keyword: list, title: "Take Me Home, Country Roads" Starring Danica McKellar in misc. flash fiction

(note: I just wrote a different version of this as a poem but “list” just fit the idea too perfectly)

Just for once, Lifetime Channel, Hallmark Channel, when the overworked CEO comes home for Christmas then magically falls in love with the strapping farmboy she had a locker next to in the eighth grade at James Q. Podunk Middle School? Just once, I know that’s the business model, I know that’s all you do, I know you’re not in it for art or even entertainment, you shill vicarious wish-fulfillment to folks who hate real life. But just once, movie monoliths, could the lovebirds move back to her city instead of staying down on that struggling farm? It’s all I’m asking.

Lifetime, Hallmark, we all well know she’s making a lot more money as an executive at Generic Fashion Magazine in one year than Johnny Sheepdip is going to make in his entire life. Not that growing food is any less noble, of course, but it’s bloody work, brutal work, back-breaking toil, farming’s mercilessly existentially exhausting, so nobility be damned, if you don’t need to be delivering a stillborn calf at three in the morning as a vocation, if there’s anything else you can do for your daily bread, maybe you just don’t do that.

Maybe, just once, have the CEO and Sheepdip go live in her Manhattan penthouse instead and when they want to feel down-home, they can just catch the subway to Madison Square Garden and get front-row seats to the Dixie Chicks or something? Jesus Christ!

Don’t get me wrong, cynical schmaltz factories, I believe in the power of love as well, but can’t they love each other in a nice three-bedroom off Central Park West where the crushing blood-toil of manual labor won’t grind their hearts and souls into fertilizer? Have Johnny discard his idiotic masculine pride and try a goddamn bagel. They’ll grow on you if they give them half-a-chance.

I’ll meet you halfway, you can still have the CEO portrayed by the actress who played Winnie Cooper on “The Wonder Years”, I know you’re legally required to make seven movies starring Winnie Cooper every year but just once, don’t make her move back to Possum Scrotum, West Virginia to sell preserves and pop out kids for some D-List actor who looks like Ryan Reynolds with bigger teeth. Have them move to Manhattan instead. Sheepdip could even join a bluegrass band, there’s only fifty-thousand bluegrass bands in the borough of Brooklyn alone, he’d still be amongst his own, it’s all that I am asking.

Your portrayal of country life as solely honest and the city as solely soulless demeans them both, you know that too, even as you write them in a lush office space off Santa Monica. Hell, you can even call it “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. John Denver wasn’t from West Virginia, after all, dude was born in New Mexico, a hell of a lot closer to, well, Denver than those country roads. That’s just the real-world truth and even if truth doesn’t always pay the bills, I’m just asking for it once.

Last updated October 23, 2019