Marcia, Marcia, Marcia

I know it is wrong to take joy from the pains of others. But, just this once, I feel that on a juvenile level, justice has been served and there is indeed no such thing as a ‘perfect world’.

For anyone who grew up during the late 60′s and 70′s, you may possibly relate. You see, there was a TV show called the ‘Brady Bunch’ (duh, I know…) and on the show was the most perfect individual that we should have been. Her name was Marcia. Marcia came from the perfect family- a loving mother and father, two sisters and three brothers. They had the perfect house, enough money to take nice vacations, and there were no substance abuse or other problems that the rest of us losers were plagued with.

Marcia in herself was perfect. She had long blond hair, she was the perfect weight, had lots of freinds and was smart. She pained every female teen who could only dream of being Marcia. Even her fictitious sister, Jan, was obsessed with Marcia.

This is the problem with TV sitcoms. They are written with the goal in mind being to get the most viewers as possible to make the advertisers and the Neilsens happy. They have nothing to do with real life. The result can be devistating to a child growing up with a ‘normal’ life who thinks that the fictitional life is what should be normal. I now look back and think of how devistating this fictional TV show must have been to someone with a skin color other than California tan watching this show, the children who’s parents remarriage wasn’t so rosey and, the children who came home to a house ruined by substance abuse.

Forty years later, we now know that the Brady’s were not as they were written.
Dad was gay and died from aids. He often faught with the show’s execs about the unrealistic nature of the show.
Other Brady’s have written books talking about what was really going on.

Maureen McCormick, Marcia, battled depression and drug abuse. Perfect Marcia it seems, is actually a real person. She just released a new book, Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice, she’s opening up about her two abortions, her battle with cocaine addiction and her long history of clinical depression.

“[I was] hiding the reality of my life behind the unreal perfection of Marcia Brady …,” the actress, 52, writes. “No one suspected the fear that gnawed at me.”

Who knew that Marcia dated Michael Jackson and Steve Martin and attended thosewild parties at the Playboy Mansion.

“I’ll always be struck by how much a part of people’s lives Marcia is and always will be,” McCormick writes. “But now I’m not bothered by the connection. It took most of my life, countless mistakes and decades of pain and suffering to reach this point of equanimity and acceptance.”

I guess it really isn’t that important to us now that the Brady’s were not really as we had envisioned them to be. We have moved on to more important things such as reality. But, in a way, it’s nice to be able to calm our inner child, who wasn’t as perfect as we thought we should have been. Thanks goodness it’s okay to not be blond, tanned, in a ‘perfect’ family situation in a ‘perfect’ world. This ‘perfect’ world really doesn’t exist outside of the TV set. We need to define our own, individual, perfect world.