rider strong

Do you remember this guy? For me and my friends from high school, it's unthinkable that we'd ever forget Shawn Hunter, semi-bad-boy and best friend of Cory Matthews on ABC's Boy Meets World. (Honestly, IMHO, he was the most realistic character... He didn't get everything handed to him in his lap like so many, and he wasn't totally crazy like certain other characters...)

So I had to laugh when I was watching the WB's new sitcom Pepper Dennis with my roommate. (This makes it sound like I watch tons of television. That's not true - BMW, yes, I did watch that faithfully for five years, but nowadays the only intended-for-people-over-the-age-of-13 t.v. exposure I get is what my roommates are watching when I'm in the living room knitting or eating ice cream before bed.) I have a really hard time with identifying actors and actresses, but I knew I knew this person portraying "Chick" (what an awful name...give the guy some mercy, eh?). I asked my roommate, but she had no idea. I decided, thus, that it must be Harry from a kids' PBS show I watch since obviously my roommate would never have seen that (I love kids' shows!! but rarely am home when they're on. When I can, though...). Kind of strange...going from PBS to the WB...quite a jump.

But, of course, I was wrong. When I finally got to watch the credits, I realized...Chick is Rider Strong!! Ohhhhhh! Personally, I feel kind of bad. Rider is so likeable...why does he have to play this poor picked-on guy? So not right. The switch from Shawn to Chick is just as drastic as the conjectural Harry-to-Chick swtich.

Well, I suppose that's the way show biz goes. Rider, if you happen to read this, which I highly doubt: I'm still a fan. And, by the way, I think you used to have a really cool website with poetry and stuff - what happened to it?

This all reminds me of a fun time in college where Amber (she's my oldest, bestest friend) and I saw an episode of The Wonder Years where we saw a kid who, again, we knew we knew. We bugged our eyes out staring at the end credits to figure out his name, but that still didn't help. So then we spent the evening searching for him online (this was before Google and many useful online movie/t.v. databases) until we cross-matched Chad Allen as the actor in both The Wonder Years and...good ol' Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman!

...Oh the amusement that a lack of memory causes...

Also amusing that, probably because I was thinking about writing this post before I went to bed, I had an incredibly strange dream last night in which Rider, who informed me his name was actually Dean and was about 6 inches taller and had a twin brother and looked nothing like the actual Rider Strong when I think about it, and I met while standing next to each other in line for something. While we waited, I had my ear inspected by a very scientifically-savvy Mr. Strong who apparently toted around a hand-held microscope specifically for examining people's earlobes. ????? Yikes! In this case, reality is better than dreams.

I thought about putting some pictures up, but I decided to be moral and not swipe them from some site and use them. Copyright laws, I respect you.