You Can't Escape Vic and Sade

This is an article written by my friend, Sarah Cole.  She has graciously allowed me to share this with my readers.

Recently, I was speaking with my mother about Vic and Sade. She had been thinking about why, as a seven-year-old in an isolation hospital, she had enjoyed it so much, She knew she wasn't sophisticated enough to catch the subtleties of some of the humor (though she did think Sade's sister Bess's letters, which invariably began "We are fine, and Walter's kneecap has let up definitely on the twinges..." were deliciously silly), and the references to local Illinois towns were appealing; but most of all, she recalled, it reminded her of being home. To which I responded, "Of course it would: your family was a bunch of nuts!" I had put it bluntly, but she agreed with me. Nuttiness, however, is not limited to just her family. Each family has its share of eccentrics; and each member has his own eccentricities. The incidents taking place in that small house halfway up in the next block, and the characters living there, were exaggerated, but they were all strangely familiar.

What's frightening, though, is how little they needed to be exaggerated. In one episode, the couple's boy Rush is planning a party. He doesn't want to host just another boring party where everyone just stands around and talks. He wants something memorable. So, as he explains to Vic, he is planning to hire a detective to break up groups of loiterers, a trained nurse to care for anyone who might get sick, and would arrange for everyone to be tattooed. He had considered calling in a fire alarm, until Vic reminds him doing so was illegal. Wild stuff? Maybe, but when was the last time you heard a teenager plan a party? It's not all that wild, after all. The same goes for the times Vic practices the ritual for his fraternal lodge. It smacks of parody, but, if you know anyone in a fraternal organization, you know you've heard it all before.

Or a more startling example might be how, in one episode, Uncle Fletcher tells of a dentist of DeKalb, Illinois, who died while he was awake. (". . .Waved good-bye to his loved ones, and walked to the undertaker's under his own steam." He needlessly adds, "I've always been glad I wasn't there.") That sounded pretty bizarre, until I read of a case of a man being found dead in the parking lot of an undertaker's establishment. His wife concluded that he had known he was dying, and had driven there himself. Somehow, I doubt the man was inspired by this fictional DeKalb dentist; so the thought that the impossible situations of Vic and Sade could actually happen does give one pause.

What's even more scary, is when you start hearing ideas from Vic and Sade episodes being suggested by real, seemingly normal, people. For instance, in one of the episodes, Vic's lodge plans to set up hospitality routes for members, so they can stay at each other's houses while they travel. Of course, the mobs who would be traveling through the Gooks' town were so incredible, including such members as infant cousins, straw bosses, and partners in the Powdered Rabbit business, that they would need a trailer court to handle them all. We all get a good laugh about the idea. A few years ago, my mother's family put together a directory. One of the cousins suggested we run the addresses through some software he had that would pinpoint their location on a map. One of his persuasion points was that, when we were traveling, we could stay at each other's houses.

I'm not smart enough to make this up. But, so far, happily, we haven't made the map.

Uncle Fletcher, Sadie's vague uncle, was a monument of quirkiness. Besides calling everyone "Honey,' and turning up at inopportune times, he seemed to know everybody. Everybody! Everybody with an unexpected past, or an odd talent, that is. He would keep track of them by reciting, each time their names came up, their history. Invariably, these litanies of remarkable triviality would end with "later died." It was always worth a chuckle on the program. Now, listen to your elderly relatives talk about people they remember. One day, I was riding with my parents and grandparents. The area through which we were passing had been farmland, belonging to families my grandparents had once known. As we went along, the grandparents were discussing Peter Schwartz, who had come from Indiana, married Lily Plow, who was fifteen years older than he at the time, had sold the farm, moved to Mendota and died about ten years before. Or cousin Margaret Steepleknocker, who sent her children to military school after her husband drowned in a grain bin, bought a tree farm in Idaho and is buried in the township cemetery. Now, I made up these sample descriptions, but this was essentially how my grandparents were keeping track of these people they had known. The whole time they talked, my mother and I were pounding on each other to keep from laughing out loud. They sounded just like Uncle Fletcher!

I could go on, but my point is, if you listen to Vic and Sade, then listen to the people around you, you will soon hear your own personal episode of this absurdist, realistic domestic comedy. The underlying humor of Vic and Sade is its glorification of the commonplace and trivialization of the extraordinary.– just like real life So, look around. How many times have you seen the truly remarkable overlooked and the merely bizarre honored? My mother has described Vic and Sade as a program on which nothing happens. But in that "nothing," all kinds of remarkable things are taking place. Just like the real life it reflected; albeit in a funhouse mirror.

(By the way, I don't know what Powdered Rabbit is, either. But once I figure it out, I'll be going into business, and the directory shows I'll be traveling through your town...)

© Sarah Cole 2011