This has got to be the most interesting story I've read all week. It's about the youngest brother on Home Improvement, Mark Taylor (né Taran Noah Smith, pictured right) falling in love with a crazy-ass Midwestern-turned-Northwestern artist/born again vegan woman, named Heidi Van Pelt. Which all, in itself, we hardly find unbelievable. But there are pools and layers of scorn accruing and settling, exerting a pressure on the base level that will almost assuredly fail to make diamonds.
The poor woman should have read her Aeschylus and pulled a Clytie on her man. Or something. Because it sounds (from the admiteddly homer-ish Kansas City Pitch's account) like she got fucked sideways with a funnel. Actually, there may be something to all this. We're constantly reminded of Absolom, Absolom!—reminded of it by every story of self-starting, family betrayal, questioned/questionable origins, and viscous, dreamy decline. This piece is very possibly the highest form qua apotheosis of, (the chef d'oeuvre, if you will) stories involving a) child television stars; b) vegan foods; and c) women who have had aspirations of joining the CIA.
It all starts so innocently,
So when Zachary Ty Bryant and Taran Noah Smith — both young stars of the hit sitcom Home Improvement — showed up at her house for a raw-food dinner party in 1998, it was hardly anything to write home about. Smith was just some 14-year-old, meat-eating kid; Van Pelt didn't pay him much attention.
