For Sunday: Wonder Woman spins, and spins, and spins

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I think I speak for everyone who loved Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman when I say that we never got tired of watching her spin. She could turn even the most pedestrian outfit into something special.

Here are several dozen spins. Watch the outfits. It’s a whole education in late 1970s / early 1980s fashion.

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For Halloween: The Great Pumpkin

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“It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” was one of the first televised Peanuts specials, and one of the best. Here are a few selected scenes dealing with Linus’s misguided belief in the Great Pumpkin (who will only rise from the most sincere pumpkin patch in the world), and Sally’s reaction when she realized that she’s wasted her whole Halloween evening.

“YOU OWE ME RESTITUTION!”

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Raymond Burr

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Raymond Burr was a handsome second-string actor who started his career in the late 1940s. He evolved into a movie villain (as in “Rear Window"), and then a heroic TV actor (as in “Perry Mason,” and later “Ironside”). He was handsome and broad-shouldered, with a deep gruff voice. He gained weight in the 1950s and 1960s, but it gave him gravity.

Also, he was gay.

He met an actor named Robert Benvenides while working on the “Perry Mason” show. They fell in love, and spent the rest of their lives together. Hollywood couldn’t endure this, of course, so the studios created a fiction about marriages and children. (Raymond was married to a woman for a while, back in the 1940s, but it ended in divorce and no children.)

He was reputed to be very generous. IMDB reports the story that Errol Flynn told him that, if he died with ten dollars in his pocket, he wouldn’t have done his job. It inspired him to be philanthropic, and he always helped his friends.

He died in 1992, and Benvenides was his sole heir, but Raymond’s family contested this. They failed, thank goodness.

How times have changed! Look at George Takei! And Neil Patrick Harris! And Ellen de Generes!

Partner and I have talked about marriage. Sadly, we’d end up paying more income tax married than we would as two “single” people. But our mutual employer, Brown University, regards us as Domestic Partners, so we enjoy some advantages that way. Also, we have not found any local institutions that discriminate against us. Lately (with all my health-related adventures) I simply introduce Partner to my doctors and nurses as “my life partner,” and he’s welcomed immediately.

How easy we have it, and how difficult Raymond Burr and his partner Robert Benvenides had it, only twenty years ago.

The world is moving in the right direction.

Slowly.

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For Sunday: A man arguing with his own stomach

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I thought that, since getting a feeding tube implanted in my stomach, this might be appropriate. This is a very funny Alka-Seltzer commercial from 1967, featuring a man arguing with his own stomach (voiced by a young Gene Wilder), and drawn by the clever R. O. Blechman.

Listen to the rapid angry dialogue, if you can. It’s wonderful. “You always hated my mother!”

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Salty Brine

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I came to Rhode Island in 1978, so I missed the early career of Salty Brine. He was a radio / TV personality with a deep jolly voice, who hosted a children’s show called “Salty’s Shack.” (He portrayed a sea captain, naturally.) By the time I got to Rhode Island, he was best known for reading the school closures on the radio when it snowed. There’s a small region in northwestern Rhode Island, the Foster/Glocester area (pronounced "Fosta/Glosta"), very underpopulated, a bit more elevated than the rest of the state, which gets more snow than the rest of the state; they close school when no one else does.

And Salty would boom: “NO SCHOOL FOSTA GLOSTA!”

And children throughout Rhode Island (even those who didn’t live in the Foster / Glocester school districts) would cheer.

Salty Brine, the children’s host, the radio personality, was inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 1979.

Does that tell you something?

They even named a beach after him: “Salty Brine State Beach,” in Galilee.

We had local celebrities when and where I was growing up. I remember Rusty Nails the clown, who was on Portland television in the 1960s; if you watch “The Simpsons,” you’ll see a version of him as Krusty the Clown (Matt Groening, the creator of the show, grew up in the area at the same time as me).

But I do believe that nowhere are those local celebrities as beloved as Salty Brine is beloved here.

Why?

