Skip to main contentLike most in the Portland metro area last week, the Schnoz was obsessed with the case of Sarah Roberts, the Lake Oswego 16-year-old who faked her own abduction. Maybe it was the Nose's fine appreciation for raging against the machine, but he couldn't help but feel protective after watching her performance during last Wednesday's press conference.
There she was--hair dyed pitch-black, wearing what looked like a Nordstrom-plucked sweater set that screamed "Mom made me wear it" and clashed with the tricked-out punk-rock jean skirt that seemed to come from her own closet. She looked a little bit like the grim-faced malcontent Enid in the movie Ghost World (see View from the Couch, page 59) who remarked, when confronted with a lame party, "This is so bad it's past good and back to bad again." It's not clear how Sarah Roberts would rate her press conference on the Bad-o-Meter. After being yanked back home from a shopping spree in Seattle with her gun-wielding boyfriend, she read her prepared statement with all the emotion of an eighth-grade French class reciting verb conjugations. And was that a semi-suppressed smirk that punctuated the end of each sentence?
No doubt about it--Sarah Roberts is a bad girl who did some bad things. But is that reason enough to want her head on a platter? The Nose isn't going to make any friends saying this, but even though he can't defend what Sarah did (yes, those poor dogs!), he admires her a bit. You see, there was once a time when the Nose was a young lad living in snotty suburb that valued status quo over all else. As a teenager, the Nose thought he was being drowned by hypocrites, wannabes and the hollow pursuit of bourgeois dreams--and maybe he was. His parents didn't understand him and tried to quash any attempts to forge his own identity, creating a rage within him that took the calming waves of adulthood to smooth down. His head nodded in agreement when James Dean asked, "Is this where you live?" and Natalie Wood replied, "Who lives?" And he understands why the three women on the cover of this newspaper have followers. He remembers hearing Sleater-Kinney's song "Call the Doctor" and appreciating its attack on the machine of normalization that tries to process youth. "They want to socialize you/ They want to purify you/ They want to dignify and analyze and terrorize you./ ...I'm your monster, I'm not like you./ All your life is written for you."
While the Nose has long since cut the ring out of his nostril, he knows from real experience that it's the golden kids, the ones who won awards and played tennis with their parents, who often grow up to become comfortably complacent and politically passive. It's often the bad girls (and boys) fueled by passion, anger and more than their share of drama who grow up to change the world--just look at Erin Brockovich.
Sarah Roberts is a bad girl. Bad girls cause trouble and create havoc. And sometimes, when the stars are aligned just right, bad girls do good things--you just need to give them the time and room to do it.
WWeek 2015