Before there was reality TV, there was my family.

Before you read this blog, there are a few things you should know about me.

            I was raised in a white, middle-class family in a small suburb about twenty minutes North of Dallas, Texas. My parents have been married thirty-five years. I have an older sister and a twin sister. Growing up we had a family dog that lived for nineteen years, named Little Bit. My mother stayed home until my sisters and I were in school and then she became a high school teacher, at the high school I eventually attended. My father worked at Ford, and was a self-proclaimed “Union Man.”

            From a distance my family was not unlike any other. For a long time I told myself that. “I’m just a girl, in the world,” I might sing to the Clueless soundtrack, in my room, wearing my dad’s headphones (from the 80‘s, the kind that managed to rip out every strand of hair on your head each time you removed them) and a Beastie Boys shirt that I took from my sister’s closest and stretched awkwardly over my plump, eleven year old, prepubescent frame. Downstairs, behind the security of our front door, in our red brick, two-story house, that was similar to every third house next to it, our family lived a quiet life that was anything, but normal.

            We were the reality television show waiting to happen; ...except we weren’t famous, it wasn’t cool to be eccentric back then, and no one would pay us to film our garage, packed to the ceiling with old computers, karate trophies, dusty encyclopedias, and VHS tapes.

            It was around that time that my father took up acting. He of course did what any good parent would, and immediately solicited his children for acting roles. He forced us to memorize the Oscar-Meyer Weenie jingle, and then made intimidating, ‘do it or else’ faces behind the woman working the camera as we forgot what came after, “Oh, I’d love to be an Oscar-Meyer Weenie...,” at an audition. He once landed a role as an extra on Walker Texas Ranger, but they eventually sent him home because he kept pitching Kung-Fu movie ideas to Chuck Norris during breaks. After a few ups and downs with CiCi Pizza commercials, stints on PBS, and several community theater Greater Tuna gigs, he settled into working as a gun-fighter at Six-Flags. To an eleven year old, this was amazing. Free Six-Flags tickets, you can’t go wrong! This gig lasted for years. Eventually it became routine, normal even, to see my father come down the stairs dressed in full Western attire, complete with loaded pistols (with blank, trick-bullets) in their holsters on his hips, in hot Texas summers.

            Years passed, and a boy I was to go on my first date with was on his way to my house to pick me up. I was frantically pulling clothes from my closet trying to decide what might best compliment my Kool-Aid (Cherry, if you’re curious) hair-dye job that I had managed the night before. I ended up choosing a Polo shirt of my dad’s that seemed hip at the time, but looking back, made me look a lot like Chaz Bono. I threw it on and raced downstairs just beating my mom to the door. I begged her to not make him come in (since our house resembled an episode of Hoarders, sub the dead, decaying cat for one misplaced hamster in the couch), but she whipped around my shoulder, and invited him in, just as I started out the door.

            We sat awkwardly, three feet away from one another on the sunken couch that my dad usually slept on, while my mother made small talk, asking him about his likes and dislikes. He was sitting on a dirty piece of laundry. I focused in on it, trying to decide if it was a pair of my father’s underwear or a white t-shirt, when I noticed the look on my date’s face. His eyes were looking past my mother to the landing at the bottom of the stairs. There, in full Western wear, looking like Wild Bill Hickok, stood my father. I was mortified! My father on the other hand, took this as an opportunity to reward my date (my first date!) with a personal show, featuring a professional gunfighter.

            He stood, feet should-width apart, hands on his waist, whistling Western gun fight tunes, twiddling his fingers over his pistols, and then, without warning he drew his pistols and,

 BANG! BANG! BANG!

            Before the smoke could clear and my date could unfold himself from the fetal position he took cover in, my dad was had produced a headshot from his office and was asking my mother to get a Sharpie so he could, “get this feller an autograph!”

           

            Despite what statistics might tell you, or how our white middle-class family appeared on paper, we were anything, but normal.

            I could tell you about how my mother once mistook duck food for gourmet Trail Mix at the zoo and consumed five packages before we made it to the penguin exhibit. Or about the time my father’s childhood friend, who was now a raging alcoholic, came to stay with us for a week (after his wife unexpectedly left, claiming her sister had an emergency) and told my aunt she looked “damn good,” right before shitting himself on our back porch, and then stripping naked as the day he was born, let my father hose him down. Or I could tell you of a time my older sister and I strategically placed Cheetos in the bathing suit top of my twin sister while on a vacation we later deemed, “The Seagull Massacre of 96’.” I could describe the time my mother dared me to ask my big-bosomed choir teacher if her favorite restaurant was Hooters, then sitting in the Principle’s office afterward, while I listened to my mother say she had no idea why I would say such a horrible thing. I could go on and on pulling memories from files in my mind with labels like “Things I’d Like to Forget” or “Why I Need Counseling.” I could elaborate on the time my mother declared we could finance a rental car for a vacation and after a heated debate with my frugal father, rented a two-door Geo Metro, and my father, upon seeing it, furiously remarked, “Damn Brenda, I could fit more in my pocket,” as he wedged a suitcase between my twin sister and I. I could share with you, that on that very same vacation, I threw a large piece (OK, more like ten pieces) of chewed Grape Bubblicious bubble-gum out of the window of that rented Geo Metro as we drove on the highway, and how at the next rest stop my father made me spend my “Fun Fund” (aka saved up allowance), on overpriced cleaning supplies at the gas station, and how every member of our family worked to remove the grape gum that had stuck, and then stretched, down the side of the rental car.

           

            Reality television too often gets a bad rap. When I see shows like “Honey Boo Boo” or “John & Kate, Plus 8,” I no longer take them for the train wreck, sloppy, shit-show they hold for face value. They are someone’s memories. Someone’s awkward family photos. Someone’s mental “This Is Why I Am In Counseling” file.

            I think as adults we bottle ourselves up, tuck away our embarrassing Olan Mills photos in a closet, and, to the rest of the world, do our best to appear normal. People like Honey Boo Boo are pioneers, really. Little Honey Boo Boo is trailblazing paths that maybe we all should walk down a time or two. I defy you to look down you family’s Memory Lane and deny your crazy Uncle Larry, or block out the memory of the time you pulled your grandma’s pants down at Thanksgiving as a prank, only to discover she doesn’t like to wear underwear. It’s in the revelation of these family secrets and the disclosure of these private, often embarrassing family moments, that we all discover a very real truth about ourselves.