If you didn’t see ABC’s Wife Swap! on March 2, here’s what you missed: Powderhorn Park peacenik Mina Leierwood gingerly examines the contents of “Fort Patrick,” the Louisville, Kentucky, home she’s to live in for two weeks with a family of strangers. Cheri Patrick, the usual lady of the house, is a retired Air Force senior airman; her husband Ryan is a former sergeant in the U.S. Cavalry. She runs her home with military efficiency. When her three young children are actually allowed to play, it is typically with toy guns and bombers. Leierwood finds taxidermy on the walls, a cavalry sword above the master bed, and a “W” mouse pad, baseball cap, and mug.
Meanwhile, conservative Christian Cheri Patrick had marched into Mina and Greg Leierwood’s Minneapolis home. She tried valiantly to come to terms with the “Send Bush Packing” suitcase planted in the front yard, and attempted to force the Leierwoods’ belligerent seventeen-year-old, Dan, to say the Pledge of Allegiance. (Dan, a long-haired and lip-pierced atheist, believes the United States should be dismantled.)
It is hard to imagine two families who better characterize America’s current political polarization—real representatives of an America divided into what some wags have called “The United States of Canada” (the “blue states”) versus “Jesusland” (the “red” ones).
While the show’s title promises more kinky fun than Desperate Housewives, its mission is more noble than that. It merely challenges two ordinary families to see life from another point of view for two weeks. There are no key parties, no swinging, no hanky panky. Instead, it’s a sort of cultural exchange program. The swapped wife shows up at her new home and must familiarize herself with the “household manual” (each family writes one). She is required to follow the current household rules for the first week. At the start of the second week—the “Rule Change”—she may unleash a new world order.
After seeing Wife Swap!, I couldn’t resist calling on Mina for some backstage dope. Here is what you missed even if you watched: For one thing, Mina found a high-powered crossbow in the basement, within reach of the little troops. Leierwood says that part got edited out. While some of the dropped footage is shocking (always keep your high-powered crossbow out of reach), most of it presents a more nuanced picture, and one that gives us all hope for more gray area. What makes it onscreen can be a sort of two-dimensional caricature—but it wouldn’t be the first time TV simplified real life.
The show’s rules meant Leierwood, during her first week, had to follow Cheri Patrick’s rigorous military routine, getting up at oh-six-hundred hours for a forty-minute walk, waking the kids and making them breakfast, getting them off to school (husband Ryan sleeps late because he works the late shift at a steel mill), and then cleaning the house like an obsessive compulsive on crystal meth for the remainder of the day. (Cheri’s daily chore list is divided into fifteen-minute increments.)
Mina Leierwood is a Quaker and therefore a pacifist. When it came time for her to impose her rules on Patrick’s household, she eliminated all the toy guns, bombers, tanks, and violent video games from the home, asking the children to collect them and place them in a cardboard box labeled the “War Chest.” (“That’s not fun,” said five-year-old Brendan Patrick.)
For Cheri Patrick, week one meant that she couldn’t do all the cooking and cleaning herself, because the Leierwoods share chores. It’s hard to know which was the bigger hurdle for Cheri—the trashed house or the secular humanism. When she wasn’t retching with disgust at these Bush-haters, she was compulsively trying to find her place in the kitchen. When Dan challenged her for cooking without help, Cheri replied, “I believe that a man is the head of the house, because when Eve partook of the apple or the fruit that she shouldn’t have, she condemned herself and her kind to be under the heel of man.”
Under the heel of the oppressive order at “Fort Patrick,” Mina Leierwood started to crack. Constantly on camera, stressed and unable to sleep, Leierwood told me that she slept the second week in a hotel after she and temporary husband Ryan got in an argument and Ryan kicked a door. (Edited out.) In his defense, Leierwood added that she had covered Ryan’s red pickup truck with peace magnets (also cut). Despite their differences, Mina called him “a great father, a great husband.” Most of the heat from the episode revolved around Dan’s intense provocation of Cheri; at one point, he yelled at her, “Jesus was a carpenter who talked too much!” and Cheri left the room crying. (Out-of-control Dan’s views don’t necessarily represent the Leierwoods’. He’s a teenager, after all. Greg laments his son’s cruelty, saying, “I hate to think I’ve taught Dan to be that insensitive.”)
Off camera, there were moments when Dan and Cheri actually got along. During week one Cheri had to attend her first peace rally, but during week two Cheri made Greg, Dan, and Avram, the Leierwoods’ younger son, play paintball. “They loved it!” said Mina. At one point, Dan and Cheri ganged up on Greg and Avram, pelting them with paint. “For pacifists,” Cheri exclaimed, “you guys are a pretty good shot.”
Of course, there were mild transformations by the episode’s end. Cheri learned that she doesn’t have to be perfect, that she can ask for help. Mina learned to put a more personal face on war, to understand the sacrifices soldiers make.
The editing was equal opportunity, giving neither side a clear polemical advantage. For example, during the episode, eight-year-old Tyler Patrick draws a military plane. Mina asks him about it and he says that the plane is dropping bombs over Iraq. What got edited out: Mina told Tyler that there are also children and moms and dads on the ground. And Tyler came to Mina hours later, saying, “I think I figured it out about the bad guys. They’re just like us. We just haven’t met them yet.”—Shannon Olson
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