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The Media Made Me Do it

Stay Free! asked: Have you ever imitated something you’ve seen on TV or in the movies? In reply, our readers and contributors shared their witty comebacks, special outfits, and not-so-secret fantasies, which appear below in no particular order.

When I was in high school, I saw an episode of Real People about a boy with no arms. The story showed him using his feet to dress himself, play soccer, and eat at the table. He laughed and held his cutlery between his toes. After watching this, I trained myself to use my toes for all manner of basic tasks normally performed with hands: dialing the phone, lighting cigarettes. In college, I would show off all these feet tricks for my friends. (And my parents thought that knowing how to play bridge was essential for socializing at college!) Even today, I still do many things with my feet that others use their hands for. When barefoot, I never bend over to pick anything up: I simply use my toes.

Catherine Sears

Nothing filled pediatric wards with broken tibias faster than the sight of Evel Knievel attempting to jump buses on TV with his motorcycle. While I never imitated him myself, I was more than happy to help construct the flimsy wooden ramps that would send my friends hurtling into the pavement on their Huffys on many a suburban Saturday. I can’t imagine how well bicycles must have sold back then as they were continuously destroyed and replaced in these feats of daring. Mercifully, I seemed immune from this influence. However, I did once jump off the roof with an umbrella like the Penguin on Batman.

Ashley Holt


First of all, yes, I know how supremely geeky this is. But when I was in high school I sometimes wore a 12-foot Doctor Who scarf that my mother knitted for me. By "sometimes" I mean "every day." I also wore numerous Doctor Who T-shirts and accessories, including a classy enamel pin depicting the fifth Doctor in his full regalia. One day, this girl looks at it and says, "Oh, my God, is that you wearing your scarf?" All this time I was slavishly imitating a TV character and she thought I was a fashion trendsetter (albeit a disastrously failed one).

Daniel Radosh


When I was in the eighth grade, I ordered a pizza to my math class after watching Spicoli do it in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The pizza actually arrived late because the delivery guy went to the wrong junior high. When he finally got to my class, my teacher immediately knew it was for me and flipped out. The school put the pizza into the school vault until they could figure out what to do with it--and with me. I think I got detention for a week, but they gave me the pizza back at the end of the day, so I had a nice picnic with some friends as we laughed about the whole thing.

Sarah Jacobson


I dressed like the Fonz one traumatic fifth-grade day. As soon as I stepped on the school bus, I realized the grievous error in judgment I’d made. I was stared at, laughed at, and taunted ("Ayyy, Fonzie! You think you’re tough? Huh, Fonz? You gonna beat me up?") like never before--and I was already something of a social outcast. I unslicked my hair in the bathroom before second period, but even my friends never forgot about it. Years later in high school, my friend Ed would frequently ask "Hey Mike! Remember when you dressed like the Fonz?" before collapsing into giggles.

Mike Appelstein

Mike, someone I knew from the Boston punk scene, was a big guy who was impressed by the movie Fight Club. Inspired, he started a similar club in Cambridge. But instead of a bonding experience, it apparently was just guys getting beat up by Mike. It was completely consensual, just that nobody could fight nearly as well as Mike could. Eventually the Cambridge Police broke it up, and the non-Mike participants were reportedly just as happy to have an excuse to stop as they had been to fight in the first place. Meanwhile, Chuck Palahniuk (author of the book Fight Club) denied knowing that any real fight clubs exist.

Rich Mackin

I can’t remember where or when I saw Mary Poppins float down to earth with her magical umbrella, but I do remember desperately searching the house for my own umbrella so I could experience the same graceful descent. I found an umbrella and climbed to the very top of the monkey bars in our backyard. I was so confident that the same laws of physics would apply that when I hit the ground with a BANG I reasoned that it must be the wrong type of umbrella and went inside to look for another. Armed with my new umbrella, I plummeted down to earth just as quickly as before. My final attempt involved both umbrellas, which was a big mistake because I had no free arm to help break my fall and became tangled up in a mass of umbrellas, frustration, and pain at the base of the monkey bars.

