Dorkadia

The other day I was dropping a few Ragnarok postcards off at the Grind and I showed one to the cute barista behind the counter and proudly told her she should come. She took one look at the back and said something like, “Oh my God…you guys are such dorks.” I blinked, opened my mouth to say something like, “nuh-uh…am not a dork!” then thought better of it and slunk back to my chair, dorky cup of hot cocoa in hand.

She’s right, of course. We’re dorks. Not the entire Tantalus Theatre Group, mind you…one or two of us are patently cool (literally…they have taken out patents on their variety of cool…see, that was a dorky joke), but by and large, we’re dorks. The thing is, I’m not sure that’s a problem. Didn’t the dorks finally win? At the end of all of those ‘80s movies, don’t the dorks prove that smart is cool, that creative is powerful, and don’t we get the hot cheerleader while the quarterback gets dunked in the pool while the college dean laughs at him? Don’t we rise victorious while “We Are the Champions” plays in the background? I seem to remember something about that in the handbook.

I like to think of the beginning of ‘90s as the end of the ultimate ‘80s movie (that being the ‘80s, themselves), and with it, I like to believe the dork found power. The ‘90s saw a pop, followed by a full-on explosion of nerdiness into the realms of cool. Suddenly pedantic intellectual conversations orbiting around minor semantic points became all the rage. Obscure bands nobody had heard of were way more popular than the ones everyone had heard of. Bands that were “alternative” were cool. It became a style of music and a mode of being, as did grunge. Afternoon cartoons began to reference things no child could ever get…and we loved them for it. At the cusp of the decade, Pump Up the Volume came out. It was the definitive 90’s high school movie. Instead of the film culminating in everyone realizing that the nerd was cool for being himself, it told us that in the beginning and went on to the moral that it didn’t matter if the nerd was cool or not, because, cool or not, everyone’s still just as tortured as everyone else.

I liken the dotcom boom at the end of the decade to the moment in Lambada when the class nerd teaches the class that computers are cool by programming his computer (in only three or four keystrokes) to play music that an animated man dances to. In no time, the whole class is up and dancing and they all want to know how to use a computer.

I’m not exactly sure where I was going with this when I started typing it this morning. Maybe I was heading somewhere into the fact that, just as the dotcom boom fizzled, the rise of the nerd seems to have been fleeting. Eventually advertising caught up with it (I can still remember the commercial that called Budweiser the “alternative beer”) and the edgy and obscure was marketed, packaged, and shipped off to Middle America to mellow out in the cask at the nation’s center for a while. The jock vs. nerd high school movie, which was practically extinct in the '90s (unless it was being produced for ironic reasons, because to do so was tragically kitschy or satirical), returned worse than ever for the sense of irony and the apologetic intellectualism it picked up from the '90s.

Worse still, the nerds who forged forward the revolution of proving to everyone that nerd was cool suddenly became elitist and snobby. At the top of the food chain, former nerds had just as little time for people different than them as jocks once had for the former nerds (an event predicted in 1992's Revenge of the Nerds III). The dreaded hipster was born.

Again, not sure exactly where I was going with this, and I’ve kind of petered out. I think this whole entry was really just an excuse to use a Lambada metaphor. Which, I suppose, makes me the biggest nerd of all.