B-Man Bylaws

The million commandments of radical self-expression

By Gretchen Giles

“Please keep in mind that you are responsible for yourself at all times in every regard once you enter Black Rock City. . . . Everyone is requested to help ensure our collective survival by following very simple rules relating to public safety and community well-being. Everyone is expected to abide by these standards. . . . Any violation of these requirements could result in ejection from the community.”

–Burning Man Survival Guide, 2002

Before reading any further, please take a moment to rehydrate yourself. That’s right, get a glass or a bottle of water and chug it. Wipe mouth. Repeat. Good, now you’re ready to contemplate living for a week with 25,000 other people on a high desert playa where temperatures swoop up to the occasional three figures and nary a spigot exists.

Burning Man is an outdoor temple to the concept of radical self-expression, but it is emphatically not an exercise in anarchy. Such radicalism is best attained through rigorous adherence to a rather lengthy set of rules and regulations governing behavior, comportment, and self-sufficiency. The Burning Man organization demands that you read their survival guide regardless of how many times you’ve been, and it truly offers more admonitions and tenets for behavior than any other outdoor festival you might ever attend. Those fogies who think that an announcement to avoid the bad acid that’s going around is too restrictive may wish to rethink this summer jaunt to the Nevada desert.

We hereby offer the Compleat Newbie’s Guide to Burning Man, a quick summation of what you will and won’t be doing during this week-long, art-drenched bacchanalia of free-thinking fun. Please do have another sip.

During your stay Aug. 26-Sept. 2 in the instant nation of Black Rock City, you may be purely nude or covered in body paint or draped solely in an obi you’ve fashioned from the flag of the former Czech Republic. Perhaps you’ll be moved to dress as a fetishist soccer player or pagan nun or New Age ancient mariner. There are seven full days to consider, and it’s your call.

You won’t, however, be sporting such little floaty bits as sequins, glitter, or feather boas. At Burning Man, such finery is filed under “trash, other people’s,” and your exploratory dress-up romp will earn you all-around censure and plenty of extra time grubbing about the playa trying to pick it all up again.

You will be wearing shoes with socks. Not just sandals and not bare feet, unless you’d like to get a rampant case of alkali dust chap more commonly known as “playa foot.” Pack some Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap to soak those dogs; it’s biodegradable and smells nice too. You should also have at least three pairs of clean, new, extra socks–over and above your ordinary sock needs–to give away or wear as you like.

Your dog will remain at home. So will your guns, your drug habit, and your occasional desire to engage in public sex acts.

Feeling a little cranky? Please pause and take another gulp of water.

If you have a menstrual period scheduled for the end of August, pack extra Zip-lock baggies. If you never intend to menstruate again or otherwise, pack extra Zip-lock baggies. If you know no one who knows no one who’s ever even menstruated once, pack extra Zip-lock baggies.

Perhaps for the first time in your life, you’ll be paying lavish attention to single-ply toilet paper. If you wish to be popular with thousands of new friends, you will often have single-ply toilet paper actually upon your person. Single-ply toilet paper will also be the single thing to accompany your exertions into the many problematic port-a-potties that ring the playa.

You won’t sell anything during your stay at Burning Man, nor will you purchase anything with ordinary U.S. currency beyond ice and espresso, the twin staffs of life. Bring the intangible or the useful–socks!–to utilize in the trade, barter, and gifting society you will be joining. Everything that you need to eat, drink, wear, make art with, listen to, read, and sleep on, in, or with will arrive with you. Every pull tab, bit of plastic, food waste, pork rind wrapper, ciggie butt, employed condom, magazine subscription card, and empty sunscreen bottle will depart with you.

Remember that if you give someone a watermelon, they will have to carry, store, eat, and dispose of the remains of said watermelon. Give them a poem or a massage or a kiss or a drink or a handful of sand and a piece of melon instead. Take their chewed rind and spitted seeds gratefully and put them into the compost pile you intend to bring home with you in a special, lidded, plastic garbage can that you’ve brought exactly for this purpose. Consider the brevity of seedless grapes.

If you smoke, carry an ashtray. If you eat, leave extra packaging at home. Recycle in Black Rock City, and have weighted or tied garbage bags–secured so that they can’t blow away–at the ready. Schedule two hours of free time during the lengthy exodus at the event’s conclusion to cheerfully help clean up the desert.

