“Small Wonder” finally to be released on DVD
Here’s a story. Raza Syed was the first real-life friend I ever made on the Internet. It was 2002, I was living in NYC, he in SF, and we made a connection based on a shared morbid fascination with Jerry Supiran, the squeaky manchild who played “Jamie Lawson” on “Small Wonder”.
In 2002, there was no fuckyeahjerrysupiran tumblr to bring similarly-distracted people together, so when an AltaVista search for Jerry brought me to a wonderful post on Raza’s immaculately-maintained blog in which he recounts and idea he’d had for writing “‘I Was Jamie Lawson’: A fanciful exercise imagining a day in the life of Jerry Supiran as a high-school junior or senior”, I knew we would one day be friends. We started to correspond soon after. This was me in an email dated September 13, 2002 explaining in all lowercase (as was the style) to Raza how I found his site:
i was thinking of starting a novel-ish type work of image fiction based on a thinly disguised adult jerry supiran, grown into a children’s ad creative. in research, i was intrigued that you had had similar designs on the cherubic jamie lawson.
So there you go. We both wanted to write about Jerry Supiran, and thus, we became and have remained close friends, having both moved to LA to work in film, having gotten together regularly to watch movies and drink heavily, and having both wondered why the show that sparked our friendship never made its way to DVD box set.
And I got an email today from Raza, just a link to something I’d find interesting (as he’s known to do for his friends), and the link told me that the DVDs are on their way.
Thanks, Raza. Thanks, Internet.
