"I've seen one in a book and I was not impressed"

Life without labels

The last few days have been shall we say interesting. For reasons that partly go over my pea brain and partly are just not relevant to this blog so I’m skipping them, public schools in much of Ontario were closed for a strike on Friday and today. Until a couple of hours ago I believed this would go on indefinitely, and that after all that (gestures) our household was not going to be spared the horrors of something called online junior kindergarten.

Now that I realize there is an actual doable workweek ahead, a lil return to Queen Victoria.

Commenter Julie pointed me to “Pam,” a Victoria Wood song I had somehow missed until my recent Wood music binge. This will be the “Pam” post.

Wood sings as “Pam,” which (see: Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham) means that contemporary idiot audiences would assume Wood is Pam, or is somehow endorsing Pam. Which is really a shame because Pam sings things like, “I don’t say gay, I still say queer, I think that Mussolini had the right idea” (with “queer” and “idea” rhyming). This tells you precisely who Pam is. If there were hedging it wouldn’t work, and by “it” I mean the song, which takes you all sorts of places.

It begins with Pam’s marriage, engaged 1962, to a man named Howard. Wedding night is a bit frosty. “I said now look, I must be blunt, I couldn’t give a beggar on the whole sex front.” Throughout the song there are references to things Pam finds preferable to sex: toast, card games, ironing, etc. And then there’s the line, the line: “Harold dear, now do get dressed, I’ve seen one in a book and I was not impressed.”

Pam sings that after she got divorced she “chummed up with a woman by the name of Joan.” Ohhh. “She moved in, she seemed quite nice, wore army boots and braces but I didn’t think twice.”

Joan makes a pass. Pam’s indifference to Howard repeats itself with Joan: “I didn’t faint, I didn’t scream, just carried on demolishing my custard cream.”

She’s game but it does nothing for her.

The final scene puts Pam on a cruise:

“So much to do, so much to see, with a load of single women who look just like me.”

There she meets a bachelor who bets her 10 pounds that “you’ll have an orgasm while I’m around.” He dies suddenly while trying to seduce her, which delights her because she realizes, “I never had that orgasm, I’m ten quid up!”

Pam has no deal. She’s not asexual, demisexual, bisexual. She’s a frigid homophobe who’s also up for anything. In this she’s reminiscent of the similarly-named, same-era SNL character Pat, who was either a man or a woman and no one knew which and because 1990s non-binary wasn’t a contemplated possibility. Pat, you’re cancelled. But, aaah, Pat wasn’t non-binary. In the world of the show there absolutely was a binary answer but no one around Pat knew what it was, and it was too awkward to ask. But also, Pat seems dated. Pam, no, she holds up.

Pam is aggressively square, proper, and (sorry yes that word again) frumpy. She’s not repressed, or if she is, she likes it like that. She just wants to curl up with cocoa and watch murder mysteries. She’s not easily impressed!