T is for Tami Maida

Lately when I can't sleep I make a little list in my head of A-Z for some of my favorite television shows. Last night was Felicity. I don't remember the whole list as I was slightly delirious and only partly awake. A was for Abrams, B was for Ben, C was for Chad Mulcahy (who got hit by a bus), D was for Dean & Deluca, E was for Elena, F was for Felicity, G was for Greg (the gross guy Felicity dated in season two), and H was for Hey. Of course. Usually I can never get to the end of the alphabet before falling back to sleep. I always get stuck on Q. I couldn't think of a P last night so I came up with Planned Parenthood, which had to like the episode where Felicity fought for the morning after pill. So far I've also done Battlestar (A is for Apollo, B is for Baltar, C is for Cylon, D is for Dualla, E is for Ellen Tigh, F is for Frak, etc.) and My So-Called Life (A is for Angela, B is for Brian, C is for Crimson Glow, D is for Danielle, E is for Enrique Vasquez, etc.) It's somehow comforting to know that I could do this night after night and never actually run out of favorite shows.

Lately I've been obsessed with searching for Grinkov and Gordeeva footage on YouTube. I used to watch My Sergei and sob and sob. They sure skated beautifully together.

Remember the recent Grey's Anatomy when Derek was doing the surgery to cut the guy's brain in half so he wouldn't have seizures anymore? Was I the only one who immediately flashed back to the TV movie where Patrick Dempsey himself played the young man who wanted to have the brain-in-half surgery to stop his seizures? That was such a great TV movie! (At least when I was 11.)

It was almost as good as the one where the teenager was going in for a heart transplant and sang cheerfully as he was being wheeled away, "I left my heart in San Francisco ..." which I can't find or remember the name of and it's driving me CRAZY.

Or the one where Mary Stuart Masterson was a pregnant teenager with cancer and decided not to be treated so the baby could live and she died at the end.

OR the one when teen mother Nancy McKeon gave her baby up for adoption to Lindsay Wagner and then decided she wanted the baby back, and the judge said that blood is thicker than water and gave the baby back to her! That one made me so sad back in the day. It seemed so wrong ... Lindsay Wagner had been raising the kid for, like, two years! It makes me mad just thinking about it. It was very upsetting.

We also had repeat viewings of this baby-switching movie that was actually quite gut-wrenching. Of course they figured it all out and the boys ended up growing up together and being best friends.

I remember also being mildly obsessed with the one where Chad Lowe killed himself. (Available at Netflix!)

Also available at Netflix, another favorite that I loved so passionately that I prayed to God the evening it aired in 1983 that I would dream about it that night, and I did. I swear. High School USA with Nancy McKeon and Michael J. Fox. Ah, third grade dreams.

I have already gone on and on about how Love Is Never Silent was my all-time favorite TV movie, never to be surpassed.

Except of course possibly by Quarterback Princess.

I don't know what it was about the early 1980s, but apparently I spent a lot of time watching TV movies. Especially ones about Teens With Issues or Baby Woes. I think it must have been because I was just discovering the magic of the VCR and recorded a lot of what came on every night. Good times.