Winamp Wednesday: The Point of Getting Out
On being someone else for a while.
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Blue Rodeo, “Flying”
“This one’s off the Due South soundtrack, right?” I said.
She said, “it is, and I’m a little alarmed that you know that.”
There’s not a teenager alive who really understands where they’re coming from. We are always ourselves, but there is a tipping point where that graduates to someone we create from someone gathered from external sources. The endless chase to be someone usually means that for a while we are someone else, or at least the best parts of them we can see.
That’s why I have spent many moments in conundrums big and small wondering what Constable Benton Fraser would do.
Due South was part of the glut of early-90s shot-in-Canada dramas that made up syndicated schedules and network Saturday nights. The story of a Canadian Mountie who came to Chicago to find his father’s killer and then ended up staying because there wouldn’t be a show otherwise, Due South lived and died on the sort of characters a small fandom could endlessly obsess over. In the nascent days of the Web this sort of connection was imperative. If you were like me then most of your use of the internet consisted of finding wildly incorrect information while attempting to do research for a school paper, then giving up and going to the library. But when we weren’t doing that we were seeking out small pockets of fandoms, from JMS answering fan questions after every episode of Babylon 5 on CompuServe to confirmation that, yes, shows like Mann & Machine and Probe had indeed existed and weren’t just a figment of fevered teenage imagination.
There was no clamoring at school for a Due South fan club to meet at lunch, no playground rush to reenact its exploits, an utter lack of representation within comic shops and hobbyist locations. Whatever little spark of obsession I had over it ignited into a fire because I was able to find those old Angelfire and Geocities pages extolling the virtues of the show. I am very glad to say that you can’t find the fanfic I wrote—nor can you for other dead, buried, and forgotten shows like She-Wolf of London and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues—as not even the Internet Archive reached those depths. But we can thank those websites for taking my passing fancy and turning it into something much deeper.
Constable Fraser was everything I wasn’t at fifteen: confident, tall, handsome, fearless, resourceful, Canadian. He had good posture and unflagging attention with Sherlock’s powers of deduction but without his crippling addiction to cocaine. Women loved him and he was always respectful and kind. He never forgot to say please and thank you—and that’s always “thank you kindly”, I would be remiss not to mention that for other fans—and he wasn’t scared around animals like I was. There were many characters I wanted to be and to live their adventures, and most of them were played by Harrison Ford. But Fraser? Paul Gross played him to a perfect T. I wanted to be like Fraser because I thought that was my way towards being the kind of person I should be.
Also his partner was a wacky uncouth Italian-American who dressed like John Tesh’s music sounded, and boy did I see a bunch of myself in that comparison.
…I even owned that tie. The show was hammering a certain point home, I’m sure.
I have never been a physically-imposing person, average in all respects and less than average in respects I try to throw under “average”. I think too much about how my ears are different shapes and how my nose hangs ever so crooked. There’s no real air of command that I come by naturally, no chiseled cheekbones or prominent chin. I’m too fidgety and distracted to be the hero. We all grow into ourselves as we age and start to lean on our credits rather than our debits. But when we’re younger we can only see average, below average, not the hero. If we try to emulate the greatest that we know, will we become them just through mimicry?
So I started standing with my hands clasped behind my back at form of parade rest. I led with my chin and said “thank you kindly” whenever the situation called for it. If we are all books of spells then I tried my best to conjure Constable Benton Fraser. The goal was, and always has been, to be better in the way great heroes are. It’s not that I wanted to be the hero; if anything I could go for being less of the main character of my own life. But people loved Fraser, and my corner of the internet held him up as the ideal. If I could at least be as kind and as observant as him, life would be a little bit better. Being a teenager is mostly a disaster, so who wouldn’t want to navigate those years like the world’s greatest Mountie?
I doubt I was the only one who was going at this life with an eye towards being their favorite hero. I doubt I’m the only one still doing it. Keep track of how many GenX and Millennial men in your life do Harrison Ford’s one-finger point in times of stress or frustration. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to live those adventures.
It’s not that I believe in manifestation—maybe I just call it frequency illusion—but Due South bled into the world more when I decided on this specific bit of emulation. A conversation about The Guess Who’s “American Woman” that outed more than a few of my classmates as fans of the show. An unexpected rerun of Leslie Nielsen’s time as Mountie Buck Frobisher. A mighty teenage crush sharing some of her favorite songs, and when Blue Rodeo shows up you can say “this one’s off the Due South soundtrack.”
“It is, and I’m a little alarmed that you know that.”
Because our fandom lived online, so who expects the people to whom you’re growing closest to know the things you love? A moment of surprise, a while of growing closer, a life lived with the knowledge that someone else has these same obsessions. You’re going to grow into your own person, but that needs a springboard. It needs a hero. And maybe we have the same one. You’re not on your own, but you can really fly…
Next Time: Beautiful people everywhere! The way they show they care makes me want to say…