Don’t dump your trash in the nearby towns of Empire and Gerlach, because they can’t handle the influx. Giggle only in the privacy of your car, not in the town grocery store, upon realizing that Gerlach can be correctly pronounced as “Girl Lack.” Consider donating a daughter to that town in the future.

If your garage doesn’t contain an RV or trailer but your desires do, you will cover up the name of the rental company upon arrival. You won’t embarrass yourself and others by sporting a G*P T-shirt that screams its logo across your chest, nor will you wear the ubiquitous N**e check mark on your cap. Such items may be humbly turned inside out or discarded in strict favor of pagan nun gear.

Yet reverse snobbery is to be avoided at all costs. Should some hapless souls stroll misguidedly by clad in such T-shirts or caps, you will not scream obscenities at them or otherwise demean their essential humanity. You will instead offer them from your satchel an extra wimple woven from fresh reeds and sunflowers. Participation is everything, and even those seemingly wandering about in corporate symbols gawking at nekkid people may be subversively attempting an art you don’t know about. Ask.

(The sole exception to the “essential humanity” rule are ravers, who are universally shunned and detested. You, however, will strive to be kind even to them.)

Excuse yourself for a pee. Was it clear? Excellent. Have another sip.

Unless the Department of Mutant Vehicles has designated your vehicle an “art car,” it will remain parked for the entire length of your stay. Gifted people have at least two extra sets of car keys scattered somewhere where they can be easily retrieved. Those most intelligent of all simply keep their keys stored in the ignition, where they belong.

Your funky old cruiser bicycle is the best way to tour the many miles of shimmering Burning Man diaspora. String LED lights on the handlebars or invest in a cheap headlamp. Night biking will be your gig for the next week, and being able to see and be seen is a distinct advantage.

If your shelter is roped, flag those ropes with reflective tape. If your structure is held down with rebar, duct-tape soft Dubya dolls on the steel ends or cover them with liter bottles. Think ugly ankle gashes stinging with alkali dust. Think headlong bikes colliding with night-shrouded tent ropes.

This year’s nautical theme, the “Floating World,” demands that your math mind get a short workout. All directions are laid along the smarty-pants lines of latitude and longitude. Take a minute to figure this out, and save yourself the seasick stomach of someone who can’t find her way home again.

The politics of fire and water–yes, good reminder; please take a drink–are huge. Suffice it to say that neither should touch the playa floor. Fire may only be ignited on the many burn platforms erected for this purpose. And please pick up that fallen match.

Police officers of all denominations are among Burning Man’s bubbling crowd. Some of them will be undercover. They can and will arrest you if so inclined. Your tent, teepee, RV, or yurt, however, is your residence while in BRC, with all the civil rights and liberties–however rapidly devolving–of your residence at home. You do not have to allow entry. The Black Rock Rangers with their distinctive Burning Man symbol are volunteer mediators, not officers. Use them early and often to help diffuse potential problems with other Burners.

When packing, don’t forget your art, a hat, a good camping knife, extra batteries, rope, earplugs, sunscreen, Wet Wipes, warm and cool clothes, something to write with, Vitamin C hard candies, a first-aid kit, scarves, money for ice and coffee, and a well-prepared sense of forgiveness and wonder.

Because after you’ve settled in and adhered to the many, many rules designed to allow almost 30,000 people to be wholly free all at the same time, you’ll find that you can be too. But come on, please–have just one more sip.

Download the Burning Man Survival Guide from www.burningman.com.

From the August 22-28, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Going for the Goal

It’s 10:30, and your child knows exactly where she is

By Gretchen Giles

Daniel is a very healthy 15-year-old Petaluma High School student who fully expects to contract adult diabetes at age 42. Don’t be alarmed: He plans to triumph over the disease by age 47. Once cured, he aims to live to 99, soberly aware that he’ll probably have prostate cancer by then, as he’s learned that many men either die of or with this disease.

Having married at 30, retired at 50, written full memoirs by 55, and built two dream houses at ages 53 and 64, respectively, Daniel’s thankfully looks to be a good life. In between he’ll golf (age 37), garden (59), read for universal pleasure (73), and live a quiet life by the ocean for a few years (74).

This young man also knows when he’d first like to have sex and which drugs he plans to take and in what amount, but he’s not quite as forthcoming with that information.

How about you? Got the next several decades all mapped out yet?

