I just had one of my mediocre ideas. Boy, was that a mistake.

Well, I still haven't stopped watching The Facts of Life.  I've finally found a website that had the Goes To Paris tv movie.  I didn't watch it all but I did see more than the Reunion a couple weeks ago and let it play when I wasn't watching.  How did I get here after being obsessed with Guns'n'Roses and before that, the Avengers movies?

I'm really coming to the conclusion that most of the episodes aren't very good.  There are some exceptions but even those have some obvious problems.  Really the only thing that sells it is watching Mrs. Garrett and the four girls.  I'm not particularly interested in watching the "very special episodes" and this show pushed those a lot.

The Paris movie is a good example of the problems with the show.  The five characters all had stuff to do but not much, especially compared to what they could do in a half-hour sitcom episode.  Filming in France added a lot of screen time - one assumes part of the deal was a commercial for tourists - but that was about it.  They didn't have much to do with each other except at the beginning and end so much of the fun part of character interaction was missing.  They added the extra footage and removed the laugh-track.

I don't mind the laugh-track myself.  I'm sure I'd be annoyed with it if I actually started watching tv again (like I'm not already doing that) but I never had much of a problem with it.  A laugh-track can certainly be loud and obnoxious, but so can a live audience.  I paid a lot more attention to the characters and stories than to what other people thought was funny.  I am annoyed when there's applause or 'awww's.

Mrs. Garrett had a basic plot at a cooking school and Charlotte Rae was always fun.  Her variety is a big help, going from stern to ditzy to angry to over-the-top in whatever emotion she was portraying at the moment.  Rae had to play the adult on the show, the anchor to set everything straight.  The girls were sent to a strict school - why all four of them but no other student from Eastland? - where they quickly escaped.  Not from what you'd expect from teenage girls, Jo wanted to go to La Mans but instead had a romance, not too different from what Nancy McKeon already did.  Natalie and Tootie went sight-seeing until they ran into Frank Bonner of all people who played a character different from how we know him, Herb Tarlek of WKRP in Cincinnati.

Kim Fields and Mindy Coen didn't really do anything but give us more of the pair we liked.  I have to wonder how much they were really acting.  Obviously if they think one way but the script says something else, they get paid for acting, but I do wonder how different Natalie and Tootie's characters really were from them.  Then there's Lisa Whelchel who had probably never been to France, there's really no point in setting up anything Blair might really be believed in doing, just do a few scenes with her in a room with some other people, then go out and film her as a tourist.  Just call her "Blair" instead of "Lisa" and that's about it.  Write the script so Blair likes going around and seeing famous sites by herself.  Probably the easiest of the subplots to write.

I did immediately recognize Kim Fields' mother Chip which surprised me.  I had recently seen the episode where she plays Tootie's mother, here she's just a bit character.  Not a shock, her daughter's going to Paris, she can go along and also fill up a role, probably best for everybody.  Kim was the youngest member of the cast.  Looking it up, I see she'll turn 52 years old in May, almost the same age Charlotte Rae was when Mrs. Garrett was created, turning 52 in April 1978.

One thing I would do if I had any authority in Hollywood is try to recreate the series.  As a cartoon and yes, the four actresses would have to voice their roles.  Then again, I'd also want at least one take of them recording each of other three roles and decide who was best at each of the three roles they aren't known for.  Use it as a dream sequence or just a bonus track for the video.

For that matter, I am genuinely surprised that there hasn't been any attempt (that we know of) to actually show the four of them together again.  The reason I started watching these episodes again was the news that Cloris Leachman died - so far I've only seen one episode she was in - and obviously Beverly Ann and Edna would be at the end of their lives if not already gone.

The neat idea, which I might as well write here because where else will it ever happen, is that they don't even need to be physically together.  A couple of weeks ago, I actually found myself writing a page or two worth of dialogue.  My idea is that they probably have very little to do with each other anymore - the actresses probably have see each other much more often - but they do belong to a website for Eastland School Graduates.  Since they had more history with each other, they created a private group, probably called "Over Our Heads" or "Edna's Edibles."  That's where the news that Mrs. Garrett has died comes out.

Basically, the actresses would just be recorded in character like they were looking into a computer and responding to each other.  It would be creatively iffy on when each one of them is there, they might change clothes at various points if one of them has been gone for a day or a week.  The actress would recite whatever she's typing at a given time.  The one line of actual dialogue I imagine is Jo reading Blair's news that Mrs. G. has gone and, broken up by it, screams "Will you shuddup!!!"  Since it's not an actual dialogue, Blair continues delivering the news without noticing.

I don't see a whole lot of plot beyond finding out what the girls are doing these days.  I have no ideas for Jo, my ideas for the other three are probably quite a twist, but all centered around what Mrs. Garrett brought them.

Blair has basically become her mother, she's now on her third or fourth marriage, and her kids - adoption was cited in the Reunion - want someone who's actually there for them, just like Mrs. G. was for the young Blair.

Natalie gave up on her attempts to change the world.  Being a wife and mother shows much more success and she still writes, even more now that her kids are in school.  I think she'd be the happiest of the four.

I actually found a way into this story when I started trying to figure out how or why anybody could call Dorothy "Tootie," even including a line where Natalie tells her 'we should have stopped that by the time we graduated high school.'  Dorothy is probably the main storyline, her most-recent marriage is falling apart, her kids are in trouble, she's doing less acting then ever, being mostly in production now, the news of Mrs. G. hits her hard and makes her think that she hasn't been so happy since everyone called her "Tootie" and really misses that sense of hope in her life.  It could be a plot-point where she's basically demanding to be "Tootie" and everybody forgets that because obviously it's been decades since that was normal.  The only other idea I have for Jo is her response when she logs on and finds out, just asking 'has the world gone insane?'

Anyway, that's as far as I've written.  Blair reporting the news, keeping very reserved.  Natalie and Tootie catching up on what's been going on and remembering Mrs. Garrett.  Can't write more until I figure out where Jo is coming from these days and haven't had Blair do more than this yet.  But it's a lot of fun to try to envision the girls.  I'm pretty sure the series is still part of my basic mind and I haven't lost that part.  And it's interesting to picture how such an event would be filmed, obviously the actresses can record each part on their own and then just edit the footage together.

If I were running the show, have them all do it in the same room but that's probably not doable.  I'm just thinking of one episode, roughly as long as one of the episodes, just to catch up on them.  And since I'm imagining this, have one clip of the four together, hopefully in character but regardless, even if it's just for the closing credits, I think we'd like to see them together one more time.  They probably caught up on each other when they joined the website so there wouldn't need to be a lot of exposition or remembrance except for occasional comments.

The facts are all we can hope for.  Let's do something about it before time runs out.