Paul Feig, creator of the brilliant late-'90s TV cult classic Freaks and Geeks has taken all the miserable, humiliating scenarios of his youth and made one big messy cafeteria sloppy Joe out of them, using cruel nicknames, bungled make-out sessions, embarrassing elf costumes, dangerous dodge balls, sadistic sex-ed classes, and a less-than-perfect prom as ingredients.
I recently picked up this funny memoir in the tiny and tightly-run Powell's bookstore at the Portland International Airport, where it staunchly resides on the "store favorites" table. Who can't relate to the awkwardness of first kisses, the terror of locker room bullies and the wacky hijinx that leads hanging a Nazi flag in your parents living room window?
Presented as a series of linked vignettes, Feig plunges into his high school survival stories, daunting pre-teen realizations and multiple grade school traumas. One of my favorite sections is when Feig describes his parents using items from their military surplus store to dress him as an "olive drab elf" for his school's Christmas pageant, earning him such nicknames as "stinky, the Retarded Elf," which will only be one of many awful names he gets called.
Excerpt
WE STOOD IN LINE AT ELLIS ISLAND FOR THIS?There is no God. . . I mean, there can't be. Think about it. . . If there were, then things in life would have to be fair. There would be no suffering, there would be no war, there would be no poverty . . .
. . . and none of us would be born with last names that could make us the brunt of adolescent jokes for the entirety of our school careers.
In a truly just universe, no child's last name would be Cox, Butz, or Seaman. No teenager would come from a family named the Hardins or the Balls. A young Richard Shaft wouldn't have to come home from school crying each day. An underendowed Lisa Titwell wouldn't beg her parents to let her finish her education at an all-girls' school. And an adolescent Paul Feig wouldn't have had to endure hearing the letters e and i constantly taken out of his last name and replaced with the letter a.
But, alas, I did.
It didn't start out that way. Fortunately, or unfortunately, when I was in grade school, there was a TV commercial for Fig Newton cookies that featured a man dressed up in a giant fig costume who performed a jingle called "The Big Fig Newton." He would dance and sing the words "Chewy, chewy, rich, and gooey in- side . . . Golden, flaky, tender, cakey outside." At the same time, he performed a goofy, vaguely Egyptian-type dance, and then, after a few more product-endorsing verses, would wrap up his corporate caperings by saying "Here comes the tricky part," whereupon he would stand on one leg and grandly sing, "The Big . . . Fig . . . New-tonnnnnnn!"
The commercial was very popular and something every kid in my school district strove to memorize in the hopes that he or she could then perform it in front of his or her peers and obtain big laughs. Because of this, and thanks to the free association of youth, I, Paul Feig, became known as "Fig Newton."
At first, I hated it. I mean, who among us really is happy when we're assigned a nickname? It's never a situation where we get some cool handle like "The Big Hurt" or "The Yankee Clipper" or "Stud." It's always some lame, obvious play on our names, turning the once proud crest of our ancestors into something that either has to do with a body part, a reproductive organ, a mental shortcoming, or an insensitive term for a person who practices nontraditional sexual unions. The kids I grew up with could bend the most innocent name into something you wouldn't want to be called, even if it was preceded by the phrase "and the Oscar goes to . . ." Names as harmless as Smith and Jones could easily be twisted into Smegma and Boner, and so the journey from Feig to Fig Newton was little more than a quick trip to the local humiliation mart.
Life lessons abound for our fearful hero, and name-calling is only the beginning. He'll endure an ill-fated stint on the baseball team, "I've always had problems with my legs, and running," a Halloween performance dressed in drag, and an arch enemy that manifests in the form of a school bus driver.
Under the hysterically funny stories are deeper threads involving rights of passage, peer pressure, unattainable acceptance, misplaced aggression, and a Lord of the Flies type of tribalism. The satisfaction of the book comes not only from the clear writing and the painfully funny insights, but also from the knowledge that anyone who ever when to mean to Paul Feig is sure as hell sorry now.
It's a big "get" for all of us freaks and geeks. It turns out revenge isn't a dish best served cold, it's best served in 278 steaming pages of scathingly funny insight by a guy who not only survived all these experiences, but chose to remember them in vivid detail.
Paul Feig's website: http://members.aol.com/heyhiboy/default.html