Rhode Island is small. We treasure our own. And if they’re successful (and known beyond the borders of this small state), we treasure them even more.

And I am told by people of my age from Massachusetts that they used to love Salty Brine, beamed in from Providence, back in the 1960s and 1970s.

So Salty Brine is a legend, in Rhode Island, and even outside its borders.

You see? You don’t need to reach far in life. You just need to be well-known in your little neighborhood. If you manage that, all kinds of things can happen.

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Mister Ed

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There is a current TV series called “Wilfrid,” in which a man (played by Elijah Wood) owns a dog whom he sees as a person. The dog, Wilfrid (played by the Australian Jason Gann) is willful, and angry, and tricky. Wilfrid pretends to be Elijah’s friend, but he’s not. Wilfrid tricks Elijah repeatedly, and plots against him.

It makes me long for Mister Ed.

Mister Ed was the title character of a TV show back in the 1960s. He was a very charming horse who lived in a stable belonging to Wilbur Post (played by Alan Young), who’d bought the house / stable / horse from a previous owner. Wilbur was shocked when Mister Ed spoke to him. But Mister Ed said: “I only speak when I’m with someone I feel like speaking to.”

Mister Ed could dial an old rotary telephone (with a pencil in his mouth). When he read, he wore giant glasses! (Where did he get them, do you suppose? The Secret Talking Horse Optometrist?)

Mister Ed wasn’t stupid. He knew about most things. He did (in one episode) fall in love with another horse he’d seen in the park, but who hasn’t had that experience?

Mister Ed was a remarkable horse.

Of course, of course.

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In memoriam: Cosmo "Gus" Allegretti

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You’ve seen me write about dead relatives, and the passing of friends, and even the passing of celebrities.

Well, a celebrity passed away a few weeks ago, though many of his fans didn’t even know his real name.

He was a puppeteer / actor / dancer named Cosmo Allegretti, known to his friends as Gus. He was a regular on the “Captain Kangaroo” program that ran from the 1950s into the 1980s. But you seldom saw him – during the first ten or fifteen years, anyway. He was always in disguise.

Sometimes he was Dancing Bear, who never spoke, but who communicated through clever little softshoe routines:

Sometimes he was fussy old Grandfather Clock, who had to be awakened very gently, and who told stories and recited poems:

Later in the show’s history, he was Dennis the Apprentice, always dressed in a painter’s whites, big and earnest and clumsy (though at least he didn’t have to hide his face anymore):

Best of all, he was Mister Moose and Bunny Rabbit. Bob Keeshan, writing about the show, said that “these two were surrogates for children, demonstrating their playful power over adults.” I loved them both: they were sneaky and dishonest without being really bad. The Captain was often frustrated with both of them, but you could tell that he loved them too, and they seemed to love him too.

Mister Moose was a practical joker. He was always tricking the Captain into saying things like “Let ‘er rip!”, at which point a couple hundred ping-pong balls would fall from the ceiling all over the Captain’s head. And then Mister Moose would go into raptures. (Personal note: whenever I do a puppet voice, it’s Mister Moose’s reedy falsetto. Why not?)

Bunny Rabbit was silent, like Dancing Bear. He was small and wore glasses. He’d get the Captain’s attention by rapping on the tabletop, and he always ended up stealing all of the Captain’s delicious carrots.

Here they are together, bamboozling the Captain one more time:

So many good memories.

Rest in peace, Gus.

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The decline and fall of CNN

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Ted Turner, a true visionary who’s also a true kook, founded the Cable News Network in 1980. People said he was crazy; there wasn’t enough news in the world to justify a 24/7 television news network.

CNN sputtered along through the 1980s. Finally, the first Gulf War in 1991 gave them a breakthrough. People sat hypnotized in front of their TVs and watched the live coverage from Iraq and Kuwait: Wolf Blitzer, Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett, Christiane Amanpour. I remember sitting mesmerized in front of a friend’s television myself (I didn’t have cable in those days).

Then cable became common. Then it became almost universal. Then it became almost necessary.

