Saved by the Bell

I love Saved by the Bell. There, I said it. Notice the present tense. I didn't use the word "loved" nor did I qualify the statement with some sort of deflecting argument. It was great back in the late eighties and early nineties when I was the same age as the kids at Bayside, and it's still great now. And much to my wife's chagrin, I am no longer in the closet about this topic.

Every morning I get up and turn the television to Sports Center while eating breakfast. It's a masculine move that satisfies the masculine front that I have acquired over the years, which is all very good. My wife does her best to oblige my need for sports in the morning, making casual conversation about the Viking's 5-0 start and how much of that can be attributed to Brett Favre's leadership. But as soon as she leaves the room and the sports coverage turns to racing or something equally boring, I turn it to TBS to catch a re-run of the best teen show ever.

Now this was a secret I managed to keep from her for quite some time, years in fact, but somewhere along the way I got sloppy. Maybe I left it on while putting a dish away in the kitchen. Maybe I was tending to my kids' breakfasts. But when she would enter the room and see what was on, I could only deny it for so long. "Honestly honey, I was channel surfing. I was looking for Dirty Harry on AMC. Channel 46 and Channel 48 are almost the same! I must have hit the 8 on accident. It's an honest mistake!"

But somewhere along the way, she stopped believing me and I stopped trying to hide it. I'm sure that she enjoyed the show when she was a kid also, but her tv viewing has matured to Fox News in the morning. Me? I'm just trying to take a trip down memory lane.

In high school I idolized Zack Morris. I had my hair cut like his, wore preppy clothes, and even my best friends like Bobby called me "Preppy." I always longed for Zack and Kelly to work things out, for A.C. Slater to dump that nut job Jessie Spanno, and for Lisa Turtle to be civil to Screech. I grew bold with Zack's antics and ploys to win over Kelly and fool Mr. Belding. I lifted weights to look like Slater (that didn't work out very well.) And when I was a freshman in college, the Bayside Boys also experienced their first year of dorm life. So when the show started to fail with nighttime audiences, I was overjoyed that they brought back Kelly's character and wondered why Barton County C.C. couldn't also have coed dorms! How cool would that have been? It would have been like a compromise between real life and Ally McBeal's coed bathroom (which, for the record, I was against and still am.) When Saved by the Bell, The College Years was canceled, I became depressed, so depressed that the cheesy movies the group did like the one in Hawaii and Zack and Kelly's Vegas wedding didn't do anything to give me closure. All I had left was 90210.

And so I became a closet Bell head. I grew older, started losing my hair and gaining table muscle, but Saved by the Bell kept me young, and keeps me young today. As a teacher, I see that kids have changed since 1993 and it makes me sad, much the way any generation is saddened by its youthful passing and all that goes with it. I look back at old pictures of myself and what my wife calls funny, I call home (girls' big hair, fuchsia pink and lime green shirts, Z Cavarichi's, and high top basketball shoes.) When the Saved by the Bell Reunion edition of People Magazine came out in August, I quickly coveted it, reading the article before even picking up my Field and Stream. The era never dies because every morning at 6:00 I can turn on the tube and know that this art has transcended time, as most art does. And every time Mr. Belding sends Zack Morris to detention, I can secretly live my past vicariously through him.

By the way, what's up with Screech nowadays? What a moron!