I Liked Blair Better When She Was More Bitchy Than Crazy

You may remember Lisa Whelchel, who played Blair on The Facts of Life, and went on to write some astoundingly creepy advice books on Christian Parenting.  S.z. first noticed Lisa’s “creative correction” methods back in 2004, when she was featured in the Washington Post (scroll down to item B):

Whelchel offers the following: “For lying or other offenses of the tongue, I ’spank’ my kids’ tongues. I put a tiny drop of hot sauce on the end of my finger and dab it onto my child’s tongue. It stings for a while, but it abates. (It’s the memory that lingers!)”

Macing the kids will also create memories that linger.  In fact, any number of chemical weapons make great disciplinary aids, in that they require much less physical exertion on the parent’s part than do old-fashioned beatings.

A little later (scroll down to the 2nd post), s.z. noticed that Lisa was writing an advice column in Today’s Christian Woman, coming off like a combination of a dotty Ann Landers and an Old Testament prophet whose lunch of locusts really wasn’t agreeing with him.  In the excerpted column, Lisa offered foolproof tips on what to tell if your teen is gay, and how to stamp it out before it metastasizes through the while family.

Two common threads exist among those who struggle with homosexual tendencies. First, does your son exhibit any signs of childhood molestation or incest? If you suspect this is the case, seek help from a local Christian counselor.

Then look at the father/son (and for girls, the mother/daughter) relationship. Does your son feel accepted by his father? Is your husband a jock who rejects or even ridicules your son’s interest in the arts? Perhaps your son’s father isn’t even in the picture, either by divorce, absence, death, or passivity. The father holds the key to affirming a boy’s manhood. Without that blessing, a gaping hole is left in a young man’s life. Fortunately, a healing substitute often can be found in a strong father figure. If not, some young men attempt to “cannibalize” other men through homosexual actions to fill that void.

So, if your son wasn’t molested, has a father who doesn’t make make fun of him for being a sissy, and he isn’t a cannibal, then there’s no way he’s gay.

Now, Lisa tells us how to make sex so creepy that your kids will never be heterosexual either.

When each of our children turned ten, my husband, Steve, and I took them to a hotel for an overnighter, just the three of us. We would check in one early afternoon and spend the rest of the day doing something fun together.

Before heading out to dinner, we read the chapter “Male+Female+God’s Gift of Life=Baby,” from a book entitled How You Are Changing (Concordia), by Jane Graver. This was the moment when our son, Tucker, responded with, “I should have packed a barf bag!” and when our daughter, Haven, began with, “You mean our pastor did that?” then proceeded to ask the same question about every parent she knew.

So, the plan so far: never say anything at all about sex until the kid is ten.  Then, take him (or her) to a motel and read him the chapter of the book that tells him that the man puts his thing in the woman’s you-know-what, and God sends the woman a baby.  Reassure him that although this is disgusting and icky, that the pastor does it too — just not with Mrs. Pastor, ’cause she’s too spiritual for that kind of thing.

Over dinner, we answered any questions our children had (although at this point, Tucker never wanted to hear the word “sex” again!).

See, the plan works!  Tucker is now effectively asexual, and Lisa will never have to worry about him defiling his purity.

When we returned to the hotel, we read a few chapters from the book, What’s the Big Deal: Why God Cares About Sex (NavPress), by Stan and Brenna Jones. Steve and I like this book because it forthrightly answers so many questions from a godly perspective without giving more information than necessary. Before our son or daughter hit overload, we laid the book down for the evening, snuggled up in bed together, and rented a family movie.

Finish off your child’s sexuality by keeping him in the motel room as you read to him several chapters of a book on how sex is bad unless it’s to make babies — and then crawl into the motel bed with him.

The next morning was interspersed with a few more chapters, a lot more fun, a few more questions, and a lot more hugs, until we completed the book together.

And so, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, the Wechel children have been effectively conditioned.  But if Lisa finds out they weren’t, I’m sure she has some Creative Corrections for the occasion.  You know, like a clothespin on the body part that offended Christ.

Well, Lisa’s back, and The Bloggess has got her!  It seems Holly, Lisa’s hard-working PR rep, emailed The Bloggess asking if she’d like to interview the former Facts of Life star about her latest endeavor:

Lisa Whelchel is currently on tour with the Nation’s Largest Women’s Conference - “Women of Faith” which has attracted nearly 4 Million women since it launched in 1996.

The curious capitalization makes it sound as though it’s a conference of the Nation’s Largest Women — you know, Margo Dydek, Julie Strain, Allison Hayes from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman — but then Holly drives that image right out of my mind when she drops this bombshell of trivia:

Lisa Whelchel is so committed to living a downsized life as a mom that she even passed on JENNIFER ANISTON’s Role on “FRIENDS” which was offered to her. That role made Jennifer Aniston’s career and she earned $25 Million in 2008 and was ranked the #8 highest earning celebrity in Hollywood on FORBES 2009 Celebrity 100 List. It’s difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast to living on a pastor’s salary!

For “passed on” read “someone sent her agency the pilot script” or possibly even “she made an audition tape that the casting director’s assistant eventually got around to watching.”  But the important thing is that the former TV star is now living the  modest, humble, stay-at-home life of a pastor’s wife (a phrase Holly relentlessly repeats until one begins to suspect onomatomania), which is obvious from the way Lisa is touring the country and giving interviews.

The Bloggess obliged Holly by emailing a list of twelve probing questions for Blair.  Here’s a sample:

6. Your song, “ Cover Me, Lord“, is very pretty but I think it would be more mainstream if it was something about getting shot at by radical non-Christians and you’re all“Cover me, Lord!” and he picks up a bazooka but in the end all the people he killed would be up in heaven with him because it’s a “Bazooka Of Salvation”. And then they’d all be like “Ah! You got me, Lord!” and point at him like those Mentos commercials. That would be awesome. This is less of a question than a suggestion, I guess.

Read the whole thing.  It’ll make your day.

Posted by scott on July 14th, 2009