Then CNN found that it was competing with Fox and other news networks, which were using the formula CNN had itself created: reporting, reporting on the reporting, experts. It is hard to fill up twenty-four hours a day with news, so you come up with other stuff – let’s be charitable and call it “commentary” – and pretend that your "commentary" is news too.

Let’s fast forward to the present day, shall we?

On the morning of the fourth of July, Partner and I happened to be watching CNN, and I suddenly realized that they were running a promo for the return of “Crossfire.”

“Crossfire”! This was a point-counterpoint program with Tucker Carlson maybe ten years ago, which got shamed off the air by Jon Stewart, who pointed out that they were accomplishing nothing except filling time. 

Now they’re bringing it back.

Okay. Back to CNN. They’re doing a piece on the New England Patriots player, Aaron Hernandez, who killed some people. First, the anchor garbles the words “New England Patriots” into something incomprehensible, and stares silently into the camera for a long moment until she recovers control of her voice. Now we go to the story. CNN has a reporter on the scene in Attleboro, Massachusetts; a neighbor is leading her around the crime scene, explaining things to her. How the hell does this guy know anything? Best of all, the neighbor is introduced this way: “This is Jay. He asked that we not use his last name.”

Hi, Jay. We can see your face. If we really meant to do you harm, we probably wouldn’t need to know your last name.

But don’t blame poor Jay in Attleboro. Blame the CNN reporter who said, “Uh, sure, if you don’t want to use your last name, you don’t have to. But of course you can appear on camera.”

Isn’t CNN hiring anyone with any expertise in journalism?

Evidently not.

But journalism is no longer in demand.

You gotta fill up those twenty-four hours a day with something!

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Vintage drinking glasses

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The TV series “Mad Men” has absorbed Partner and me for about a year now. We’re all caught up through Season Six. Each season has covered a year of the 1960s (more or less), so we’re up to the end of 1968. We’ve seen the assassination of two Kennedys, the murder of Martin Luther King, the Love Generation, et cetera.

The show's writing is excellent, as is the acting (by people like Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss and John Slattery and Robert Morse).

But, as with a lot of series set in the past, it’s possible to watch this show for the clothes and the sets and the accessories.

Bugles, for example. When I saw a minor character eating Bugles, I remembered when Bugles were new (in the mid-1960s), and I was amused and charmed, and astonished at the writers’ acumen at knowing that the product was introduced (with great fanfare) in the mid-1960s.

Also: in “Mad Men,” everyone drinks all the time. We see the drinking accessories: really darling glasses, clear glass with silver rims.

My parents had glasses just like them, with a big “W” monogram on them, in silver, naturally. I loved those glasses.

They recently showed up on a cutesy website: replicas of the “silver-rimmed Mad Men drinking glasses,” $25 for two (not including shipping).

Aha, I thinks, and went to eBay, and found two cute authentic Dorothy Thorpe roly-poly drinking glasses for $18 (including shipping).

They arrived the other day. They are perfect. They make me happy when I look at them, and they make a nice tinkling sound when I put ice cubes in them.

And they remind me of my childhood.

So, for your drink: will you have brown or clear?

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Froggy the Gremlin

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A long time ago, back in the 1950s, there was a radio/TV show for kids sponsored by Buster Brown Shoes. It had characters like Midnight the Cat, who only ever said “Nice!”, and a mouse who played the piano.

Also it feature Froggy the Gremlin.

Froggy was invoked with the words, “Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!” He always appeared with a big BOINGGG, with the words: “Hiya, kids! Hiya! Hiya!”

Froggy was an ugly little frog puppet who made people say and do stupid things against their will.

Regardez:

You will notice that Froggy the Gremlin is completely without remorse. He makes people do stupid things, and then he laughs at them, and then (once in a while) he makes believe that he meant something else, or that it wasn’t his fault.

You are never for a moment without a doubt that it was all Froggy’s doing.

Froggy is evil and relentless. He laughs at misfortune. He promises to be good, and he never makes good on his promise.

