A VEGGIE UPDATE

As many of you are aware, Veggie Tales has hit NBC over the past few weeks with very good ratings, but with most of the "God-stuff" cut out. How did this happen? Why did someone agree to it?

Well, in the past couple of days, Phil Vischer, creator of Veggie Tales, has blogged about just those questions. With the furor flying, it's good to read the whole story.

Also fascinating -- and heartbreaking -- is Phil's 11-part story of The Fall of Big Idea Productions. Beautifully written and painful to read, it's a cautionary tale that wades right into the clash between art and business that frustrates us all. Click over when you have some time...

WHAT COOKIE ARE YOU?

It's certainly true that I often feel as if I have a foot in two separate and conflicting worlds (Hollywood vs. the church... writing vs. teaching... fun mom vs. mean mom), and am pulled between them.

Right now I feel oddly pulled toward the kitchen... How 'bout you, what cookie are you?

You Are a Black and White Cookie

You're often conflicted in life, and you feel pulled in two opposite directions. When you're good, you're sweet as sugar. And when you're bad, you're wicked!

What Kind of Cookie Are You?

REALITY CHECK

Maybe the reason I end up watching so much reality TV (compared to scripted TV) is because it's less work. When I watch scripted TV, I find myself rewriting in my head, or replotting, or making a mental note of something that was done especially well. When I watch reality TV, I can turn that part of my brain off and just watch like everyone else.

Excuses aside, I thought I'd just weigh in here on the beginnings of a couple of this season's reality shows.

Survivor

Or should that be, "Survivor: The Racist Season"? That's at least what some would have us believe. Or should it be "Survivor: The Naked Ploy for Ratings"? (Probably more accurate...)

If you haven't been watching (or reading about it), this season's Survivor consists of 4 teams, 5 members each, divided by race: Asian, black, Hispanic, white. A "social experiment," we are to believe. This experiment, apparently, will show us what happens when people of the same race are put together in the same environment -- because of course in real life, we're all perfectly integrated and people of the same race never hang together.

Is it working? Depends on what you mean. The smaller size of the teams isn't really working, if you ask me. Each team feels like the endgame because it's so small, yet we don't know the people well enough to be at that point. And when one team threw an immunity challenge to get rid of one member this week, the import of their action on such a small team seemed particularly idiotic. (But was it? At Tribal Council, said member, whose name I simply don't remember, professed undying love for a member of another team whom he's never even talked to -- a little too weird to be around for 39 days, perhaps...)

As for the racism issues... Well, one of the lessons we always repeat to ourselves with regards to our own writing is, "Keep your characters in the same room." In other words, you can't have conflict between characters if the characters have no chance to interact. In the same way, the potential of conflict along racial lines has been effectively removed from Survivor so far this season (though the Asian team has already started dividing along nationalistic lines). Does that give us a more "pure" Survivor, where the conflicts are based purely on personality? Or a more tame one, when we were promised more edgy?

It sort of doesn't matter. With teams of 5 (two teams now down to 4), a merge has to be coming sooner rather than later. And then we'll be back to the status quo, all promotional gimmicks over.

Dancing With the Stars

Just this week I had to teach a shortened version of our class on "The Spiritual Needs of the Audience," and I had to miss Dancing With the Stars to do it. As I started the first spiritual need -- the Need for Beauty -- I realized why I was missing the show so much: It so meets the need for beauty.

I just love this show, if only for the way it makes me smile. And I love the way our whole family flocks to watch together. And the way Lee gets up to show Sabrina how to waltz during commercials. Yes, it feels like a flashback to 1950s tv -- but I unashamedly love this show. (Clearly I'm not alone, given that it was no. 1 last week -- which still sort of astonishes me.)

Right now I'm a Joey Lawrence fan, with Emmitt Smith close behind. Emmitt is just so smooth and light on his feet -- you can tell he's not even thinking about what his feet are doing, which is one of the marks of a good dancer in my book (I hate it when I can see them counting their beats mentally). Mario lost it a little for me this week with the showboating, but his first week was so strong. Jerry Springer is giving us a lesson on how to behave when you're publicly put in a situation where you're not playing to your strengths -- he's playing the bad cards he was dealt beautifully (with Harry Hamlin close behind on that score).

