homie, Don’t You Know Me?”

After seeing “To Tell the Truth,” I have to admit I was a bit creeped out on how Whitley tried to make up with Dwayne before he told her he was seeing Lisa, especially when she was all up on him giving him chicken pecks on his neck. Made me sick…never mind.
Also, I never have understood why Whitley and Dwayne break up after he had one lousy date with Lisa. If Dwayne was sleeping with Lisa, I could understand, but they couldn’t work this issue out so we wouldn’t have those preachy episodes that followed “Do You Take This Woman?”
By the way, I like these episodes–they’re the strongest of the fifth season. They weren’t too goofy (well, “Woman” may have been a bit goofy, but hey, they didn’t rip off an ancient television tradtion like the evil twin sister like in “Lisa-Who-Little”) or too preachy. They were touching enough to make you care…then the show blew it with its many preachy episodes.

Before we get into a time-honored tradtion of fifth-season moralizing episodes, let me start with a sixth-season episode featuring a very special guest ya’ll should know as very dear to Jasmine Guy and Jada Pinkett Smith.

“Homie, Don’t You Know Me?” (1993, unaired on NBC)

NOT Starring: Darryl M. Bell, Cree Summer, Glynn Turman

Guest Starring: Tupac Shakur (Piccolo), Monica Calhoun (Yolanda), Shaun Baker (Champ) Bumper Robinson (Dorian Heywood), Patrick Y. Malone (Terrell Walker), Michael Ralph (Spencer Boyer)

Writer: Ron Moseley

Story: Kadeem Hardison and Moseley

Director: Hardison

Summary: Lena’s buddies from Baltimore Yolanda and Champ bring along unwanted guest and Lena’s ex-boyfriend Piccolo. While Piccolo annoys Lena by still wanting to get in Lena’s pants, Yolanda and Champ irk Terrell and Gina (respectively) by wanting to get with them and Charmaine because…well, she’s annoying. Dorian eventually gets in a fight with Piccolo only to still have Lena’s respect in the end. As for the other friends: Lena brushes them off because they don’t like her in college.

Comments: I swear, a lot of this episode just screams to me that some of the actors were in the episode because they were on contract. Case in point: Guy’s two “guest” appearances (where she gets dissed by Champ in the Pit and then where she whines about what you can’t do at Hillman later in Height Hall) and Brown’s appearance (in the Height Hall scene).

Lena’s friends try to come off as too damn street (except for Tupac, of course). They look like stereotypes instead of people you’re supposed to be afraid of. (Then again, the episode as well as the show’s appeal to younger viewers in the age the hoody of is dated). And as usual Bumper Robinson and Patrick Y. Malone cannot act their way out of a paper bag while Karen Malina White is shrill as Charmaine.

The moral also doesn’t work with me. It suggests that these kids acting tough on the streets are working “goverment jobs.” Not dealing drugs, not in the army, just working “goverment jobs.” Basically that’s the weakness in all of the Moseley/Hardison projects: their contrived image of youths of the 1990s that makes them look like stereotypes instead of real people–another image that prevails in “Love Taps.” All their episodes are geared to turn off the very audience the show seeked to turn on to the show (especially against the more hip-hop oriented Martin, which never berated its audience for trying to fit into a certain trend). I’ll probably point to the fact that Hardison was about 27 or 28 when this episode was being taped…but that just seems like a quick cop-out to suggest he was out of touch with kids 10 to 15 years his junior or he just really hated the hip-hop culture. Of course I’m not exactly saying that, but…

Next up: Mammy Dearest

Hypocrite!

Today I reconized that Whitley is a hypocrite (by writer error, of course).

In “Rule Number One,” Whitley demands of Lena to stop calling Dwayne, well, any variant of Dwayne except Mr. Wayne.

But yet, this is the same woman who, when asked to call Paul Paul in “The Power of the Pen,” did so (“Paul…my favorite apostle”).

Of course, if Hillman was real and I was a student observing this mess, I would call Whitley a bitch.

Then again I fear I will piss off the mighty Jasmine Guy, so I take that back immediately.

Southern Accents!

Learning a lot about Southern Accents today…

Earlier in the history of this blog I reported that Jasmine Guy used a Georgian Southern Accent to play Whitley.

Technically Whitley’s accent is known as a Deep Gulf Southern Accent, according to Accents: A Manual for Actors by Robert Blumenfield. This accent is heard in most of Georgia and North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

The accent Whitley needed: a East Coast Southern Accent, heard in Maryland, Virginia and coastal North Carolina and Georgia.

On Mr. Gaines…

In later seasons of A Different World, on the felt board that held the Pit’s menu, there is a small inscription below the menu: ADVICE-FREE. Any one character can bitch about their problems to Mr. Gaines, and he would be sympathetic to their cause (to a certain degree). Usually his lines are ironic or support the main idea in some way—unless he’s cursing out those damn college kids!

Here’s another PowerPoint Slide presentation…

Forgive me if I posted this before, but here are some insights on “Mammy Dearest.”

Excerpt from “Mammy Dearest”
•FREDDIE: Just because they put [Aunt Jemima’s] face on a pancake box, that doesn’t mean that’s who she really was!
–The first “Aunt Jemima” was a former domestic servant for a Chicago judge who fabricated tales of life in the old South (apparently, those that her white superiors wanted her to tell) for spectators at the 1899 Columbia Exposition. The pancake mix received many orders—hell, it’s still a brand name now.
–Consequently, an “aunt jemima” or a “handkerchief head” (derogatory term) is a tom that has discovered religion (usually Christianity) or a mammy in the dominant white culture. Usually aunt jemimas are nicer, happier, politer, and less headstrong than mammy.
–Eventually Aunt Jemima’s look on pancake-related materials was later softened so she looks more like a modern day professional maid than an aunt jemima.

