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| I owe a lot of my comic leanings to my early years watching TV. (And Myopia) |
When I was eight years old we had a black and white television. It sat like an idol in our small living room and at least four or five of us kids would sit about two feet from it to watch shows like I Love Lucy, Dobie Gillis, The Patty Duke Show, Leave It To Beaver, Ed Sullivan, or The Honeymooners. I was too small to remember much about the shows. I barely remember when the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show. I don't know if I actually saw the show or saw a show about that show. But what I do remember is the day I was looking at a tall vase that sat on top of that TV one afternoon. The yellow and green vase held three purple Iris blossoms my mother had cut from her garden that morning. I reached to touch an Iris petal and the vase, being top heavy, tipped over onto the back of television. The program that was on escapes me, but it was probably while a commercial for Brillo pads was on. And when the water from the vase met the big long hot tubes in the back of the set, a mushroom cloud rose upwards, smelling of burned out cathodes. I don't even know what a cathode is, but it sounds right.
My parents did not punish me, which was a miracle in itself. I do not know what my mother and father discussed that night, but the next day we had a brand new color TV where the old set sat in our living room. I do not know where my parents bought the TV, but we were only the second family in the neighborhood with a color TV. And owning a color TV was a sign of upward mobility. Now when we kids huddled around the set, Dad would order us to get back. We already had damaged retina's and were nearsighted. The optometrist bills alone ran into the thousands of dollars, in 1964 dollars.
The set was enormous; it had fancy wood turnings and a crisscross wood pattern that lay on top of a textured greenish colored fabric, that covered the TV's speakers. The TV was Victorian in form, and we all felt a bit more refined in its presence. The new rules were that nothing could ever be set on top of the television. Only my mother was allowed to dust the TV, when it was off, with lemon scented spray. The lemony scented TV was our informal god. The new TV soon began showing us live Vietnam war footage in living color. The former black and white shows were now in Technicolor. It was like when Dorothy walked out of her house into the Land of Oz.
It was like in the film, Pleasantville, where a teenage brother and sister, with the help of a magic remote control, (delivered by Don Knotts) become actors in a TV show. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUI9N-fCX7o This film addresses so much about the change television has made in the world, as well as the technological leap from black and white to color in films and television. Once the brother and sister arrive in Pleasantville, they set about opening the eyes of the bland citizens of the small fictional town of Pleasantville. Soon, David's (Toby Maguire) and Jennifer's (Reese Witherspoon) meddling gets out of hand. At first the changes seem for the better: streets that used to simply end now continued, books which had no words were filled with stories, roses and apples turned red, young people discovered love and sex, a wife became liberated, a shop owner discovered his artistic talents. David realizes that the people in the town are real, and has a moment of doubt that what he and his sister have done may not be right - until he sees that much of the change has made the people happier. Taking a bite from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is a necessary thing for human beings. We were meant to learn from our mistakes. In Pleasantville, when people took that bite, so to speak, they changed to full color people. Their world got bigger. At first the colored people were a minority, until one by one most of the townspeople were changed. The final showdown occurred in a courtroom, where the town's mayor becomes so emotionally charged with David's arguments that he changes as well. The symbol is easy to comprehend, and akin to the racial rights movement that swept America in the 1960s. Black people were accepted, based primarily on the color of their skin. In Pleasantville, and in America, the dreams blacks and other minorities were broadened to all the colors of the rainbow.
When I first saw Ed Sullivan on television, he looked as dead and stiff as a man could look. When technicolor arrived, Sullivan became more alive to me. This was the beginning of the Golden Age of Television. From 1964 to 1969 a slew of new shows were introduced. The Smother's Brothers, Hee-Haw, Rowen & Martin's 'Laugh-In,' I Dream of Jeannie, Green Acres, Gilligan's Island, Star Trek, Pettycoat Junction, Lost in Space, The Munsters, The Addams Family, and many soap opera's, as well as films made their debuts.
Our country's leaders had sent the young men to fight in Vietnam, a war many were starting to not believe in by 1966, despite patriotic songs about the Green Beret. The sitcoms kept us ignorant and laughing through it all. CBS-TV's news anchor, Walter Cronkite, was already the most popular newscaster in America, and he was now ruddy cheeked. My parents hushed us while Cronkite delivered the news each night, such as when Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the presidential election. The memory of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was still fresh in our minds, but in my mind, the only thing that mattered was watching comedies on TV.