Why haven't I mentioned any of the women? Well, somehow they're just not that interesting this year. Sara the country singer is too embarrassed by her own body. Willa (I don't even know who she is in real life) is terrific, but clearly has no fan base whatsoever. Monique and Vivica Fox both did well, but haven't shown the personality I'd like to see, falling back on rather cliche sexiness instead (and same for Willa, who has better moves if worse scores).

But I'll be happy to change my vote, as the contestants work hard and continue to amaze. All I can say is, I won't be missing an episode. Somehow this is a TV show that just purely makes me happy every week. I turn off the TV smiling. And how many shows can you say that about?

THAT INVISIBILITY CLOAK THING

I don't know why I wasn't that interested in J.K. Rowling's post regarding the "NAQ" (never-asked question) about Harry's invisibility cloak.

Here's the NAQ:

...Why did Dumbledore have James' invisibility cloak at the time of James' death, given that Dumbledore could make himself invisible without a cloak?

Prior to posting this I had a quick look on-line, and realised that some fans have been speculating about this question. However, nobody has ever asked me about it, and they really should have done...

It seems to me there are only two possibilities: Either James felt the cloak wasn't safe with him (the least likely possibility -- I would think one would be much more concerned with keeping other things safe, like, say, one's infant son), or Dumbledore needed it for someone else's use.

Who could that person have been? Well, almost anyone in the Order of the Phoenix. Given that Dumbledore knew, thanks to the Prophecy, that either Harry or Neville could be in danger from Voldemort at any time, I wouldn't be surprised to learn someone was posted to stand watch under an invisibility cloak in Godric's Hollow. After all, we saw the same tactic used with Mundungus standing watch (poorly) at 4, Privet Drive. Presumably the person standing guard would be the person (one of the people?) who was present for Voldemort's attack on the Potters.

We'd all come up with the same list. Pettigrew, Snape -- really, anyone from the Order is probably eligible to be on that list. The list gets narrowed down a bit when one realizes that Dumbledore had to get the cloak back somehow -- Pettigrew, for instance, wouldn't have been in a position to return it.

There is much more to say -- and much is said at Beth Priest's well-thought-through blog. I just can't seem to get my mind spinning around the whole issue -- I have no idea why. Do I subconsciously think that Rowling is trying to distract us by misdirecting us? Am I just too wrapped up in my own stuff at the moment? Not sure...

But while I can't come up with my own thoughts for whatever reason, I'd love to hear yours...

VEGGIE TALES: SELL-OUT? OR SELL-NOT?

Many people have opined on what's happened with Veggie Tales now appearing on NBC Saturday mornings. The basics: Apparently at the last minute, NBC demanded an edit of the Veggie Tales episodes to appear, excising references to God, including the standard Veggie Tales tagline, "God made you special, and He loves you very much."

What to do in such a situation? Do you take the stand of Rack, Shack and Benny, and refuse to bow down to the chocolate bunny? Or do you make the cuts as demanded in order to get on the air?

Veggie Tales chose to make the cuts. Immediately some people branded them as having sold out. You can read Phil Vischer's response to their upset fans, if you're interested.

Personally, not knowing anything at all about how the deal went down, my guess is that we're looking at naivete more than selling out. Phil Vischer has never shown much of a head for business, having had his big dreams dashed for lack of an adequate business plan. My guess (purely speculation, I repeat) is that he saw a chance to play in the big leagues again and didn't read his contract well enough. The time to stand up and refuse was when going line-by-line through a contract that certainly gave NBC the right to edit... not at the time when the edits were demanded. So either someone was naive ("Oh, they have the right to edit, but they'll never use it") or sloppy ("Go ahead and sign, it looks okay to me").

But I actually became concerned about the Veggie-Tales-on-NBC issue from a different angle.

A couple of weeks ago, I was driving, with my radio on to a local Christian radio station, KFSH 95.9 FM. And the morning drive time jocks announced that Veggie Tales was going to be on Saturday mornings. Lots of "how cool," etc. And then Bobby Shaw, the guy DJ, said this:

"Tivo them, burn them to DVD, and you'll never have to buy them again!"