Leslie Mello


After seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark I left the theater feeling like Harrison Ford. It was as if I could swing from trees and outrun blowdarts and giant rolling boulders. My sister tied a rope to the back of her bike and I lay down in the middle of the street and held onto it. I don’t remember if Indy did this in the movie, but I wrapped the rope around my left arm so I couldn’t let it go. My sister tried to drag me down the street, but after a few feet, I was crying so bad she stopped. My knees and face and arms were all scraped up.

Steve Reynolds

In my junior year of high school, I started dressing like Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Nearly every other day at school, I wore combat boots, cook pants, a white shirt, suspenders, and a bowler. I couldn’t get a shillelagh, so I used a cane with knots in it instead. I went to see the movie 19 times, and the last eight times I wore my Clockwork Orange outfit. I even used to hitchhike in it. Everyone thought I had wigged out; you don’t do that in New Hampshire. I dressed this way for about six years.

Jim Rocheleau


My life amounts to little more than a futile search for Laura Petrie of The Dick Van Dyke Show. This is my curse.

Paul Moshay


When Madonna first came out with that "Express Yourself" video à la Fritz Lang, my two best friends and I used to dance along every night when it was on the MTV top video countdown, "working on our moves" as it were. It actually got to the point where we practiced crawling under the kitchen table (fetchingly) and lapping at a bowl of milk. Also, I cut off all my hair and started wearing boxer shorts so I could look like Mary Stuart Masterson in Some Kind of Wonderful. When people see pictures of my family from that awkward period they mistake me for a boy, saying, "Your brother is gorgeous," which I only recently started taking as a compliment.

Brett Kelly


I was one of the few kids in elementary school who didn’t have a TV, which made keeping up on lunchtime conversation extremely challenging. I did, however, have a downstairs neighbor with an old black-and-white contraption, who let me watch Happy Days with him. I thought most of the characters were dorky, but secretly I knew I was just like the Fonz. One day, on a class field trip, I dropped my notebook. I picked it up with my thumbs out, the way I did everything, the way I imagined the Fonz would pick up his notebook. "Hey," another kid said to me, "are you trying to pick up your notebook like the Fonz?" I was mortified and hotly denied it. "Of course not," I said. "Don’t be stupid, that’s just the way I pick up my stuff." He nodded but with a smirk, and walked away. My career as a Fonzie-wannabe was over.

Rachel Neumann


When we were about eight, my best friend, Carrie (who happens to edit this zine), and I would turn one of our living rooms into a mini-wrestling arena. With WWF on television in full view, and with no regard for the taunting of our brothers, we would each choose a wrestler and then act out the match as best we could. This was fairly easy since each of us was cooperating in the drama we were portraying; we never tried to hurt each other and didn’t play in an angry way. We simply thought it was fun. Funny also is the fact that we didn’t realize WWF was fake--so we were "faking" an already fake event.

Wendy Marich


In fifth grade, I had a snazzy red electric guitar with a whammy bar that I never really learned how to play. Instead, I would wear ripped jeans, mousse up my hair and "air guitar" to Poison, White-snake and Mötley Crüe videos. I would pretend to ape the moves of Bret Michaels, Vince Neil, et al. The culmination of this was my lip-synched performance of Poison’s "Talk Dirty To Me" with three friends at the school talent show. Unfortunately, my friends were more in awe of my electric guitar than my slick moves.

Nick Nadel


In junior high, I was outside one day with friends and there was a guy giving me a hard time. He wasn’t bigger than me, in fact, he was thinner, so I wasn’t too afraid when things got more physical and we started shoving each other. He backed up and reached in his pocket, as if he were scrambling to pull out a pocketknife. Just then I remembered a scene from an old gangster movie where a guy was fumbling in his coat to pull out a weapon. The phrase it invoked in the other, unarmed man, had struck me as a really cool line, so I repeated it to this kid: "You’d better be reaching for a sandwich, because I’m gonna make you eat it!" Unbelievably, this stopped the kid and he just walked off, sneering.

Bob Kathman


When I was very small, I was fascinated by Zorro, the masked and sword-wielding star of the Disney TV series. I prevailed upon my mother to make me a mask, cape, and hat, which I regularly donned before charging madly about the house with a little toy sword, hacking and slashing away with great heroism at the bad guys who threatened our home. One day, my mother showed me a picture of myself in this condition. I couldn’t believe how stupid I looked, standing there with my droopy little cape and plastic sword in summer shorts and bare feet. I never wore the costume again, and I suspect this is why I’ve never owned a TV.

