My Friend Thinks Michael DeLorenzo Is Gay. Discuss.

To say I loved this show as a little kid would be an outrageous understatement. It slammed into my chest and took my breathe away. I was six when the tv show followed the movie, and immediately fell in love. (I can not help but wonder what a shrink would say if they knew that in my imagination, at night when I was in bed, I was convinced that the kids from Fame turned into 'bad guys' who lived underneath my bed and if any part of my body went over the edge, they would grab me and drag me into their horrid world underneath my bedroom.)

I wanted to BE Coco. Never Doris Schwartz, the white jewish girl, or Julie Miller, but Coco Hernandez. Go figure. I nearly shat myself when my mother told me that the school the Fame kids went to was a real school, only a train ride away in Manhattan.

It's not that I had all the record albums. It's that I had every single song memorized. Thanks to Netflix, this weekend I watched the first ten episodes of the first season of the show. Turns out I still have all the songs memorized, from Desdemona to High Fidelity.

If you've ever done this, you may have noticed that when you are 31 and watch a show you used to watch at ages six and seven, you pick up on different things. First of all, a surprising number of the men had perms. What's up, Lee Curreri? Second of all, most of the actors actually attended high schools for the performing arts (yes, there's more than one). These days if an actor has to play the part of a soldier they go to boot camp for three weeks. Surfer? Surfing lessons for a month. Not with Fame. All the major actors on the show truly were performers.

Third, the weight. This shocked me so much last night that it's getting its own paragraph. Obviously in the Fame show, there's a hell of a lot of dancing. Thus, a lot of dancers. Sure, Coco was tall and skinny. But there were girls cast on this show in the 80's who were AVERAGE WEIGHT. It blew my mind. Not only were there average weight girls on this show (who today would be considered fat), but they were cast as average people. They weren't cast to act in "a very special episode of Blossom" about weight or eating disorders. That just never happens these days. It should, and it's really sad that it doesn't. There are parents out there now who wonder why their daughters have body image issues. They should be forced to sit down and watch a season of Fame.

Fourth, the relationship between student and teacher. I want to start out by explaining to those of you who may not have seen the show (I can't imagine anyone hasn't seen Fame; it should be required viewing) that the school was portrayed as ground-breakingly different. In real life, there was a school for the performing arts in Manhattan as far back as the 1930's, though the real LaGuardia High didn't open until 1984 (it combined two performing arts high schools). On the show, they tried to give the impression that families relocated from other parts of the country so their teenagers could attend the school. That went over my head as a little girl.

I do recall that Lydia went to a student's house to check on him. But this time around I saw that Leroy camped out on the steps to Sherwood's building when he wanted her to tutor him. She came up the street, saw him and stopped, he grinned, she grinned back and invited him in for coffee. With all our stalking and password protecting information, can you imagine the fallout if a student showed up at a teacher's house these days? I once ran into my marketing teacher outside of the Gap - it was horrifying.

Know what else I missed? The fact that Gene Anthony Ray was flamingly gay. I watch now and see the way he walked and heard the way he spoke, and it's glaringly obvious. Back then? Didn't notice a thing. He died at age 41, which breaks my heart. I saw an interview with him a few months before his death. He was completely high, stumbling around Europe, clearly unwell. To see him like that, when you know how insanely talented this guy was...

Lastly, something else that went over my head as a six year-old were the racial issues raised in the show. If you recall any other show in 1982 dealing with racism directly (that was not a documentary) please let me know.

I encourage everyone to put Fame in your Netflix queue to re-watch it. Even if you don't care about dancing. At the very least you'll be rolling on the floor at Michael DeLorenzo's perm and Leroy's white socks pulled up to the knee with the wide stripes. Never mind the short-shorts.