You want I should break bad on you?
My relationship with Felicity is too expansive and extensive to catalogue here. But I swear that I’m the atypical late-90s teen who went to NYU for reasons other than the show. I swear. Honestly, it had more to do with Molly Shannon saying on Late Night with Conan O’Brien that she went to NYU than anything to do with Keri Russell’s locks. I swear. But I did love the show, and besides obsessing over it in high school (did we really schedule our Spanish study lessons so we could also watch Felicity? Yes. Yes, we did), I also loved it in college, even after it was regulated to rerun oblivion on the WE network. But before those dark days, I made my season one freshman year/first boyfriend B watch every episode of her senior year right along with me (and maybe, even, perhaps, an additional viewing of the video tapes I made… do I still own those? Yes. Yes, I do.) Knowing what the show meant to me, he even went as far as throwing me a Felicity-themed 19th birthday party, construction paper curly wig for me and all. (He was a great guy and I regret losing him, one of the biggest regrets of my life… last I heard he was married to a guy and working for HBO in LA.) If you still wonder the extent of my love for the show, let me tell you: this was in the very beginning of the TV on DVD stage, and so, in order to make sure I had all the episodes, I bought VHS Emmy Screeners on EBay. Yeah. That’s how much I loved it. I stayed up late in my season one freshman year college dorm room, rapidly refreshing eBay.com on my blueberry iMac to win auctions of Emmy screener videotapes. Alas, eventually, DVD won out, but I made sure to buy them all. For a few months during season four senior year of college, I lived on the couch of an apartment I had subletted the previous semester. Now, I’m someone unable to sleep without noise. I inherited (from my grandmother who used to fall asleep watching CNN Headline News) the undesirable trait of needing the television (or music, if I’m desperate) to fall asleep. My poison that month or two on the couch on East 13th Street? Felicity, of course. I’d plop in one of the DVDs, no matter how many times I had already seen it, watch an episode and drift off into sleep during episode two. It happened so frequently (every night) that my “roommates” began to joke about it and even began to tease me about it. I, of course, responded by forcing them to watch the show, knowing that they would enjoy it, even love it perhaps, for surely anything was better than the Jeopardy!/Wheel of Fortune 7PM block they were accustomed to watching. And love it they did. They particularly loved this DVD extra, an Emmy parode [sic] featured on the Season 3 DVD (but actually filmed after Season 1). The lines, especially Elena’s, became catch phrases in the house. They loved it. So much. Until I broke the DVD player by watching the show one too many times. And then they weren’t so happy. But then our season ended when they kicked me out I moved to a sublet in Washington Heights.
Don’t squeeze my shoes, Felicity.