George Donovan


Almost every time I shop for groceries, I throw something into the cart in a desultory fashion in homage to Mary Tyler Moore, who does this in the opening credits.

Chip Wass


When I was about five or six, I was totally infatuated with Underdog--a cartoon canine with a secret identity. Especially intriguing to me was the "super energy pill" hidden in Underdog’s ring. When he found himself in trouble or when the apple of his eye, Sweet Polly Purebred, called for help, U-dog would open his ring and pop a pill. Accompanied by a triumphant chorus, he would transform from a wimpy pup into a muscle-bound, albeit clumsy, hero complete with a cape and the ability to fly. As an aspiring hero myself--already hopped up on many a Saturday morning episode of Batman, The Lone Ranger and Zorro--I thought the pill option was the quickest route to public adulation. And I knew of many pills hidden in the house. One afternoon, I climbed the counter and took a bottle of the orange-flavored St. Joseph’s Aspirin for Children (most likely because I had been given some during a previous illness). Over the next several hours, I flew through the living room, jumping on and off the sofa, battling bad guys up and down the stairs, and strategically downing the orange tabs as crime-fighting circumstances dictated. By dinnertime, unsurprisingly, I was barely able to rise from the sofa. After repeated questioning from my mom, I showed her the empty bottle. She gave me a glass of milk, and, upon finishing it, I upchucked my fantasy onto the basement floor.

Dan Cook


My best friend Wendy and I watched Saturday Night Live religiously when we were in fourth grade--the same year we convinced our math teacher to let us perform skits for the class. Every Monday, the class would take time out to watch Wendy, me, and a couple other friends and our zany antics. Although I probably never would have credited SNL for the idea, I tried to write fake newscasts in the SNL style, and even stole a few of their jokes (figuring no one would notice with all those good snot gags thrown in).

On an unrelated note, I read A Clockwork Orange in high school and--though I didn’t understand the book at all, and wasn’t particularly fond of it--thought it would be cool to appropriate the character’s slang in my everyday speech. "Droogies" for "friends", "moloko" for milk. Needless to say, this never caught on.

Carrie McLaren


After seeing Spider-Man, I left the theater in my frequent postmovie liminal mental state--in this case, the fuzzy twilight of overidentification with Tobey Maguire. I found myself roaming the streets of New York City, pressing my fingers (middle and ring) to the base of my palms. It was strangely comforting--maybe it’s an acupressure point?--though I stopped short of aiming my wrists at buildings from which to swing. I am 33 years old.

Alexandra Ringe


My twin brother and I once watched The Warriors at home on cable. The movie, at 1970s cult classic, is about an innocent gang trying to get home to their turf while another rival gang tries to incite other gangs into killing them. My brother and I got very caught up in the action and started trying some of the fight moves. I am embarrassed to say we both had roller skates and one of the gangs uses roller skates. (Very corny movie, lots of feathered hair; more like the Village People than a real gang.) The friendly wrestling escalated into an all-out fight after a few successful kicks. No serious injuries, but lots of cuts and scrapes.

Jason Hudson


When I was around seven or eight in Michigan, all the kids in the neighborhood formed a Trailer Park Wrestling Federation. It was designed to be similar to the World Wrestling Federation, except it occurred in the arena of a trailer park alley- way. (This was nearly 20 years ago, when "professional" wrestling first became popular on television.) What scares me now is that the "pile drivers" were real, as were the "clotheslines" and "neck breakers." We bought sturdy cardboard that we made into championship belts, adorned with the titles "heavyweight" and "middleweight" in crayon. Each champion would have to defend their titles every weekend against the other eight-year-old terrors of the neighborhood.

Jeremy Stanifer


As a youth sixty some years ago, my double-first cousin and I would listen to the radio serials every afternoon (no TV yet) and then act them out the next day in our backyards and the woods behind them: the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Captain Midnight and his young friend of the hour, and our favorites, the comic book heroes Batman and Robin. She was always the alpha male, the Lone Ranger or Batman/ Bruce Wayne, while I, ten days her junior, played the subservient guy role. We still reminisce about this whenever we get together.

Buzz Ringe