Friday the 13th!

And so begins the really disjointed story of Norma going to college after raising her children, starting with a mis-matched closeup of her River Community College application. 

Spoiler alert! 

Her graduation robe is red!

According to Wikipedia,

We get to anticipate Mrs. Arnold in 100 episodes.

How about that!  

"Norma Arnold (Alley Mills): Kevin's stay-at-home mother. Unlike her husband Jack, she is friendly and upbeat. She met Jack as a college freshman. When he graduated, she moved across the country with him and didn't finish college. She eventually gets her degree late in the series, and starts working at a software startup called Micro Electronics. She is shown to be more moderate (in contrast with her more conservative husband) and increasingly becoming bored and yearning to break away from her homemaker role hence reflecting the rise of feminism in the 1960s. (100 episodes)"

I love to picture Belushi on SNL doing the impression!

For what it's worth, even when I was a kid as it aired, the opening credits theme song scared the beetlejuice out of me! We had long opening credits back then! (Relive those sixty seconds of Joe Cocker, being scary.  So scary. I'm glad our generation also got first dibs on the fast-forward button.)

Make sure you play "Saturday" by Yo La Tengo

Make sure you play "Saturday" by Yo La Tengo while considering the image of where in time and space Norma Arnold dwells.

Connect with that thought.

TV Land Climate.

The show debuted twenty years after the fictional Arnold family's sitcom-esque life events took place.  Place - this is presumably California, and that California became Wondrous enough in 1968 to our culture to warrant a nicely done television show.  

(pretty kickass run-on sentence, yes? ha ha!)

A debut after the nation just collectively drank its way through the Super Bowl? I bet that cost a fortune to put together, but the producers had to catch us at just the right time when our guard was down as a nation. This is the TV climate that wore America down the previous year.  Small wonder that Roseanne, (the anti-Wonder Years Mom) was a flying success, too!

Americans are weird.  Can I get a witness?

The sweater.

The sweater to be held responsible for this blog.

I figured out how I could maybe recreate this sweater. 

It looks like that awful bobbly late 1980s acrylic yarn, though. Ick.

Screengrabs.  "Fashion."  Wonder Years Mom.

Screengrabs. "Fashion." Wonder Years Mom.

The Wonder Years recently surfaced on Netflix. I found the mother, Norma Arnold, to be one of the more underserved characters. I'm not a fan of the show, but hear me out.

For one, Alley Mills is just so  pretty.  (And much more lovely & earthy than, say, Betty Draper (AMC's Mad Men.))

Alley's part is unsung particularly early on, as she is mostly just a source of one line: "Kevin."

Kevin, the annoying twit at the center of every damn episode. Complete with the twerpy eyebrow raise that probably won him the show.  That's not my area of expertise.  Me and Kev are about the same age, so kudos for some great child-acting, Fred Savage. Seriously, thanks for Party Down. (Bobbi & Constance are my favorites!)

Anyway, I think there is more to Kevin's Mom's character.  Here, I champion the underdog and accept this project.  What might we discover? What does her house say about her? Did the writers ever, actually do her justice? Who are her friends?

What questions does the show leave us with, assuming I can survive viewing this much Wonder Years?

Most of all, let's check out what fun the wardrobe staff had dressing her, stylizing this nearly-invisible character played by an utterly lovely actress.

All content is work safe, with probably some F-bombs here or there - so I guess, not actually work safe.

Enjoy!
Suzy Dragnet