I honed my skills and did impersonations of people like Maxwell Smart, and cartoon characters. Television was the ultimate diversion from reality. My mother, who perhaps feared the television would replace God, made sure we went to church each Sunday. She often tried to pry us away from the TV, and told us to go outside and play. Naturally we boys had war battles in the woods. We had shows like Combat to mimic, and the ongoing Vietnam war footage. Dirtclods became hand grenades, sticks became machine guns. My sisters played with Barbies, having been brainwashed themselves by the never ending commercials about Barbie and Ken. One day while playing with Ken, his head came off. The girls could not get the head back on, so they melted it on with matches.
We boys also had a love of fire. Mounted on a large sheet of plywood in our dungeon-like basement, was a model train track. Imagine a basement with a dirt floor and a coal burning furnace, where spiders grew to enormous sizes. My younger brother, Bob, and I were not afraid of going down to the basement, it was where our dog, Mitzi, had had her pups. It was just another place to play our war games. We put plastic army soldiers on the trains and lit them on fire. The soldiers limbs dripped like candles. Seeing how well they burned and melted, we place the soldiers on rafts, which we set on fire and let float down the irrigation ditch that acted as a natural border between our front yard and a pear orchard. This was a time when DDT was still being used on food crops. I suppose there was plenty of it in the fruit we occasionally ate from the orchards and in the irrigation ditch. But when you are a kid you don't think about things like that. It was only years later that I learned that the maker of DDT was also the maker of Agent Orange and Napalm, our dear friend Monsanto. Monsanto sold a lot of products on television, under different brand names. Nowadays they genetically modify all the seed crops worldwide. All the corn syrup that company makes could cover the planet.
The set was enormous; it had fancy wood turnings and a crisscross wood pattern that lay on top of a textured greenish colored fabric, that covered the TV's speakers. The TV was Victorian in form, and we all felt a bit more refined in its presence. The new rules were that nothing could ever be set on top of the television. Only my mother was allowed to dust the TV, when it was off, with lemon scented spray. The lemony scented TV was our informal god. The new TV soon began showing us live Vietnam war footage in living color. The former black and white shows were now in Technicolor. It was like when Dorothy walked out of her house into the Land of Oz.
It was like in the film, Pleasantville, where a teenage brother and sister, with the help of a magic remote control, (delivered by Don Knotts) become actors in a TV show. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUI9N-fCX7o This film addresses so much about the change television has made in the world, as well as the technological leap from black and white to color in films and television. Once the brother and sister arrive in Pleasantville, they set about opening the eyes of the bland citizens of the small fictional town of Pleasantville. Soon, David's (Toby Maguire) and Jennifer's (Reese Witherspoon) meddling gets out of hand. At first the changes seem for the better: streets that used to simply end now continued, books which had no words were filled with stories, roses and apples turned red, young people discovered love and sex, a wife became liberated, a shop owner discovered his artistic talents. David realizes that the people in the town are real, and has a moment of doubt that what he and his sister have done may not be right - until he sees that much of the change has made the people happier. Taking a bite from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is a necessary thing for human beings. We were meant to learn from our mistakes. In Pleasantville, when people took that bite, so to speak, they changed to full color people. Their world got bigger. At first the colored people were a minority, until one by one most of the townspeople were changed. The final showdown occurred in a courtroom, where the town's mayor becomes so emotionally charged with David's arguments that he changes as well. The symbol is easy to comprehend, and akin to the racial rights movement that swept America in the 1960s. Black people were accepted, based primarily on the color of their skin. In Pleasantville, and in America, the dreams blacks and other minorities were broadened to all the colors of the rainbow.
When I first saw Ed Sullivan on television, he looked as dead and stiff as a man could look. When technicolor arrived, Sullivan became more alive to me. This was the beginning of the Golden Age of Television. From 1964 to 1969 a slew of new shows were introduced. The Smother's Brothers, Hee-Haw, Rowen & Martin's 'Laugh-In,' I Dream of Jeannie, Green Acres, Gilligan's Island, Star Trek, Pettycoat Junction, Lost in Space, The Munsters, The Addams Family, and many soap opera's, as well as films made their debuts.
Our country's leaders had sent the young men to fight in Vietnam, a war many were starting to not believe in by 1966, despite patriotic songs about the Green Beret. The sitcoms kept us ignorant and laughing through it all. CBS-TV's news anchor, Walter Cronkite, was already the most popular newscaster in America, and he was now ruddy cheeked. My parents hushed us while Cronkite delivered the news each night, such as when Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the presidential election. The memory of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was still fresh in our minds, but in my mind, the only thing that mattered was watching comedies on TV.