For those of us still trying to conduct ourselves by stumbling from accident to epiphany in no discernible order, perhaps it’s time for a high school refresher course in Human Interaction.

Adopted by the Petaluma City Schools District in 1993, Human Interaction is more than just a fancy name for sex education, and it’s absolutely not like any sex ed I remember. Of course, the shocking memory of my elegant sixth-grade teacher suddenly producing an ancient sanitary-napkin belt and hoisting it up over the skirt of her faux Chanel suit, repellently girded for either chastity or battle as she explained the menses, couldn’t be the same as yours. Or so I hope.

We had drug information sessions in which synthetic marijuana smoke was wafted straight up our noses to Pavlov us into virulent rejection of the stuff. We saw dead people’s stupid cigarette-ravaged lungs encased in Lucite, we worried that our DNA would be rearranged by LSD, and we giggled over the innocently persistent questions of one classmate who just couldn’t understand what had happened to his pajama bottoms in the night.

And then, with little more solid introduction to the vagaries of adulthood, we were released into the world. We were making it up ourselves as we stumbled along.

If Petaluma High School English and Human Interaction teacher Bobbin Tobin has her way, this generation of kids isn’t going to stumble a step. They’ll trot because Tobin’s students undergo an intensive 18-week compulsory course that teaches young adults to make choices so well in advance of opportunity that certain things–like sexual activity and drug use–are just simply settled.

“All those programs like ‘Just Say No’ have been shown not to work,” Tobin says emphatically, sitting in the dark afternoon light of her classroom, having spent the morning there teaching summer school.

“What consistently works,” Tobin says, “are positive things. Kids who have goals, kids who are going to college, kids whose parents are involved–those kids make better decisions about their lives. So goal setting is part of the class. They set their own grade goals, they set their food goals for health, and as the class progresses, they set a sex goal.

“They also have to set a drug goal,” she adds. “‘What drugs do you see yourself using and under what conditions? The drug that puts you most at risk for HIV is alcohol. You say that you’re going to remain a virgin, but you’re going to be drinking? How are you going to do this?’

“What the [experts] are saying is that kids are ending up in sexual situations, and they don’t know how they got there,” she continues. “So on a Monday or Tuesday morning at school, they’re asked to set their sex goal: ‘Where, when, under what conditions, how long would you know that person?’ They have to say it! One of the things that our [visiting] speakers present is that if you don’t have a plan for yourself, somebody else can sidetrack you.”

Having a plan for yourself means having a sense of your own history, who you’ve been so that you can more clearly see who you want to be. To that end, Tobin has the class engage in such lifeline exercises as Daniel’s exhaustive delineation of disease, health, marriage, dream homes, and all that reading for universal interest.

“They can’t win the lottery,” Tobin laughs. “They all want the good stuff. The restriction I put on it is that you have to bury your parents. You have to do that because your parents want you to; they don’t want to bury you. You have to face a major illness because most of us do, and I want it to be one you can survive. I don’t want it to be cancer. Again, it’s about going for those goals.”

A student gone astray is what led Tobin to her goal-setting evangelism. Shocked in 1992 to learn that a former student had contracted HIV while attending Petaluma High (“It burst my bubble,” she says), Tobin asked for and received permission to put a one-week AIDS prevention course smack in the middle of her freshman English classes.

The next year the school board formally adopted the Human Interaction program, one that’s unique in the county. Tobin again asked to teach it.

“Abstinence is my battle cry,” she says, admitting that she’s surprised by her own fervor. “I never would have said that it started that way, and I don’t say abstinence until marriage. My urge is for them to make choices after high school, because I see America selling the kids’ teen years away. Abstinence is a way to talk about how to be a kid longer.”

While celibacy may be her battle standard, Tobin also has the county health department in for a frank talk about contraception, plenty of classroom condom passing, and excited discussion of the pending male contraceptive pill.

Tobin’s class is also heavy on family interaction. Students must interview squirming parents who wish they were better liars on the particulars of their own youth, and are even urged to ask their parents what birth-control methods they themselves employ. “‘I don’t want to know!'” Tobin mock-cries, imitating her students, but persists. “I ask them: ‘How many children do you want to have? Thirty-six, one for every year you’re married? Birth control will become an issue in your life. Do your parents have 16 children? Probably not. They’ve made some decisions.'”

