Throw away your bongs and bring out the dancing lobsters
Like many college-aged adults in the United States today, I can still remember my 6-year-old self nestled into the living room couch watching The Amanda Show after an arduous day in the first grade. What an unparalleled way to wind down, I thought, as Amanda shouted her special blend of silliness and non sequiturs — the type that can only ever be fully understood by elementary school kids and recreational drug users — from inside my television.
In the early 2000s, Amanda Bynes was a unique breed of hero. Her sketches felt eons ahead of anything else my friends and I had ever seen, and it didn’t seem as though she cared what adults thought of her (as if their oldness could even begin to get in the way of her genius). She was distinctly our champion. Our parents had Letterman; we had Bynes.
This has all changed drastically over the past couple of years. Starting with a slew of traffic violations, evolving through a Twitter-chronicled meltdown and climaxing in an eventual arrest, Bynes has become a laughingstock. Gone are the days of bringing in the dancing lobsters, traded instead for tweets such as “drake is gorgeous,” or “My Life Revolves Around My Nose Jobs Until My Nose Is Finished.”
Although she continues to amuse, fans are no longer laughing with Bynes. Instead, they laugh at the bong she allegedly threw out her 36th-floor apartment window or at the fire she started in an elderly stranger’s suburban driveway. Bynes’ behavior is so outlandish she can even make an act as terrifying as soaking a small dog in gasoline and nearly setting it ablaze a laughable comic dust-up.
But maybe it’s time that we stop laughing at Bynes. After all, the woman has been in the spotlight since she started acting professionally at age 7. She secured a leading role in All That before she was in her teens, not to mention landing her eponymous show before the age most kids start high school.
With a childhood like this, it was never difficult to predict that Bynes would develop problems in adulthood. Her admission to rehab seems to show trouble with addiction, and speculations of Bynes suffering from schizophrenia have circulated around the Internet. She has legitimate health concerns, and we all share a small part of the blame.
Let’s face it: Not even the quirkiest of quirky would act like Bynes simply for attention. She has real issues — not just the I’m-famous-and-still-not-happy type. Here’s hoping when she gets out of rehab she still holds same sense of humor as before — because it would be a personal catastrophe to realize now in young adulthood that one of my favorite childhood TV shows was founded on the exploitation of a child’s mental infirmity.
To Amanda: Come back to the land of the living; we all miss you. This time, though, do it for your sake, not ours.
