2003–2005

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2003–2005

The Hebrew Hammer
My personal favorite in the whole collection. The scene is brilliantly funny, and the Vassar joke just makes it all the better. Vassar as an aspirational place for Jews.


Girls Will Be Girls
A super-campy movie with drag queens playing their own personas. Here they discuss their sordid pasts. Vassar as character point for a very sexual place.


Undercover Christmas
A wretched made-for-tv movie, where cocktail waitress Jami Gertz witnesses a crime, and is taken home for Christmas by the investigating detective for protection. She meets his mother, Tyne Daly, and they do not mix; Gertz is uneducated, Daly a socialite. In this scene, they finally make a connection...and then go out for the inevitable makeover montage scene. Vassar as character point for sophisticated and elegant.


All My Children
Vassar’s probably shown up on the soaps more often than I’ve been able to identify. (See also General Hospital and Another World.) I find this scene exceptionally odd, having no context at all for the plotline.


The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron
A popular kids’ show set in the future, here the principal of the school (a regular character) is directing Macbeth in Space. Similarly to Spongebob Squarepants, there is a flamboyance and mannerisms to this character that read extremely gay, in an over-the-top way. The principal’s flamboyance has been well established before this point in the series; making him a Vassar student is all the more curious. Vassar as character point for…let’s say “theatrical.”


Real Time with Bill Maher
In this very first episode of the HBO political talk show, comedian Chris Rock schools conservative attack poodle Ann Coulter about George W. Bush’s SAT scores. I don’t include much material that's non-scripted or references from documentaries/news, but this is pretty funny.


Lost (extra)
Well, not exactly Lost, but an extra from a set of audition tapes. Here, Jorge Garcia is reading for Sawyer (can you even imagine the show that way?). An odd treat for Losties...with an even odder treat for Vassar Losties right at the end. The scene seems to involve Sawyer struggling with someone over a sweatshirt—which apparently is a Vassar sweatshirt.  Was one of the characters originally conceived as a Vassar graduate? One more Lost mystery to unravel.

Thanks to Whitney Freemesser ’95 for this awesome catch.

American Dreams
This family dramedy set in the 1960s, right at the end of its run had a character departing for Vassar. A character point of no great import.
Thanks to Ilena Robbins ‘09 for this catch.

NCIS
Here’s yet another criminal procedural show (see other police procedurals) with yet another Vassar victim. Here the investigative team has been quarantined after opening a letter containing weaponized plague. Trying to find who would have a grudge against the unit, they look at old case files and find a Vassar student whose death may reveal something.


Man of the House
This slight comedy puts tough-guy lawman Tommy Lee Jones in a house to protect a bunch of cheerleaders, the only witnesses to a crime. One is his estranged daughter. This scene falls at the end, after the big shootout with the bad guy, and his daughter begins to grow closer to him.

Without a Trace
Yet another police procedural (see the full list). The investigators are checking a suspect’s background, whose Vassar alumnus status is seen as enviable. Interesting in that it’s thought of here as an elite institution without reference to gender, equivalent to any other co-ed school.
Saving Milly
Made-for-TV docudrama based on journalist Morton Kondracke's memoir about his wife, who died of Parkinson's in 2004. The movie hits all the conventional beats for this kind of story—opposites attract (conservative journalist coming up in the world with an image of the blueblood wife who would be an asset for his career, falling for a liberal free-spirit "part Jewish, part Christian, part Mexican therapist/activist), she rescues him from alcoholism, she dies tragically after a heroid struggle. But Vassar shows up multiple times here, as it really was a thing in the memoir.


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Page Two: 1940s
Page Three: 1950s
Page Four: 1960s
Page Five: 1970s
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Page Seven: 1990s
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