I was reading Dwanollah’s excellent piece on Sweet Valley High for some reason, as one does on a warm August day in the office that one feels should more rightly be spent outside in the hammock with a tall glass of frosty lemonade and a stack of YA books. I mean, y’all, Sweet Valley High. You have to read this. Sweeeeeeeet Valley High. That sounds really dirty when you say it like that: “Yeah, well, I took her out to dinner and I thought I’d be able to drive my red Fiat down into Sweet Valley, but no go.” Doesn’t it? Maybe not. Maybe it’s just me.

Now, for the exhaustive break-down of the whole SVH thing, you really must just go and click on that link because there’s not that much more to say about the whole phenomenon. I myself lost interest in Sweet Valley right around the time Francine Pascal started branching out into the books where the twins were in middle school, back when they still shared a room and Jessica had yet to move into the Hershey Bar. I know there’s a whole franchise around this, and I think that the Wakefields even eventually made it to twelfth grade and maybe even went to college? And there’s also a bunch of stories about the ancient lineage of Sweet Valley or something, and I don’t even know what all else. Sweet Valley High, it’s a full time job just to try to keep up with it. Not that that isn’t a great job, actually. If there’s someone hiring for that, I’m totally available, okay?

I mean, really. The lavalieres. The perfect size 6. The jewel-like California town they lived in. “They were exactly identical, except for the tiny mole on Elizabeth’s right shoulder.” Jessica and the number 37: “I’ve got four hundred and thirty-seven dates for this Friday night, Cara, what do I do?” Dairi Burger and that one time when Todd Wilkins (star of the basketball team!) got a motorcycle and Lizzie wasn’t allowed to ride it and then some girl rode on it with him and Lizzie was all mad and then she did ride it and she fell and had a traumatic brain injury, or something. Lila Fowler’s lime-green Triumph. You know what all of this means, don’t you. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Lizzie and the sorority “in which she was a member in name only.” And Bruce Patman! Did you know that my all-girl punk band (I’m the drummer, just like Watts in Some Kind of Wonderful. And also possibly the lead singer, just like Phil Collins) is called The Bruce Patmans? Or possible just 1BRUCE1, after his Porsche’s license plate. I was just going to ask who has a Porsche their senior year of high school, but then I didn’t because there many kids at my high school who had cars like that, including one kid who actually did get a Porsche for his eighteenth birthday or something. “Yeah, after we see the 1BRUCE1 show tonight, I’m totally heading out for a trip to Sweet Valley, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.” Dirty Sweet Valley.

What I really wanted to tell you all today is a game that My Friends Ashley and Marah and I used to play concerning Sweet Valley High. As is written into the contract of all little girls growing up in the eighties, we were all SVH fans and bought them up with a quickness every year at book fair time. Ashley had them all lined up in order in her room, if I recall correctly. I think mine were more on the scatter-them-fetchingly-into-pastel-pools-of-schmoopily-written-dreck organizational principle. We must have been around nine, probably in fourth grade or so, right smack in the middle of our secret club days. Anyway, we used to play in the pool a lot and I forget exactly who it was that had the brilliant idea to play Sweet Valley…in the pool. See, it’s the night before the big Synchronized Swimming competition, and whoever wins is going to get taken out to dinner with Bruce Patman. Or something. And get her picture in the paper? Something? Anyway, there’s something with Lizzie and Jessie and Enid and something else about who’s going to be in their synchronized swimming group, and then what kind of show should they put on…you’ll forgive me if all the details aren’t springing handily to mind, I’m sure. Uh, okay. This is starting to be a lame story: “Okay, y’all, check it! This one time, in the eighties, I played in the pool with my friends. The end.”

Anyway. Marah was Elizabeth, because she was Good, and Ashley was Jessica, because she is the closest thing the Key Girls come to Bad. I had to be Enid, because of the non-blondeness, I think. Or maybe because it is my lot in life to be the Best Friend. That was so me in high school and so me in college, you don’t even know. Perenially the sidekick. Now I think I should have pushed to be arty hippie Olivia with her men’s shirts and long skirts and bandanna twisted into a rope to keep her tousled, curly hair out of her face. Olivia! Much better than Enid. But no, I was Enid and I was in the synchronized swimming competition and…that was it. That’s the end of the story. I think. Woo, the eighties! Aren’t they the best?

Well, it was either this “story” or a story about how hair lady Zan, unaccountably, has given me a shag cut for some reason. She asked yesterday when she was styling it if I wanted straight hair or curly hair, and I told her to do whatever made her happy, and apparently what makes her happy is to give me a big poofy shag. I don’t know. I washed all the spackle out of it and beat it into submission with that Body Shop coconut grease I’ve been using, but the prospects look dim, I’m afraid. Now, aren’t you glad I didn’t write about that?

Posted on August 8th, 2003 by Chiara
Filed under: Everything, Reading