#mike farrell imagine

[markdelonge]

xero’s account

hello and welcome to your (new) favorite blog !

— my name is zero ..

— she/her

— i’m sixteen, dni if you’re uncomfortable

— october libra 🐈‍⬛🖤

— music enthusiast

** punk rock, nu metal, hip hop, pop, r&b **

this account’s content contains:

imagines / headcannons, gifs (my own and reposts) pictures, memes, writing prompts, moodboards, photosets.

** i get a lot of content from pinterest so if you ever see a gif / edit / picture of yours (or whatever the case may be) dm me and i’ll give credits/delete ! **

requests are open

masterlist links 🔗 : linkin park, blink-182, ariana grande, jackass cast, criminal minds cast

— all of my imagines are gender neutral unless specified

— feel free to dm me and go into detail on what you want me to write

— will not write: stepdad/mom x stepson/daughter, incest, s3lf h@rm, su1c!de, smut, abuse, kidnappings, bestiality,

— open to constructive criticism!! i’ve been writing for the better half of four years now but there’s always room to improve!

— feel free to submit more than one request but do not spam my inbox about the same story, i don’t work well under pressure and it will get scrapped :)

— please be patient! i try to put as much thought as i possibly can into my stories, so some may take a little longer than others

** disclaimer: i no longer write for eminem **

** disclaimer two: i made these ari gifs :) **

[prince-of-elsinore]

still thinking about that Mike Farrell quote about BJ walking to Maine, specifically the “And it probably wouldn’t have been as wonderful as he’d have hoped it was, because you know, lives have gone in different directions” and how really that just acknowledges and summarizes the core irony and bitter-sweetness of not only beejhawk as a ship, but BJ and Hawkeye’s canon friendship, and the ethos of the entire show.

It’s a cruel twist of fate that brought these people together. War, senseless destruction, indiscriminate killing: these are the circumstances under which they become intertwined. None of them want to be there, they all want out, they endure unutterable horrors and will forever be altered and scarred. Wouldn’t it be morbid to cherish any part of that experience? To want anything but to leave it behind and wash it all off? And yet--they will miss each other. All the goodbyes are difficult, and BJ and Hawkeye's is the hardest of all. Hawk knows, and BJ must too, deep down where he’s not ready to admit to himself, that it will never be the same between them. The war created the conditions of their friendship. The stress, the blood, the fear, the yearning, the depression, all were part of it--are the very reason they “cling to each other,” in BJ’s own words. They cannot go back to that, and given the choice, they would not.

BJ and Hawk will undoubtedly miss each other, very much, as they both admit. I’m sure there are many times post-war that they wish the other were there, or might even long for the simplicity and camaraderie of the Swamp (with the rose-tinted glasses of memory), but you can’t pick and choose which parts of an experience to keep and which to throw away. The war was a package deal. Any possible reunion between any of the 4077 would, inevitably, make it clear how lives went on and paths diverged. For most of them that wouldn’t even be a disappointment, but for BJ, who clings harder than anyone to the “there and later,” to the fantasy of a perfect future, of course whatever he hoped for when he so confidently told Hawk “I promise” isn’t how it would play out. But that doesn’t mean--and Mike’s quote doesn’t even rule out--that there’s no happy ending, even if your happy ending is BJ and Hawk together. It only means that BJ will have to realize that his relationship with Hawk isn’t something he could preserve in ice and then thaw out and jump back into like nothing at all has changed (just as he’ll no doubt realize with Peg when he gets home). Because everything has changed. The war is over. If BJ and Hawkeye want to preserve their bond, they’d have to find new patterns, new ways of relating to each other, new routines away from death and destruction and hardship. It would take time and effort. Mike also said they’d make a point of seeing each other. To me that sounds like he thinks they’d be willing to put in the work. I like to think that too, even if I’m imagining a bit more drastic an endgame.

tl;dr: Mike Farrell understands that at the core of MASH is the paradox that these people mean more to each other than anyone who didn’t share that experience, but the status quo where those relationships are forged and flourish is a state of war that they all want out of so badly.

[thats-highly-significant]

Casually talking about MASH with my 55-year-old coworker and managing to restrain myself from telling him that I’ve had a blog dedicated to MASH for four years and have said the most heinous things imaginable about Mike Farrell’s tits on a weekly basis should get me The Congressional Medal of Honor btw

[theloopus]

imagine besides Mike Farrell saying BJ goes to Maine in an interview someone discovered they actually shot an alternative ending where BJ is home with Peg and he's like ok but i can't live without Hawkeye actually so i'm gonna walk across the country. Hawkeye i'm coming to you..... aaand cut ok everybody good work. end tape. well this actually happened to us queapers

[thebreakfastgenie]

"Look, one year, Erin and Peg and I will come east." "One year." "Yeah. And, um, and we'll get together and, uh..." "Have dinner." "Yeah." "In other words, goodbye."

A year later, BJ keeps his promise. Erin and Peg in tow, he heads East, to Hawkeye, and they all have dinner together. It's not exactly how they imagined it.

Shoutout to Mike Farrell for inspiring this one with that quote I've been thinking about for a year.

[variousqueerthings]

Was thinking about what you said about the likelihood BJ never sees any of them / Hawkeye again, and besides the very interesting cocktail of emotions that idea makes me feel (agreement and denial at war, essentially), it inevitably got me thinking about the Trapper & BJ comparison again.

