Photo via rojakdaily.com
A week ago I added the new Gossip Girl series to list of things to watch because all of the actors look very high fashion and it seems interesting.
I also added it because I never really was a tv watcher when I was younger (we were either never at home or watching movies) and so I missed Gossip Girl when it first came out. Finally, I had some work to do late one night this week and I thought I would turn the show on to see what it was about while I designed a few slides for a client.
I figured, okay, if I want to look at the new one I should at least watch a bit of the show that made a reboot like this necessary and I should see what all the hype was about back in the day.
Y’all. Arughahaurh!!?!?!
I couldn’t make it through the first few minutes of the premiere episode without pausing the it to catch my breath. Everything, from the clothing, to the hair, to the weird forced drama, to the not necessary catty meanness, to the uncomfortable male-gaze innuendos brought my time in high school crashing down on top of me.
I mean, I’m writing about it, so I am trying to find the words to say to properly explain this show and my reaction… but like, the absolute stranglehold that this show must have had on the girls that I went to school with is astronomical. However, now that I am writing this out it all kind of makes sense because I went to a private, mostly white, high school, in a high-rise, in the middle of a very affluent city. Everyone drove nice cars. Were were able to walk around the city and do what we want as long as we got to class on time. We also wore impossibly expensive uniforms that were very easy to dress up or down depending. The ONLY difference between the Gossip Girl show and my school was that we were located in the South and we were a Christian school. So, just take that same drama but add a layer of Christian, passive-aggressive handwringing and that was my junior and senior year of high school.
There was even a time when I noticed that a lot of the girls in my class and on my sports teams started calling my B. Which now that I’m watching the show I feel like may or may not have been a good thing? (Honestly, don’t worry about it if you have seen the show. All the girls that called me B I was cool with and still am today. lol)
Anyway, now that I have made it through season 1 episode 1 (I couldn’t sit through 5 min of episode 2), I wonder if I should keep watching it. On one hand, I kid you not, it was a very weird out of body experience that I kept doing this to:
On the other hand, I am kind of curious to go down the rabbit hole and see how much the show and my school life paralleled. I mean honestly, y’all, one of my friends actually wore the EXACT same outfit that Serena van der Woodsen wore when she arrived back in New York in the first episode. The scarf and everything. I will remember it to this day because when I saw her I thought, “Oh that is a sophisticated look. I like it but I wonder why she’s wearing that scarf?” Then for months after that other girls in my school started buying the uniform ties and giving slightly disheveled curls a go. I am still in shock as I type this.
I was talking to my friend and I told him that I wonder what my time in high school would have been like if I knew about this show then. Maybe I would have been able to see the scandals that were coming next? Or why some of our classmates just, all of a sudden started acting weird aka just like the main characters in the show (yes, I don’t want to leave the boys out of this because there were definitely men in my class with the same haircuts as these guys wearing scarves, getting highlights, and acting like sex-crazed jerks all of a sudden)?
So now the question is: do I finish the show and sit through another round of my high schools drama (read: trauma)? Or do I just watch this new one coming out? Let me know in the comments.
You know you love me.
XOXO,
B
BTW: Even though I didn’t watch the show I do know who the Gossip Girl ended up being (I think :-/). So that level of suspense is gone for me.
Welcome Home Love 