Saturday, July 6, 2019

Sit Right Back And Hear A Tale

Fossil music was coming right out of our TV.

I didn't even know you could get that sound out of a flat-screen, but sure enough, the dramatic strings and horns of the Perry Mason theme song were charging through the room, and I dropped 55 years just like that.

Perry Mason wasn't one of the shows I watched. In fact, at age ten, I didn't have a show. I played outside, and later watched what Mom and Dad watched, which would be Huntley Brinkley and the Dick Van Dyke show. My friend Carol was nuts about Perry Mason, but she was kind of advanced. She used words like "however" in ordinary conversation. But of course I remember the theme song. And that was enough to get my reverie going.

Shows still have theme songs but they're super snappy and to the point. Everybody has a skillion shows they could pluck out of space at any time and you don't want to make them wait for anything. Nobody today will sit through the Gilligan's Island theme song, which didn't outpeter for about ten minutes, and even with all that, the Professor and Mary Ann were just a footnote. In fact, it says a lot about the nature of time that we did have enough of it to sit through that crappy song. We were marinating in time. We had no fear of missing out: nothing else was happening.

What the theme song did remind me of is how there were certain shows that absolutely everyone watched, and then they'd rehash them all the next day. Ed Sullivan. Batman. Laugh-In. You didn't want to miss your show. And you certainly would miss it if your fanny wasn't in front of the TV when it started. You didn't get another shot at it until the reruns started. That means that you knew all your friends were watching the exact same thing you were, at the exact same time. It was a new, modern, yet remote form of togetherness. It was amazing. Now, unless somebody drops a skyscraper, nobody's watching the same thing at the same time.

We've always been social beasts. But the nature of togetherness changes. My grandparents' generation did togetherness old-school. Physically. And that was probably because they had to cut hay or slap cattle rumps or polish their horses or something. And if your daughter took off for the hinterlands and someone asked you how she was doing, you had no idea. You'd have to wait until a hand-written letter showed up, so it was dependent on the stamina of someone's mule. You'd just stare off into the horizon all wistful-like, and shake your head, and go back to wiping something down. It was a little sad, but it didn't make you crazy like it can now.

Because now you can be together with anyone in the world at any time and there are fifteen different ways of going about it. It's frantic. It's diffuse. It's togetherness in aerosol form. And if your daughter doesn't answer your text right away, you pretty much have to take it personally or imagine the worst. She's out there in that spray somewhere. It's been an hour. Where can she be? Is the mule okay?

31 comments:

  1. When I was really little, I loved My Favorite Martian. Later there was Gilligan's Island, Bewitched, and Star Trek, which my friends watched as well. The next day, we would get together and "perform" the episode (or a variation of it) with each person being one of the characters. So even though we watched TV, it was always specific shows -- not whatever happened to be on. And we didn't watch constantly -- only when "our shows" were on. It also brought us together in play as we acted out the stories and made up our own. It probably helped us develop our imaginations rather than serve as a substitute.

    Watching TV was "special" then, because it was an adjunct to our lives. We had other things to do. TV is no longer "for special". It seems to be an essential part of everyone's life, even being on all the time as background noise.

    For Paul and I, it has become a "special" activity again, as we no longer have cable or satellite. We watch things on Netflix for maybe four hours a week -- and only things we actually want to see.

    At a garage sale a few weeks ago, a girl of about 10 was trying to push some of her parent's things to people while her mom relaxed in a chair. She tried to work up my enthusiasm for various things, including a small flat-screen TV.

    "No. I don't watch television," I told her.

    You would have thought I had said that I eat babies. She was horrified. "You don't watch TV?" she asked. Then again, for good measure... "YOU DON'T WATCH TV???"

    "Believe it or not," I told her, "there is more to life than watching TV."

    I'm sure she must have immediately went to her mother for reassurance when I left and probably has nightmares about a world without TV.

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    1. A friend of mine in junior high was a Christian Scientist and her family didn't own a TV. I don't know if those two facts are related, but it's stuck with me to this day.

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  2. I used to visit a since-deceased family friend who had Alzheimers. The facility would turn on the television to old black and white movies, I guess thinking that they would spark interest in the elderly residents. They didn't. They didn't speak or reminisce or react. They definitely weren't watching. The place was silent except for the television. It was really kind of creepy.

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  3. I can't work up any enthusiasm for TV anymore. I can't even work up any enthusiasm for OLD TV anymore. It seems like such a waste of time to watch people pretend to be other people. Give me a good book any day. Or watching, you know, REAL people :)

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    1. Real people pretend to be other people too, you know.

