Fox shouldn’t do dramas any more. They did a lovely job with the X-Files for many, many years, but if anyone can think of another smash hit, wonderful drama like that that Fox has put out in the last ten years, let me know. I can’t.
I do enjoy their comedies, which the OC almost works as. Almost. As EW puts it, the show has some really rather unintentionally amusing moments. I believe the one they quoted was “Welcome to the OC, bitch. This is how they do it in Orange County.” The trouble with that line for me, however, is who says it.
Chris Carmack is a wonderful actor. Just not necessarily on this show. I know he’s a wonderful actor because I watched him act in a large variety of roles throughout high school.
It was not really any surprise to any of us that Chris “Scrappy” Carmack made it into the “big time”. He was always one of the best looking and most talented guys at the school. That was, actually, one of his biggest problems. The boy was good looking, a good actor, a great athlete, a jazz sax player, and an all around nice guy.
Then he went off to NYU to be in the musical theater program, and the next thing we knew, he was an Abercrombie model, a guest star on “Strangers with Candy” (if you have never managed to turn on the television to a guy you knew in high school making out with a forty year old, over made up woman, feel lucky), and had an appearance in the Kia All Models Sales Event ad. It’s good to see him getting a recurring role on network television, don’t get me wrong.
Its just hard to buy him as the bad-ass boyfriend when he, Sheida and I spent the afternoon before senior prom out by our calculus portable playing baseball with a broken chair arm and an empty coke can. Impressively, he could hit that coke can right handed, left handed, back handed, over head and granny style. We’re talking about the kid who sat in front of me for half my classes freshman year and would lean back to stretch and accidentally whack me in the nose.
I once sat by, helping paint a large set for our freshman year musical, while Scrappy dipped his hand in the white paint, snuck up behind his girlfriend, and planted a big, wet hand print on her ass. I’ve worked on plays in which we had to create a rip away suit for him. I helped practice ripping away said suit. I’ve had to help him with 10 second costume changes, and nearly run him over with 12' by 12' by 12' sets. I’ve watched him balance pretty much anything on his chin (chairs, stools, twenty foot two by fours), for hours on end. We dressed him up in a too-tight gold suit to pretend to play the sax during the bridge of “Respect” when the “Frijoles Calientes” performed at the yearly lip-synch festival. That took rather a lot of encouraging before he was willing to actually do it. I once walked backstage after a scene change while he was changing in the wings, to compliment him on his top hat. I didn’t even notice that he wasn’t wearing any pants.
Now, I can say that I’ve seen my campers bring in their costumes in bags with his face all over them. I’ve discovered that there’s actually a fan mailing list devoted to him on yahoogroups. My mother, who is always better at keeping up with the Scrappy sightings than I am, once walked into an Abercrombie & Fitch store in New Orleans for the sole purpose of asking the sales lady for one of his bags. The woman simply smiled (I guess they got those sorts of requests a lot) and asked why my mom wanted it. When Mom told her it was because I went to high school with him, the woman’s eyes widened, got all sappy, and she breathed: “Reeeaaaaally? What’s he like?”
There are, it seems, a lot of people taken in by Scrappy’s pretty face. Just remember, if you are one of them, that I’ve seen him in his boxers. I’ve also seen (and have pictures of, somewhere) my friend Sheida deciding that the best revenge for the teasing she’d endured from him was to load up a paper plate full of potato salad and smear it all over his head.
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