Ellen Greene, "Somewhere That's Green"

I watched the latest episode of Obsessed on A&E with great sadness. Sadness for Russ, a compulsive hoarder who was clearly in unspoken and unrequited love with his one friend, Rich, a fellow onetime auditioner for the Gay Men’s Chorus of L.A. There was an utter absence of intimacy in Russ’s life - in every sense. He’d surely never been fucked, perhaps never even kissed; and more sadly, probably never been told “I love you” by anyone except his mother. As part of his way of making peace with his lack of physically and/or emotionally intimate relations with others, he took to developing unnaturally close attachment to things: the faux memories antiques evoked for him provided a facsimile of emotion, of something to be sentimental about. He took to reliving imagined life and love rather than actually living and loving. And all he really wanted beyond that fantasy world of tchotchkes was for his beloved friend to have a chair and share the air with him.

His plight made me think of a song I’d heard at a bar’s karaoke night the previous evening: “Somewhere That’s Green,” from Little Shop of Horrors. Audrey's desire for domesticity in its quaintest form was all the poor hoarding guy really desired from life. (In all honesty, though, his reality is probably far closer to Herbert’s faithful rendition on Family Guy.)

I’ve never actually watched Little Shop of Horrors, so I don’t know if Audrey got her domestic bliss with Seymour. Russ, sadly, did not get his with Rich. I hope you get yours. Everyone should have a bit of it.