These were the first episodes I caught when I began this little trip down memory lane. If I didn't know how the good the show really is, I don't know that that "Our Miss White" would have hooked me. Maybe it's because past the age of about 10 I never really had a crush on a teacher. When I was genuinely little, women's faces could be divided into two camps -- soft and hard. The soft ones were easy to crush on and the hard ones were mean. And it's remarkable how true to reality the stereotype was. Once I got older, say Jr. High, there just weren't any young teachers around. In fact, some of my teachers had been my parents' teachers 25 years before, that's how along the downhill slide they were. Not a lot for a 12 year old to fall for there.
"Our Miss White" doesn't serve up much of the exhilaration of this "on the cusp of everything" time in life. It's more about those moments that leave you cringing, even years later. Kevin has eyes only for young, eager English teacher Miss White. She's written a play about current events (which serves to remind the viewer of the spirit of the age), and Kevin can't resist accepting her offer to play RFK. He becomes angry with his dad for flirting with Miss White and imagines that the ride home he gets from her after rehearsal is pregnant with possibilities. In the final moments, when Kevin has just completed his big monologue and he is moving toward Miss White for... something... reality intrudes in the form of her boyfriend Stephen (presumably the Mr. Heimer she marries that summer). Thus is elation laid low by disappointment.
The larger theme of "Our Miss White" (hammered home with Dylan's "The Times They Are A'Changin" at the end) is a bit heavy-handed (not politically, but rather as a writer's device firmly reminding us that this is a show about The Sixties), but it's nice to see Jack Arnold -- a consummate regular guy, no lefty, and presumably no closet arts patron -- swept away by his paternal pride to lead the standing ovation.
"Christmas" is the first of the series' holiday episodes. Of course it's about the True Spirit of Christmas and is split between the Family Story and the Winnie Story. The Family Story is about Kevin and Wayne's efforts to make a color TV the family's gift to itself. In the end, after the issue has ripped through the family like a hurricane and Dad has held firm against all entreaties, the Arnolds are left laughing in the rain and happy together despite the lack of Glorious Color in their living room.
The Winnie Story concerns Kevin's search for a gift for Winnie, which he only begins after she gives him something and tells him not to open it until Christmas. Being caught off guard, he looks for the thing a boy in junior high thinks a girl should get as a gift: perfume. I remember debating whether to do perfume or jewelry for a girl in middle school, and before that there had been a tremendous hullabaloo when my brother wanted to spend $30 ($30!) on a gold necklace his girlfriend when he was in 7th grade.
In the end he buys her a sno-globe like the one Paul bought for his mom and Daniel Stern makes a reference to James Bond and Pussy Galore (for the record, any cheap reference to Pussy Galore is okay by me). But when Kevin shows up to Winnie's house to present the present, he finds the Coopers are out of town (they're choosing to celebrate the holiday someplace else, where they won't feel brother and Viet Nam casualty Brian's absence so keenly). After getting angry at Winnie for not being there and then himself for getting angry at her, he sheepishly leaves his gift with the housesitter and walks off to the strains of Joni Mitchell's River (one of the best melancholy Christmas songs ever) to find his family for the caroling that ends in a cloud.
In "Christmas", Kevin is struggling to do the grown-up thing and give a reciprocal present, not because it's obligatory, but because he wants Winnie to know she's special to him (although he requires getting something from her first to instill the courage he needs to give her something). His sno-globe is a surrender to convenience and budget and ends up being the quintessential obligatory gift, even though that's not what's in his heart. In the end, Winnie's gift is revealed as something simple and powerfully beautiful, and as much a wish for herself as for Kevin as she and her family continue to grapple with Brian's death in Viet Nam.
This episode is more subtle than "Our Miss White." It illustrates a lesson that some people never fully learn -- the holidays (and birthdays, etc) are about the acts of giving and receiving, not the gifts themselves. It also contains a great line in the closing narration that serves as a kind of defense for a series drenched in nostalgia, "Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you wish to never lose."
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