Riding the Bus with My Sister

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Riding the Bus with My Sister is a memoir by Rachel Simon, published in 2002 by Houghton Mifflin about the time she spent with her mentally challenged sister Beth, whose lifestyle centers around riding buses in her home city.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In 2005, the book was adapted into a television movie for CBS in which Rosie O'Donnell appears as Beth, who is dependent on her father. When her father dies, her sister, played by Andie McDowell, comes to stay with her. At first, they fight about Beth's rampant consumption of junk food, resulting in bringing her cholesterol levels up, but after six months Rachel realizes that Beth is content with her life.

It was directed by Anjelica Huston.

[edit] Cult Appeal of the TV Movie

Although the TV movie has been touted as mature and feel-good, it has recently risen to prominence as a sort of shlocky b-grade affair. It is especially popular as "bad entertainment" with college students (18-25), which has been likened as being the main demographic of Family Guy and South Park. O'Donnell's performance as the mentally retarded Beth, has been both praised as "disturbingly accurate" and criticized as "over the top."[1] [2] [3] [4]

The satirical pop-culture show The Soup parodied the film, focusing mostly on what appears to be Rosie O'Donnell's campy acting. The show took movie clips and added laugh track and claimed that it was really a pilot episode for a fictional new CBS comedy show entitled, "Riding the Bus with My Sister - The Series!".

A "Best of Rosie" [5] montage was put up on the pop culture website TVgasm. The montage encapsulates some of the TV movie's more ridiculous moments, which include several instances of Beth's maniacal desire to buy a toilet seat. Other moments (rendered entirely bizarre due to their out-of-context nature) include Beth calling another woman a hippopotamus, offering her social worker a "nutritious" cookie, an ominous monologue about the moon's alleged omniscience (surprisingly reminiscent of a Sesame Street song), and an outspoken lust for actress Andie McDowell.

Radio disc-jockey Don Geronimo of The Don and Mike Show recorded the movie and had sound bytes extracted from it and are still used to this day. The day after it aired, Geronimo sarcastically declared it as "The movie of our lives", along with a barrage of sound clips which amused the entire crew.

[edit] Notes and References

  1. ^ http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117926925.html?categoryid=32&cs=1&query=riding+bus+sister
  2. ^ http://www.tvgasm.com/archives/miscellaneous_tv/000759.php
  3. ^ http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=343828
  4. ^ http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05121/494216.stm
  5. ^ http://www.tvgasm.com/archives/television_specials/000761.php
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