ER, adieu
/And then, well, then, my mother actually did die, and then Rachel and I had a baby and moved and had little access to cable TV (although I’m guessing that last one is a flimsy excuse, given that ER probably plays on all the free channels in 24-hour marathons), and that particular show fell by the wayside, as did many, many things.
But I still kind of missed it. If all the characters were real people, I would friend them on Facebook and ask them for updates: “Great to see you! It’s been so long! How are the twins? Did Seattle work out?”
I missed it not least for the fact that ER was just full of smart, sexy, professional women who were integral to the storyline (for more on that, see Dorothy Surrenders) — nurses, yes, fantastic nurses, but also doctors. (And not blathering idiot doctors like the whiny whinies on Grey’s Anatomy.) Some of them were even queer.
Of course, the plot that involved Kerry and Sandy and their baby boy, Henry, held a certain weight for everyone in my circles. You remember: bio-mom Sandy, a firefighter, dies, and her homophobic-ass family tries to take the baby away from Kerry. At about 11:01 PM on the Thursday night after it aired, my phone rang. It was my mother. From her hospital bed. She was livid.
“You just make sure that Rachel adopts that baby!” she told me.
“She will,” I said. But then I also tried to comfort her with the obvious. “But Mom, um, you and dad aren’t going to try to take the baby away from Rachel if anything happens to me.”
“Of course we aren’t!” she snapped. “But that doesn’t matter. You just make sure you take care of things!”
“Okay, Mom,” I said. “Okay.”