A few weeks ago I was on the phone with a good friend. They paused a second when we were talking about some science subject. He blurted out, “You got to check out this show called Loudermilk!” I paused a second and made him spell it. He wouldn’t elaborate. Just that the dialogues was amazing and I would love it.
So, I got off the phone pulled up Prime, and started my first episode. It is an irreverent TV show about a addiction support group ran by a difficult person who use to be a music critic that partied with rock stars. He is not a nice guy, few people in the group are but they are all trying to be decent people. Which is what they are, most of the time. And they come across a lot of “Nice” people who not decent to them. This show hits every twitter talking point you can imagine. Not politically correct all the time and makes you laugh at the absurdities some thought processes go down.
This week I am on the third season and one episode put me in huge tears. My son walked up asking if I was “OK.” And I just turned to him and said, “That was beautiful.”
It was episode 4 of season 3 called “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” In the episode a part of the group end up having to take a court ordered female sensitivity class. Mind you some of these addicts include sexual addiction. I don’t want to ruin a lot of this but there is a moment that is huge where they are talking about the unfair treatment of women’s pay in the workforce and the point of the “Me too” movement. When the character went through a transformation of understanding I cried.
You see my mother is an engineer. She was one through the 70s and the 80s. A brilliant no nonsense woman who could draw circles around her contemporary men. My dad who has been divorced from her for decades recently told me the story about her in highschool. They lived in a paper mill town in Michigan. My mom had to prove herself to be “let” to take the drafting classes and when started them, dad said they were having boys coming in on the weekends to keep up with the pace she was doing in completing them. They couldn’t tolerate a woman taking the class let alone out pacing them.
There is so much about culture we don’t talk about. She was telling me how at one point when people really started looking at the wage disparity between women and men they had to give her a 60,000.00 dollar raise a year to give her what the novice men out of college were getting paid at the time. If you look at wages from that period that is a whole lifestyle change.
I have always been proud of her, she never had it easy. She was shunned at work for being a woman and then shunned by other women for being a working mom. She went to work everyday no matter what went down. She even went to work the day after being accidentally kicked by horse on the weekend. Her work ethic and stubborn ability to get things done is awe inspiring.
I time to time ruminate over my decision to be a stay at home parent. My step-father commented the other day about cleaning out stuff from my room. Apparently they found a bunch of advanced math tests with 98 to 100 percent on them. He laughs when he talks about it because what they found on the back were these detailed drawings of unicorns, dragons and castles. I would smile. Math was a great class. You do the test, then you can check your answers. And there was always time left so I got an opportunity to draw. Then I remember why I never went down the engineering path. I like playing in my head with impossible things even more then math.
Finally got around to the writing.
And in this field pay is about the audience. Though I have speculated if I didn’t make my gender apparent if it would affect sales? I do find a bias when I say that I am a writer most assume it is going to be romance or self help. There is this pause when I explain, urban fantasy and that my magic system is based on science concepts.
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