Sex, Lies, and Videotape

My parents never owned a video camera.

As a child in the eighties, I thought this was an embarrassing deficiency. Other people’s parents had video cameras. They also had minivans and trampolines and family ski trips and parents who signed up to be chaperones on school trips and cunning, microwave-friendly bite sized snacks and Dads that weren’t weird. Our lack of household video camera reflected poorly on us as a family.

In those days, an A grade on a class project nearly required use of video camera. A fact I tried to make clear to my mother on numerous occasions.

“In order to do well on this book report, I’ll have to do a skit,” I’d say. “You’ll need to pick up four or five of my closest friends, drive us to a scenic location, and costume us in period appropriate costumes.”

My mother looked at me as if I were delusional. She had to work, and sit at a city council meeting, and follow that up with a visiting urban planner, and follow that up with a nightcap at a charity cocktail.

“Okay, you don’t have to make the costumes. But you’ll have to videotape it for us.”

At which point, she would invariably ask what video tape had to do with a book report. Which, to my mind, was a dumb question. You couldn’t do a clever skit about “To Kill a Mockingbird” without recording it on film and you couldn’t record it on film without a video camera. It was no use for her to try and belabor the point by suggesting I do something so outré as WRITE a book report. For the love of God, I was in the Gifted Classes for Chrissake, and a simple written book report would never pass muster, not when Teresa and Dylan were actually creating a clone of Boo Radley with a chemistry set, some Sea Monkey eggs, and a shortwave kit from Radio Shack. Or something like that. My mother was just hedging, trying to avoid pointing our cringe-inducing lack of a video camera. ANY video camera. Even one that only took Betamax tapes like the Lewis’s had.

Usually I couldn’t get her to move on the subject. I’d find myself procrastinating until the night before the due date, write out some shoddy report, carping endlessly as I dotted my “i’s” with hearts and bubbles, and express no surprise when it was returned with a mediocre grade.

“If I’d done the skit I would have made an ‘A’,” I’d say.

My mother, lips pursed, would hand my paper back to me. “If you hadn’t written this the night before it was due, you probably would have made an ‘A’. I mean, you didn’t even finish the concluding paragraph.”

I’d sigh theatrically and flounce up to my bedroom, escaping to Sassy Magazine and the marzipan candies I had stashed in my bookshelf, to the closet door papered with photos of sensitive beautiful men—River Phoenix, Johnny Depp, Christian Slater. John Cusack would bolster my crushed spirit; he would sooth my aching soul against the inequities of the seventh grade. He would buy me a video camera if he could.

Sometimes, after much mewling on my part, my mother would succumb and drive up to Videoland USA to rent a video camera for an evening. My complex skit would be rendered functionally useless by my inability to produce actors, and the project would devolve into a kind of awkward, rambling monologue, with multiple costume changes and improvised accents. Deep down, I knew these would barely pass muster, especially when shown after my classmates presented filmed re-enactions of a climactic scene from “All Quiet on the Western Front” with pyrotechnics. When my video played, the class set in a sort of bored haze, laughing, but at the wrong parts, eyeing me, uncomfortably, wondering, perhaps, why I chose to deliver a lecture on Einstein in the style of Shakespearean tragedy, wearing a nightgown, with a pillow underneath to simulate pregnancy.

I was making some brave choices for the seventh grade. And my teachers, perhaps out of regard for my skills as thespian, but more likely out of pity, rewarded me with a good grade; even though it was obvious I neither knew nor gave a damn about Einstein.

A videotaped skit guaranteed a better than average grade. As long as you came bearing the VHS, it wouldn’t matter if you’d actually finished the book. That was common knowledge.

I had my own reasons for wanting the camera, which all boiled down to imminent celebrity. I was sure my plucky persona, precocious wit, and prodigious talent would make for quality cinema. And so what if I didn’t screen-test well, I could be a wellspring of script ideas and directorial prowess. I envisioned collecting legions of neighborhood children to round out the cast of my productions.

And of course, there was always my sister, the Boop.

The Boop was seven years old at the time, and cursed with an appetite for performance nearly as insatiable as mine. We’d been putting on low budget theatrical presentations for years, seating my parents on the den sofa for lengthy song and dance numbers. As older and (I believed) wiser child, I fashioned myself the writer/director/choreographer/star of such entertainments. The Boop was a hired hand, occasionally the starry eyed ingénue, and mostly deaf to all of my instruction.