I think about BJ calling out, I'll see you in the states, I promise! and the smile he wears. and I think the reason it hits so hard is bc in the moment when he says it, he absolutely does mean it? the flush of emotion in those big life moments can make everything seem undeniable e.g. "you mean a lot to me, so of course we will see each other again". but ofc people don't live in those big life moments.

it's so easy to envision BJ finding a way to integrate Korea into the greater lie that is his life (easier to do when it's over, in the past and subject to whatever framing he chooses to give it). the truth he can't face in the moment of goodbye is that it really IS goodbye, that Korea-as-it-was and Hawkeye do not fit in the life he told himself he burned to get back to.

(Hawkeye was so tired, I got the impression he implicitly understood all this about BJ and wearily accepted it even though it hurt -- another way GFA knocked me down; sometimes people are not as strong for the people they love as they'd hope, and sometimes you just have to accept that it's going to hurt and there's nothing to be done.)

With Trapper, I think it is also very likely he never sees Hawkeye again, or at least not for a very long time. But I don't think he ever lied to himself about it; he seemed like a "ripping the bandaid" type. the pain of not seeing hawkeye again is one he is willing to confront and accept (and inflict?)

(...apologies, this didn't end up being as coherent as I'd hoped, I sat down with coffee on my break and started rambling in your inbox lol)

OK FRIEND WE ARE HERE WE ARE QUEER WE ARE (STILL SICK AND RUMINATING OVER YOUR WORDS BUT I GOT ABOUT FIVE HOURS SLEEP LAST NIGHT BUT I THINK THAT BRINGS OUT MY BEST RAMBLES SO!)

"I think the reason it hits so hard is bc in the moment when he says it, he absolutely does mean it" <- oh heck yes, BJ is -- to me -- the character on this show who faces all of this experience the least, including the bits that, despite everything, were good. he's got that increasingly at-odds-with-his-outbursts genial type of "everything will be fine" attitude right up until the last moment we see him.

something about the best lies are the ones we believe ourselves and the things he's going to be slapped in the face with when he gets home, despite knowing that it's not the home he left (also do we think he shaves off the moustache, yay or nay? if he does, I put that down to the commitment to put on the "nice young husband/father/veteran/doctor/community man" man again, for better or for worse, but if he keeps it, I'll assume it's his one concession, because I doubt he'll actually properly talk about anything).

Trapper was weary and pragmatic and (correctly) pessimistic way back in ceasefire (although he allowed Hawkeye to be hopeful for the most part, I like the read that Trapper tries very hard to not bring Hawkeye down, but occasionally how he really feels just slips out), not to mention the way he talked in mail call.

Who was it that said Trapper's speech about the war in mail call is basically Hawkeye's journey's-end by s11, because um... ouch.

I just watched my first Mike Farrell interview yesterday (the first interview I've seen with any cast member except for Alan Alda, and it was very emotional, but at least I didn't tear up as Mr Farrell himself did!) in which he said that he imagines they'll see each other at least once again, and that BJ would "walk across America" to see him -- but then he also added that it wouldn't be same, which was quite a sad little amendment to what until that point seemed like his personal BJ/Hawkeye is end-game headcanon.

Whether or not BJ and Hawkeye do see each other again (and purely geographically, there's a higher chance of Hawkeye bumping into Trapper, especially considering the fact that Charles is in Boston and I like the idea of Charles and Hawkeye getting surprisingly close after the war -- surprising to them of course, they have more in common than they'd admit!) I would love to know (but would be afraid to ask) Mr Farrell what he feels about how they left things, and how that might play into one or two odd reunions.

I've gone deep down a rabbit-hole of thinking about all of this in terms of BJ's issues (and Hawkeye's issues -- I say this over and over again, but was BJ wrong when he felt like he was Trapper's replacement, and to rage against the box he'd been put into that didn't really allow him his own personhood. On a meta sense, if Hawkeye knows they're in a haunted narrative, then BJ specifically is aware that he is Trapper's shadow and he doesn't like it! and I don't think it helped with everything else that was going on) and so the idea of fluffy mutually healing BJ and Hawkeye doesn't really gel with me, because they've hurt each other -- and BJ has really hurt Hawkeye, sometimes in very pointed, somewhat vindictive-seeming ways -- a lot!

But would BJ romanticize it in his head after he got back and real life there got hard to handle (as I imagine it will for him)? Would he smooth out the rough parts and -- who knows -- create outright lies to fix things (in which BJ Hunnicutt creates the ultimate AU) -- he and Hawkeye were the best of friends after all, and he says in their last scene that he doesn't know how he would have made it without him (I cannot go back and look at the wording, I cannot go back and look at that episode yet, I'm not strong enough!) so he's not wrong when he remembers just how important Hawkeye was to him.

The ways in which Hawkeye at times becomes a kind of stand-in for Peg (or, that is, the wife that BJ has in Korea -- I said this in another post, but I want to reiterate that I use "wife" deliberately, because I hc BJ veering wildly between acting with Hawkeye as his male best friend, and BJ treating Hawkeye like his put-upon spouse, because he's just... real fucked up about his actual wife, but then also at times they're a gay couple), versus the idea that Peg could start to be the butt of comparisons to Hawkeye?

I'd have to think about that one some more, now I've just written it. It depends on the Flavour of post-war fucked up BJ.

Anyway, Mike... Mike, care to go into detail about it not being the same? Do you think BJ will be able to live a life of benignly empty oppressive polite middle-class heterosexual suburbia after all of this? Would he just... carry on, living the dream (the dream here being used as in a literal sense that he builds the fantasy to cope)?

[marley-manson]

sorry to vague but seeing someone compare Hawk/BJ fans celebrating Mike Farrell’s quote about BJ walking to Maine to queerbaiting and accusing them of “lying” is really putting into perspective the huge divide between my era of fandom and current fandom lol

I cannot imagine seeing people talk about a 70s sitcom and believing there’s any actual gay intent behind it. Like man, only a decade ago all gay readings came with the implicit understanding that it’s all 100% fanon - maybe with intentional subtext behind it in the case of 90s/00s shows, but no one would ever read a post about how gay something is and go “wow you lied, this wasn’t textually gay!”

