Four minutes older, but sometimes it felt like four years!

Bitch, do not lie to me: If you are a woman between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-two, you totally mainlined Sweet Valley High "novels" back in the day. And perhaps, like me, you may or may not have made an audio recording of a staged reading of several chapters of one of them at your friend’s house one everlasting summer afternoon when you were eleven.

Um, but anyway, SVH was an apparently endless series of partially-hydrogenated petroleum-based confections featuring a pair of vapid blonde twins, the physical description of whom would have found much favor with the Nazis: blonde, blue-eyed, 5’6”, those stupid identical “lavalieres” (whatever the fuck that is) that they wore. And of course, as we all remember, both were “a perfect size six.”

Well, yada yada yada Gossip Girl et cetera, Random House is reissuing the books, but with some key updates (helpfully highlighted in the press release), including trading in the legendary red Fiat (the fuck?) for a red Jeep Wrangler (um, the fuck?) – and people are getting all bent out of shape over the fact that the girls will now be “a perfect size four.” Which, ugh. Yes, that is about twelve kinds of horseshit that little girls don’t need. However, with the vanity sizing that’s gone on in the intervening 20-odd years, it kind of amounts to the same thing, and won’t give anyone an eating disorder who wasn’t on track for one anyway.

In my mind, the real damage those fuckin books did was to present being sixteen as the end-all be-all of female existence. Sixteen blows, man. Yeah, sure, you can drive, but you still have two-and-half more years of high school, you feel me?

So anyway, mostly this stuff is harmless, though deeply, deeply stupid – the “adventures” of the twins (Elizabeth, the studious noodgy Gallant to Jessica’s prick-teasing Goofus), their older bro Stephen, their Jim-n-Cindy Walsh-like parents (whom my sister and I decided drove a “maroon business car”), that c**t Lila Fowler and that even bigger c**t Enid Rollins, ultradouche Bruce Patman, castrato Todd Wilkins, sad hapless Winston Eggbert, fatass Lois Waller, token part-Latina Penny Ayala and the rest of the silly-ass gang of one-dimensional twits being unleashed on a new generation is bigger news to me and the other old hens of my generation than to The Kids Today.

Case in point: I did not look up, even on Wikipedia, any of the names or details of the stuff I just wrote about. This was from memory, over twenty years since I read my last SVH. If only my three years of Honors Spanish had such staying power …

PS: Sorry for the lack of updates lately, y’all … I’m victim of a cornucopia of time-suck events lately (including the thoroughly dispiriting one of looking for daycare for Kid Gleemonex), but don’t worry – I’m always thinking of you folk, and I’ll be back on the once-a-day schedule asap.