View From Our Window Is One Reality

Before I get to the wit and wisdom of Marcia Brady, I must describe the view from my keyboard:

White metal desk. Paper plate decorated with poundcake crumbs. Scattered newspapers. Outside the window, a graceful grid of trees, a leaf-strewn lawn.

Pedestrian stuff.

But the view from my desk - and from my bedroom and the many windows I’ve peered through in my life - helps shape my view of the world. That I sit in a spacious office and work at a secure job has everything to do with my reaction when I read that the District of Columbia is so destitute that it faces massive firings, program cuts and Mayor Marion Barry conceding power to outsiders.

The Republican Congress, in its zeal to meet Contract With America budget promises, has targeted programs that give cereal to poor children and keep destitute elderly people warm.

Your view can affect whether you care. Some folks clearly do not.

Until recently, my own view dismissed perky Marcia Brady, eldest daughter of “The Brady Bunch,” a scrubbed TV family whose ‘70s-era sitcom enjoyed a six-season run.

Because I grew up thinking that Marcia and her Mild Bunch were meaningless, I had no intention of seeing the new movie “The Brady Bunch.” But that weekend, my family found itself at the mall, searching the theater marquee for a movie both kids and adults could see. Guess what was the lone offering not rated R.

My disgusted husband snorted at the kids’ suggestion that we rush dinner at the food court to get to the theater early.

“Like we have to worry about getting seats?” he asked. “Who wants to see ‘The Brady Bunch’?”

Enough people to buy $14 million worth of tickets, that’s who. In its first weekend, “Brady” was the No. 1 movie in America.

The seats we barely snagged were next to a bubbly blonde named Jacqueline, 30, who giggled at my astonishment at the crowded theater.

“The Bradys are cool,” she explained. “When I was 13, Marcia taught me about dating, clothes, when to kiss a boy - everything!”

Who knew?

Who knew that a show about the tepid exploits of - as its theme song puts it - “a man named Brady,” his three sons and his new wife, “a lovely lady” who’d been raising “three very lovely girls … (with) hair of gold,” could mean anything?

Even when I was a teen back in 1972, the Bradys’ brand of goop made me choke. But I understood Jacqueline, and I enjoyed the movie.

So did Dana Scherer, 24. Today, Scherer, a government economist who as a child daily watched “Brady” reruns, marvels, “I thought the Bradys were normal and that our family was weird!”

The movie is a time-warp comedy that plants the very ‘70s Bradys - with their paisley vests and cheerful, “groovy” outlook - in the ‘90s, illustrating “how the world, and women, have changed,” Scherer says.

“Half the song was about the (female characters’) hair. He had a name; she was just ‘a lovely lady’. … And what, exactly, did Mrs. Brady do?”

“It wasn’t realistic,” Scherer concludes. “But TV was my window on the world.”

We all have our windows. Some look out on expanses of green, on clean, safe streets; others on concrete, youthful drug dealers and children without a blade of grass on which to play. Some have 19-inch screens on which fabrication gains total authenticity.

Whether our windows frame fact or fiction, what we see feels real. I was so happy to see Sam Malone - the former “Cheers” bartender played by Ted Danson - on a recent “Frasier,” you’d have thought I was seeing an old friend. Which, of course, I was.

From my desk in my pleasant office, I can’t see the District of Columbia’s mess the way, say, a D.C. government secretary - a single mom of three, perhaps, who could lose her livelihood - sees it.

The view from some windows makes it easy to ignore the plight of jobless moms and dads, hungry children and freezing 86-year-olds - people we’d care for if we only knew them.

It makes it easy to concentrate on other compelling images - of greedy bureaucrats, welfare cheats and roving thugs who some of us feel “deserve” the coming catastrophe. It makes it easy to close off our hearts.

How you see things depends on which images are most real to you.

Maybe it’s just my view, but living in a world where TV characters seem more real to us than many breathing, threatened human beings makes me crazy. I want to scream, organize a protest, turn off the TV.

Or just close the window.

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