Card Readings: It's All Right...
Whoa! Okay, time out (to read a Substack)!
In an attempt to bring order into the chaos that is both my office and existence, I have decided to pull cards from my large stack of trading cards once a week and glean some meaning from them. While my perfectly-good tarot deck may object to this, it also does not contain a non-zero chance of pulling Michael J. Fox from the deck. Our second pull gives us…
Who can forget the immortal characters “Leslie”, “Back”, and “Kelly”, forever surrounded by their protective quotation marks? Best known for, I believe, smiling and posing as if they have been taken hostage inside a Gap? I absolutely know who these people are!
Unless this font is particularly unreadable and that’s a Z rather than a B. Oh lord, does it say Zack? Is this Zack Morris? No, that’s terrible! Zack Morris is Trash!
I will admit that I had zero interest in Saved by the Bell when it was on TV. It was a sitcom about school, and I already had enough school in the daytime and I had better sitcom options because my parents let me stay up and watch Night Court. A show like this one had to compete with whatever was on Nickelodeon at the same time (Double Dare, probably) or whatever game was in the Nintendo at the time (most likely The Battle of Olympus) or with the prospect of playing with Star Trek toys while listening to whatever classical music CD my brother had just brought home from Tower Records. The finite-yet-infinite possibilities of being a child meant that I didn’t exactly have room in my heart for these characters.
So anything I’ve learned about this show I’ve learned through cultural osmosis or the odd episode I watched alongside my friends. Screech was a nerd dropped right from 70s stereotypes (and not, as a popular rumor went at the time, Mike D’s brother), Mr. Belding was trying his best, and most of these kids deserved better. But I was not up on the greater lore of either Saved by the Bell or The College Years. Good thing this particular card has me covered!
Yes, the card includes an excerpt from the show! Authentic dialogue between “Back” and “Leslie”! This is from the second episode of The College Years, which astonishingly aired in prime time and may account for the fact that I didn’t know that this version of the show ran for roughly a nanosecond. And with the stumbling love triangle involving a drowned Victorian ghost and a flop-haired besweatered nogoodnik presented here, I can’t even imagine how it managed to fail. “I like her but not as much as I like you” is not the flex you think it is, Back Morris.
What did the cards tell us today? Perhaps that we have to move forward even in the face of indecision? Little moments can mean a lot? It’s okay to get dressed in the dark? All three of these seem like good advice.