I’m currently working on a nonfiction project that I am very excited about, so I’ll be taking a (not-too-long) hiatus. In the meantime, here’s a throwback to my most popular post: The Pre-Code Peep Show: A Lesson in 1930’s Lingerie.
Dear CityTV and Shaftesbury,
Ten reasons why you should bring John Reardon back to Hudson & Rex:
Filmed in glorious Metrocolor, MGM’s CinemaScope beach party exposes the hypocrisy and double standards of the sexual revolution.
Trigger warning: sexual assault
It seems fitting that Where the Boys Are was released the very same year that the FDA approved the sale of Enovid (the first brand of “the pill”) for use as an oral contraceptive. “It touched on all these subjects that were sort of taboo for that time,” actress Paula Prentiss, who plays Tuggle, said of the film, “and then the 60s exploded.” Unfortunately, the Pill was restricted to married women until 1972, so the college-aged heroines of Where the Boys Are couldn’t yet benefit from it. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t thinking about, talking about, and yes, sometimes having sex.
The film opens on a snowy midwestern university campus, where a Courtship and Marriage class is taking place. The teacher, the ironically named Dr. Raunch, is discussing the “problems of interpersonal relationships”, specifically “random dating among college freshmen and premature emotional involvement.” She calls on Merritt (Dolores Hart), who, with her sleek sweater-set, is the epitome of the mid-century college co-ed. Merritt’s prim and proper appearance belies her progressive thinking, however: “In this day and age, if a girl doesn’t become a little ’emotionally involved’ on the first date, it’s gonna be her last — with that man, anyhow,” she says, turning the tables on – and schooling – her archaic teacher. “Honestly doctor, if a girl doesn’t make out with a man once in a while, she might as well leave campus; she’s considered practically anti-social.” Affronted, Dr. Raunch indignantly asks Merritt to explain to the class what ‘making out’ means. “I think they already know,” Merritt replies, to giggles from her classmates. “Making out is what used to be called ‘necking’. Before that, it was ‘petting’. Going back to early American days, it was known as ‘bundling’. It’s all the same game…Well, we’re supposed to be intelligent so why don’t we get down to the giant jackpot issue: should a girl, or should she not, under any circumstances, play house before marriage? My opinion,” Merritt continues, as the other girls look on in shock, “is yes.“
“Play house” is, of course, just a polite pre-Betty Friedan way of saying “have sex” and it’s enough to get Merritt kicked out of class and sent to the Dean who asks her if she’s “overly concerned with the problem of sex.” “I’d say there are probably half a million co-eds in this country. I’d imagine ninety-eight percent of them are ‘overly concerned’ with that problem,” Merritt cheekily replies.
With the theory portion of our “interpersonal lesson”, out of the way, Merritt and her friends — the no-nonsense, marriage-minded Tuggle (Paula Prentiss); romantic, starry-eyed Melanie (Yvette Mimieux) and fun loving Angie (Connie Francis, in her film debut) — are about to put Merritt’s ideas into practice as they head to Fort Lauderdale for spring break with one goal: “TO MEET BOYS!!!”
Continue reading “Fun, Sun & Sexual Politics: Where the Boys Are (1960)”
My first kiss was going to be special. Of course it would be: every song, movie and television show told me so. And I knew who it would be with, even if I didn’t know his name yet: a sensitive, shaggy-haired boy; like River Phoenix in Gus Van Sant’s black and white polaroid: beautiful and brooding. Wide-eyed Wiley Wiggins in Dazed and Confused. Kurt Cobain telling Courtney Love that “zits are beauty marks” in Sassy magazine. Kissing one of these boys would be like sinking my teeth into a chocolate-covered cherry: gooey and sweet. Deliciously messy. These were the boys I papered my walls with: surrounding myself with dreams only to dive headfirst into a nightmare.
As it turned out, my first kiss was not with an angel-faced boy but instead with a sweaty-faced man: a 90s office drone who was the human equivalent of a Xeroxed butt. In the 80s and 90s, people did this at work parties: they sat on a Xerox machine and photocopied their butts. Hilarious, right? Well, this guy was the personification of that: in other words, he used his privilege as a professionally employed, straight white dude to be an ass.
Continue reading “Xerox Butt-Head: My Disappointing First Kiss and Revisiting My So-Called Life in Middle Age”
This week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Glenda Fordham of Fordham PR! We chatted about the five-year birthday of Filthy Sugar, my journey of releasing my first novel during a world-wide pandemic, the fabulous dames of classic movies and more! You can read the interview here.
It began on an afternoon in late August.