My jaw dropped. I had just heard a Christian encourage illegal activity on the public airwaves.

Now, I know that the stats show that Christians steal music online as much as non-believers do. But it's one thing to hear those stats and another to hear someone giving permission to hundreds, maybe thousands of people to do just that.

For shame, KFSH. For shame, Bobby Shaw.

I wrote to Bobby. I pointed out that he was encouraging illegal activity. That copying copyrighted material without paying for it is stealing. I pointed out that, even though his station advertises itself as "safe for the whole family," he was encouraging activity that is harmful to the families of his listeners.

I told him that hundreds of thousands of people (thousands of whom are Christians, and therefore possibly in his audience) rely on the legal sale of the products we work on to put food on the table and gas in our tank. Writers, actors, musicians, all receive residuals, tiny payments based on every DVD sold, every CD sold, every airing on cable TV. Those tiny payments add up. They can make a difference between being able to pay the rent or not, for thousands of people.

I pointed out that my kids know that burning music off the internet, ripping DVDs off the TV, is, in fact, theft. (Cory even approached me with some worry this summer when people started asking him to make a CD of his hit songs from Family Camp: "Mom, we can't do that without violating copyright, can we?" I found myself explaining the concepts of fair use and parody to a 12-year-old.)

I asked Bobby if he wanted his "family-friendly" station to stand for stealing bread off the tables of his listeners? To stand for flippant encouragement of theft? And I asked him to please respond on the air, apologizing for his remarks and taking them back for the sake of the listeners who would be harmed by them.

Here's his response, by return e-mail:

"Thanks!"

What a wuss. What a shameful way to respond.

So, did Veggie Tales sell out in editing for NBC? Yeah, they probably did, most likely without realizing they had (back at the deal stage). But now that they're on the air, I can only hope that they're a HUGE hit, causing many many listeners to race out to Toys R Us and Wal-Mart to buy DVDs and videos of the 'real' episodes. Because that way, maybe my friends who've worked on Veggie Tales will make up a tiny bit of what they lost from an irresponsible DJ making shameful remarks.

And in the meantime, I've taken KFSH off the radio buttons in my car. Because any station that encourages theft and refuses to correct their statements isn't "family-friendly" in my book.

HOW STRESSED ARE YOU?

This week's quiz was quite a surprise. I would have given myself a score of 85 at least! Why, I'm positively relaxed!

Your Stress Level is: 60%

You are somewhat prone to stress, especially when life gets hard. When things are good, you resist stressing over little problems. But when things are difficult, you tend to freak out and find it hard to calm down.

How Stressed Are You?

If the comboxes are working, take the test and let us know!

SAFE THROUGH THE STORM

Thinking through the 9/11 anniversary just a bit more....

I was struck by all the op-ed pieces and commentators talking about the "Are we safer" question. Are we safer now than we were five years ago?

I think it's the wrong question. Because we weren't safer on 9/10/01. Sure, we thought we were. We just didn't know how unsafe the world really was. We learned 24 hours later.

The world is not a safe place. It never has been, not since the Garden of Eden. We like to pretend it's safe, and perhaps we need to, for the sake of our children, for the sake of our own daily peace of mind. But the world is not safe.

Are we safer now than we used to be? Of course we are, in some ways. Women no longer expect to have half their children die as infants -- and no longer face the prospect of their own death with every child they bear. Food is inspected and packaged and frozen, with nice little expiration dates printed for our safety. We have air bags and car seats and pasteurized milk and antibiotics and weekly paychecks and bike helmets and vaccines and GPS systems and Neosporin. Our world is much safer than it used to be, even a couple of generations ago.

But we also have cars that come out of nowhere to hit our children at speeds unimaginable to our grandparents. We have asbestos leaking and lead-based paint peeling from our older buildings. We have trans-fats and high fructose corn syrup clogging our bodies. We have an antiquated air traffic control system. We have AIDS, we have heart disease, we have cancer at a rate unheard of in previous generations. And we have a whole population of terrorists (accomplished and wannabes alike) dedidicated to our eradication. So in many ways, no, we are not safer.