Sex education only occupies a third of the program that Tobin has devised with fellow Petaluma High School teacher Peggy Wiley. The other 12 weeks range from apartment hunting to job applications to the food pyramid to–in Tobin’s eyes, perhaps most importantly–learning how the media manipulates young people.

“[Our kids are] seen as Africa–an undeveloped resource,” she says angrily. “Advertisers talk about them as the ideal group because their brains aren’t fully developed, but they’ve got access to money. . . . You ask how sex education has changed? I wish that I could go back and get my degree in media analysis, because the manipulation of the dominant culture to be mindless and instinctual–to go wherever the instinct is–is so counterproductive to the health of our kids.

“If everybody took the TV out of their houses,” she adds, “I would not have to teach this class. The information that comes in because of it targets them and is so sexualized.

“I’m not their life,” she says of her students, energetically gathering up her lunch and briefcase to depart for another appointment. “I have them for 18 weeks. The best I can do is to start a dialogue with each family, but some families are not safe to have dialogues with. I have kids who can get drugs from their parents. If I could get the kids to understand that they are caretaking themselves for their future and that they have to treat themselves very, very thoughtfully, then I’ve done what I’m trying to do.”

From goal to goal, in a very discernible order.

From the August 15-21, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Yurt Place or Mine

Nomads for the new millennium

By Nick Williams

I first encountered the Central Asian structure known as the yurt (ger in Mongolian) while visiting Kazakhstan 12 years ago. Stooping to enter through the carved and painted wooden door, the dimly lit interior was pungent with the odors of damp animal hair, smoke, and spices. The Kazakh family alighted on pillows and oriental carpets spread on the tamped earth, their possessions neatly stored in wooden chests around the perimeter. In the middle, a platter of steaming pilaf awaited sharing.

Akin to a teepee, a kiva of the Southwest, an igloo, or a Massai thatched hut, the yurt has something familiar about its archetypal circular form–the primal sphere reflecting the 360-degree horizon, the cycles of seasons, the spiral path of consciousness. Indeed, it was like coming home, and I imagined that one day I’d live in one.

Now one of these circles is my home. It was erected three years ago with the help of friends on land overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Though the underlying architectural structure of this tent/cabin/pagoda is identical to its native predecessor–the framework consists of wooden rafters spanning from expandable lattice walls to a central pressure ring–Kazakh and Mongolian nomads would hardly recognize this up-scale progeny. Where the traditional yurt is swathed in sheets of felt made from pressed animal hair (not skins), mine is covered with laminated canvas punctuated with vinyl windows, wooden doors, and is crowned with an acrylic dome skylight.

The relatively low cost and ease of construction make yurts ideal temporary homes, weekend retreats, guest homes, or studios for art, dance, or yoga. Occidental Arts and Ecology erected two 24-foot yurts as dormitories for their workshop participants. A 30-foot yurt in Sebastopol formerly hosted monthly “Dance Your Prayers” evenings. Two years ago, in a brilliant move to help solve a long-standing problem, Napa County bought a dozen yurts to put up seasonally as housing for migrant farm workers.

On the outskirts of Bodega, weaver and fiber artist Ed (many yurt owners lack permits; last names are omitted to protect their privacy) erected a 20-foot yurt among his apple trees to use as his studio. “Besides being economical,” Ed said, “the main reason I chose a yurt was because I wasn’t sure how long I’d be staying here, and if I were to move, I could pack it up and take the studio with me.”

In hindsight Ed said he would have bought a larger, 30-foot yurt, and the only big problem is that on hot days it’s too warm inside. Though temperate regions such as Northern California, particularly near the coast, are ideal for yurts, on those rare hot days they can become giant porta-ovens. And even with the optional insulation liner, the occasional subfreezing temperatures require keeping the wood-burning stove stoked.

For decades back-to-the-land types have created their own yurts from scratch. Now several companies in the USA are dedicated yurt makers. Depending on the size–typically between 16 and 30 feet–and various options (extra windows, French doors, high walls, insulation liners, opening skylights), a yurt can cost between $1,400 to $7,000. Highly reputable and longest in the field is Pacific Yurts Inc. in Oregon, who sell between 300 and 400 a year.

Fast gaining ground since it began operations eight years ago is Nesting Bird Yurt Company out of Washington state. President Jody Locklear estimates that a total of about 1,000 to 1,500 yurts are sold annually in the United States and that Nesting Bird’s sales have doubled annually for the last four years.