The year was 1998 and the relatively small yet restless world of downtown Toronto still operated from 9-5. Dust and grime settled over the city like fresh snow: to the eyes of this Etobicoke girl, it was dazzling – only a bus and a subway ride away from my home in blue-collar Alderwood and yet it felt like another world. Seated at the window of a diner at the intersection of Bay and Wellesley, I ordered a plate of French fries and gazed out at the grand old Sutton Place hotel across the street. I was wearing a periwinkle blue blazer that I had bought on sale at Le Chateau and a skirt that was probably much too short for a job interview. Well, for a job interview at any ordinary company but this, I would soon find out, was no ordinary company. In only a matter of days, I would be offered that receptionist job and The International Academy of Design – IAOD for short – would become my world for the next eight years. Eight years of prancing in student fashion shows wearing Styrofoam bras and paper flowers in my hair; of TIFF celebrity sightings and taking giggly surreptitious whiskey shots in the photocopier room with my fellow receptionists, reveling in the rebelliousness that came back then with being young and beautiful in downtown Toronto. The photocopier room: where my new friend Y whispered – as she helped me hide from a program director with Don Draper ambitions (he was really more of a Pete Campbell) – that she would soon be leaving; she had found a position in her chosen field. Leaving? I was gutted. You can’t leave. I just got here. I thought I’d never see her again but we’ve now been friends for almost twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years. A time longer and older than I was back then.
Written by Heather Babcock, 2025
I remember the night that Mr. Manchester made me a feature. He took me out to see The Broadway Melody and afterwards he told me that I reminded him of Bessie Love.
-Lili Belle, Filthy Sugar
Hollywood’s first all-talking musical, and the first sound film to win Best Picture, The Broadway Melody (1929) entered the public domain on January 1st, 2025. Today, the film feels clunky and static, particularly when compared to its much slicker Busby Berkeley successors of the early 1930s. However, a strong performance from Bessie Love (who takes to talkies like a fish to water), the graceful vocal talents of Charles King and the always welcome presence of the charming Anita Page (aka “the Girl with the Most Beautiful Face in Hollywood”) manage to make this early talkie enjoyable, despite its awkward moments.
In my novel, Filthy Sugar, I named Queenie, the burlesque star of my book’s fictional Apple Bottom theatre, after Page’s character in the film, and Bessie Love is a favorite actress of both my protagonist, Wanda Wiggles, and her lover Lili Belle.
The song “Happy Days are Here Again”, which also entered the public domain this month, wasn’t in The Broadway Melody but it was featured in Chasing Rainbows (1930), another musical film which also stars Bessie Love and Charles King. I wanted to have my character Brock Baxter, the Apple Bottom’s vaudevillian comic, sing “Happy Days are Here Again” in Filthy Sugar but I didn’t know how to go about getting the rights to use the lyrics so I ended up writing my own song instead, titled “Highballin’ Hard Times”. Sample lyric:
My pockets are empty but my honey’s got money/As long as I’m with her all my days will be sunny!
In retrospect, I’m kind of glad that “Happy Days are Here Again” wasn’t in the public domain at the time I was working on Filthy Sugar since writing a whole new song was much more fun!
When I was in my early twenties, a student at the fashion design school where I worked told me that I reminded him of a cat. “It’s the way you walk”, he said, “like you aren’t afraid of anything. Like you don’t care what other people think”. This is not true: I am afraid of a great many things and I care too much about what other people think of me (way more than I should). Still, being a cat person, I took the compliment as high praise. After all, the cat is everything that we humans want to be: beautiful, confident, independent: the cat suffers no fools. The cat is both beauty and the beast. Or, to paraphrase the Counting Crows, we all wanna be big, big cats but we’ve got different reasons for that.
In the 1981 movie Roar, then-married couple Noel Marshall and Tippi Hedren take our obsession with big cats to shocking extremes. “For over a decade, Noel Marshall, Tippi Hedren and their family lived with 150 untrained wild animals to create what became the most dangerous movie ever made,” the 2015 Drafthouse Films trailer explains. “No animals were harmed in the making of this film. 70 members of the cast and crew were.”
When I first watched Roar, it was with a sense of uneasiness. Those are real lions, I said to myself. Those are real people interacting with lions. That’s real blood.
Continue reading “The Feline and the Fury: Roar (1981) and Classic Hollywood’s Obsession With Big Cats”
When I was in my late twenties, I worked in a small office with a large window facing Islington subway station. Sometimes I would see an older woman sitting on the grounds outside the building across the street, a building which we used to call “the ship center.” The woman wore her grey hair in pigtails and was always dressed in blue jeans and a matching button-up jean shirt. Her face, free of makeup, was as softly wrinkled as a silk bedsheet after a lovers’ tryst. She was usually reading a book; sometimes she wrote in a journal.
