Ben Stein's Diary/The Wonder Years Recede
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY THE WONDER YEARS RECEDE Friday I can't sleep anymore, so I got up at seven and took Trixie for a walk. At this hour, West Hollywood is quiet and even delightful. One of the...
...My car phone rang...
...That's why I look like him...
...The family is suing the school, and Mom is really upset...
...He was not looking forward to any great changes in his country, he said, even now that Mengistu has been thrown out...
...I don't handle the fluffy stuff," she said...
...It was great...
...On the way back from the meeting, a TV producer told me she was making a MOW (movie of the week) about teenage sex...
...Just as if to emphasize my point, the phone rings and it's Wendy, a beautiful woman whose father has offered to pay her way through law school...
...Michael, the producer/director...
...Sheilah, her sister, also a costumer...
...Anyway, I love Washington...
...A metaphor for life...
...I did not know that...
...Now, this is a bittersweet moment indeed...
...Thursday An unusual day for little me...
...They were 100 percent mistaken, but they looked intelligent and thoughtful...
...Maybe you could talk to her...
...The traffic makes even the dogs sick...
...Knowing him by itself would not have the same effect...
...The "gag" is that I, along with a hardy hand named Skip, stay behind in the exploding classroom so that I can be filmed looking terrified as the explosions go off...
...They don't look totally insane, like most of the people I see in L.A...
...If you're ever really lonely," I said, "you can come over and sleep in the guest room...
...In a way it's a good thing...
...And I asked her if she would lend me $200,000 for the down payment on a new house, and she just laughed at me...
...No, I mean they were Jews...
...Workmen had already started to take it apart as I packed up my clothes...
...Wendy, also a costumer...
...Wanda looked at me for a long moment and said, "Will you come look at Volvos with me this weekend...
...It was all swell, and I think I looked properly terrified and scared, especially since the boiling stuff really did hurt and burn...
...A series of frantic calls back and forth to New York to fact-check items in a story by yours truly about a player in a collapsing daisy chain scheme who happens to insure people's lives...
...If you don't, then you don't want bank deregulation...
...It sort of goes back to whether you want a reprise of the S&L catastrophe...
...He has a good sense of humor, a kind face, knows his subject cold, and is generally a paradigm of what a congressman should be...
...So, they don't worship calves anymore...
...To tell the truth, I was scared...
...Even the witnesses who were in favor of deregulation looked sane...
...Then a close-up of the beakers boiling over onto my hands...
...The Killing of Brother Cantwell...
...It's not a complex issue, really...
...The people in the government offices and in the law firms and inthe restaurants all look so buttoned-down and calm...
...Christine, who makes snacks all day for us...
...I got a call from my pal Lenny, who is marketing the world's best suntan lotion, made with his very own "tri-solar" compound, which may or may not be baby oil...
...He's the first government official I have ever met whom I really look up to who's younger than I am...
...We did not get to the final scene until about 11:00 p.m...
...Legal realism...
...Bob, the producer/writer...
...I think I'd like to get a Volvo...
...One schmuck in an ancient Oldsmobile had crashed into one crummy stop sign, and hundreds of cars were immobilized, along with their drivers...
...It took me a minute to realize that, if I'm his Science Teacher, and he's leaving school, then this is probably my swan song on "The Wonder Years...
...The routine is that I see my mistake, step back in horror, put my hands over my ears, and duck...
...This could be just coincidence, but Trixie threw up again just as I put down the car phone...
...She's a well-known TV reporter and anchorwoman...
...I remember when the Beltway was first finished between Colesville Road and Georgia Avenue...
...The set was mobbed with extras, with gaffers, lighting men, sound men, boom men...
...Myres McDougal had a theory that lawyers could do exactly that...
...The producer waved his hands around and jumped up and down and told me how the script should go, and I watched him...
...You mean like they were Israelis...
...She came into my office anyway and tried to talk about which guys had crushes on her and which were the richest...
...It was like being high all of the time...
...Pests and nuisances and always there...
...On the way, I ran into totally stopped traffic, what we call a "sig-alert," on La Cienega...
...It was a call from the mother of a lovely girl of about sixteen who was badly injured in her school during her drama lighting class when several huge lights fell on her...
...In the script, I make a mistake in a chemistry experiment and blow up my lab...
...I especially love the part inside the Beltway...
...Roger, the prop man...