Like I’m happy for younger people who grew up with gay representation in their fun fandom media, but Mash has none (well aside from Very Special Episode George) and no one involved in the show is ever going to say that they deliberately wrote a downlow gay romance into it lol. The best you’re gonna get is jokes like Alan Alda calling Wayne Rogers a better kisser than Mike Farrell, or the usual “It’s great that gay fans can see themselves in those characters :)” rote statements. And if you expect more than that based on how fans talk about the ships, I really think that’s on you in this case.

And like there are a lot of young Mash fans who do seem to take a lot of the jokes as like... intentional secret gay rep or something, and maybe do think Mike Farrell played BJ as gay lol, and I personally find that take kind of weird and exasperating, but that’s not lying either, that’s just ignorance.

[justsomeguycore]

can you imagine if mike farrell said also bj is gay

[ao3feed-mash]

Wonderful

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/CjvukP1

by TheBreakfastGenie

"Look, one year, Erin and Peg and I will come east." "One year." "Yeah. And, um, and we'll get together and, uh..." "Have dinner." "Yeah." "In other words, goodbye."

A year later, BJ keeps his promise. Erin and Peg in tow, he heads East, to Hawkeye, and they all have dinner together. It's not exactly how they imagined it.

Words: 4269, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: MASH (TV)

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: F/M

Characters: Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, B. J. Hunnicutt, Peg Hunnicutt, Erin Hunnicutt, Daniel Pierce (MASH)

Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Peg Hunnicutt, B. J. Hunnicutt & Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce

Additional Tags: The Hunnicutts Go to Maine, Post-War, Episode: s11e16 Goodbye Farewell and Amen, maine, crabapple cove, B.J.'s inability to say goodbye, that one Mike Farrell quote about whether they see each other again, they have dinner, Grape-Nuts Pudding, POV Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, B.J. does not actually walk across the country but he may have threatened to at some point, B.J./Peg is mostly background it's more about Hawkeye

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/CjvukP1

[mashbrainrot]

— Transcript below the cut —

Nobody ever calls him Dave

The role of the lovably unlovable doctor in 'M*A*S*H' fits courtly David Ogden Stiers like a surgical glove.

by Arnold Hano

When David Ogden Stiers mentioned that his birthday was coming up, the M*A*S*H crew decided to throw a party – birthday cake, 35 candles, the works.

But David Ogden Stiers called it off, probably because he still considers himself the new boy on the block, something of an outsider. Stiers (it's pronounced STYers), who plays the stuffy Boston doctor uncomfortably assigned to the MASH unit, is a shy man who prizes his privacy.

And this shyness isn't helped by Stiers' feeling that he still doesn't belong on a show that features so talented an ensemble cast as Alan Alda, Mike Farrell, Loretta Swit, Harry Morgan, Gary Burghoff and Jamie Farr. Stiers replaced five-year veteran Larry Linville at the start of the 1977 season. But others have gone through the same problem. Mike Farrell, who came on as Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt after Wayne Rogers left, says he's ''simpatico with David. I was in his shoes. He's grabbed me as an anchor.'" But not tightly. ''We haven't socialized,'' Farrell says. "But that's only because he hasn't accepted the invitations we've offered."

If Stiers hasn't fitted in socially, everyone agrees he has adapted to the role swiftly. Alan Alda raves about Stiers. "I'm very fond of him. He's extremely skilled. It's such a pleasure to work with him. He comes up withterrific ideas." In an early script, Stiers presents Alda with a can of gourmet food to take on a date. Alda studies the label. "Wild boar goulash?" he says. And Stiers makes the OK circle with his index finger and thumb. Except instead of raising his hand, Stiers improvised a stiff horizontal sign, held tight to his belt. "'It was perfect," Alda says. "Exactly the way his character would make it."

Stiers enjoys the freedom of the M*A*S*H set, where he is encouraged to do whatever he thinks will work. His first episode has him chewing out Radar, the cherubic corporal. "At first I tried to be nice to him. Then I realized, I am not a nice man. So I shouted at Radar. Imagine! I shouted at Radar, possibly the most sympathetic character in the history of this tube."

Everybody was pleased. Burt Metcalfe, producer of the series and the man who hired Stiers, says, "David has this unique quality. He can be lovably unlovable."

Stiers glows. "There is an extraordinary working relationship on the set. If it gets any more positive, we'll all have goony smiles." It's so idyllic that Stiers, always a night man before, now rises at 5:30, not only to make sure he's on hand for the first call, but because he likes to stand on the deck of his one-room Hollywood apartment and watch the sun come up. "It's the most beautiful time of day." says Stiers. And he's totally alone.

David Ogden Stiers – he likes using all three names; nobody ever calls him Dave – is an only child. A tall, courtly man whose shiny dome makes him look older than his 35 years, Stiers was born in Peoria, Ill., in 1942 and moved to Eugene, Ore., when he was 15. As a kid, he played baseball on Peoria sandlots. "| would hit the ball and I'd stand, appreciating the loft. I was out before I took a step. My teammates weren't thrilled."

Soon they stopped asking him to play. What he did was read, play the French horn and the piano, sing in church, and gravitate toward the theater. "The only child is left a lot to his imagination,"' he says.

He was never much of a student, because he didn't care. "My folks sent me to a psychologist after I finished high school. I had been enrolled in the University of Oregon, but I flunked out. My folks sent me to night school. Again I flunked out. I didn't want to be there." The psychologist found nothing haywire; all David wanted was to give acting a chance.

