Our Hero

After years of having every embarassing moment of her life recounted and exaggerated by her father in his newspaper column, 17 yr. old Kale Stiglic has decided that she has had enough. Kale begins searching for something that she could use to publicly embarass her father. When she finally finds the ammunition she needs to get even, it backfires on her and threatens to destroy the marriage of her parents. What makes matters worse is that Kale's annoying 25 yr. old brother, Ethan has separated from his wife and is moving back in with the family. Now she must figure out a way to repair the damage that she is responsible for. Through all this stress that is going on in her life at the moment, she discovers an outlet to express who she is, what she feels and thinks in a zine that she creates entitled, ""Our Hero.""

One of the teachers at Kale's high school, Mr. Minetta decides to make the special required project a ""Passion Play."" What should be an organized project turns out to be a mess, starting with the the mistitling of the play. Where it should cover the last days of Christ, Mr. Minetta is having the students cover his birth. Also, some students like Dalal are offended by the play's strong religous content being covered in a public school. Mary E. is euphoric and takes great pleasure in being involved in the mixture of a misguided and innacurate handeling of such a serious topic. Kale also doesn't want to do the play because she dreads being the person who has to play a costumed cow again. She discovers that Ross has got the permission to do an alternate ""independent study"" project and decides that she wants to do one on her zines. First she has to meet with her assigned project advisor. She decides to bring all her zines to school for the meeting. There, Kale lets Ross and Mary E. re

Kale is ecstatic to find out that her zine was showcased in a literary magazine, but is disappointed that the other zines that were also covered in her opinion seemed to be more interesting than hers. She decides to make her next issue more exciting by approaching and setting up an appointment at her home to interview a dirty disheveled man nicknamed, ""Crazy Guy"" who wanders around the area near the health food store making odd faces everyday staring up at the sky. He also smokes like a chimney and then drops the cigarette butts on the ground. After that, he picks it up and then stuffs them back in his mouth. Later in the evening, Kale prepares dinner for her and crazy guy, but begins to panic and wonder whether this was such a good idea. Meanwhile, Mila reluctantly agrees to let her son, Ethan create and perform a stand-up comedy routine for a benefit that she is in charge of preparing.

Finding out that she is low on funds to continue making copies of her zines, Kale decides to get a job working at a health food store. A dark cloud of frustration and uneasiness begins to hover over Kale's new job when she has to work with Shana who has a bad attitude and appears to have a negative outlook on life. As she continues to work, Kale discovers that Shana is a single mother of a little girl and is less fortunate than her. She tries do help out by attempting to place some extra money anonymously in Shana's bag. Instead of helping, it makes things worse as an angry Shana gives the money back and tells Kale that she doesn't want her pity or help. Meanwhile Ross continues his streak of wearing outragous clothing by coming to school one day wearing very unique, shiny shoes to school. This garners the attention of everyone including Kale and Mary E. who begin to question Ross' sexual orientation. It proves an interesting and hilarious conversation topic for Kale and Mary E.

Kale's dreams finally come true when she gets to go out with Perfectly Frank. As the date goes on, Kale realizes that the fantasy that she built up surrounding Frank doesn't seem to match with reality. Meanwhile, sparks fly between Mary E. and Ethan.

As the annual taking of the family Christmas card picture approaches, Kale decides that now is the opportune time to seek her revenge on Ethan for making her look foolish in the previous Christmas photo shoots. Kale tricks Ethan into believing that he had gotten the girl that he cheated on his ex-wife with, pregnant. She starts regretting what she has done when Ethan starts to fall apart. Meanwhile, Mary E. receives an unclear and inaudible phone message from Ross who went on a trip to meet a zine writer that he had communicated with on the internet. She starts to become worried and attempts to seek help from his grandparents, but their minimal understanding of English proves to be a problem.

A still grieving Kale is continuing to live in her memories, which causes her to seclude from the rest of the world even more. In order to help Kale move on with her life, Mary-E attempts to convince her friend to attend a zine show. There Kale has the shock of her life when she is visited by an old friend. Meanwhile, Ross begins to freaks out and becomes a nervous wreck when he comes into contact with his long time crush, George Lagogianes who is covering the zine show.

With Bill again intruding in different parts of Kale's life by attempting to spend a lot of time with her mother, she attempts to be free of him by departing Toronto for the weekend with her friends. Everything seems to be in order for this mini-vacation as they have finally acquired a car, but there is one problem. An activist/zine writer named Malachi has handcuffed himself to Kale's car to protest air pollution.

An ""Our Hero"" reader sends Kale a naked picture of himself wearing cowboy boots. She gets a kick out of it and decides to bring it to school to show it to her friends. Unbeknownst to her, she accidentally loses it along with one of her zines. The picture falls into the hands of Mr. Minetta who reports Kale to Ms. Terzik-Sykes who in turn calls her parents. At home, Kale was expecting to be punished by her parents for what happened, but is shocked to find out what her parents really think when she receives another hilarious and embarrassing talk from them. Joey and Mila tell Kale that it is ok for her to look at porn because they do and it helps them with their love life. Things go from bad to worse for a freaked out Kale as Joey decides to protest the punishment the school has given to his daughter. He wants to make a speech at a parent teacher meeting to discuss the right to free speech by defending and preaching the merits of porn with the assistance of visual aids.

In an effort to have more excitement in her life and feel like she is making a difference, Kale joins Malachi and his activist friends in building a park in the middle of an intersection to protest the lack of green space. Kale makes the mistake of leaving her palm pilot with all the names and numbers of Malchi's friends, which the police use to apprehend some of them due to the park incident. Meanwhile, happy go luck Mary-E is feeling down due to a cranky clerk at her favorite story refusing to smile and be nice. In order to counter this and brighten the day of many people, Mary-E gets permission from Ms. Terzik-Sykes to have a niceness day at school. Dalal and Ross race against time to put a stop to this niceness day as the two believe that Mary-E's feelings will end of being hurt if this event backfires.

Kale heads to Bill's house to find out whether he was doing drugs while he was sleeping with her because she needs this information to donate blood with Malachi. At his home, she meets his new girlfriend Kayla who seems to share a lot similar characteristics with Kale, two of them being looks and clothing. Fearing that Bill will treat this girlfriend the same way that he treated her, Kale becomes obsessed and consumed with breaking the two apart. She discovers that this was a big mistake when she sees a side of distraught Bill that she had never seen before. Meanwhile, Ethan decides to use Kale's basement against her wishes to hold his own comedy workshop to teach aspiring comedians.

Kale's perspective, So our generation is supposed to be liberated, right? I mean, we're so liberated that to us 'liberated' is this hugely outdated word that makes us giggle. HAHAHA. We look smugly back at our parents' generation and think - poor them having to grow their hair to make a statement and having to fight these really obvious issues like racism and sexism. Our world is so much shinier. People are so much more tolerant. Yay us! While all the above may be true in general terms, I'd like to point out that where the PC learning of our youth left off, the narrow-minded views of the ages have taken over. For instance, in the area of ""young women"" and sex, I have recently discovered that we're all just a bunch of red-necked yahoos, scratching our privates and making grunting noises at the people we don't understand. If women want to have sex a lot, that should be fine. If women want to have sex a little, that should be fine, too. If women want to save sex for marriage, what's the