Take Me Home Country Roads Starring Danica McKellar
Lifetime, Hallmark, maybe just for once
when the overworked CEO comes home
for Christmas then magically falls in love
with the strapping farmer she once had
her locker kitty-corner to at the
James Q. Podunk Middle School?
Hallmark, Lifetime, just once
I know that schlock's your business model
I know that's all you do, I know you're not
in it for art or even for the entertainment
you shill vicarious wish-fulfillment to
folks who hate every second of real life
but just once, tee-vee movie monoliths
could your lovebirds move back to her city
instead of staying down on his struggling
family dirt farm? It's all that I am asking.
Lifetime and Hallmark both,
we in the audience all well know
she's making a lot more money as an
executive at Generic Fashion Magazine
in one year than Johnny Sheepdip will
make in his entire earth-cursed lifespan
not that growing food is any less noble, of course
but it is a bloody grind, a brutal back-breaking toil
farming is mercilessly and existentially exhausting
so nobility be damned, if you don't need to be
delivering a stillborn calf at three-thirty-five
in the morning as your vocation
if there's anything else you can do
to make your needed money
maybe you just don't do that.
Maybe once, my noble schmaltz machines
have the CEO and Sheepdip go live in her
Manhattan penthouse instead and when
they want to feel down-home, they can
catch the subway to Madison Square Garden
for front-row seats to the Dixie Chicks
or something? I mean, Jesus Christ!
Don't get me wrong, post-modern monster factories
I believe in the power of love as well, but can't they
love each other in a nice three-bedroom just off
Central Park West where the crushing blood-toil of
manual labor won't grind their hearts and souls away
into so much organic free-range fair-trade fertilizer?
Have Johnny discard his idiotic masculine pride and
try a goddamn bagel. They'll grow on you if you'll
just give them half-a-chance.
Just once, opiate dealers for people on their asses
I'll meet you halfway, you can still have the CEO
portrayed by the actress who played Winnie Cooper
on the old twice-nostalgic show The Wonder Years
I know you're legally required to make seven movies
starring TV's Winnie Cooper every year but just once
don't make her move to Possum Scrotum, West Virginia
to sell preserves and pop out kids for some D-List actor
who looks like Ryan Reynolds except with bigger teeth?
Have her and Prince Farming move to Manhattan instead.
Sheepdip could even start a bluegrass band, there's only
fifty-thousand bluegrass bands with the borough of
Brooklyn alone, he'd still be amongst his own.
Come on, people, it's all that I am asking.
Hallmark and Lifetime, seriously
your crass portrayal of country life
as solely honest and city-living as
solely soulless demeans them both
demeans us all, you know that too
even as you write your scripts in some
lush office down Santa Monica way
hell, you can even call the whole thing
"Take Me Home, Country Roads"
John Denver wasn't from West Virginia after all
an American alien was born in Roswell New Mexico
a hell of a lot closer to, well, the great city of Denver
than those imaginarily-perfect Appalachian country roads
that's just the real-world truth and even if truth doesn't
usually pay the bills, try selling the truth just for fun
I'm just asking for it for Christmas this year
I'm asking for it just the once.