He spent a year with community theater in Eugene, and in 1962 joined the California Shakespeare Festival in Santa Clara, Cal. For seven years he did only classical roles and somehow managed to support himself. Then he joined San Francisco's improvisational company The Committee, but left in 1970 to go to The Juilliard School in New York, to do something about a voice that was "Illinois flatness compounded by California flatness, that horrible back-in-the-throat speech.'' Juilliard, though, cured him nicely, and today his voice is rich and resonant.

But San Francisco had not prepared him for New York. "All the orchestras of the world converged every winter on Carnegie Hall, all the dance companies. And the theater knocked me out. I was almost convinced," Stiers says, "that was the best of all possible worlds. That is, until I'd get out of the theater and feel that abject hostility on the street, see people talking to themselves and other people with open, running sores." It was a contrast Stiers found hard to adjust to, with "the filth on one hand and the cultural life rich as whipped cream on the other."

In 1974 he appeared with Zero Mostel in 'Ulysses in Nighttown,' and two months later opened in the musical 'The Magic Show,' playing an aged alcoholic magician. After nine months he'd had enough.

"I ran screaming from New York and settled down in the Oregon woods." His agent, Susan Smith, asked him to come to Hollywood to meet producers. He made a couple of films, in also-ran parts, appeared in the brief series Doc, did the pilot for Charlie's Angels and was offered a regular Angels role, which he turned down because he would have had to sign for seven years. He played three episodes on The Mary Tyler Moore Show as the station manager who hassled with Mary and Lou Grant over pay raises. M*A*S*H producer Burt Metcalfe saw one episode.

"Larry Linville had annouced he was leaving M*A*S*H," Metcalfe recalls. "We had to fill the hole. Larry was a brilliant actor, but we had allowed the Major Burns character to become somewhat childish. I thought we should go in another direction. Find a character who'd be a far more formidable opponent for Hawkeye and B.J. I had an image of William Buckley in mind. Then I saw David."

Nobody else was ever interviewed.

In January of 1977 Stiers signed a two year contract. He sees his character, Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester, as a man who has studied in Europe and summers in Maine. "I keep trying to lay in traces of very Down East expressions. 'Thank you' has become 'Th'k yo.' He is a petty man. The more threatened he gets, the richer his language becomes. In one speech I call Hawkeye and B.J. 'cretins and Visigoths.' That's got to be a television first." Especially pronounced 'cretins', British style.

That's his life these days. During one extended break he went back to Peoria for a family reunion, and though he enjoyed the reunion, he did not relish playing the role of star. "I'm happy not to be recognized. When I go to a restaurant I like to eat, undisturbed. I hear horror stories about Burt Reynolds and other stars, who never expect to get more than three forkfuls to their mouths consecutively before being interrupted for autographs. I am definitely a 33-fork man so far."

So he eats, usually alone, in a French restaurant on Vine, below Hollywood Boulevard, and then he walks home, to his barely furnished bachelor apartment where he lives alone.

Marriage remains in the abstract. "I expect it to happen, but I do not expect to work to bring it about. I look forward to a rewarding, loving relationship. But it is nowhere on the horizon." He has one special woman friend, but she lives in San Francisco nearly 400 miles away.

He'd like to make a movie in something other than a minor part, he'd like to do more Broadway theater and he'd like to go to Europe, which he has never visited. But that, too, is later.

"What I want to do eventually is settle down in Oregon,'' he says. "Go home and shut up and listen to the wind and the pine trees. Hollywood furthers your career. But you don't make friends."

Meanwhile, he remains in his Hollywood apartment, where he listens to classical music. Recently he bought a Richard Strauss autograph. "I walked into a place in Beverly Hills. Somebody had left the autograph on consignment for $225. I said, "I'll take that." Now I listen to 'Rosenkavalier' and nearby is a photograph of Strauss with a letter to a friend, signed by him. It connects. It puts him into the same room with me."

Otherwise, of course, he's alone.

[briamichellewrites]

4

Mike and Joe were hanging out with Brad, Rob, and Dave “Phoenix” Farrell. They were trying to get a record deal. Brad secured an internship with Warner Music, so he was going to see if he could somehow get their demo seen by his boss. Where’s Bria? She was in France for a week. Her father had an apartment in Cannes, so she was going to do some sightseeing and shopping. He brought them the bottle of wine she had gifted him. Joe asked them to guess how much it cost.

They had no idea. Four thousand euros. Rob calculated that to be four thousand two hundred eighty-two dollars and ninety cents. Damn! Mike told them how she had given a very expensive-looking handbag to her assistant. Did she usually give gifts like that? He thought she did it occasionally. The wine tasted delicious! Brad and Rob didn’t try it since they didn’t drink.

It was part of their Jewish religion. They also didn’t eat anything that came from animals, pierced their ears, or tattooed their skin. Phoenix and Mike had their ears pierced, but they didn’t have tattoos. Phoenix wanted to get a tattoo in the future. Mike wasn’t interested in having something that permanent on his skin. Neither was Joe. They needed a lead vocalist since they fired Mark Wakefield following a disastrous performance at the Whiskey A Go Go.

They had several demos of songs they wrote and produced in Mike’s bedroom at home. All they needed was someone to believe in them enough to sign them to a label. They just wanted to play music on stage in front of a crowd of fans. That was their dream. Maybe they would win some Grammys and sell millions of albums.

Bria got to the apartment. She thanked her driver. Merci, madame. Everything was ready for her arrival. She brought her stuff to her bedroom before going out to walk around. Cannes. It was her childhood home away from home. She had a lot of positive memories there with her father. It made her miss him. She imagined he was proud of the woman she was becoming, as was her mother. It had been a year but some times were harder than others.

