I want you to have a point of reference, so the following pictures are of Josh Lucas and Patrick Dempsey:

Okay?

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Sally and I watched a Lifetime movie last night called Don’t Cry Now. I won’t even bother going into the entirety of the plot, since it wasn’t anything too exciting (a woman finds out her stepdaughter is trying to kill her because she’s nuts and wants her father back all to herself, basically). But, there were these two things that happened in the movie that were just too incredible to let go.

Jason Priestly played the woman’s brother. There was some bad blood between them (he had been in jail for three years for conspiracy to commit murder, and he also was tight with their father who she had some unresolved issues with – issues which, incidentally, had nothing to do with her, quite frankly) and after her husband’s ex-wife is murdered (by the stepdaughter herself, it turns out – explained in a reveal that wasn’t ever really revealed and had to basically just be guessed at by us) she’s convinced that JPriest did it. I don’t really know why, since it doesn’t seem that he would have known this woman at all, and clearly would have no motive to kill her.

Anyway, the woman is pretty heinous to her brother and is suspicious of him and nasty and basically trying to catch him in any lie or criminal act that could give her cause to call the police and have him arrested again. (It turns out that he’s actually a cop, and the whole jail thing was a fake out so that he could become undercover vice without anyone knowing.) So, she goes to his house and sneaks into his bedroom and starts rifling through his drawers. She eventually finds a gun, but before that, she pulls out a box of something called Interceptors. The box is ginormous, and she sort of stares at it for about ten seconds before putting it back. There were a lot of scenes of this woman just having long, pointed reaction shots to things that weren’t in any way related to the plot. And these Interceptors? So not related to the plot.

Maybe she was surprised that he had a box of condoms in his room since he only recently got out of jail, but it didn’t seem that strange to me even before the “I was never in jail” reveal, considering this house belongs to him and did before he left for “prison.” And, he’s a guy. Condoms in his bedroom? Weird, right??? No, that’s what I thought.

The fact that he had a 48-pack was kind of bizarre, true, but honestly, that wasn’t the strangest thing about the Interceptors. The weird part was (and I don’t know if this is why the reaction shot was so long, because if it is, this movie instantly became awesome) that the economy sized box of Interceptors proudly displayed the phrase “Extra-Large.”

…

And the second thing about this movie that was weird: the woman was being poisoned by her stepdaughter unbeknownst to her and, since she had been feeling a little flu-ish and had seen a bit of blood in her saliva one day, she decided to stop by the doctor’s office. She had also, unfortunately, just realized her husband (Joe from 90210! what would Donna think?) might be having an affair with his co-anchor at the tv station (incidentally, he was having an affair, but it was with her best friend – surprise!). Her husband and this anchor woman, btw, both being in perfectly normal-seeming health. And the woman having only had a little bit of acheyness and some nausea one night and a little bit of blood in her spit when she brushed her teeth in the PAST WEEK (symptoms the stepdaughter also displayed herself in the past week), asks the doctor to perform an AIDS test.

An AIDS test! And then she brings it up again when she talks to her best friend about her suspicions about her husband’s cheating on her. An AIDS test! And THEN, when the doctor calls to tell her she’s being poisoned, the first thing she asks is, “Are the AIDS test results back?” The doctor, of course, quickly dismisses the negative result because she’s being POISONED!

And it’s not like she didn’t know that someone was out to get her. She had received an ominous warning from the husband’s ex-wife just before she was killed, so she knew she was in danger. But, of AIDS???

There was also a pretty great scene where she walks in on her husband and her best friend in bed, but without being able to capture her husband’s totally stoked face pre-noticing his wife in the room and subsequent “who is this woman on top of me?” face post-noticing his wife in the room, it just wouldn’t be fair to tease you. Sorry for doing it anyway.

When I was around 12, I used to have these epic Uno tournaments with my friend Meghan. We would play for hours and we would have single games that went through two or three reshufflings of the deck because we just couldn’t get down to zero cards. We even combined both of our Uno decks several times to make a gigantic draw pile. We were nerds.

But, anyway, we never played with anyone else. It was always me playing Meghan and that was it. I imagine I played my brother or sister or Dad once or twice, but Uno was really this showdown between us two. We were besties, but we fought all the time, and constantly accused each other of cheating and Uno was a real war. We would relish drawing forty cards and having a huge hand full of non-number cards. It’s a much better game when you play against one person, because every single non-number, non-regular-wild card means you get an automatic second turn. We would pile up all these cards and act all sad like we were losing and then go on this super bitchy rant, slapping down cards. “Reverse you, go back to me; skips you, goes back to me; draw four, goes back to me; draw two, goes back to me.”

She still lives across the street from me, but I haven’t actually conversed with her in probably three or four years. We just never cross paths, which is kind of weird. But, I still remember exactly how her room looked back then and how we couldn’t listen to music while we were playing and how playing Uno was something which was Very Serious for us. I’ve played Uno since, obvs, but it’s never the same. Games don’t last that long and there’s never anything at stake (like the fact that you get bragging rights for a week after the game is over, which was how long it took for the loser to stop sulking and trying to convince everyone that cheating had so obviously occurred).