I think he may be my spirit animal.

One more:

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Movie review: "Star Trek Into Darkness"

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I was nine years old and in the fifth grade when the first “Star Trek” series began on TV. It was a bit late – ten o’clock, I think – but, for some reason, my parents allowed me watch it. I was hypnotized. I remember especially the “Cat’s Paw” episode, with Korob and Sylvia, which first aired just before Halloween 1967:

I’ve never been  the same since.

I’ve seen most of the various TV series, and most of the movies. I didn’t care much for “Next Generation,” but I did love “Deep Space Nine.” “Voyager” I flirted with, but we never fell in love. “Enterprise” I didn’t connect with at all, though I think Scott Bakula is very hot.

The movies have mostly been disappointments. The first one was much looked forward to – I remember yelling “Beam me up!” in the theater lobby, which everyone thought was very funny – but it was really pretty terrible. “Wrath of Khan” was a good movie, as was the one with the whales – what was it? – “The Voyage Home.” Most of the “Next Generation” movies were completely forgettable. The movie before this one, “Star Trek” with Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, was actually pretty good, although it seemed to indicate that we were moving  into, ahem, an alternate timeline, in which things didn’t happen the way they did in the original TV show or the first few movies.

Anyway: so here we are, on our second movie! Chris Pine (Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (Spock) are still both very cute. (The director likes to let the camera dwell on Chris’s pretty eyes for minutes at a time. I admit that his eyes are very special.) Spock is still in a relationship with Uhura (Zoe Saldana), and they’re spatting this time around, which is also cute. Scotty (Simon Pegg), Sulu (John Cho) and McCoy (Karl Urban) create a solid old-fashioned connection to the original series, funny and serious at the same time, and all three of them give terrific performances.

But, unfortunately, all of the above excellent performers are saddled with a sub-standard plot.

Benedict Cumberbatch is the villain, and he’s very good at being a villain, because he has that voice, and that slightly-inhuman face. But the plot is all things blowing up, and maybe the Klingons will attack us, and maybe there are bad guys within StarFleet!

Yeah, mm-hmm. We’ve done this before. About a million times.

There is a ton of stuff in this movie for the fans (which non-fans will not even notice): tribbles, a mention of Harry Mudd, the appearance of Carol Marcus. The producers made a big deal of not revealing the movie’s plot in advance, and I’ll play along. I will say this: Cumberbatch is playing a villain named John Harrison, but John Harrison is not his real name.

I went to this film as a Star Trek fan always does, hoping for a really good movie.

I came away thinking: “Oh, well. Chris Pine is cute, so it wasn’t a total loss.”

Well, anyway, I have high hopes for next weekend’s “Man of Steel.”

And if it turns out to be terrible: well, at least Henry Cavill’s very cute.

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Annette Funicello

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Annette Funicello passed away on Monday. It wasn’t a surprise; she’s been sick for a long time – she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1987, and has been battling it ever since.

 

 

But it is a very sad occasion for me.

 

 

Annette was my very first television crush, back in the late 1950s / early 1960s, when she was one of the original Mousketeers. She was so pretty! And she was always smiling!

 

 

Annette had a singing career, and she even had her own TV show for a while. Then, in the mid-1960s, there were the Beach Party movies with Frankie Avalon. I never tire of seeing those beach movies; they are eternal 1960s summer, with no shadow of Vietnam or the counterculture. Annette is always the Good Girl; Frankie is always tempted by the Bad Girl (Connie Stevens, or Luciana Paluzzi, or whomever), but he always comes back to Annette.

 

 

Annette did occasional gigs in the 70s and 80s, but not much. Then, after her MS was diagnosed in 1987, she and Frankie Avalon made the dreadful-but-loveable “Back to the Beach,” with Connie Stevens and Pee-Wee Herman. It’s a twenty-years-later beach movie, which tries to recapture the feeling of those madcap stupid 1960s beach movies. It fails, naturally.