“There are several reasons for the surge of interest in yurts,” Locklear surmises. “Particularly among baby boomers, there’s a trend towards simplifying life. Those wanting a weekend getaway or a significant alternative home in a quiet place might choose a yurt because of the portability factor and its low environmental impact. And yurts are no longer simply an off-the-grid tent. Upscale ones have hard-wood floors, stone hearths, lofts, and full kitchens that appeal to someone unwilling to sacrifice creature comforts.”

Though yurt life hints of a perpetual camp-out, my thoroughly modern yurt with pine-paneled floor is wired with electricity, phone, and hot water; my kitchen is equipped with sink, under-the-counter refrigerator, and a two-burner propane stove; and my bathroom boasts a glass shower, sink, and composting toilet. And even on the frostiest winter nights, it’s warm and cozy with a wood-burning stove.

Like myself, many people in the North Bay have chosen yurts as their primary residence. Wishing to become independent of the rent scene, 10 years ago Jackie Screechfield moved to a meadow in west Sonoma and created an 18-foot yurt. “I read books on yurt making and got blueprints from a woman in Bodega that had a small yurt-making business. I sewed my first yurt on a Singer sewing machine and broke lots of needles!”

She lived in the yurt for three years, birthed two children there, and later built a new 22-foot structure. When friends began requesting yurts, she bought an industrial machine and now creates custom yurts and also consults with those wishing to make their own. Though they lack the fine finish of the larger manufacturers, each is unique and runs at about half the cost.

It’s impossible to estimate the number of yurts dotting the hills and valleys of the North Bay, but it’s easily in the hundreds. Though yurts are structurally sound, can withstand 120-mile-an-hour gales, and are earthquake-proof, obtaining a permit for one still varies in California from county to county. Typically, they are granted on a case-by-case basis and allowed for nonhabitable purposes such as studios, offices, or recreational structures. Napa and Mendocino have granted permits for housing, though Marin does not allow yurts as permanent living spaces.

When I called the Sonoma County Permit and Resource Department, the man I spoke to was entirely ignorant of yurts and claimed (mistakenly) that they’ve never given out permits for them. Despite the laws, a large percentage of yurt dwellers, particularly in remote regions living off the grid, brush off the formalities of codes altogether and live in yurts anyway.

When Robert and Marcie began constructing their dream home in Marin in 1999, they bought a yurt and set it up on their land. It was permitted as a storage building, but their three children used it as a bedroom. The 20-foot yurt, permit, concrete platform, and sun deck cost them a total of about $10,000.

When it came time for Barbara to erect her 24-foot yurt among the redwoods in western Sonoma County, she put out a call to friends for a Northern California version of a barn-raising party. “It was really wonderful to have all this communal support to help create my new home,” she recalls. “A caterer friend’s contribution was a wonderful meal that we shared afterwards.” (One person said, “Only in California could a person have two conflicting invites on the same weekend for a yurt-raising party!”)

The circular deck had been constructed beforehand, and the yurt was fully erected within four or five hours. (Though over a dozen people helped out, only four or five people are needed.) Barbara now uses her 24-foot, high-wall (7-foot tall) yurt as a living room, office, guest room, and a meeting space for her women’s group.

“Being a circle it’s very womblike, centered, and grounding. When you look up at the spokes of the rafter, it’s like living inside a medicine wheel, a mandala, or a sand painting,” Barbara shared. “People love the space, and a couple friends have reported having special experiences. I had a gathering and my friend sat in the center and had this incredible experience of oneness and well-being. The very shape of it may actually draw in energy.”

What Jackie says she loves about yurt life is that with the thinner barrier delineating inside and outside, nature becomes more intimate. “Inside my yurt, I’m totally aware of what’s happening around me. Every rain drop, the sun moving through the seasons, the moon, the birds. . . . And when you sit in the center and sing, play an instrument, or chant, the sound rebounds back to you and creates a special resonance.”

For more information, contact Pacific Yurts (800.944.0240 or www.yurts.com); Nesting Bird Yurts (360.385.3972 or www.nestingbirdyurts.com); and Native Now (707.874.2414), who make custom yurts and consult with those making their own.