The world has never been safe. It isn't safe now. The dangers change. But the idea of "safe for the whole family" is a lie.

When I was a little girl, one of my big desires was (for some odd reason) to be in the eye of a hurricane. I must have seen some movie (Flipper?) that put it in my head.

It never occurred to me, of course, that to get to the eye of a hurricane, I would have to go through the hurricane.

Thinking about that, oh these many years later, I realize that I live in a hurricane. Life swirls around me with its constant threats: Car wrecks. Broken bones on the playground. Loss of jobs. Brush fires. Cancer. Dog bites, wasp stings, rattlesnakes. Creditors at the door. Riptides. Plane crashes. Earthquakes.

But God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea.

The hurricane is always around us. On 9/11, it hit in a new and unexpected way. But no matter what, we are always in the eye of the hurricane. Always.

If only we didn't have to go through the hurricane to get there. Oh, if only...

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY

I don't watch morning TV. So five years ago today, I dropped Cory at school, then went home to get Sabrina ready for her first day of her last year of preschool.

As I turned on the car, the radio came on, set to a local news station. I heard a man's voice, full of urgency, saying, "We're going to city hall now--" And I clicked the radio off. I assumed they were talking about Los Angeles City Hall. I assumed it was some local crime or political story. And off we drove to preschool, happily playing games and singing songs as we drove.

When I pulled up in the parking lot, another mom, Sandy, was unbuckling her son from his car seat. And she was crying. Something horrible must have happened for a mom to cry on the first day of preschool! I rushed over to ask what was wrong.

She stared at me as if I came from another universe and said, "Haven't you heard? Don't you know?"

And she told me what had happened. Other moms assured me -- The U.S. was under attack by terrorists. The World Trade Center had been destroyed.

It made no sense to me. How could something so solid, so stately, be destroyed that easily? I had just been in the World Trade Center two months earlier. Just a week before, Lee and I had been talking about how, next time we were in New York, we should eat dinner at the top of the WTC, wouldn't it be fun.

Some of the moms had to race off. Their other kids' schools were closing, they had to pick up their children. Or even if the schools were staying open, they wanted their kids at home.

I called Lee. "Turn on the TV," I told him. My voice was shaky. And then I called my son's school. "Are you closing the school" I wanted to know. "Now why would we do that?" said the receptionist. And her voice was an echo of sanity and calm on an insane day.

I spent the rest of the day doing what we all did. Watching TV and trying to fathom how the world had changed. And over the next few days, I put Stephen Sondheim's musical Assassins in my car CD player, and listened to it over and over... the stories of how "something just broke" but the country keeps going anyway. An odd choice, but it helped.

That's what I was doing five years ago today.

Where were you five years ago today? And what music were you listening to in the next week? (I know the comboxes are iffy -- hit refresh a few times, and you should be able to access them.)

Let us know....

A NEW KIND OF PREJUDICE?

I happened to be standing around in a group of moms I barely know a week or so ago, and we were chatting about school. Pretty normal, given that school was about to begin, given that, in L.A. at least, it's no longer a given that you can put your child in the local school and expect them to get a decent (or even safe) education. The effort to get into the 'right' school -- private or public -- is a constant topic of conversation among L.A. moms (and frankly, it seems it's more effort to get into a good public school than private).

Well, one mom had recently moved out of Beverly Hills into Los Angeles, leaving the (used-to-be) famed Beverly Hills school system. The mom had an amazingly-worded explanation for it. What she meant was that she didn't want her kid going to school with all the Persians who have moved into Beverly Hills. (And there have been cultural clashes up the wazoo in B.H. as the Persian population has skyrocketed. We saw them just starting when we lived there over 15 years ago. Nowadays many of the clashes involve architecture.)

A fairly bigoted remark to make in public, one would think. But this particular mom had her remarks so nuanced, so smooth, that if you didn't already know what she was talking about, you'd never get her point. Boy, was she slick. Not an obvious ethnic slur in sight. Believe me, there was no way to call her on any prejudice, because if you dissected her words, all she'd really said was that they had moved to give their kids a good education.

