Acting made her feel like Heather! again, and she was good, she was better than good, the only problem being that when she was up on the stage with everyone watching her and applauding her, one part of her always knew that people were watching and applauding her not because she was Heather, but because she was pretending to be someone else. The point being it was anybody other than the real Heather they were applauding; it was a complete stranger they were praising.
And now, waiting behind the door of her room in the Burrow, Heather hears a small noise in the hallway. She holds her breath for a few seconds — not that it makes any real difference — until whoever it is passes by her room and goes back to their own room. If only, she thinks, she could be an actress like the one on Mellow Valley who shared her name. She wouldn’t be here at all.
IN CASE YOU ARE CONFUSED:
The Cast of
Mellow Valley
Residents of the Burrow
Norm
Jeffery
Judy
Madeline
Sergeant Moody
Viktor
Heather*
Heather
Junior (a psychopath)**
Raymond
The Captain***
*Heather, the character on Mellow Valley, was actually an actress named Angela Morrison, who, as coincidence would have it, was killed in a car accident at the exact moment the other Heather, the Heather of the Burrow, was saying her name to Mr. Kaminsky, so technically speaking there was a current vacancy in the realm of celebrities with the name of Heather.
**Junior, a member of the cast of Mellow Valley, whose character’s name, Junior, happens to be the same as his actual one, Junior (Lima, Ohio, et cetera), has become, in the years that followed his appearance on the show, a psychopath with a fascination for crossbows.
***While never an official member of the cast of Mellow Valley, the Captain was hired as a consultant for one episode, never aired.
Lives made of nothing but air, without even the layer most sponges have to separate the outer world from the inner one. Or possibly capturing the outer one and making it the inner one. It’s hard to explain.
The third episode of Mellow Valley, subtitled “The Nature of Hope,” is the one in which all the characters on the show suddenly notice that, especially during certain hours of the afternoon, Grandpa Stoner is impossible to find, and when people ask him what he does during those hours, he refuses to answer. Naturally everyone becomes worried, but eventually Junior tracks him down at the local animal shelter. There, it turns out, Grandpa Stoner has been spending a part of every day playing with farm dogs who were left behind by owners who moved away to find work in the city. Sometimes their owners’ farms were foreclosed upon, or else their marriages fell apart under the disappointment of one bad harvest after another, or just from the pressures of balloon payments due on their homesteads as a result of taking out bad loans from unscrupulous lenders. At the shelter, Grandpa pets each of these dogs and talks to them, trying to make them feel better about their situation, which, he reassures the animals, is only temporary.
“But Grandpa,” Junior says, dismayed, “don’t you realize you are just raising the hopes of all these dogs, insofar as all of them — or at least ninety-nine percent of them — are doomed? What good does that do? Don’t you think you are only increasing their sense of betrayal at the end, when, expecting a pat and some kind words, instead they are dragged off to be gassed, thus making their last moments even worse than they would have been?”
“Not necessarily,” Grandpa Stoner answers. “Dogs can’t see into the future any more than you or I, and studies show possibly less. Ergo: we all know we’re going to perish in the end. Does that mean we should deny ourselves whatever pleasure we can find along the way? Consider that these animals’ hope might last for weeks, or at least days, while this sense of betrayal you speak of will last only a minute. Are you so afraid of dying that you can’t see anything else in the room? Please tell me it isn’t so, Junior.”
Junior doesn’t know what room the old man is talking about, let alone what he is supposed to be seeing in it — tables? lamps? — so he waits until everyone has sat down to the dinner table that evening before he returns to the question of pleasure versus truth that Grandpa raised at the shelter, and from that point on the rest of the show becomes more or less a debate along those lines. Grandpa Stoner, Norm, and Judy take the side that momentary distractions are necessary and, in fact, unavoidable. Heather, Junior, and Sergeant Moody — who provides several gruesome examples from prisoners-of-war he held captive for a time, generally a short time — represent the case for unflinching pessimism.
In the end nothing is resolved, but at the time TV Week called it “A rare, if unsuccessful, example of a thoughtful situation comedy on a network that has become a byword for the total vapidity of its offerings.”
THE TECHNICAL SIDE OF THINGS
Meanwhile, outside the Burrow, in a room in a totally different part of the city, away from the tall buildings and the mom-and-pop grocery stores, far from the sheet-metal fabrication plants, the fabric shops and Internet start-up ventures, in a room lit by bad artificial light, filled with brass gauges, machinery, boilers, tubes, wires, and compressors, and also plenty of cranks, levers, and wheels, two men are working. At the moment, both are awake, but soon one of them will retire to another room, a small room right next to the one they currently share. And in that second room, the man, after removing his heavy boots and taking off what he calls his “funny hat,” will take a nap on the single cot.
While he sleeps, his partner, whose own hat remains on, will continue to operate the machinery in the larger of the two rooms.
Their names are not important, but their jobs are very important.
And every once in a while — say, every four or five years — some young executive full of self-importance will have the bright idea of releasing all the episodes of Mellow Valley, complete with outtakes, as a boxed set. Or he’ll even suggest they bundle up what they already have and send them out of the country to people still wearing loincloths and shooting arrows, to places where they are so starved to see anything at all that terrible acting and weird story lines aren’t negatives. In other words, he’ll say, let’s market the show in fourth- or fifth-world places and we can squeeze a couple more bucks out of the old film library. But then he’ll sit down and watch the series and understand what a disastrous idea that is. So that will take care of that until the next bright young executive comes along.
Are objects in the mirror more distant than they appear? Honestly, Raymond doesn’t know, since, despite the tremendous number of polished mirrors in the Burrow, the only time he looks at one is when he has to, which is hardly ever (though he did more often when Madeline was with him, in order to look nice and make her like him). But these days, when he looks at all, it’s only to imagine how he would appear to Madeline if she ever changed her mind and wanted him back, which, even to him, is an idea, based on his image in the mirror, that appears increasingly far-fetched.