Amazon Prime the old late night comedy live show Fridays (1980-1982) popped up as a free viewing choice on their streaming network. I had fond memories of the show as being quite good, beloved over Saturday Night Live actually even though it was modeled after that show. So I watched all the available episodes again. 40 years later.
This was the first appearance for me in the renaissance of Melanie Chartoff. She was a very attractive young woman at the time of the show, dreamy eyes. She was the one of the show who did the fake news broadcast every week as well as various characters. I remembered having a fan crush on her back then 40 years ago and it revived with these reruns of old programs that are still interesting and sometimes quite funny. Some good musical acts too, like The Clash. The show had a very good cast including a couple who went on to more fame together, Larry David, and Michael Richards.
Naturally I got curious about what happened to Melanie Chartoff after Fridays and consulted IMDB. There were several listings for acting, but not being much of a TV watcher I never saw any of these shows. I was happy to see that she had apparently done well with a steady voice acting gig in a popular animated TV show. I have no idea what the SAG-AFTRA rates are for this kind of thing but it is a lot less effort than going bodily before the camera after memorizing all the lines.
My friend found Melanie Chartoff on instagram and that led to the ebook just released, Odd Woman Out.
It is a collection of stories from her life.
It all starts off like a showbiz autobiography. Having been a bit of a community theater star myself while in high school and born around the same time as Melanie Chartoff, I felt a bit of shame within myself for not knowing that I could have or should have come directly to NYC and set about making a profession. She recounts some interesting adventures in theater like the crazy big budget flop of an outer space set Broadway musical that ended up injuring some to the cast in the run-through and scattering the backers into greener, more earthbound, less grandiose, and precarious investment pastures.
The showbiz stuff climaxes with the high profile casting on Fridays. Here things begin to turn as she feels the harsh glare of the celebrity spotlight that is on everywhere a TV performer attempts to go. But then, do they adore one because of something in the self or simply because of the TV celebrity success status? This is a hard question for anyone to answer, particularly a young woman in a patriarchal society. That is an extreme and unique position to be put in, the electronic blasted artificial imagery beyond what humans have ever had to deal with before in our evolutionary story. TV is a very powerful and still very new medium. I don’t think we know what to do with it yet, how to control it rather than it controlling us. I mean a TV performer just president. This was a TV phenomenon.
There seems to be a shift here in her story as Chartoff perhaps becomes more connected to what she really wants and needs out of life after being made aware of the hollow emptiness of TV celebrity.
In the book this change to the more personal coincides with her mother at 64 finally divorcing her dominant crude belittling father.
Melanie Chartoff was not pleased with her father. He wanted her to stay at a retail job at Sears rather than an offered theatrical opportunity. This part caused me to once again think about the horror of trying to recover from the trauma of patriarchy. Was the whole showbiz game playing basically a work around, a means of finding attention and love? But where is it? Where is love? It is perhaps, up there, in TV celebrity? To those who do not and will never arrive, never get inside the TV, fame and fortune are remotely attractive. A blissful wonderland of success.
Where could a woman go after arriving in celebritiville 40 years ago? An actor can only do the TV and movie roles that the patriarchal big business structure of commercial TV chooses to finance and what does that offer a thinking woman who is more than a pretty face? (For myself as an actor I started to back away when I was being sent by agents to casting calls for network TV cop shows. My emotional reaction was, I don’t even want to WATCH these stupid cop shows, let alone contrubute to their making or work to get a day player gig on them. And I was a man still getting chances in my 60s.)
For a woman that attractive face must be maintained throughout the entire life of the career. She can be the wife, the scream queen, yes a few, very few get to be Mary Tyler Moore or Carol Burnett, but that is rare even more rare 40 years ago.
With apparent good fortune Melanie Chartoff landed the Rugrats animation series.
The last half of the book moves away from showbiz into family issues and more personal feelings about love and connection. With fits and false starts it all ends, late in the story and relatively late in her life, with a happy ending.
From an exhilarating showbiz start into a warm embrace into what is really valuable to her, what she really wants and needs; That is the story told in Odd Woman Out.
This is the voice of a woman. When she talks about love, objects of love, she does not hold back. I found myself wondering if a man could write about an object of love in the same way. Our expectations and boundaries are different. Man speaking of a love object might be viewed as creepy but a woman would not and Chartoff is not in her final chapters when she writes about a man she cares for and his family that she embraces.
These are my thoughts while reading the book. They are entirely subjective based on my own experience. Other readers' experience of the book will be entirely different.
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