...And Jews worship calves...
...The other was a lobbyist, I guess...
...I sat on the stage and watched several hundred 13-year-old extras pretend to graduate...
...I should tell you that I love Washington...
...From Squaw Valley to the Sterling Law Library at Yale...
...I was trained at Ohio State and it was pretty serious...
...No, the Jews just briefly worshipped calves and then they were shamed by Moses into the worship of God once again," I said...
...I drove my parents' Chevy V-8 Impala so fast on a curve that I could feel the car start to lose its grip on the road...
...I know others may disagree...
...This has just been discovered since 1990, and we think it's worth making a movie about...
...I had no idea I would become a regular character, and I only remember that they had to pry my fingers off the dressing room door when I left because I loved it so much that first time...
...and dozens more, who had all seemed like part of a per manent family...
...When I consider the general level of productivity of younger workers, and their general lack of connection with the larger world, I tremble...
...The only problem I had on the panel came after I had said: "The problem of bank deregulation basically comes down to this: 'Thou shall not steal.' " A representative from Tennessee asked me angrily if I was testifying as an economist or as a showman...
...She was a 14-year-old crack addict at the American High School in Ankara, Turkey...
...It was called Heroin High, she once told me...
...In this one, we see a closeup of me as I handle the boiling beakers and look terrified...
...The producer wants me to write a feature about what happens if Moses comes back to earth and sees whether or not people are following the Ten Commandments...
...A nap in my little condo, which is about the highest point in Los Angeles, and then back to a meeting at a hotel with a major league producer...
...You're well spoken...
...I can see why people would commit huge scams and crimes over it...
...So, after a few rehearsals, they lock us in the room, give me a cue by "walkie," and then I look horrified, set down my boiling beakers, and duck...
...One of the legion of doormen at the Shoreham Rock'n'Roll Towers walked along with me and talked about conditions in his native Ethiopia...
...That means she could be rich and we wouldn't be rich...
...Part of this episode is shooting at the John Muir Junior High School in Burbank, where I went for my first episode almost three years ago...
...I'm in Washington, D.C., to testify about bank deregulation before Congressman Ed Markey's Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance...
...Someday I am going to wake up and life will make sense...
...The gag is that I, as chemistry teacher, have blown up my classroom inadvertently...
...We hustled and bustled around the stage for a few hours, and then I had to do my main thing before leaving...
...She is twenty...
...Art, the second prop man...
...I sat in the car with Trixie and ate candy...
...Whose children were they again...
...What can that mean...
...Israel's...
...Or at least one of them did...
...The girl was in a coma for two weeks, and then recovered almost completely...
...Gary, the A.D...
...Fred Savage, the star...
...Whereupon my old Dad grabbed his microphone and said, "The fact that a point has been made forcefully does not in any way mean that the point is false or mistaken...
...No," she said...
...And now I'm not supposed to get a new house out of it...
...Today's episode is about Kevin Arnold, the star played by Fred Savage, graduating from John F. Kennedy Junior High...
...Out to a meeting at a TV production company, where a group of us sat around and talked about a TV show which would star little moi...
...In fact, you want a lot more regulation...
...Idrove out to Malibu and watched the sun set over toward Santa Cruz Island...
...I mean, how long have I been wanting a house with a gourmet kitchen...
...It was just a prop...
...I hope so...
...I don't make much money any longer, and I feel its mighty gravity pulling me down to earth...
...is that she cannot really stand to take tests, mostly because she prefers to ski...
...That was it...
...That's all right for Fred...
...The producer patted me on the back and told me that he was sure it would be a great movie, and that we should certainly expect Kevin Costner to play in it...
...Also, she is not quite sure exactly what a law is, and wonders if lawyers get to make up laws as they go along...
...I really can't believe how selfish my own daughter is...
...I thought that was Hindus...
...I handle hard news, like the Oscars, what's happening at the ski resorts...
...At the desk of my building, an attractive blue-eyed woman talked to the concierge...
...As such, they were a lot like parents when you are eight years old...
...It was left to her boss, a man in his fifties who is a true genius, to finish the job...
...We rode up in the elevator together and I learned she lived next-door to me...
...Monday Back in glorious Malibu, up at the crack of dawn to rush into town to act on "The Wonder Years...
...Boom...
...When Fred Savage came by, he looked at my bandaged self and said, "Ben, that's so cool...