After her mother’s death, he was treated for PTSD and his grief. He had intrusive thoughts that her death had been his fault, along with trouble sleeping, and avoiding talking about his wife. Even years later, he couldn’t talk about her because it was too difficult. He couldn’t even talk to Bria about her. That was his biggest regret because he wanted her to know her mother.

But, he was never able to. He took two weeks off to get her affairs sorted and her funeral arranged. Bria didn’t go to the funeral because she was too young. She stayed home with her nanny, who played with her. At six months old, she didn’t understand what was going on.

Phoenix was curious about Mike’s girlfriend, so he told him about her. At eighteen years old, she was an orphan, as her father died the year before from a plane accident. What about her mother? She died from AIDS complications when she was a baby. Did Bria have AIDS? No, her mother was infected from a blood transfusion during labor. Her death was extremely hard for her father.

She knew little to nothing about her. Her mother left her a house in her will and that was where she was living and her father left her an inheritance. What did she do for work? Nothing. She didn’t need to work because she had billions of dollars in her bank account. It was her father’s money. It was an interesting perspective between their lives and her life. She never had to do anything because she had people to do it for her.

He was teaching her how to do things like laundry and making food for herself. She was such a sweet girl, though and she was always willing to learn something new. Her assistant was her mother figure. He watched them interact and they were like mother and daughter. Why did she need an assistant? She hired her after her father died because she had worked for him.

She was part of the family and she had watched her grow up. It made him appreciate what his parents taught him and his brother. When she came home, he would bring her over to hang out with them. The guys would love that! They thought Phoenix would enjoy hanging out with her.

“Je suis un peu en retard de voyage. Il me faudra environ vingt-quatre heures pour m'adapter. Je suis tellement heureuse d'être ici, cependant. J'ai hâte d'être ici depuis un certain temps.”

While out shopping, a local recognized her as the little girl who used to spend holidays in Cannes with her father. Could she ask how her father was? She informed her that he had died the year before. The woman was horrified because she didn’t know. She apologized and expressed her grief for her. Merci. He was there in spirit. The woman agreed he was. How long was she staying? Ten days. She told her to stop by the store before she left.

Je le ferai. Merci. Yes, she was very happy to be there. She went into Le Speakeasy Cannes for dinner. It was almost dinner time, so the restaurants would soon be filling up. She was seated almost immediately since there were tables available. Merci. She provided her proof of age by providing her passport which had her birthdate after ordering a glass of wine.

The waitress looked at it and confirmed her age. She would bring her a glass of wine. Merci. She looked at the menu after the waitress left to get her drink. While she was deciding what she wanted to order, she heard a familiar voice. It was American, so she looked over at the podium and saw a guy struggling with his French. The hostess was struggling with her English, so she saw an opportunity to see if she could help them out.

Oui. She translated for both of them before sitting back down. The hostess brought him over to the table next to hers. Thank you. The guy asked her if she could translate for him.

“You came to France and you don’t know French?”

He laughed. “I’m in a tough spot here and I need help.”

“Okay. You can sit here with me.”

He got up and walked over to her table before sitting down. Thank you. He introduced himself as Brad Pitt. It was nice to meet him. She introduced herself as Bria Lavigne. When the waitress came back, she explained the situation. It wasn’t a problem. She put down her glass of wine. Since she hadn’t decided on what she wanted, she asked for a few extra minutes.

She decided on a creamy risotto with truffles and parmesan. While talking, she learned he was there on vacation, as was she. Why did she decide to come to Cannes? Her father owned an apartment. It was their vacation home. He was from Alsace, a cultural region and a territorial collectivity in eastern France, on the west bank of the upper Rhine next to Germany and Switzerland. She was a first generation immigrant. What about her mother? She didn’t know very much about her.

She died when she was six months old. He was sorry about that. Thank you. After dinner, he walked her back to her apartment building. They exchanged phone numbers for when they were both back in LA. They then said goodbye to each other. He watched her go inside before walking away.

@zoeykaytesmom @feelingsofaithless @alina-dixon @fiickle-nia

[markdelonge]

** linkin park masterlist **

mike shinoda:

“dating mike shinoda” (headcannons)

chester bennington:

brad delson:

phoenix:

rob bourdon:

mr. hahn:

[fangirl-imagines]

Dating BJ Hunnicutt Would Include...

A/N: In this house we love and respect Peg Hunnicutt so in these headcanons BJ isn’t married when he comes to the 4077th. 

You were one of the first people he met when he came to the 4077th and you were immediately taken with the fresh faced, kind eyed San Francisco surgeon.

Being there for each other when you break down over things being too much. 

Him making dumb jokes all the time and loving the way he can get you to smile even when you’re rolling your eyes. 

Being best friends with Hawkeye who loves to tease the two of you about your relationship.

Jokingly threatening that you’re going to leave him for Hawkeye. 

He threatens the same thing. 

Getting drunk in the swamp on the worst tasting and strongest booze you’ve ever had after too much death and cold and pain for a lifetime in one day. 

Slow dancing in Rosie’s together.

Teasing him about his mustache when he starts to grow it out. 

Fighting sometimes when you’re both too frustrated and tired with the war and living in camp. 

You’re both stubborn and don’t want to give in and admit you were wrong but also hating fighting with each other more than anything. 

Hawkeye third wheeling constantly. Not that any of you really mind so much. 

Sneaking around in the supply closet or an empty tent whenever you can because privacy is a luxury in the crowded camp. 

