My crazy guilty pleasure

Tags

aliens, guilty pleasure, postaday2013, sit-coms, Star Trek, Star Wars, T.v

One of the new shows this year is Neighbors on ABC. It’s about a human family who unwittingly move into a gated community that had been taken over by alien shipwrecked aliens inhabiting human form. Jaime Gertz has been a favorite actress of mine since I was in my late teens, early twenties. She plays Debra the mom, happily married to Marty, they have three children. They find out that they are living in an alien community and hijinks ensues. The alien family who decide to adopt Debra and Marty Weaver as friends, are named Jackie Joyce Girney and Larry Byrd. The aliens all named each other after sports figures.

Tonight is a very special episode, George Takei from Star Trek fame and Mark Hamil from Star Wars fame are guest appearing as supreme commanders checking in to see how the mission is going. I must not be the only one who considers this show as a guilty pleasure when two icons of science fiction are willing to grace the t.v show with their presence.

I am done with my confessional, you should tune in and watch, it is cute and harmless, good for when your brain doesn’t want stress or worries.

Idyllic

What does your ideal community look like? How is it organized, and how is community life structured? What values does the community share?

I grew up in Astoria, Queens and we had our small community that revolved around 24th Street. There was a group of boys, the boys on the block and a few girls and we all played together; at different stages of our childhood lives, it was harmonious, contentious, tension filled but rarely combative. We played tag and cops and robbers when we were in elementary school. When we got older we played a team version of tag and pretty soon left the games for hanging out on the various stoops. Eventually cars came into the equation and that meant that the hanging out left the block and moved onto greener pastures as in Astoria Park.

I was often left behind because I had a very strict mother and my universe was still restricted to the block. The boys were a few years older than I, so of course I was jealous of their freedom, so I explored other blocks outside of our little kingdom, off the reservation but not too far. The boys were not happy with my perceived slight whenever they returned. It was such a weird dynamic.

We also had the elders who surveyed the goings on of the block, the nana's, the yaya's, in a word the grandma's, who sat on the stoop and kept an eye on the comings and goings of the "kids" and any strangers who would walk down the block. We had our own neighborhood watch but they weren't the running type, they were the gossiping type.

I have fond memories of my childhood on 24th Street, the tight knit community, the boys on the block and knowing that at all times there was a grandma who was watching over you, making sure that you stayed out of trouble and that everything was fine on their watch.

Idyllic

What does your ideal community look like? How is it organized, and how is community life structured? What values does the community share?

I grew up in Astoria, Queens and we had our small community that revolved around 24th Street. There was a group of boys, the boys on the block and a few girls and we all played together; at different stages of our childhood lives, it was harmonious, contentious, tension filled but rarely combative. We played tag and cops and robbers when we were in elementary school. When we got older we played a team version of tag and pretty soon left the games for hanging out on the various stoops. Eventually cars came into the equation and that meant that the hanging out left the block and moved onto greener pastures as in Astoria Park.

I was often left behind because I had a very strict mother and my universe was still restricted to the block. The boys were a few years older than I, so of course I was jealous of their freedom, so I explored other blocks outside of our little kingdom, off the reservation but not too far. The boys were not happy with my perceived slight whenever they returned. It was such a weird dynamic.

We also had the elders who surveyed the goings on of the block, the nana's, the yaya's, in a word the grandma's, who sat on the stoop and kept an eye on the comings and goings of the "kids" and any strangers who would walk down the block. We had our own neighborhood watch but they weren't the running type, they were the gossiping type.

I have fond memories of my childhood on 24th Street, the tight knit community, the boys on the block and knowing that at all times there was a grandma who was watching over you, making sure that you stayed out of trouble and that everything was fine on their watch.