Turning the Hands of Time Waaay Back

I don’t know about you, but I’m still waking up an hour early and then only managing to fall back to sleep again two minutes before the alarm goes off. That’s ‘cause this past Sunday marked the day when instead of springing ahead, we fall back--or, in my case, fall out of bed and begin obsessively dialing the time number over and over in order to reset the myriad clocks that seem to materialize in my apartment, like mushrooms in the dew, on this occasion only (who knew there was a clock on the microwave, for pity’s sake?).

I even adjust the time on my VCR, which I think knowing how to do means I have an extra male chromosome, or something equally genetically aberrant. The only clock I don’t change is the one on my computer, which I think still believes it’s 1987, so no fears about the millennium bug for me!

I know you can identify, or the time number wouldn’t be consistently busy, and I wouldn’t have to keep hitting redial.

Of course, getting a whole extra hour handed to you on a plate is good news for practically everyone who isn’t a small child waiting for his parents to take him to see “Antz” for the seventh time. And weak-souled, flighty creatures that we are, we forget that we’re going to have to give it back come spring.

Who doesn’t want more time? Certainly not Riley Elizabeth Weston. She took more than an hour--she helped herself to an extra 13 years.

Riley Weston, in case the name is not yet the household word its owner hoped it would be, is a writer hired by producers of the new fall series “Felicity” who were under the impression that she was a mere 19 years old.

Even though many of the current crop of television shows appear to have been dreamed up and scripted by talents not yet old enough to chew solid food, 19 (although ancient in some other categories, such as model-actress-whatever) is still young for a writer. Enough so that the media took notice.

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Entertainment Weekly put Weston on its “It List” of the 100 most creative people in entertainment, accompanied by a fetching photo of her in, as I recall, tight jeans, big hair and a mannish white shirt. “Felicity,” in case you’re not a regular viewer of the WB, as Warners likes to call its fledgling network (it’s the one with the frog), is one of those big-hair, small-shirt shows about a teen who kicks over the traces and goes to big bad New York City instead of following her parents’ wishes and attending Stanford along with Chelsea Clinton and Ken Starr’s daughter in order to become a doctor, a too-tame option that evidently was open to her because she has a brain buried somewhere under all that angst and hair.

“In many ways, I am Felicity,” Weston told EW. “So I hope to portray this generation in a realistic light.”

Well, those compulsive list-makers over at EW got the “creative” part right. But neither they, nor her employers at Imagine, which produces “Felicity,” nor Disney’s Touchstone TV, which signed her to a six-figure deal, knew just how creative Weston actually was. Turns out that instead of being born, as advertised, in 1979, Weston first entered the world way back in 1966. Don’t worry, I’ll do the math. That makes her 32, which, as everyone knows, in today’s Hollywood is practically over-the-hill. So the generation she was speaking for wasn’t exactly her own.

Weston’s birth name was Kimberlee Elizabeth Kramer before she underwent a legal name change in 1997. She was, as claimed, a struggling actress-turned-writer, but she’d been struggling for a good many more years than she cared to admit. Her screen credits included a role in “Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit,” coincidentally produced by the folks at Disney, who appear not to have recognized her potential genius at the time.

Weston/Kramer is no longer employed as a staff writer on “Felicity.” What will happen with her Disney deal is unclear. The powers-that-be are keeping mum--could it be from embarrassment? On the other hand, Riley-or-is-it-Kimberlee? gave interviews to the trades and appeared on Entertainment Tonight last Thursday to confirm her real age, acknowledging that “the emphasis on youth in this business was a compelling factor in my decision” to turn back the clock some 13 years.

In keeping with yet another trend, she apologized, saying she “never meant to hurt anyone,” and admitted that she lied to her agents, attorneys, colleagues, Disney, the press and nearly everyone she came into contact with on a professional level. (This girl should think of running for president! After all, she’s nearly old enough. All she needs is a few prayer breakfasts under her belt.)

Showing a talent for equivocation that would be amazing in a 19-year-old, Weston/Kramer suggested through her newly acquired press representatives that most college students have fake IDs, too. Just another one of the many ways in which she is Felicity.

“I’m strong, I’m quirky, I’m weird and I’m proud of it,” she said.

Sounds like insta-TV-movie to me. Maybe Disney can roll it over into her deal.

As someone who was, in fact, 19 when she graduated from college (no, I’m not going to tell you what year, but it was the same one the original Kimberlee was born in--it’s at the top of the column; look it up) and began writing professionally, you can tell how objective I am. On the other hand, I do have a tiny grain of sympathy buried somewhere. If you’re a good writer, you’re a good writer, right? No matter what age you are. True, but not in Hollywood, where you’re either a wunderkind or day-old Wonder Bread.

I was thinking of lying about my age, too, but then I would have to have been 5 when I wrote for the original “Saturday Night Live.” Still, it could happen. . . .