Even more rare is getting r&r at the same time in Seoul. That is like winning the lottery for the two of you. 

What you don’t know is on one particular trip to Seoul that BJ got he bought a ring. He carries it around with him for safekeeping but the only person who knows is Hawkeye who bugs him about when he’s going to give it to you already almost every day. 

On days where things are slow and you feel like boredom might kill you the two of you and Hawkeye of course will usually play cards or start reading a book out loud. 

On days where the casualties wouldn’t stop coming and you’ve both been on your feet for endless hours you usually end up both collapsing onto a cot together practically lying on each other and falling asleep. 

Seeing the best and worst of each other on almost a daily basis

Breaking the rules and spending the night in the Swamp every few nights because you’re too tired to move to your own tent after a long day or its so cold out that you’d both rather risk getting in trouble than go outside. 

Frank yelling at the two of you almost daily about pda. And by pda I mean a quick kiss or a hug.

BJ is not big on pda at all but he also isn’t afraid to kiss you in public or hold your hand. 

In fact, hand holding is a constant with the two of you. You both are getting pretty good at doing things one handed. 

Forehead kisses in private. 

Being the #1 target/victim of his pranks 

Getting your very own Hawaiian shirt to match him and Hawkeye. 

Him hovering when you are sick or tired

Will do anything to make you smile

Doesn't admit what's bothering him when he's upset just gets snippy and sassy not wanting  to admit what's bothering him until you drag it out

Describing in detail your hometowns to each other, each of you wanting to know everything you can about the other.

And talking wishfully about being together after the war. 

You’ve never been to California but anywhere with him where there’s not shelling and meatball surgeries sounds like paradise.

[hhawkeye]

that baby from mash must be so old now

[aym-mya-dreams]

I don't even know what say... I thought crying for 5 minutes would get all my emotions out but no... he saved so many lives and inspired many but that the fact that his own words couldn't save his life hurts the most... I wish you were still here and I could give back life like you did for us /his fans/...RIP thank you for the inspiration and I'll try to continue what you started~☾ - You say you're not gonna fight 'Cause no one will fight for you And you think there's not enough love And no one to give it to And you're sure you've hurt for so long You've got nothing left to lose So you say you're not gonna fight 'Cause no one will fight for you You say the weight of the world Has kept you from letting go And you think compassion's a flaw And you'll never let it show And you're sure you've hurt in a way That no one will ever know But someday the weight of the world Will give you the strength to go~LP

[thebreakfastgenie]

‘M*A*S*H’ at 50: War Is Hell(arious)

Five decades ago, “M*A*S*H” anticipated today’s TV dramedies, showing that a great comedy could be more than just funny.

“M*A*S*H,” which debuted in September 1972, feels both ancient and current. With Jamie Farr, seated, and, from left, Mike Farrell, David Ogden Stiers, Alan Alda, Loretta Swit, Harry Morgan and William Christopher in a later season.Credit...CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

By James Poniewozik Sept. 16, 2022 Updated 10:59 a.m. ET

The pilot episode of “M*A*S*H,” which aired on Sept. 17, 1972, on CBS, lets you know immediately where and when you are. Sort of. “KOREA 1950,” the opening titles read. “A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.”

The Korean War could indeed seem a century away from 1972, separated by a gulf of cultural change and social upheaval. But as a subject, it was also entirely current, given that America was then fighting another bloody war, in Vietnam. The covert operation “M*A*S*H” pulled off was to deliver a timely satire camouflaged as a period comedy.

The year before, CBS had premiered Norman Lear’s “All in the Family,” a battlefield dispatch from an American living room. But “M*A*S*H” was another level of escalation, sending up the lunacy of war even as Walter Cronkite was still reading the news about it. The caption acknowledged the risk by winking at it: Who, us, making topical commentary?

Today, “M*A*S*H” also feels both like ancient history and entirely current, but for different reasons.

On the one hand, in an era that’s saturated with pop-culture nostalgia yet rarely looks back further than “The Sopranos” or maybe “Seinfeld,” “M*A*S*H” is often AWOL from discussions of TV history. Sure, we know it as a title and a statistic: The 106 million viewers for its 1983 finale is a number unlikely to be equaled by any TV show not involving a kickoff. But it also gets lost in the distant pre-cable mists, treated as a relic of a time with a bygone mass-market TV audience and different (sometimes cringeworthy) social attitudes.

Yet rewatched from 50 years’ distance, “M*A*S*H” is in some ways the most contemporary of its contemporaries. Its blend of madcap comedy and pitch-dark drama — the laughs amplifying the serious stakes, and vice versa — is recognizable in today’s dramedies, from “Better Things” to “Barry,” that work in the DMZ between laughter and sadness.

For 11 seasons, “M*A*S*H” held down that territory, proving that funny is not the opposite of serious.

Alda’s Hawkeye was a forerunner of the modern dramedy antihero.Credit...CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

Off the beaten laugh track

The characters serving in the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea were professionals whose vocation was to save lives. But their assignment was to patch up soldiers so that they could return to the front lines and kill other people or get killed themselves. This was the eternal, laugh-till-you-cry joke of “M*A*S*H.”

“M*A*S*H” stepped into, and outside of, a tradition of military sitcoms. “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” and “The Phil Silvers Show” poked fun at the hardships and hustles of life in uniform; “Hogan’s Heroes,” which preceded “M*A*S*H” from 1965 to 1971 on CBS, was about shenanigans in a Nazi P.O.W. camp. But as for the abominations of war, these sitcoms, like the bumbling Sgt. Schultz of “Hogan’s,” saw nothing.