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    2. True, but they're not getting paid for it and there's no script, lol

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    3. I don't know--what's the salary for President?

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    4. $400,000/year . . . good point.

      Although Trump has been donating all of it, believe it or not. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/01/26/trump-donates-part-salary-alcoholism-research/2688769002/

      I wasn't actually thinking about the three-ring-circus in Washington when I made the comment. Just reg'lar people :)

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  4. I may have shared this with you before, but in elementary school we were limited to 30 minutes of TV per day. That meant that we would have to sit down with the "grid" of channels (or later, the TV guide), and plan out our TV watching. We were allowed to 'save up' TV time, and then use it later. (The best example would be if we wanted to watch a full-hour show, perhaps a "Hullabaloo" extravaganza...) I can appreciate this now, because it taught us planning and reminded us that there are plenty of other things to do.

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    1. Your parents were awesome. Maybe not your mom's politics, but everything else...

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  5. We didn't get a television until late (and I never acquired the habit). When people were talking about 'that show' I was ignorant. I have seen snippets of them decades later and know that my ignorance was bliss. I am perfectly happy not to be connected (while appreciating the wonders of the time sucking internet).

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    1. There are so many things "everybody" has seen that I haven't. Incuding (not that it's TV) Star Wars.

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    2. I didn't see Star Wars until the final movie was released on DVD, then I watched all of them one after the other.

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    3. Never saw a single second, but I do know who Luke's father is!

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  6. We had an intermittent Magnavox. Sometimes it worked. Most times it didn't. It was of the give-it-a-good-whack vintage. I still thrill to those days of yesteryear whenever I hear Rossini's William Tell Overture… Hi yo, Silver! Away!

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    1. Can't listen to it without seeing that rearing horse.

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  7. Sounds like we're generation cohorts. I remember "Who knows...what evil lurks in the minds of man...the SHADOW knows," and here's where I'd get goosebumps.

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    1. Wait a minute...wasn't that radio?

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    2. Yep...but I'm 81, and my brain has apparently forgotten some important previously known skills.

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    3. The goosebumps are what's important.

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  8. See, now I have to go to youtube to find out what Perry M's theme was. But first I need to reread to be sure I have not misunderstood the bit about someone's daughter being a mule.Do they even have cell phones in Venezuela?

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  9. I used to bike over on Saturday's to cut my great uncle Ed's lawn and then we'd sit around and watch the Groucho Marx show together. His TV was so old the picture tube was round.
    And then when color TV was invented, it was so expensive we would all get together and go over to the one house in the neighborhood that had one to see the NBC peacock unfold its feathers and watch them turn to color.
    By the late 60s, TV was so much a part of the "military-industrial establishment" that when I moved out of my parent's house, I never owned or watched TV again until the 1980s - part of "getting straight" and having kids of my own. I still rarely watched it but the BetaMax got a real workout. I was always amazed that they could watch the same favorite movie over and over and over again.

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    1. Now that I think of it, I went through at least a decade without a TV. But although I don't see most of them, there sure are a lot of good series being made now.

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  10. Hinterland! There's a word not heard much these days. And of course I now have the Gilligan's Island them running through my head.
    I remember kids at school all discussing whatever assortment of shows they all watched, but I barely looked at Tv during the week, preferring to read in winter and hang around at the beach in summer. The beach was only 5 minutes walk from my house. I did eventually learn about Dr Who though, when a friend invited me home to watch it with her, this was back in the 60s when the Doctor was the old man with long white hair. after that I was always home at 4:30 to watch and learned about Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, Superman and all the rest.

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    1. I still haven't seen Dr. Who. 'Sixties? Really? Sorry about that theme song. If it makes you feel any better, and it shouldn't, it's stuck in my head too.

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  11. Fond memories! My mom and I watched Perry Mason religiously, (just last week I watched reruns of it). We were all in on watching-as-a-family Ed Sullivan, the Dick Van Dyke Show, Laugh-In -- and the Danny Kaye Show, my all-time favorite, a couple of years later. NO Gilligan's Island. Ever. Ew. I watched Batman, but without my parents. And to go even further back -- I was too little to get much of it on first runs -- Your Show of Shows, with Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, etc. Those were good days.

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    1. Of course, as very devoted Murrmurrs readers might remember, my dad didn't allow me to see certain shows. That included the Wonderful World of Disney and Mission: Impossible. And EVERYONE at school watched Mission: Impossible.

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  12. and Dobie Gillis! How could I forget Dobie Gillis?

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    1. Oh goody--now "Dobie Dobie Dobie" has replaced "Gilligan's Island" theme song in my brain.

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