My dad’s work was having some kind of company picnic sort of thing a couple of weeks ago, and they were playing games. He was even sent home with some, one of which was a card game called Rats. It’s kind of the opposite of Uno (you want to end up with all the cards instead of none), with absolutely no strategy. Like bizarro Uno mixed with war.

It sucks when you lose at a game that takes real strategy. It sucks even more when you lose several times in a row in a game that is completely based on luck. Because, then, well, you’re not a bad card player. You’re just a natural loser. I lost twice in a row at this game tonight with Sal.

But, then we decided to play one more game before going to bed. One more game which lasted over half an hour and literally drew blood at one point (the result of an attempt to snatch up extra cards gone terribly awry). Uno 2.0? Maybe not. But, all I’m saying is, I won that last epic game, and I’m going to be talking about it until Sally finally asks for a rematch.

My friend Carly wrote me an e-mail the other day that contained only the subject heading “OMG YOU GUYS” and the following url: undressedtv.com

I can understand the brevity because as soon as I clicked on it and found out what it was, there weren’t really words. Someone is uploading all of the episodes of Undressed from, I’m assuming, their old VHS tape collection (since it’s not out on DVD). They currently have Season 1 up, which I’ve been watching over the past few days.

If you never saw it, then Undressed was this horribly acted show on MTV that was all about sex and who was having it and how. Perhaps their first live action scripted series, but I’m not sure about that. It had three or four vignettes going at once in each episode, running sort of like a soap opera, and each story arc would only last a few episodes each. Characters would drift between vignettes, too, so the main character from one would become the sister of the main character of another a month later.

It’s one of those ensemble cast shows where, for years after it ended, you’d find yourself going, “Don’t I know that guy from somewhere?” in reference to every day actor in a bit part in every tv show or made for tv movie you’d ever see. And the answer almost always came back to, “Wait, wasn’t he that guy that liked that other guy and then had sex in the laundry room with him on Undressed?”

Undressed came out in 1999, which was my senior year of high school, and since almost every other show that dealt with high school life that came out either before or during my high school years (Saved by the Bell, Dawson’s Creek, Buffy) were so beyond different from reality (except for Daria, whose two characters Daria and Jane were EERILY similar, both in personality and in their relationship to each other, to my friend Laura and me) that I just didn’t expect any portrayal of high school to be true to life, I didn’t think of the high school-age characters’ story arcs in Undressed as anything other than fiction. The stories that followed post-college adults? Whatever. They were old.

It was the college-aged kids that got me. I was headed for college in a year and I defy any 1982-born college-bound teenager watching that show for the first time to not have had the thought, “So, wait, are people REALLY gonna be having sex in the laundry room all the time, because that’s, like, where I’m gonna want to clean stuff.” And the first time I saw NYU’s Hayden dorm’s laundry room, I had two reactions: 1) Wow, it’s a LOT dirtier in here than it is on Undressed. And 2) Why is that guy looking at me like that? I’ve gotta get out of here.

The funniest part about watching Undressed now is how innocent it seems. Kiki, the promiscuous blonde (who’s in a monogamous relationship when the show starts, so I don’t really get the whole promiscuous tip) gives her nerdy roommate a vibrator as a gift so she could stop being so uptight and when Gina’s unable to get off by fantasizing about the disgusting male models in a Playgirl-style magazine, she assumes that Gina’s a lesbian and gives Gina a little peek at her GIANT SATIN GRANNY PANTIES. Hot.

Katie and Dave are having problems in their relationship, so they try sleeping with other people (in their tiny one-bedroom apartment). When Dave’s prospect comes out of the living room and tries to seduce Katie by talking about her “other” “down there” piercing, Katie’s first reaction is, “Wow, I could never let a guy do that to me.” The other girl says, “It wasn’t a guy…” And there’s this whole beat where I guess you’re supposed to be all, “Ohhhhhhhhh, she’s bi! And now THESE two are gonna have sex!” And that may be what I thought way back when, but as I’m watching the show now, I’m like, “So, what, she didn’t think that there are female piercers?”

It’s not like I didn’t know anything about sex back then, either. I knew the basics and I watched Real Sex on HBO (not regularly, obvs, but when I was with a bunch of friends and we were all just trying to act older than we were while simultaneously trying to gross each other out), so I knew about some of the creepier kinds of sex out there, but I guess it was just the proximity to my own college years that made this show make me think that this is what my life was going to be like: mildly unattractive people just constantly trying to hook up with each other and using really cheesy innuendos and metaphors to get their points across (like “eager beavers” and “raincoats”). Oh, and every straight person is going to think at some point that they’re gay.

The other day when I called my friend Mike to tell him about this website, he started watching an episode and said that, despite our degrees from NYU, we had never really been to college, or, at least, the college that we thought we were going to go to from watching Undressed. Which, I have to say, re-watching Undressed, though it has been awesome, has made me really really glad that, if that WAS college, I missed out.

Who knows how long this site will be online, since studios are so quick to scream copyright infringement lately. For now, though, I’m really enjoying remembering what life was like before I was ever independent and before I ever knew anything about anything.