Only three years earlier, CBS had canceled the successful “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” amid controversy over its antiwar stances. But by the early 1970s, even die-hard anticommunists saw Vietnam as a lost cause. Pop culture was changing, too, as evidenced by the success of “All in the Family” and of Robert Altman’s 1970 film “M*A*S*H,” based on a novel by Richard Hooker (the pseudonym of H. Richard Hornberger).

The show’s creators, Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, imagined a version of the story that was more pointedly political than Altman’s dark-comic film, and certainly more so than Hooker’s cheerfully raunchy book.

The staff of the 4077th, mostly draftees, channeled their frustration with their situation into pranks, drinking, adultery and gallows humor. The insubordinate-in-chief was Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce (Alan Alda), who was dead-serious about surgery and dead-sarcastic about every other aspect of the wartime experience.

Casting Alda as the ensemble’s moral center and chaos agent was key. He could caper on set like the love child of Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx (Hawkeye would imitate the latter while making rounds with patients). He gave Hawkeye’s flirtations with nurses a bantering lightness (though from a half-century’s distance, they can come across more like straight-up harassment).

But Alda also conveyed Hawkeye’s exhausted spleen, which the doctor poured into letters to his father in Maine, a frequent episode-framing device: “We work fast and we’re not dainty,” he writes in the pilot. “We try to play par surgery on this course. Par is a live patient.”

“M*A*S*H” borrowed bits from its sitcom predecessors. It was a workplace comedy, with a goofy boss, Lt. Col. Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson), and uptight antagonists, like the gung-ho lovers Maj. Frank Burns (Larry Linville) and Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Loretta Swit). The staff wrestled with bureaucracy and gamed the system, as when the hyperefficient company clerk, Cpl. Walter “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff) mailed a jeep home one part at a time.

But the zaniness came with constant reminders that the realities of war could intrude at any moment, like the incoming choppers ferrying the wounded. The producers pushed CBS to dump the laugh track — what’s a studio audience doing in the middle of a war zone? — and eventually compromised on shutting off the yuk machine during operating-room scenes.

The show earned its belly laughs and its quiet. Even the sitcom-standard high jinks — dealing with the black market for medicine, inventing a fictional officer in order to donate his pay to an orphanage — were forms of protest.

In Season 1’s “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet,” Hawkeye meets a writer friend, doing research on the war, who later turns up on the operating table with a mortal wound. The executive producer Burt Metcalfe told the Hollywood Reporter that a CBS executive said, at the end of the season, that the episode “ruined ‘M*A*S*H.’”

The show would run for another 10 years.

“M*A*S*H” shows its age in various ways, including in a subplot in which Farr’s Klinger sought discharge from the Army by dressing in women’s clothes.Credit...CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

Comedy meets dramedy

“From any angle, ‘M*A*S*H’ is the season’s most interesting new entry,” the critic John J. O’Connor wrote in The Times in September 1972. Audiences came around in Season 2, after CBS moved the show to a better time slot. It spent most of the next decade in the ratings Top 10 (even as its own timeline hopscotched among different points from 1950 to 1953).

The early seasons worked in a vein of joke-heavy dark comedy, branching out into more story forms and social issues. A Season 2 episode involved a gay patient, decades before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, who had been beaten up by other soldiers in his unit. (“M*A*S*H” had its share of gay-tinged jokes — as well as a long-running subplot about Jamie Farr’s Cpl. Max Klinger trying to win a discharge by dressing as a woman — but they usually played as banter rather than gay panic.)

Then, in the Season 3 finale, the series exploded a land mine. Stevenson had signed a deal with NBC, and Henry was written off in affectionate sitcom style, with goodbyes and a party. In the episode’s closing moments, Radar — a farm kid who saw Henry as a father figure — walks into the operating room to read a bulletin: “Lt. Col. Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.”

Henry’s death kicked off the series’s peak era, in which it evolved from a lacerating comedy into something closer to what we would recognize today as dramedy.

The new commanding officer, Col. Sherman Potter, was a career Army man, played by Harry Morgan, once Jack Webb’s stoic sidekick in the revival of “Dragnet.” (Morgan played a crackpot general earlier in “M*A*S*H.”) More competent and less malleable than Henry, Potter had a gravitas befitting a show that was growing in ambition.

The Kafkaesque absurdism deepened, too, as in “The Late Captain Pierce,” in which Hawkeye is declared dead in a bureaucratic mix-up and tries to exit the war on a morgue bus. “I’m tired of death,” he says. “I’m tired to death. If you can’t lick it, join it.”

The experimental episode formats became more daring. “Point of View” is shot from the vantage of a wounded soldier whose throat injury renders him mute. In a repeated format, a reporter visits the 4077th for the new medium of television. The unit’s chaplain, Father Francis Mulcahy (William Christopher), described seeing surgeons cut into patients in the winter cold. “Steam rises from the body,” he says. “And the doctor will warm himself over the open wound. Could anyone look on that and not feel changed?”

Just as important, the show evolved its supporting characters, especially Margaret, spoofed as a harpy and sex object in the early seasons. In a Season 5 episode, she vents to her subordinate nurses about the pressures that have made her into the stickler they know. Eventually, she becomes a more complex foil and ally.

Swit and Larry Linville in the first season of “M*A*S*H.” Her character, Margaret, became more complex as the show went on.Credit...CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

The hilarious but one-dimensional Frank even earns some sympathy before his eventual exit, as Margaret throws him over for a fiancé. He’s replaced by the snobby, intelligent Boston Brahmin Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester (David Ogden Stiers), while Hawkeye’s partner-in-pranks Capt. “Trapper” John McIntyre (Wayne Rogers) makes way for the dry, laid-back family man Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell).