...You look like that economist Herbert Stein...
...He's my father," I said...
...A call from my pal Wanda, a young woman who goes to the same self-help 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 group I attend...
...If you do, then you want bank deregulation...
...Do you know him...
...My fact-checker was a woman "from the Islands" in the Caribbean who could barely speak English, had almost no background in finance (no, make that no background), and also could not stay near the phone long enough to take my calls...
...We've just discovered," she said, "that teenage girls have sex largely to express their unhappiness and to get back at their parents and to get attention...
...Congressman Markey is my hero...
...went the air cannon, and I was on the floor under a blanket...
...That's what I like about you, boy-by Benjamin J. Stein chik," the producer said...
...All of the camera crew and sound people are behind barricades...
...How many other boys of 46 get to have their fathers stick up for them at a congressional hearing...
...The last day on the set of "The Wonder Years...
...He'll still be in the show next year...
...T he producer was staying in a bun- 1 galow at the Beverly Hills Hotel...
...The point is about the gold," I said...
...Could Wendy, on her ski slopes in her little bunny outfit, have come upon the same theory as McDougal and Harold Lass-well...
...I got a telephone call from my friend Earl, a yacht salesman in Miami who is losing his mind from worry about money...
...My first stunt-work...
...He's against bank deregulation, too...
...She started to get so nervous that she threw up...
...Not fashion or lifestyle pieces...
...The crew applauded, and that was the last time that the science classroom will ever be used...
...Anyway, she was lonely for her dad, who is with a big bauxite firm in Turkey, and she's here in the 'Bu all alone...
...The problem Benjamin J. Stein is a writer, lawyer, economist, and actor living in Malibu, California...
...Topolsky, the producer/new father...
...He was an emaciated man reading a newsletter about gold bullion...
...I used to make enough of it so that I felt weightless...
...But, I thought, if I do it I might get asked back to be a guidance counselor next year...
...I would play the guy who was frozen...
...He's a Brooklyn boy who made money producing pictures, and now he's about to become a laird in some poor valley near Perth...
...It's a thrill because, while I have done a fair amount of testifying before committees, this is the first time that I've been on a panel with my father, the braino economist...
...You look familiar," he said to me...
...I was really happy...
...He is also losing his mind from worry about money...
...Ten minutes later, she showed up at my door...
...That's how it is here...
...Then he gave me a thumbs-up sign...
...Wanda, did you know that the children of Israel wandered in the desert for forty years after they crossed over the Red Sea and they got so crazy about not finding Israel that they forsook God and made a Golden Calf and bowed down and worshipped it...
...Maybe she's got it right...
...Josh Saviano, the co-star...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 25...
...See, I'm mixing two chemicals and I get distracted by a fight between Fred and Josh, and then, as the fissionable plutonium mixes with the fluoride or something—Boom...
...The gravity of money...
...Maybe not...
...My lawyer tells me that Tanya [the daughter] could easily get a million dollars, but Bruce and I won't get a thing...
...And who stood at Tanya's bedside all those nights while she was in a coma...
...Mei Li, the costumer...
...He gave me a few general commandments of his own about "arc" and "franchise" and then showed me photos of his new estate in Scotland...
...It could happen...
...The problem," he said, "is that we have too many provinces, and they do not want to be in one country, and they all have arms, and they kill each other, and that won't stop...
...At the graduation ceremony, I'm swathed in bandages, with my arm in a cast and my chest in one, too, and I have to say that it's a fitting metaphor of just how hurt and sad I feel that the glory days of yours truly as a teacher on "The Wonder Years" are coming to an end...
...A special-effects man has been hired to rig two "air cannons" to blow the doors off the classroom...
...It would be about a man who was frozen in a Defense Department experiment in 1955, then thawed in 1991, and how he adjusts to being back in a world he never made...
...You're well thought and well spoken...
...I was wearing a jacket from Polo and a Hermes tie, and he was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt...
...I take back all of those things I said about Hollywood...
...But now that I am leaving, they seem ineffably sweet and wonderful...
...I could buy anything I wanted except real estate...
...It all went fine, and I can see why people take risks...
...That goes pretty far in this world...
...Thesday D er Tag...
...She tried to talk to me about the used car she wants to buy, but I told her I had to read about junk bonds...
Vol. 24 • July 1991 • No. 7
