If you’re on Facebook, you know that the only posts more prominent than those about politics are those about birthdays.
Every day I get notices about birthdays of friends, notices about birthdays of people who are allegedly friends though I have no idea now how I connected with them, and posts about birthdays of celebrities. That’s how I learned that Maureen McCormick turned 65 last week.
I’ve never been one of those people who obsess about the passage of time and growing older, but this one gave me a bit of a jolt.
It shouldn’t have – the math is easy enough to do and I always knew she was a few years ahead of me. Sixty for me isn’t exactly around the corner yet, but I can see the corner from here. Or I would see it if I could find my glasses.
Why did this one hit me more than Cheryl Ladd turning 70 last month, or Michael J. Fox turning 60 back in June? I suspect it’s because when I was five years old, Maureen McCormick was the first girl I “noticed,” the way boys notice girls with that mix of confusion and fascination necessary to perpetuate the species. I dumped her a few years later for Olivia Newton-John, but you never forget your first.
I think that “Holy (expletive)” reaction was also a result of watching the Brady Bunch episode “Today I Am a Freshman” the night before getting the news. Having its images fresh in my mind likely exacerbated the disconnect between that effervescent teenager on TV and the woman now officially categorized as a senior citizen.
Of course, it’s Maureen McCormick who turned 65, not Marcia Brady. Television freezes characters in time so they never grow older than they appear in the final episodes of their series. Reunions and revivals allowed viewers to watch Marcia get married and have kids and struggle with alcoholism, but those moments will never resonate as deeply as the original show’s five seasons.
Those are the episodes some of us watched when they were first broadcast, and then every day after school growing up, then on nostalgia networks, and now in DVD sets. We were introduced to Marcia when her mother married a man name Brady. We watched her new family come together, we saw her fall in and out of love and succeed at most things she tried and take a football to the schnoz and get Davy Jones to sing at her school.
But before she could graduate high school, as her brother Greg did in the show’s last episode, the series reverts back to season one, episode one, and a time loop closes in which no one gets older, no one gets sick, and no one mourns the loss of a loved one.
Part of the appeal of this show and all of these shows we classify as Comfort TV is that they are trustworthy places to visit. That’s not an inconsequential thing when our non-scripted world with its open-ended denouement is one we no longer recognize.
Still, there is no Marcia as we knew her without Maureen, so it’s understandable to conflate their separate lives into one entity and see one within the other despite the passage of time.
Maureen is human like the rest of us, subject to the same slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (and if you read her biography you know she suffered more than most), but there is something of the eternal in Marcia.
She is good and safe and beautiful and dwells in a place where she will remain good and safe and beautiful forever. That’s a place not unlike the destination to which those of my faith aspire, unworthy of it as we may be. So the next time someone watches The Brady Bunch and says “Marcia, she’s heaven,” that may not be far from the truth.