My boss’s friends, who were all divorced and in their sixties, were obsessed with the woman with the grey pigtails, but in an unflattering, unromantic way: they speculated about her upbringing, her housing situation, her family life and, most of all, if she had any children (their overall assumption was that she didn’t). One of them called her “the beggar lady”, although there was no evidence of her ever “begging” anyone for anything.
These men spent their days and nights drinking and gambling at the various pubs that populated Bloor Street West at the time. They were about the same age as the woman with the grey pigtails, except they didn’t look as good as she did. Who were they to judge this pretty woman who read books and wrote in journals? The anxiety that bubbled under the surface of their mockery was palpable: here was a woman who didn’t need them – or anyone, it seemed. A woman who was not looking for their approval. A woman who did not ask for their validation. Here was a woman who felt free to simply sit on the ground and read a book.
She scared the living sh*t out of them.
I am reminded of the woman with the grey pigtails this year – a year that began with my partner and I having to defend our relationship at a NYE get-together (how dare we be happily unmarried for over a decade!); a year in which I received abusive e-mails from a bitter, hate-filled old man attacking me for being both working class and a writer (how dare a self-educated woman from a blue collar family call herself a writer – I should know my place!). During a year when we are witnessing the fierce uprising of “the childless cat ladies”, I remember the woman with the grey pigtails.
And I realize that she is now me.
Written by Heather Babcock, 2024
Although the Soda Fountain’s focus is on film and pop culture of the 1920s and 30s, we do occasionally review movies made during other parts of the 20th century. So put on your best pair of tight jeans, shake up that can of Aqua Net and crack open a box of Dipps granola bars because we’re reviewing the ultimate Canadian teen movie of the 1990s: Degrassi’s School’s Out!
If the name Joey Jeremiah means anything to you, you’re probably A) Canadian and B) Gen X. With his trademark fedora, Joey (played by the charismatic Pat Mastroianni) was the cocky but good-hearted troublemaker of the OG Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High television series’, the Canadian franchise which undoubtedly, for better or for worse, left its mark on a generation of Canadian teens who came of age in the 1980s and early 90s. Although Degrassi was made up of an ensemble cast and didn’t allow for star billing, Joey undoubtedly became the star anyway. Can we call him the Canadian Cagney? Or maybe the Canadian Ferris Bueller? The only difference being that unlike Ferris, Joey always got caught. And in School’s Out (1992), the made-for-TV movie that marked the end of the original series, boy does he ever get caught.
That’s because Degrassi wasn’t just entertainment; it was educational entertainment. Every episode was a “very special” one: the show tackled heavy topics such as AIDS, teenage pregnancy, abortion, alcoholism and death, as well as lighter fare like first date jitters, unrequited crushes and trying to get into a strip club when all you have is a crappy fake ID and barely enough dollar bills for a glass of Coca Cola. Degrassi addressed these issues head on with an often unflinching eye, yet it was never quite as edgy as it clearly thought itself to be. The series had much in common with the “hygiene films” or “social guidance films” shown in classrooms during the 1950s and 60s: there was always a lesson to be learned and parents (usually) knew best. In grade eight, we had a “Guidance” class which consisted of nothing more than our teacher playing VHS tapes of Degrassi Junior High while at the same time making snide remarks about the appearance of the cast (“With hair like that, no wonder they have problems!” he’d cackle).
In spite of the fact that I had to watch it at school, I chose to watch Degrassi at home too. Although the show sometimes looks a little cheesy to me today, it didn’t then: my sister and I would make jokes about other teen-oriented TV shows, such as Saved by the Bell and 90210, but, unlike my Guidance teacher, we never made fun of Degrassi. There was a certain authentic grittiness to this Canadian show that was missing from the American programs. For one thing, unlike 90210, the kids in Degrassi were actually kids: with pimples, frizzy hair and all. Joey and his best pals Snake (Stefan Brogren) and Wheels (Neil Hope) even formed a Ramones-esque band called The Zit Remedy. Also, the show was Canadian and in the 1980s and early 90s, that was a big deal: most of the pop culture we consumed was American so it was kind of a thrill to watch a TV show set in our home city of Toronto, and one that never pretended to be American at that. I remember being really excited whenever they’d show Canadian dollar bills and how proud I was when the New York based Sassy magazine mentioned Degrassi in an issue. So when School’s Out debuted on CBC television on January 5th, 1992 when I was in ninth grade, it was a huge deal and not just for me: the movie attracted 2.3 million viewers. In an era long before streaming, we all pretty much watched the same thing and School’s Out was the talk of my high school the day after its premiere. There are a few very important reasons for this: one involves a banana and the other involves an F-bomb. But more on that later.
Continue reading “Sex, Drugs and Scrunchies: Revisiting the Degrassi Movie School’s Out (1992)”
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