Top 5: Single Dads on TV

I've been tossing around the idea of writing a Top 5 about single parents on TV, and with Father's Day this past weekend, it seemed like the perfect time to showcase some TV dads. There have been lots of single parents on the small screen over the years, from The Andy Griffith Show to Gilmore Girls, but I'm only going to cover shows that have run during my lifetime, and that I've seen, which admittedly narrows it down, but write what you know, right? So these are my Top 5 TV Single Dads.

5. Alan Harper, Two and a Half Men

Alan (Jon Cryer) is a single dad forced to move in with his brother Charlie (Charlie Sheen) after a divorce from his son Jake's mother. He's the intellectual type with a propensity towards awkward social skills, particularly with women. He really wants to be a good dad but struggles to connect with his son, who is arguably one of the dullest tools in the shed. Despite a ridiculous ex-wife, a rich womanizing brother, and an uppity domineering mother, he's the most level-headed in the bunch and tries hard to be a stable and loving father.



4. Jimmy Chance, Raising Hope

Jimmy (Lucas Neff) is a 23-year-old kid who finds himself raising a baby girl after impregnating a one-night-stand who drops the child, Hope, off on her way to jail for murder. It's a weird premise, and continues to get weirder. Jimmy lives with his kooky parents Virginia and Burt and his grandmother Maw Maw (Cloris Leachman), who suffers from Alzheimer's and barely makes sense. The family is at the lower end of middle class, scrounging to make ends meet by working as pool cleaners and grocery baggers, but they always put family first and want what is best for baby Hope. Jimmy is always trying hard to give his daughter a good childhood, even if it means the rest of his life is a disaster.


3. Chaz Finster, Rugrats

I watched a lot of Rugrats as a kid, and unlike now, most shows I watched growing up featured a set of happily married parents. Now if you turn on a kid's channel you'd be hard pressed to find married parents - if you can locate parents at all. For some reason a lot of shows feature kids living with siblings or off at boarding schools, which is weird to me, but I'm not 12 anymore, so maybe that's acceptable? Looking back, this show featured a lot of adults who were pretty oblivious, but Chaz, the widowed father of the loveable red-haired Chuckie, was always there for his son. He hugged him when he was scared, tended to him when he had the sniffles, and in a particularly touching episode, told him stories of his deceased mom. Chaz, like Alan Harper, is rather square and awkward, but it works out for him - before the end of the series, he remarries a woman from Japan and adopts her daughter, Kimi.

2. Burt Hummel, Glee

I'm not a huge Glee fan, but I have to give props to single dad Burt Hummel (Mike O'Malley), father of glee club member Kurt. Burt is a mechanic and lover of sports - your basic small-town "man's man" - raising a gay son. Despite not understanding his son most of the time, Burt is supportive of Kurt's lifestyle and often stands up for him and encourages him in his singing and acting career. He's a caring dad trying to figure out how to raise a homosexual teenager who's temper sometimes gets the best of him, especially when it comes to Kurt. There aren't a lot of parents like him on television today.



1. Danny Tanner, Full House

Danny Tanner (Bob Saget) is the quiniessential TV single dad. Raising three girls after the death of his wife, Danny works hard to provide for his kids while enlisting the help of his brother-in-law Jesse and best friend, Joey. The three guys becomes best friends and band together to help out Danny and his daughters. While the series is full of outlandish storylines and way too many sappy morals (what my sister and I call "overripe banana moments" for being so mushy it's disgusting), we all watched the show and rooted for the single dad taking care of precocious girls during the 90s. He'll probably go down in history alongside Bill Cosby as one of the greatest TV fathers.

Top 5: Weird Song Associations

Have you ever been listening to the radio when a certain song comes, bringing back random memories from your past? One minute you're in traffic on your way home from work, and the next you're reliving your senior prom, all because of a simple song change. I don't know if I just had a really odd childhood or what, but when it come to songs triggering memories, I sure come up with some weird combinations. Check out my list and see what you think:

5. Lean on Me by Bill Withers  = Church Camp

This one is probably not a far stretch.  The song is about being there for your friends, and was the theme song to a junior/senior high church camp one year. It was sentiment was cheesy, but as high schoolers so were we, so it worked. When I put together the photo montage of our experience we played it to this song. Now every time I hear it I think of kids covered in mud jumping in the lake. 

4. Walk Like an Egyptian by The Bangles  = Trigonometry

In high school, I took a lot of advanced math classes (I know, what was I thinking?). I was smart enough to take Algebra in 8th grade so by time I got to high school I was a year ahead of the majority of my classmates. I even took AP Calculus - clearly my school did not offer enough art classes to keep me entertained. Anyway, I had a certain teacher who tried to make math more fun - looking back she most have done a pretty good job, as don't even like math and took all of her classes - but was painfully behind on the times. Case in point: to help us memorize trig formulas, we played a tortuous version of musical chairs while she played a tape of The Bangles, which she called Walk Like a Radian - you walked around a circle on the floor marked with radians, and whatever one you stopped at you had to recite the formula.  I don't remember any of the formulas but now the Bangles remind of pi.

3. Fly by Sugar Ray = Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

What in the world does Judy Blume have to do with Sugar Ray? Short answer: 1997. That was the year my class went on a field trip to see the play based on Blume's book at the local theater. As with most field trips, we took a school bus, and piled in 80 or so kids plus teachers. Of course we begged the driver to turn the radio on, and this was one of the chart-toppers of the time. Somehow every single kid knew the words to this song and most of them sang along loudly, probably to the chagrin of all the adults within a mile radius. The lyric "all around the world statues crumble for me" will forever bring back memories of kids singing happily and a story about a little brother called Fudge.

