This 4th of July marks the third anniversary of RightWingTrash. In other words, it’s another forgettable holiday. There really haven’t been many memorable 4th of Julys. I usually consider the day to be a drag on the level of Thanksgiving, where I don’t get my mail and the streets are full of people who should be at work. The only exception was July 4, 1990, which didn’t start out particularly promising.
I had just lined up some exciting new employment in the growing field of phone-sex scripts. This was in those pre-internet days when cheap thrills ran at a costly $2.95 per minute. They still can, but at least you get a live-cam feed nowadays. This company in Atlanta wasn’t breaking new ground for the time. They were even a few years late in setting up their adult chat lines, where you dialed a 976 area code to pay that premium price to reach live girls or pre-recorded tapes.
It was sexy stuff, but we’re not talking hardcore porn here. Things were kind of chaste. In those days before internet porn, it could be a big deal just to hear a lady reading a hot sex scene that wasn’t any more risqué than the best parts of a typical Harlequin novel. It was so sexy that even the live girls had scripted tales to read, since the assumption was that the conversation would eventually become one-sided.
I’d sent my new employers a few sample scripts from my home in Birmingham, Alabama. They were rightfully impressed by my ability to write in a woman’s voice. In fact, they asked me to provide their entire catalog of assorted fantasies—which was 30 scripts to be delivered by July 5th. That gave me an entire week to meet my deadline.
I arrived in Atlanta on the morning of July 4th, ready to start working on the scripts. My parents kept a condominium they rarely used that was off Peachtree Street near Lenox Mall. I’d already stopped by a deli to pick up a rough approximation of a 4th of July barbeque. I was settled in by 11 am, and things couldn’t look easier.
The big secret was that I had seven templates of sex scenes that I could drop into any script. Now I merely had to write a three-paragraph intro to set the scene, and then a couple of paragraphs to wrap up the tale. I kind of resented those final paragraphs. I had the feeling that few callers were going to stay on the line for my touching denouements.
I was out of ideas by noon. In my defense, these weren’t exactly the kind of sexual scenarios where an imagination can run wild. It didn’t make sense to write scripts that started out wilder than the actual sex scenes. I needed some fun-yet-banal settings from which wild romance could occur. I was in trouble.
So I turned on the television. Thankfully, my parents bothered to keep cable running in the condo. And there was my salvation in the form of an all-day marathon of
Love, American Style.
I’m not sure which channel I was watching. At the time, there were two competing all-comedy cable channels. HA! and the Comedy Channel would merge to become Comedy Central at the start of the ’90s. HA! was fairly hip. The Comedy Channel was more likely to be airing episodes of one of ABC’s biggest hits of the early 1970s.
Love, American Style was an anthology show that (usually) filled an hour of ABC’s Friday night schedule. Each episode featured fun vignettes about romance amongst the changing sexual mores of the times. There were also amazing fashion statements displayed by the kind of aging stars who’d eventually return to ABC for
The Love Boat and
Fantasy Island.
The series was graced by celebrities including Paul Lynde, Karen Valentine, Rich Little, and many cast members from
Laugh-In and
Gilligan’s Island. There were also rising stars like Diane Keaton and Burt Reynolds. These would all become unwitting players in what was suddenly an inspired series of phone-sex scripts.
A trip to the bowling alley? There’s a good setting. A guy dealing with his first trip to a female barber? Sounds like a timeless topic. The desk clerk innocently giving a lady the wrong key at an overbooked motel? Must happen all the time. A romantic ending to a shoplifting expedition? Another fine idea, but let me finish up this story about having sex with the marriage counselor.
Those five seasons of
Love, American Style had literally hundreds of great stories, including some good ideas courtesy of the short comic sketches that ran between them. I ended up with 40 scripts. Every one of them was a surefire sell. The only slow stretch was when the pilot for
Happy Days showed up in an episode, along with a series of vignettes based on Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park.” I couldn’t do anything with those.
There was also a pleasant interruption when I heard some commotion outside in the evening. I didn’t know that the Sears at Lenox Mall hosted Atlanta’s big 4th of July fireworks show. I had a perfect view of the display from the balcony of the condo. The sky was lit up red, white, and blue—just like the fireworks seen at the start of every episode of
Love, American Style. That must have been what gave some network executive the bright idea of running a holiday marathon.
And that was my best 4th of July ever. The day never really ended, either. A sex columnist in New York City recently told me that she’d run into a woman from Birmingham who was telling my story as her own—not realizing what an embarrassingly small town Manhattan can be. Also, those phone-sex scripts probably ran for several years. They were likely sold to another company, and could be very well be enjoying some internet incarnation today.
I still prefer to think of those scripts as they began life in 1990. I mostly like to think of some guy enjoying a sexy phone session, and then suddenly having a thought. “Wait a minute,” he says. “Wasn’t this a television show with Vincent Price and Ruth Buzzi in a haunted house?”
And it was, and that’s phone-sex American style.