From the August 15-21, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Under Perfect Skin

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen rule the world

By Sara Bir

I went into the Big Lots store to buy discounted Easter candy. What I walked out with was a Mary-Kate and Ashley “Let’s Hang Out” playset, which I set up on my desk at work the next day. It looks like a miniature version of an average teenage girl’s dream rec room: wide-screen TV, laptop computer, fancy stereo, CD tower, splashy-print beanbags. All that’s missing are the doll versions of Mary-Kate and Ashley, but their absence casts the illusion that the twins are on location shooting another direct-to-video romp, soon to return and resume hanging out like any other normal kids.

Real-life Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are slender and sunny media-perfect 16-year-olds–goofy and easygoing but not too spirited to be threatening–who are preoccupied with getting their driver’s licenses and probably would never date a ne’er-do-well loser rebel guy. They like to dance, make movies, and shop.

If the tiny contents of the playset represent their true interests, then hanging out for Mary-Kate and Ashley dolls means watching Mary-Kate and Ashley movies, playing Mary-Kate and Ashley Game Boy games, reading Mary-Kate and Ashley paperbacks, browsing through Mary-Kate and Ashley magazine, and perusing www.mary-kateandashley.com. Beyond the size, it’s difficult to discern the difference between the plastic toys and the plastic people.

Even with all of the glitter-caked facets in their ultraspecialized media empire, which span every conceivable commercial outlet known to consumer culture–books, videos, toys, movies, video games, TV shows, a website, a magazine, clothing–the oft-projected image of America’s current favorite twins (excluding the recently unjoined Marias) does not delve much deeper than their mini Meg Ryan haircuts and midriff-bearing, bedazzled designer T-shirts. The living Mary-Kate and Ashley don’t seem to have much to offer that would set them apart from their 8-inch toy counterparts.

Becoming Perfect

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsens’ path to tween (a most awful contraction for a most awful age, between little kid and bona fide teenager) domination began for them at the tender age of nine months, when the wee bairns shared the role of little Michelle Tanner on ABC’s dreckfest Full House. Starring Bob “America’s Funniest Home Videos” Saget, the show was a sitcom hit with a nine-season tenure. Baby Michelle quickly became the show’s most doted-on character, her toddling appearance in any scene inevitably eliciting canned awws from the studio audience.

You can imagine the charm implicit in discovering that adorable Michelle turned out to be played by not one but two real-life moppets. Enter Dualstar, the company responsible for transforming Mary-Kate and Ashley from little girls into a brand name.

During the middle seasons of Full House, the mothers of fellow child co-stars Candace Cameron and Jodie Sweetin advised the twins’ parents, Dave and Jarnie Olsen, to arrange better payment for their daughters, who were clearly the show’s biggest assets. Dad Olsen hired show business lawyer Robert Thorne to tend to this–which Thorne did, but the lawyer also smelled major untapped money potential beyond the twins’ salary.

This was back when a sulky Macaulay Culkin’s parents were locked in a bitter custody battle over their son, who wanted nothing to do with them. Thorne wanted to arrange a deal that allowed no one else but the twins themselves the option to exploit Mary-Kate and Ashley mania. He called the company Dualstar, with Mary-Kate and Ashley its shareholders and owners. At six, they were entitled to all the profit they made from any feature they starred in; it also made them the only six-year-old producers in Hollywood. The twins went from making $2,400 per episode at the start of Full House to $80,000 an episode by its close in 1995.

So Dave and Jarnie Olsen found themselves with pint-sized goldmines in their hands, and Dualstar’s Olsen machine kicked into high gear. 1993’s quadruple-platinum Our First Video (yes, their first video) set off a domino chain of Dualstar direct-to-video releases that more or less fictionalized MK&A’s real-life childhood onscreen.

When Full House ended its run, the twins Olsen (then 10) were freed up to devote themselves entirely to Dualstar’s ever branching tree of projects. Instead of the show’s demise plummeting the twins’ popularity off a cliff, it propelled their fame into a profitable orbit in its own right.

All of this wheeling, dealing, and working affected the impressionable minds of the child stars not too terribly much, it turns out. According to a 1998 bio, “If the Olsens seem like they are having a lot of fun, it may be because what they do professionally so closely parallels their real-life interests. Among their favorite things to do are to act, sing, shop, watch MTV, enjoy the great outdoors, dance, play baseball, ride horses, and spend quality time with their real-life family.”

