GOODBYE BRENDA:  TAKING DOWN MY SHANNON DOHERTY POSTER

Yesterday I had to do a very sad thing. I went behind my bedroom door and I took my poster of Shannon Doherty off of the wall.

Sigh.

My poster of Shannon Doherty. It pictures her leaning up against a wall with her arms crossed and dressed in a oversized black blazer with her dark evil eyes, long dark hair with Bettie Page bangs and this little smirk on her face that says: "That's right boys. It's me - Brenda Walsh - and I'm more then you can ever handle." 

Man oh man! I remember back to the day that I first bought that poster. I was in the tenth grade - about 1991 I guess. Wow, nearly thirteen years now. That's a long time to have a poster of a girl hanging on your bedroom wall. Shannon was starring in FOX's sleeper hit (at the time) the now legendary teen soap Beverly Hills 90210 playing good girl Brenda Walsh. I first saw her picture in an issue of TV Guide and without ever seeing an episode of the show I immediately fell in love. What was it about her? No real secret - dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin and in that particular picture I remember she was wearing an oversized blazer (which was real trendy at the time) and a bulky pair of boots (not the sleek ones I'd later acquire a fetish for, but close enough). A few weeks later I tried to begin to follow the show if only to gaze upon the object of my new found desire but it didn't last long. I soon grew tired of the Beverly Hills antics of Brandon, Brenda, Dylan and all their cool friends. Ugh. A weird eccentric kid in a fedora and trench coat just couldn't relate. Yet, despite the banality of Beverly Hills 90210 my adoration for Shannon continued. I remember paying Brian Mander's kid sister two dollars for every pin up of Shannon that she could give me out of the teeny bopper magazines that she would buy which I could decorate my own room with.

Then came the day that I was walking through Zellers and I noticed a bunch of Beverly Hills 90210 posters in the rack. Sure enough there was a large poster of Shannon Doherty. Soon her poster was hung with pride on my bedroom wall. I remember staring up at her at night and fantasizing that Shannon and I were reenacting Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's make out scene in "From Here to Eternity" (look - I was a weird little kid, okay).

But that's when the criticisms started. Shannon was beginning to get a bad name in the Hollywood scene. "Shannon is a drunken bitch who gets into bar fights," they told me. She's just misunderstood, I reasoned. Anybody who was discovered by Michael Landon and who was on Little House can't be all that bad. "Jennie Garth is more attractive," they would tell me. Bah! What did they know? Give me Shannon's dark evil raven looks to any California princess any day, I thought. "Her eyes are uneven," people would go so far to point out. Are they? I couldn't tell but the angle that her head was turned on the poster made it hard to really figure it out.

So there Shannon hung on my wall for a good long time. After a while she hung in my closet, and when I finally grew older, moved out of my mothers house and into my own apartment she hung behind the bedroom door where only the privileged would gaze on her. Although her career went up and down - getting fired from 90210, getting hired on Charmed, getting fired from Charmed, the Playboy spread, the bar fights and divorce and tabloids and bad press and getting fat and old and dumpy looking and haggard like if the drugs, liquor and partying had taken their toll - I never really stopped loving the fresh faced picture of Brenda Walsh hanging on my bedroom wall. It reminded me of what she was to me. Shannon Doherty was my poster girl. My pin up queen. Can't say I was ever much of a fan of anything she ever did but when I was sixteen years old there wasn't a more desirable woman in the world to me.

But, alas, there comes a time when you need to grow up and put childish things away. So I carefully took down my now brittle and crumbling poster of Shannon, took one last look at that smirk and those eyes, and began to roll her up carefully into a tube and I put the elastic around to hold her in place for another day.

Goodbye Brenda. It's been nice. Hope you find your paradise.

I sighed, and then I hung up a poster of the Black Canary in its place. Okay. Maybe I'm not ready to grow up just yet. :)
 

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