During my first teaching job, I lived in a big three story house with two other women, much like Mary Tyler Moore’s living situation if Rhoda, Phyllis, and Mary were too busy grading papers to speak to each other.
(An aside: Mary Tyler Moore lived behind the big window on the third floor (and Rhoda lived in a turret on the same floor; I just looked that up), yet Mary had a sunken living room. Who puts a sunken living room on the third floor? How does that happen? Is there a dropped ceiling on the second floor below Mary’s apartment?)
I lived in the attic, which was described to me as a “garret.” I shared the attic with what seemed to be one or two bees. Imagine a wacky episode in which Phyllis the landlady neglected to scare the bees out of the garret until one morning Mary was driving to work and a bee under her suit coat tried to bite her to death. (This episode would have subplots in which Rhoda got locked into the first floor bathroom, and Phyllis was dating someone from Iran.)
Those six months in that big house in Webster Groves were the only time I ever lived semi-independently, without my parents or Gary. I wish I’d taken time to have more fun. And I wish I’d spoken to those women more instead of grading papers every night. But I might as well wish I were a news producer in Minneapolis with a lot of bouffant hair and a sunken living room. We were who we were at the time.