Even in the matured version of “M*A*S*H,” a lot has aged badly. A largely male story, it subscribed to the kind of counterculturalism that saw sexual freedom mostly as license for men. For much of the show’s run, various minor nurse characters were so interchangeable that they were repeatedly named “Able” and “Baker” — literally, “A” and “B” in an older version of the military phonetic alphabet.

Ironically, Alda — an outspoken Hollywood feminist and co-star of “Free to Be … You and Me” — became a disparaging shorthand for “sensitive men” among gender reactionaries in the “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche” era. Late in the show’s run, “M*A*S*H” intermittently interrogated its own attitudes toward women, as in “Inga,” a Season 7 episode with Mariette Hartley as a Swedish doctor whose brilliance Hawkeye finds threatening.

Those later years of “M*A*S*H” could be didactic, and few fans would consider them among its best. The camp got cleaner and the hairstyles suspiciously modern. The show’s heart got as soft and the stories as shaggy as B.J.’s mustache. But the final seasons are interesting as a model for how TV would find ways to tell stories pitched between comedy and drama.

In the movie-length finale, which aired on Feb. 28, 1983, the laugh track, which had been scaled back over the seasons, was gone entirely. And while the scenario — the war finally ended, after three real-life years and 11 TV seasons — yielded the expected sentimental goodbyes and even a wedding, the core story was as dark as any the series had ever done.

Hawkeye is in a psychiatric hospital after a traumatic experience whose repressed memory his psychiatrist, Maj. Sidney Freedman (Allan Arbus), is trying to tease out of him. Hawkeye recalls a carefree day trip to the beach, a bottle being passed around on the bus ride home. Then the booze becomes a plasma bottle; the bus had taken on a group of civilians and wounded soldiers. One Korean woman holds a chicken, whose noises threaten to expose the stopped bus to a passing enemy patrol. Hawkeye urges her to quiet the bird, and she ends up smothering it.

Finally — as you will never forget if you’ve seen the episode — the memory clears: The “chicken” becomes a baby. “You son of a bitch,” Hawkeye says, “Why did you make me remember that?”

Is it melodramatic? Sure. A downer? Of course. It is also, on rewatching, a striking bit of filmmaking for an ’80s sitcom. Hawkeye’s memory unfolds with the uncanny clarity of a dawning nightmare. No music cues you in to the horror; the images just grow more unsettling and the scene more grim. It is, in a way, like the journey of “M*A*S*H” over the years: A romp in the midst of a war zone goes, bit by bit, deeper into night and the heart of darkness.

And 106 million people came along for the ride. A year and a half later, Ronald Reagan, a Cold Warrior who was elected partly on a backlash to post-Vietnam sentiment, won a second term in a landslide. Yet more Americans than voted in that election tuned in to watch a big old liberal antiwar TV show.

After ‘M*A*S*H’

For most of its 11 seasons, “M*A*S*H” was one of TV’s most popular comedies. But its style went mostly unimitated for decades.

It’s not really until the 2000s that you see its heirs emerge. The British version of “The Office” shares its ability to turn from blistering comedy to seriousness. (Stephen Merchant, a creator, has talked about the influence of watching “M*A*S*H” episodes without laugh tracks in Britain.) The mockumentary format of the American “Office” and other comedies hark back to the news-interview episodes (while Dwight Schrute is a kind of Frank Burns of the paper-business wars).

Cable and streaming especially became fertile ground for finding laughs in grim situations. “Rescue Me” made trauma-based comedy in a post-9/11 firehouse, “Getting On” in a hospital geriatric wing. The Netflix prison series “Orange Is the New Black” was as thoroughly female as “M*A*S*H” was dominantly male, but it brought anarchic ensemble humor to a deadly dangerous setting.

In Hawkeye, meanwhile, you can see a forerunner of the modern-day dramedy antihero, charismatic but damaged and driven by anger. As a kid watching “M*A*S*H” reruns religiously, I loved Hawkeye’s rascally wit, his principles and his pranks. (One of my elementary-school music pageants had us sing the theme song, “Suicide Is Painless.” The ’70s were complicated.)

Rewatching episodes as an adult, I enjoy all that still. But he’s also kind of a jerk! He’s self-righteous, attention-seeking, snide and, if you’re on his bad side, a bit of a bully. In a Season 5 episode, Sidney Freedman diagnosed him succinctly: “Anger turned inward is depression. Anger turned sideways is Hawkeye.”

This describes not a few difficult modern dramedy protagonists, human and otherwise. In one of the best episodes of “BoJack Horseman,” built entirely around the self-destructive equine protagonist’s eulogy at a funeral, you can hear the echo of the episode “Hawkeye,” in which Alda’s character, concussed in a jeep crash, spends nearly the full half-hour monologuing manically at a perplexed Korean family, to stave off unconsciousness.

Making serious comedy is a feat of balance, and some might argue that the legacy of “M*A*S*H” was to give sitcoms license to be self-important, unfunny bummers. In a 2009 episode of the TV-biz sendup ��30 Rock” — a proponent of the joke-packed school of entertainment if ever there was one — Alda made a tongue-in-cheek version of that critique himself.

Playing the biological father of the NBC executive Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), he witnesses Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), a performer on the sketch-show-within-a-show, crying over the memory of being too “chicken” to dissect a frog in high school, which he’d covered up with a phony story of having been asked by a drug dealer to stab a snitch named “Baby.”

“A guy crying about a chicken and a baby?” Alda’s character says. “I thought this was a comedy show.”

Of course, if you got the joke, it was precisely because “M*A*S*H” did its job. It proved, memorably, that a great comedy could cut deep and leave scars. A half-century later, “M*A*S*H” has had the last laugh, or lack thereof.