That was four years ago, though. Since then MK&A turned candy-sweet 16, sprouted boobs and girlish little figures–as superstars in blossom will–and turned the subject matter of their videos and TV shows away from ballet and ponies to boys, designer handbags, and boys. They launched their own magazine (currently in limbo, as their publisher, H&S Media, went out of business) and two more television series–the Saturday morning cartoon Mary-Kate and Ashley in Action on ABC, and the live-action So Little Time on the Fox Network family channel.

Despite their financial clout, the girls’ allowance in 1998 was a modest $10 a week. Now, even though their schedules are packed, the social lives of Mary-Kate and Ashley have not strayed to big-time jet-set indulgences.

The girls both have nonfamous, long-term steady boyfriends, and–unlike Britney–have not yet been caught smoking, let alone choking on their own vomit on the sidewalk in front of the Viper Room. The adult world hasn’t really caught on to them like it did with Britney, though, and the twins are mostly still a teen phenomenon, leaving the girls more room to be girls and less pressure to be adults.

So even though the busy, high-profile life they lead is by no stretch of the imagination normal, it’s probably as normal as it can be. The girls seem unscandalously well-adjusted. “They like acting,” their father told the Wall Street Journal in 1997. “As soon as they stop enjoying it, it ends.” Apparently, Mary-Kate and Ashley still enjoy acting. A lot. Right now on Amazon.com, there are 59 videos available starring Mary-Kate and Ashley.

Once MK&A hit puberty, Dualstar began preening the twins ad infinitum.The gawky average young girls of white-bread America, who are normal to begin with, can’t covet normality because that’s what makes up their whole life. To them, Mary-Kate and Ashley represent impossibly über-normal, liberated, middle-class princesses, girls who have all the latest styles they desire at their sparkle-polished fingertips and with makeup artists to camouflage any acne they might incur.

They live in L.A. and own their own horses. They fly to the Bahamas and play with dolphins on camera. They have more of a chance of meeting Prince William than 8 billion other girls do. Not only do they have their own website, they have a staff to make it for them. The twins are Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High, Betty and Veronica, Debbie Gibson, Madonna, Hayley Mills, and the Mickey Mouse Club all rolled up into two boy-crazy, flirtatious, mystery-solving, fashion-spellbound go-getters who use the words “cool,” “awesome,” and “whatever” to excess.

A few years ago they stopped being girls and became miniaturized characters lifted from Friends. You get the feeling that when Mary-Kate and Ashley have their menses, the fluid dappling their maxi pads is as blue and clear and clean as Windex, just like on TV commercials. Real periods for real girls.

In keeping with the further specialization and fragmentation of target demographics, tweens have their own stores, scores of their own magazines, their own wardrobe of pocket video-game systems, and their own technicolor junk foods. Mary-Kate and Ashley, whose product line includes a tie-in to every possible commodity, are ideal Generation Z superstars.

No big companies are competing with Dualstar, which may be the key to the twins’ hefty market share. Mary-Kate and Ashley have an umbrella that extends over not only onscreen entertainment but clothing, books, music, games, toys, and periodicals–and it’s all specifically girl-oriented, whereas the bulk of children’s media is for boys or families. What other tween sensations offer that all-in-one tidy company, one whose motto is “Real Talk for Real Girls”?

Peas in a Media Pod

It’s hard for an Olsen novice to tell the twins apart. Of course they look like each other–they’re twins. But in real life, do they act like each other? Is one painfully shy while the other is a brazen go-getter? Hmm. Here’s a 2000 interview from TheCelebrityCafe.com, straight from the Olsens’ mouth:

TheCelebrityCafe.com: What are some of the basic differences in personalities between the two of you?

Ashley: Well, there are many differences. We each have our own likes and dislikes, like any sisters would, but the basic difference? Probably that Mary-Kate loves to ride horses and I love to dance more.

Alas, there don’t appear to be dark, buried tragic flaws, their own private and exclusive causes for dissent. Mary-Kate is not secretly goth, Ashley is not struggling with sexual identity issues. They are boy-crazy, mall-mad teenage girls who, beyond the fleeting amusement and cotton-candy escapism of their TVmoviestoysmagazinebooksvideo-gamesclothingline, have nothing substantial to offer us. Oprah has a personality, Martha has too much of a personality, and Britney can at least sing. Mary-Kate and Ashley are chirpy pseudotartlets who don’t even offer the thrill of being rebellious.