•LENA: Freddie, mammy is a racist stereotype, period. That smile is not laughter, it is fear.
–God knows what that smile exactly means—it could mean fear, but it could mean reassurance, a lack of hostility in mammy (why white audiences loved mammy, why the Daughters of the American Revolution wanted a mammy statue in Washington as opposed to Marion Anderson singing in the same city)…the smile (on commercial products) can mean anything.

•GAINES: Well, if it wasn’t for mammy, you wouldn’t be here.
–Whatever happened to the equal rights movement in America?

•FREDDIE: Thank you, Mr. Gaines.
•LENA: All mammy did was cook up the vittles.
–And dispense advice and tend the white people’s home and sell merchandise and movies…

•GAINES: Well, that’s all I do for you. You know, some Black people forget their folklore. Now that’s what makes us strong.
–Where’s the evidence that we created mammy? Evidence points to minstrel shows dating from before the Civil War creating mammy, and these were primarily all-white minstrel shows. Yes, Paul Lawrence Dunbar did use mammy in some (not all) of his poems and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) features a character named Mammy Jane, but this does not mean that Blacks created the stereotype.

•In “Mammy Dearest, Gaines’s lines help Kim feel better about the mammy stereotype—but in my opinion, they are questionable. For example, take the line “My great-great-grandmother was a mammy. Strong, full of love, helped keep the family together. Now that’s nothing to be ashamed of! You should be proud!” For one, some black people would say that calling anyone a mammy would be highly offensive, even if that person was overweight or happened to stay with their family as opposed to working in a white household (which is highly unlikely for mammy because light-skinned people tended to be house slaves). The definition of mammy is someone who is asexual, overweight, angry, and usually very loyal to their white masters—they forsake their own families in favor of their masters. Not all mammies did this—Aunt Chloe went back to her cabin to take care of her children, and Aunt Delilah/Annie had a daughter (that she still neglected)—and some mammies did this with their own personal flair—Hattie McDaniel, for example—but most mammies in the media and in the marketplace were all of these things.

The quote also shows Berenbeim’s warped sense of the stereotype. God knows what the hell Berenbeim means by “family.” Black family in the slave quarters? White family in the main house? Black family in the northern United States or Canada, all of them on the Underground Railroad trying to make their way to freedom? Some people might interpret “family” as the second question I posted, helping to fuel hatred about the term “mammy.” Another item to post (other than the fact that Berenbeim has no idea of the history and various items mammy has been on other than dolls and Aunt Jemima pancake mix—he never once mentions a movie mammy in the episode) is that most slave women were not overweight due to food rations, most of them never saw their 50th birthday, and, as mentioned, most light-skinned slave (women included) worked in slave households (darker-skinned slaves worked in the fields). Unless he has a journal written by his great-great-grandmother (which is highly unlikely, since many slaves could not read or write) or her slave owner talking about how overweight she was, how does Gaines know that she was a mammy? Then again, the term could be used as affection towards this woman, but in the context of the word, this seems highly unlikely. Also, his great-great-grandmother may have had a pituitary problem—one of the few ways any slave could be overweight.

•Apparently “Mammy Dearest” might be saying that for one to change a stereotype, one must take it as his own and manipulate it into something positive. However, with Berenbeim’s broad and uneducated perspective on mammy, this moral is unclear. Berenbeim wants to make the audience think as he (and God knows whoever else endorsed this episode) thinks, but as long as there are books and other educational materials, those who know, as I have said, are going to look elsewhere (those aforementioned educational materials) and make their own opinions on mammy. As for my opinion, “Mammy Dearest” would be considered dated even for 1993—there have been several books, including a history in the evolution of the black domestic in fiction, printed prior to 1993. A good library and hours of research would have made this episode better instead of some sort of twisted “epiphany” for Kim and Whitley (at least morally) as well as a mock-minstrel show/African dance sequence complete with poems from Dunbar and Giovanni.

The Dozens—Caps and Snaps

Brought to You By
•“Liza-Who-Little,” screenplay by Dominic Hoffman
•“Mammy Dearest,” screenplay by Glenn Berenbeim

•Your mama is so dumb, she sold a car for gas money. (L-W-L)
•Your mother is so black, when she wears orange lipstick she looks like a cheeseburger. (MD)
•Your mother is so fat, she jumped in the air and got stuck. (MD)
•Your mother is so black, when they poured hot water in her head, coffee comes out her mouth. (MD)
•Your mama’s head so nappy, when they braid it it look like stitches. (MD)

And of course Kim has to ruin it by saying “It’s not funny!”

What is a cap and/or snap?

Basically an insult using a stereotype, i.e. (Subject) is so fat, ugly, black, etc. to compare the subject to something undesirable.

Okay, so I lied.

No #200 post here, since really there is nothing to post about.
I hate the fact that Oxygen is pre-empting ADW for their movies (i.e. Mystic Pizza, The Wedding). This means when I am home and can watch ADW, I can’t.

I’ve also been working on my Harley Quinn outfit, which is taking me a while to complete…but it’s almost done.

Anyway, I’m pulling out a list of snaps I’ve compiled in a Powerpoint presentation I want to get rid of on my computer. Check it out!

Our Nig and Evolution…

(http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/hwilson/wilson.html)
Okay, now, very quickly, two similarities and differences to Our Nig:

Both writers include quotes that link the chapters to the content in them.

Both have children…but Jasmine’s not doing it for the money, like Wilson, she’s telling a story for the people. (Ya’ll know she still gets money for ADW in syndication, right?)

(FYI, Wilson wrote Our Nig to try and reclaim her son, who she left with a white family, but he died before she could reclaim him.)