2. I Saw the Sign by Ace of Base  = Annie Get Your Gun 

My high school, like most in the midwest, puts on a spring musical every year. They've put on all sorts of productions, from Footloose to Oklahoma!, and my senior year the play of choice was Annie Get Your Gun. I had a lot of study halls that year - I'd taken everything possible, went to a local college for post-secondary work, and still had at about two hours of it a day - so when asked if I wanted to get out of it to paint sets, I jumped at the chance. The teacher only excused seniors and then left us unattended in the auditorium (probably not the best idea), so we blared music and wasted the afternoon painting. Somehow I ended up being the only girl with a group of guys I otherwise never would have hung out with (if it had been The Breakfast Club, I was Allison and they were Bender). And for reasons I still don't understand they were obsessed with Ace of Base, which we listened to on repeat until someone got sick of it and put in Metallica instead. Since then the 90s girl band and the old west have always been connected in my mind.

1. Centerfold by J Geils Band = Saturday Mornings

This sounds like a really creepy memory, but it's not, honest. When I was a kid my Dad and I would get up about the same time on Saturday mornings, and whenever it was on we would watch Pop-Up Videos on VH1. The music videos were usually a combination of current 90s stuff and classic 80s pop. I learned all sorts of random trivia about Paula Abdul's Opposites Attract, Michael Jackson's Billie Jean, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, Men Without Hat's Safety Dance, and of course, J Geils Band's Centerfold. Obviously I didn't know what most of the songs were about, being about 10, but it was fun hanging out with Dad listening to music he liked. The only downside is that weird songs like Come On, Eileen remind me of my father.

Experience

I was helping my parents with yardwork the other day when my father told me - yet again - that what we were doing was something I needed to write about. "This is definitely an experience," I said. "You don't know what an experience is yet," he told me. I wanted to argue, but as I thought about it, he's right. I'm only 22 years old, the most exciting things that have happened to me are a couple of school trips overseas. In his lifetime he's been married twice, gone through multiple jobs, raised three kids, lost his parents ... in comparison, my life is uneventful.

Many non-fictionists write about things they've done or places they've been, like the examples in Robert Root's book (The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction) about the seafarer in Antarctica or seeing someone ready a copy of his novel on the subway. Root himself talked about all the writing he did while on a writer's wilderness retreat. I'm an average college student with a limited disposable income. I can't afford to go on excursions just to stimulate my writing. How can I compete with authors taking a year to go to Madrid or some other exotic destination and write about their observations?

But even as I say that I am reminded of Garrison Keillor's article in a recent issue of National Geographic. It was beautifully written and engaging, and was about county fairs of all things. If you're a good enough writer you can make anything exciting. Maybe if I tried I could even make my summer doing nothing exciting. I could talk about the fresh vegetables we char on the grill for dinner, the young deer flicking their tails in the backyard as they lick the salt block, or the sun beating down as we watch my niece's t-ball game. I can't imagine there is a lot of people who would want to read about all that, though.

Dear ol' Dad

My father is convinced that he is book material.

I became an English major in the fall of 2005, and since then my dad has decided that it is my fate to write a best-selling novel – about him – and make lots of money so that I can provide for him and Mom in their old age. Mom just rolls her eyes at him and says things like, “She doesn’t want to write about us, you twit! Who would want to read it?” And he, ignoring the rhetorical nature of the question might answer “Me!” and grin goofily with a flutter of his eyelashes as if this were the most ingenious comeback of all time.

In fact, he believes this so wholeheartedly that I am going to write this famous book that every time something funny happens he’ll say, “There you go, Wessy. Chapter fourteen. Write that down.” Obviously it is not my writing skills that are going to sell this book, but his witty remarks and crazy antics. The whole family just sighs. All we need is for the whole world to be exposed to the weirdness that goes on in the Mowry household. But the thing is, as we all know and refuse to let on, Dean Mowry really is book material. He’s quite a character, at the very least.

One of my earliest memories of Dad includes him a full leg cast. My little sister Whitneigh was born when I was two, and our parents were exhausted from having to work full time and raise two young kids. The same week Mom went back after maternity leave Dad fell asleep at the wheel on his way home from work, and his car drifted into the cement beam of an overpass. No one else was hurt, but the crash shattered his eyeglasses, leaving awkward cuts on his face, and left him with a broken leg. For the next few weeks he was at home, bandaged leg up on the couch, taking care of me and the baby while Mom was at work. I was immediately enlisted as Daddy’s Little Helper, and was sent to do things since I could get there faster than he could on crutches. I would get bottles of Whitneigh’s milk out of the fridge, put it in the microwave, hit all the proper buttons, and deliver it. I was also sent after diapers and had a special stepstool to reach the red wall mounted telephone when it rang. I felt immensely important for being allowed to answer the real telephone. Usually it was one of my grandmothers calling – they would always know it was me and give me a message to pass on to Dad. Anyone else, though, wouldn’t realize I was there and Dad would have to hobble out to the kitchen to talk to them anyway. We spent our days together, the three of us, sitting on the avacado shag carpet in the living room, Dad with his white cast leg sticking out stiffly, the baby lying on her back on a blanket on the floor, me playing with them and running errands. We were quite a bunch. Mom cites this period of Dad’s medical leave as the reason why Whitneigh is so spoiled. Looking back, I realize that this must have been when I was ingrained with the ‘love language’ of servanthood. At only two years old I knew I loved my father and sister, and would gladly do whatever they needed, even if it meant talking to strangers on the red phone.