One almost had to admire the skill with which she made her point.

However, her unstated point allowed the door to be squeezed a bit further open to let other prejudices in. And the next one caught me totally by surprise.

Another mom jumped in to say that oh, yes, they had changed their children's school as well, from one public elementary school in Santa Monica to another. And why?

Well, their former school had nice teachers, and really it was a fine school and all that. But you know, it was virtually all two-income families.

And as my jaw dropped, the other moms rushed to agree that, oh yes, definitely an understandable reason to change schools.

It's one thing, I suppose, to be prejudiced against people who are different from you. The ugly "us" vs. "them" thing crops up, there are cultural miscommunications and misunderstandings, the food is different, the language is different, the style is different. There are obviously hurdles to overcome.

But to create a new "us" vs. "them" category -- and to act on it -- seems a whole different thing. It's seeking out reasons for disunity where none should exist. And does the trophy wife who uttered this statement really think that her husband's first wife gets the luxury of staying home with the kids? Does she think she'd get to do it if she hadn't chosen her husband very carefully, and probably with an eye to her future lifestyle? Does she think she'd still be a stay-at-home mom if her husband decided it was time for trophy wife no. 3? Does she think she couldn't move from "us" to "them" in a heartbeat?

It's wonderful to be able to be a stay-at-home mom. But in L.A., with its high cost of living, it's rare. It's as much a status symbol as a beach club membership or a new Mercedes every year. Two-parent families with only one income-earner are rare (and usually fairly rich).

Was I taking it personally, because I am a working mom? Maybe -- but I recognize that I have the best of both worlds in working at home. I get to work and be here for my kids.

Still, a week or two later, I am still reeling from the quiet prejudice so mildly stated on a church patio -- and so quickly agreed with.

WHY CAN'T COSTCO RUN OUR HEALTH SYSTEM?

I have one regular medication I have to take, not a biggie, and something available in generic. I had always gotten it from our friendly neighborhood pharmacy where the pharmacist knows all his patients and they deliver for free if you need them to. And I paid my co-pay of $12 every month.

But then my health insurance decided I had to use their mail-order pharmacy instead. I didn't make the changeover when I should have, and ended up paying for one month's worth of prescription out of my own pocket. It cost $46 (this is about a year or two ago).

The mail-order pharmacy worked quite well, delivering my drugs right on schedule and deducting my $12 co-pay from a credit card every month.

But then circumstances changed such that my prescription wasn't going to be covered by insurance anymore. Uh-oh, I thought. A jump from $12 a month to $46 a month. Not that much out of pocket, but still.

So I made an easy phone call to the Costco pharmacy to ask how to transfer my prescription. They took down some info and took care of it all, nice and easy. Almost as nice as dealing with the friendly neighborhood pharmacy, almost as easy as dealing with the mail-order folks.

And I went in to pick up my prescription this weekend, without a clue as to what I'd be paying. And the total bill came to $7.50.

Hello? My out-of-pocket prescription came to less than my co-pay?

I was shocked. (Pleasantly shocked. But still.) It made me start asking questions. How much was the drug company making from my insurance company anyway? How much of the $46 I paid at the local pharmacy went to the friendly folks there, if it was only costing them $7.50 for the actual drug, and how much went to the insurance company, and how much went to the drug company?

And why can't Costco just run the whole thing and cut out all the middlemen?

QUIZ OF THE WEEK

In honor of school starting this week...

This quiz only came out half right for me. I had a split personality in high school -- I was half drama geek, and half serious student (with the school's best SAT's, AP classes, etc.). My friends were half from each world as well.

I suppose it was just a warm-up for the rest of my life, where I have continued to have each foot in a different world at all times... (I used to think that was a detriment, and it made me quite restless. It was actually Michael Chabon's kids' novel Summerland that hit me like a 90 mph fastball and made me realize it's actually a positive thing.)

Anyway, see if this quiz is more than half right for you.

Arty Kid

Whether you were a drama freak or an emo poet, you definitely were expressive and unique. You're probably a little less weird these days - but even more talented!

Who Were You In High School?