I wrote something that’s going to run next week, in which I mention thirtysomething. Now I’ve got that show on the brain. It had a huge influence on me when it was first on, back when I was in my twenties, and again, when I’d watch reruns of it in my thirties. I went through phases where I identified with one of three characters. First I was totally Hope, the prissy writer/wife/mom - although I never got to the mom part, but that is a whole other story. (A series of stories, really.) I was in my first marriage (I was married from 23 - 26. Insane! Please, young tumblr folks, don’t ever do that! ), and I had a cute husband who dressed a lot like Hope’s husband Michael Steadman did, and kind of resembled the actor, Ken Olin. Same gene pool, anyway. But then, when I was 25, the marriage started falling apart, and I started identifying with Nancy, who was having marital problems with Elliott. The tv couple worked their shit out after she got cancer. In real life, my husband and I split up. And I became… …Melissa, the artsy-funky single photographer who hews toward vintage men’s clothes in a sort of punk/art school Annie Hall way, and dating men who are unavailable, including Michael’s best friend Gary, the hot, roguish English prof. I had a Gary for a couple of years. That was how I described him to a friend. “He’s kind of like Gary from thirtysomething, but with brown hair.” Even though I’m married again, I still feel kind of Melissa-ish, if only in that I sort of always have to do everything my own weird way, and I don’t have kids, and I’ve always been out of step with fashion, and with my own age group, and I have weird hair that makes people from my home town on LI describe me as “ahwtsy”… One thing I have never been though, and probably never will be, is an Ellyn - the corporate go-getter who wears skirt suits with huge shoulder pads. Yeah, that is so not ever going to be me.

I wrote something that’s going to run next week, in which I mention thirtysomething. Now I’ve got that show on the brain. It had a huge influence on me when it was first on, back when I was in my twenties, and again, when I’d watch reruns of it in my thirties.

I went through phases where I identified with one of three characters. First I was totally Hope, the prissy writer/wife/mom - although I never got to the mom part, but that is a whole other story. (A series of stories, really.) I was in my first marriage (I was married from 23 - 26. Insane! Please, young tumblr folks, don’t ever do that! ), and I had a cute husband who dressed a lot like Hope’s husband Michael Steadman did, and kind of resembled the actor, Ken Olin. Same gene pool, anyway.

But then, when I was 25, the marriage started falling apart, and I started identifying with Nancy, who was having marital problems with Elliott. The tv couple worked their shit out after she got cancer. In real life, my husband and I split up. And I became…

…Melissa, the artsy-funky single photographer who hews toward vintage men’s clothes in a sort of punk/art school Annie Hall way, and dating men who are unavailable, including Michael’s best friend Gary, the hot, roguish English prof. I had a Gary for a couple of years. That was how I described him to a friend. “He’s kind of like Gary from thirtysomething, but with brown hair.”

Even though I’m married again, I still feel kind of Melissa-ish, if only in that I sort of always have to do everything my own weird way, and I don’t have kids, and I’ve always been out of step with fashion, and with my own age group, and I have weird hair that makes people from my home town on LI describe me as “ahwtsy”…

One thing I have never been though, and probably never will be, is an Ellyn - the corporate go-getter who wears skirt suits with huge shoulder pads. Yeah, that is so not ever going to be me.

Tags: thirtysomething