Their book series (there are six) offer another glimpse at the picture-perfect world MK&A/Dualstar have created. The contrived scenarios in titles like Too Many Teddies, The Case of the Cheerleading Camp Mystery, and Calling All Boys have 10-year-old girls atwitter with vicarious popularity.

Here’s a random sample from the beginning of Two of a Kind: It’s Snow Problem:

“I can’t decide. Should I wear this sweater for the Winter Festival, or this sweater?”

Twelve-year-old Mary-Kate Burke glanced up from her desk. Her twin sister Ashley was standing in the doorway of her dorm room. She held a fluffy pink cardigan in one hand and a black cashmere turtleneck in the other.

“I do look totally awesome in pink.” Ashley held the cardigan up to her chest and struck a supermodel pose. Then she did the same thing with the turtleneck. “But I look totally awesome in black, too. Hmm, major dilemma!”

On to the videos. Faced with all the options at the video store, I had trouble deciding. There was Holiday in the Sun, but Winning London looked better. And, hmm, Our Lips Are Sealed was filmed in Australia. I’ve never been there! I wound up renting two–Winning London and Our Lips Are Sealed–because what better way to dissect the Olsens than by watching not one but two of their movies. One per twin.

After watching Our Lips Are Sealed, I can kind of tell who is who now. Ashley has a higher voice, longer hair, and is made out to be ditzier than Mary-Kate, who is also ditzy, but just the slightest degree spunkier.

Our Lips Are Sealed was really not so bad. It was rather like a made-for-television movie or a throwaway Disney TV special, and those can be fun from time to time. I liked the Mondrian-inspired go-go dresses that the twins wore to the yacht party. And the script did manage a few high points of near cleverness; e.g., a priceless jewel that winds up in Ashley’s possession is called the Kneel Diamond and the movie ends with “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” playing over the credits.

Turn on Your Heartlight

Even given our possibly shared Neil Diamond soft spot, one thing still bugs me about the dual stars: Mary-Kate and Ashley present a conflicted message with almost every product they pump off the assembly line. Our Lips Are Sealed was supposed to have the moral that “popularity doesn’t matter,” but with trendy outfits aplenty and two cute boyfriends, by the end of the movie the girls have won popularity from everyone.

Their website offers daily thoughts, such as “Put your mistakes to good use; learn from them” and “The simple things in life bring the most happiness.” Then, after absorbing those Zen capsules of inner clarity and truth, you can click on the “Real Beauty” archives and read about how to get your eyebrows waxed, just like your favorite Hollywood stars!

Mary-Kate and Ashley make crummy role models because there is nothing outright objectionable about them until you realize that they are doing their job all too well. So convincing are they as mild-mannered typical teens that you begin to overlook the product placement and feverish materialism that colors every last cross-promotional Dualstar-licensed tidbit.

At KB Toys in the mall, the arrival of the new Mary-Kate and Ashley “Sweet Sixteen” dolls bumped the Mary-Kate and Ashley “Movie Magic” dolls off the display shelves and into the mark-downs. The accessories with the “Sweet Sixteen” dolls were better, but I liked the twins’ clothing for “Movie Magic” more, plus their hairstyles were less scraggly. And only $6.99 per doll! I had an empty “Let’s Hang Out” playset on my desk yearning for them. If I had dolls to occupy it, I could reward myself during the grueling weekdays with little breaks, posing the twins or changing their outfits. My playset was sitting there going to waste!

Little Plastic People

As it turns out, the plastic Mary-Kate and Ashley on my desk have become very comfortable in their plastic Mary-Kate and Ashley world. Sometimes they read their magazine, and they watch their TV show on Saturday morning. On Sundays they ride their horse or go to the mall. And what does the future hold for them? Maybe Ashley will elope with Steve from Blue’s Clues. Maybe Mary-Kate will become a reclusive Buddhist monk, leaving Ashley to hold down Monostar by herself as the “Olsen Twin.” Maybe they will attend Harvard and become brilliant literary critics or physicists.

Or maybe they will go on forever releasing direct-to video frolics (Double Divorcées on the Town, Menopause Madness, You’re Invited to Mary-Kate and Ashley’s Nursing Home Party) into eternity. And maybe, just maybe, no one will care.

From the August 15-21, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.