KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)

By: Lynn Peril
April 2, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite TV shows of the Seventies (1974–1983).

ONE DAY AT A TIME | 1975–1984

When One Day at a Time debuted in 1975, I was 14 years old and had just transferred to a parochial high school after I refused to go back to the public junior high that summer. Goodbye, smoke-filled bathrooms and teachers who yelled at students who slept; hello, small, organized classes that focused on learning. I wasn’t Catholic, but if my price to attend was faking interest in a few religion classes — hey, I could do that.

One of my new classmates was Nancy D, a solid, dark-haired girl who wore scarves tied around her neck like an anchorwoman on the nightly news. We weren’t really friends, but we had classes together and mutual friends, which is how I came to notice that she had a folder on which she’d written in ballpoint pen in big, puffy letters “One Day at a Time” and “Whup on your feet!” “Whup” confused me. “Up on your feet” was the lyric from the show’s theme song, sung by a chorus of perky female voices. What was “whup”?

But I too was under the show’s spell. More accurately, I was under Valerie Bertinelli’s spell. Almost exactly a year older than me, she was cast as Barbara Cooper, the younger of two daughters of a recently divorced mother. As Barbara, Valerie was perfect: cute and pert, with perfect hair, and the perfect petite figure for the high-waisted, loose-legged pants that were then in fashion. By contrast, I was going through a hard ugly-duckling phase, chunky and shy.

There were other people on the show. Mackenzie Phillips played older sister, Julie, but she was brittle and maybe even too thin, which was not something I had thought possible. Mother Ann Romano, played by Bonnie Franklin, and creepy building super Schneider, played by Pat Harrington, were to my mind purely incidental, taking up time that could have been given to the girls.

I was fascinated by Barbara/Valerie. Looking back, it may have been the character’s confident kindness that appealed to me most. She wasn’t like those pretty-but-cruel girls in junior high, the ones who conspicuously mentioned how “some people” were “okay from the side, but hopeless from the front” when you were in hearing range. Even now, watching her dressed as Elton John duetting with Julie/Mackenzie as Kiki Dee in a second-season performance of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” Bertinelli’s charisma leaps out of the screen.

I didn’t want to be Barbara Cooper. She was mainstream in a way that I wasn’t, something that only became extremely apparent to me in 1977. That’s when I discovered punk rock, and One Day at a Time immediately became passé. But in retrospect, I had taken away at least one thing from my weekly observation of her. By the time I stopped watching the show, I had a group of school friends who weren’t entirely unlike Barbara: friendly, kind girls, who didn’t mind an odd duck in their midst. Whup!

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)

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