The moment the humidity of summer begins to break, Pumpkin Spice returns to Starbucks. Gallon jugs of apple cider appear in the produce section of your local grocery store and kids and adults alike go back to school. Since the summers of my youth were largely characterized by playing outside with my younger brother, my cousins, and my next-door neighbors, back-to-school season allowed me one of my greatest pleasures: after school television.
Before it was time to do my homework, on most days, from when I was about 8 until the time I turned 12, I’d plop myself onto a beanbag chair in the back room of my house and scrounge for the remote, hoping I would be able to catch every last second of the back-to-back Sabrina the Teenage Witch reruns. Sabrina, played by Melissa Joan Hart, her aunts, and their talking cat, were the highlight of my day for those few years. Here was this girl, seemingly normal but somehow unable to really fit in at her new school, secretly harboring magical powers recently thrust upon her by her family’s genetic history in witchcraft. As often as Sabrina’s hijinks were caused by her inability to hone her magical powers, I wanted nothing more than to be like her.
Sabrina, in all of that time that she had trouble fitting into her new school environment, had her detractors. There were students who thought she was strange, and her magical shenanigans could be construed as strange from time to time, but there were also bullies. One bully, in particular, reigned over her high school: Libby. Libby reminded me of the girls I went to school with around that time, needing to assert her self-declared sense of authority over every single girl she deemed unworthy. To plenty of girls with whom I attended elementary school, I was one of those girls. I experienced quite a bit of bullying as a kid, and it made it harder for me to love school as much as I once had.
The buildings that had once promised me new installments of Magic Tree House, spelling tests, and Friday movie days had begun to promise me quiet torments in the classroom and louder ones on the playground. I came to look forward to my few afternoon hours in front of the TV, falling into Sabrina Spellman’s little world of magic and mishaps. Sure, she was picked on at school, but she never let it get her down. She was a witch, after all. There were much more important things for her to worry about. Not the same could really be said for fourth grade Kate. All she really had to worry about was soccer practice, gym class, and how she was going to make it through recess the next day without crying.
There was one particular episode of Sabrina that always really resonated with me. It aired in the very first season, called “Geek Like Me,” in which Sabrina took it upon herself to knock Libby down to her own social standing just to see how the bully would like it. It happened to turn out poorly, Libby using her manipulative social skills to make her fellow “geeks” rule the school in the exact same way she had with the cheerleaders. This carried a kind of weight for me that I think I still shoulder sometimes. I wanted my detractors to understand me, to know what t was like to spend a day in the shoes of those they looked down upon.
The moral, I suppose, that I was meant to take from all of this as a kid was that Sabrina couldn’t use magic solve all of her problems. She would just need toignore the bullies and solve the problems, socially, for herself. I think, however, something always seemed to fly right over my head when it came to all of that, and I may have always carried the wrong message. My need to be like Sabrina extended to my need to change my situation. I knew, obviously, how far fetched it all had to be, but wouldn’t you think that magic sounded like the perfect solution for a little girl who couldn’t exactly seem to chase the bullies away? I certainly did. I used to pray for it, that maybe I’d turn 16 and find out I had magical powers, but, wow, did I want those magic powers to come sooner.
I’ve come to realize that this has always been my escapist solution, even for someone who has never really considered herself to be “escapist.” Around the same time as my Sabrina obsession came my deep fascination with Harry Potter. There was a kid with magic powers, and he got his when he turned 11! It made my far fetched hopes seem a little less far fetched, if only when I shredded through the pages of the novel series. When high school came, I became enamored with reruns of Charmed as I adapted to yet another new social situation, still grappling with that nagging childhood dream that magic could make everything go away. College brought me to Buffy and to Willow Rosenberg, who took up magic to become a more important member of the team. If only that could fix everything. On some days, I let myself think that it might.
I still hang on to Sabrina some days, and it’s often around Halloween when I remember how much she meant to me. Her witchcraft was my means of getting away from the day, from the teasing remarks and the hurtful laughter. She’d cast a spell, and I’d get to run away from everything that seemed to chase me, even if it was only for an hour. On the days I’d come home crying, my mom would sit and watch with me, and we’d laugh at the talking cat and the goofy aunts and the girl who was struggling to find her way. All I wanted was to be a little magical, and that little afternoon dose of witchcraft meant everything.