In our earliest performances, the Boop (age three) would waddle round behind me, wearing a ubiquitous pink tutu over a floral sundress, and muck up all my choreography. She was cute and small and wearing a pink tutu, which tended to deflect attention from my poetic soliloquies.

By the time I was eleven, and the Boop was six, we’d more or less reached a compromise. She’d participate for a limited period of time; I’d bow out gracefully. Such was the case the night Mom brought a video camera home from work, and taped our “Dirty Dancing” revue. I’d seen the movie about seven times, and fully familiarized myself with the soundtrack. The Boop knew most of the words to the songs. I imagined myself capable of jaw-dropping dance moves, ala “Fame” and “Flashdance.” The Boop had recently discovered Mom’s make-up drawer, and developed a deep-seated love of mini-skirts, sheer knee-high stockings, and plastic bangle bracelets.

As farce, the “Dirty Dancing” revue was an unqualified success. What my careful choreography lacked in technique and physical prowess, it more than made up for in extensive, mishandled props and accidental shots of my underwear. The Boop occasionally participated on my end, but for most of the time, positioned herself about two feet away from my mother. She swayed and gyrated and slunk about living room like an alcoholic stripper, occasionally thwacking herself in the head with her own hand in the heat of passion. Between my panties and the Boop’s sexy dance, we’re sort of like a b-list road show for pedophiles. Caddy Compson meets Dolores Haze meets Dance Fever with dance moves cribbed from “Jane Fonda’s New Workout.”

At the time, however, I thought it was a miserable failure, spoiled by the Boop’s uncooperativeness and relentless camera hogging. We didn’t rewatch it often, at the time, and for years the “Dirty Dancing” revue languished in a drawer full of movies videotaped off of HBO. Movies we would, in all likelihood, never watch again (“White Nights?”).

I rediscovered the videotape a couple of years ago, after the Boop revealed that it had become a popular favorite in her dorm room. She’d secreted it away in her early adolescence, fearing it would disappear into a junk drawer and subsequently become junk. And it remains, to my knowledge, the only video footage of my childhood in my family’s possession.

It’s an odd choice for a family movie, as my father never appears, and my mother provides only the slightest of voice-over. I speak with a noticeable southern accent—one I don’t remember having, just as I don’t remember when it went away.

What’s particularly funny is that it’s not even our favorite home video. That would be the backside of my Einstein book report, filmed two years later, when the Boop, at eight, made a faux commercial advertising the supposed pregnancy of her pet rabbit, when my father talked to the dog from behind the camera, when my mother shot an entire walk to the lake. The Boop is particularly fond of a moment, when she ran through the meadows on the edge of Beaver Lake, and then, breathless, reported to the camera: “I’m Sara, and I love to run.” I like the nausea inducing camera work on the walk back, while my mother and I discuss such quotidian details as lunch money and what’s for dinner.

That video was shot about a month before my parents announced their divorce, about two months before my father moved out of the house, about three months before my grandfather died, the uncanny triumvirate of domestic crisis which set in motion a series of events I couldn’t have possible predicted as I walked back from Beaver Lake and turned up my nose at the suggestion of spaghetti.

So maybe the “Dirty Dancing” revue is the better candidate for posterity. A silly, unsullied slice of life. It can be watched without analysis, without the knowledge that you are watching a family flitting about the chasm’s edge. I don’t have to look for signs and slips of the tongue, the signals I missed when I was thirteen.

My family acted well in front of a camera because it was rare for us to have one. The irony is that if my parents had succumbed and bought the camcorder I craved as a child, most of it would have been pretty awful. Lots of bickering and passive-aggression. The curtain would have fallen, and all that was real and unpleasant would be glaringly obvious. That said, I guess I’m still out of sorts over lack of a family video camera, but for different reasons. Other people can reminisce with sound and pictures. They can sit back and pine for missing summer days of hyperactive holiday mornings. They can point out their grade school friends and their senile grandmothers. My friends can’t imagine my parents being married, or our house on Westwood Road, and I still lack the language to give them a solid picture of what it was like on the good nights, with the four of us together, when my parents still seemed to be purely and deeply in love.

It was only ever an illusion, and I know that. But it was a really good one.