I honed my skills and did impersonations of people like Maxwell Smart, and cartoon characters. Television was the ultimate diversion from reality. My mother, who perhaps feared the television would replace God, made sure we went to church each Sunday. She often tried to pry us away from the TV, and told us to go outside and play. Naturally we boys had war battles in the woods. We had shows like Combat to mimic, and the ongoing Vietnam war footage. Dirtclods became hand grenades, sticks became machine guns. My sisters played with Barbies, having been brainwashed themselves by the never ending commercials about Barbie and Ken. One day while playing with Ken, his head came off. The girls could not get the head back on, so they melted it on with matches.
We boys also had a love of fire. Mounted on a large sheet of plywood in our dungeon-like basement, was a model train track. Imagine a basement with a dirt floor and a coal burning furnace, where spiders grew to enormous sizes. My younger brother, Bob, and I were not afraid of going down to the basement, it was where our dog, Mitzi, had had her pups. It was just another place to play our war games. We put plastic army soldiers on the trains and lit them on fire. The soldiers limbs dripped like candles. Seeing how well they burned and melted, we place the soldiers on rafts, which we set on fire and let float down the irrigation ditch that acted as a natural border between our front yard and a pear orchard. This was a time when DDT was still being used on food crops. I suppose there was plenty of it in the fruit we occasionally ate from the orchards and in the irrigation ditch. But when you are a kid you don't think about things like that. It was only years later that I learned that the maker of DDT was also the maker of Agent Orange and Napalm, our dear friend Monsanto. Monsanto sold a lot of products on television, under different brand names. Nowadays they genetically modify all the seed crops worldwide. All the corn syrup that company makes could cover the planet.
When my family moved from Hood River to take over my grandparents' farm five miles away, my father bought another television. This one was even more fancy than the old color set. We had a console type stereo that looked like it was made by the same manufacturer. By then the world had embraced avocado and orange as acceptable colors for living rooms and kitchens. The avocado rug covered an acre and a half in our new living room. My parents had become socialites in a big way. Their round dancing and square dancing friends gathered there after dances. The living room was so wide you had to use a megaphone to keep a conversation going with someone sitting on the forty foot long avocado green couch. My brother Bob and I had embraced the hippie movement. though it came late to the Northwest. My Dad allowed us to grow our hair over our ears for the first time. Mom was wearing shorter skirts and Dad grew sideburns. The television was still a focal point of the living room, but a much smaller one, and dwarfed by the size of the room and the enormous twenty foot picture window that looked out on a cherry orchard, a mountain. The Columbia River could be seen far off in the distance.
We had helped our father build the house, dubbed "the Party House." It had taken ten years for my father to nail on the baseboard moldings. Until we dug drainage ditches, frogs miraculously appeared each Spring in one room of our daylight basement. In the basement the seeds of rebellion were sown. It began with a nice wood burning stove we could hang out by on winter nights, and expanded to include a bumper pool table, and a couch. Before long my brother Bob and I threw parties when my parents were out. We planted young marijuana plants in my mother's empty plastic pots. I had grown tangerine plants the first year in the new house, and the plants had done well, so when my mother asked me what the new plants were I quickly told her they were tangerine plants. The ruse worked for a month until the plants took on the form that even my mother realized were not tangerine plants. This was the age of rebellion. My sister had taken up with a boy who was trouble, and near the end of her senior year in high school she got pregnant. This was the beginning of my return to sanity. My brother took a few more years, but I had had enough of rebellion. I began to lose interest in the old TV shows and began to entertain ideas about what I would do with my life.
We had helped our father build the house, dubbed "the Party House." It had taken ten years for my father to nail on the baseboard moldings. Until we dug drainage ditches, frogs miraculously appeared each Spring in one room of our daylight basement. In the basement the seeds of rebellion were sown. It began with a nice wood burning stove we could hang out by on winter nights, and expanded to include a bumper pool table, and a couch. Before long my brother Bob and I threw parties when my parents were out. We planted young marijuana plants in my mother's empty plastic pots. I had grown tangerine plants the first year in the new house, and the plants had done well, so when my mother asked me what the new plants were I quickly told her they were tangerine plants. The ruse worked for a month until the plants took on the form that even my mother realized were not tangerine plants. This was the age of rebellion. My sister had taken up with a boy who was trouble, and near the end of her senior year in high school she got pregnant. This was the beginning of my return to sanity. My brother took a few more years, but I had had enough of rebellion. I began to lose interest in the old TV shows and began to entertain ideas about what I would do with my life.
Many years later I found myself writing a directing TV commercials, sitcom ideas, and screenplays. I cannot help but think that my early indoctrination into TV Land affected the course of my life. I do not know what became of the TV in my parents house. I assume it ended up in a landfill somewhere. TV sparked my sense of humor, and for that I am thankful.
I own a big flat screen TV now, but I haven't watched it much lately. I am watching the action in my head as I write stories. There are never reruns or commercials there.
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