That, and: Don't work the perfume counter at Horne's department store if you don't want to end up pimped out at One-Eyed Jack's.

Two of the Many Things Teenage Me Actually Learned from Twin Peaks

1) Older people -- like, way over 22 -- could and did have sex. Even with each other. I realize this makes me sound like an idiot, but I was a very sheltered kid with typical unexamined childish ideas about sexuality, such as that, for example, one's parents had had sex exactly the same number of times as the number of children they produced together, and no longer had sexual thoughts, much less acted on them. But here were Ben Horne and Catherine Martell, gettin' it on all afternoon; here were Norma Jennings and Ed Hurley, unable to keep their hands off of each other; here were Donna's parents clearly still sexual even through they were old and the mom was in a wheelchair (that actress, btw? is Zooey Deschanel's mom). MIND BLOWN. Worlds expanding.

2) Even pretty people can be in abusive relationships. Again: Idiot. But I was accustomed, by some cultural osmosis or other, to domestic violence being seen as sort of a trailer-park thing that happened to the ugly and generally unfortunate. Twin Peaks went right for it, though -- Donna's BF at the beginning of the show (lovely young Donna, whose family life is as warm and supportive and loving as TV families ever get) is a major dick who orders her around and even lays hands on her (though he doesn't hit her), and then of course you see Shelly Johnson's incredibly awful marriage and home life -- they never go into it exactly how she hooked up with Leo, but she's this breathtakingly beautiful, capable girl who no doubt married a guy she thought was good-looking and had money, and then some months or years later, you end up cowering in his unfinished house while he prepares to beat the shit out of you with a piece of soap stuffed into the toe of a tube sock.