The Truth About Cats and Dogs

The other morning as I sat with my cup of coffee and checked my email, I turned on the t.v. It's a reflex that I try to break, but I don't try very hard.

In the old place, I'd listen to NPR on the radio, but we have a different stereo system in the new house and the little radio we have only gets the public radio from WNIJ, which is the Northern Illinois University public radio station. Now, there's nothing wrong with WNIJ, but it's no WBEZ, and that's the truth. There's no Lisa Labuz. There's no Morning Shift, which I had really come to enjoy; there's not even a traffic report, because who cares about traffic in Dekalb? No one.

Now, you might ask why I would care about a Chicago traffic report when my commute is three miles down a two-lane highway through cornfields. Well, because, nostalgia, that's why.

So, when I flipped through the t.v. channels and landed on the '90s movie The Truth About Cats and Dogs, I stopped. It was the perfect thing to have on while I did the zombie task of filing and deleting the previous day's emails: pleasant enough not to irritate me, and mindless enough not to distract me.

A dog on roller skates? I'm in.

But even as it was on in the background, I couldn't help paying attention to a number of things that made the soft spot in my heart--the spot reserved for the decade during which I graduated from junior high, high school, and college--warm like a puddle of pudding in the sunlight. Here are five of those things.

1. Phones. The characters in the movie, played by Janeane Garofalo, Uma Thurman, and a Random British Guy (RBG), talk a lot on phones. Talk is the key word in that sentence. They have big soul searching conversations; there's phone sex (it's weird and shot in soft focus, but at least it doesn't involve sexting...); and Thurman uses a number of payphones to leave messages on Garofalo's answering machine.
2. Book Stores. There's a scene in a book store, and this made me realize that there are a lot of '90s movies, rom-coms especially, that have scenes in book stores. It's something that will likely not happen a lot any more, and this makes me sad. Even though the store is a prop, just scenery, it is always nice to think that people in '90s movies spent time in book stores.
3. Smoking. Now, I am not a fan of smoking--it's a nasty habit that is not cool, no matter what these goofy teenagers today think. But it's such a throwback to see Thurman smoking, not because it's some part of her character, but because it was 1996 and that was what people in movies did.
4. Poo Shoes. A woman calling in to the radio program Garofalo hosts uses the term "poo shoes." This doesn't make me nostalgic; it just makes me giggle because it's something that I sometimes call Roo. And it's silly.
5. Hank. The RBG has a great dane and the dog's name is Hank, which is basically Henry. And, really, the dog is a lot cuter than the guy. A lot. Also, that's the dog's real name: according to the credits, he is Hank the Dog.

I finished watching The Truth About Cats and Dogs, not because it's a good movie (it's not) or because I'm a huge Uma Thurman fan (she's okay) or because they play a Suzanne Vega song in the scene where Thurman has a dessert orgasm while being fed a piece of cake by the RBG (I do like Suzanne Vega). It's because it made me feel sweet and sappy inside for that time in my life, that time when people talked on large cordless phones and the Internet wasn't a thing and movie soundtracks were popular and so was Janeane Garofalo. That time when I was a teenager. And sometimes, when it comes to watching t.v. at 7:30 in the morning, that's enough.