 

 

But who cares? It was fun. I watched it three or four times, because I loved Annette.

 

 

And I still do.

 

 

Rest in peace, sweetheart.

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Networking

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Not long ago I received an email entitled “The ABC Insider,” with news and views about ABC's programming season. I glanced through their schedule, and their ads, and their promos, and I found myself thinking: Yeah, it looks like ABC.

 

 

And then I stopped and wondered: what did I mean by that?

 

 

When I was a kid in the 1960s and early 1970s, we pretty much subsisted on programming from the Big Three: ABC, CBS, and NBC.  Somehow, each network managed to have a personality (we call it “branding” nowadays). I never really thought about it at the time, but I think about it now, and it was real then, and it's real now.

 

 

I managed to put myself into a kind of memory trance to dredge up recollections of programs I watched in those days, and I tried also to remember what network they were on. It was surprisingly easy. (I went through later, using that new invention “The Internet,” to verify my recollections, and I was right in every instance.)  I then looked for a thread that ran through the programming in each network's case, and in each case I didn't have to look very hard.

 

 

NBC was in those days the sophisticated network: “Laugh-In.” “The Tonight Show.” Later, “Julia” (“brought to you with pride . . . by Jello”). NBC was urban in a kind of wink-wink Playboy Club way, or in a dignified dinner-party way. It was For Grownups, or For Those Who Wanted To Believe They Were Grownups. 

 

 

CBS churned out variety shows: Red Skelton, Gary Moore, Carol Burnett, Jackie Gleason. They were the home of all those hick comedies like “Beverly Hillbillies” and “Green Acres” and “Petticoat Junction.” And, of course, they were the home of Lucille Ball. CBS was almost vaudeville. I remember when I went to college in Spokane in 1974, the local CBS affiliate's office still had the old mid-60s network slogan on its facade, “The Stars' Address.” CBS was all about personalities: familiar names, proven talent. And not just Entertainment, but Family Entertainment. No grin-grin wink-wink here; everything was broad and obvious. This was the network that churned out “Hee Haw” a few years later.

 

 

ABC was all over the map. “Hollywood Palace.”  “Peyton Place.”  “Garrison's Gorillas.”  “Alias Smith and Jones.”  “Batman.”  “Bewitched.”  “That Girl.”  With very few exceptions, they were half-hour shows, brittle and jokey, or broad and soapy. ABC was almost the 1960s equivalent of the Fox Network. Most of all, ABC skewed young: bright new faces, chirpy comedies.

 

 

All these decades later, it continues. I look at a show like “The Ghost Whisperer,” earnest and cute and mock-dramatic, and I think: yeah, CBS. And I look at something kooky and snapping-fingers hip like “Lost,” and I think: yeah, probably ABC.

 

 

But now there's a channel for everything. (I have a fond memory of the episode of “Married with Children” when they first got cable: “What's this?” “The Japanese Channel.” Click. “What's this?” “The Stained Glass Network.”) But a network/channel like that isn't really the same thing. It's like a store that sells only Scotch Tape. The three big networks in the 1960s were like full-range department stores, each with a slightly different feel: upscale, midrange, family-friendly, bargain-basement.

 

 

(But the deepest mystery of all is this: what in the world is going on inside the brain of a fifty-five-year-old man who has to concentrate hard to remember today's date, but who can still remember what network “Garrison's Gorillas” was on, forty-five years later?)

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Morning TV

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On “30 Rock” a few seasons ago, Tracy Morgan came charging in and asked Tina Fey: “Liz Lemon, who's crazier: me or Ann Curry?”

 

 

 

Well, Ann Curry is gone now, crazy or not. She giggled a little too much, and she was definitely a lightweight. But she was definitely a morning-show person, god bless her, no matter how crazy she might have been.

 

 

Morning-show people always seem to become part of the family.  While I'm in the bathroom on weekday mornings, getting ready for work, I can hear Partner laughing at George Stephanopoulos and Robin Roberts and Sam Champion on “Good Morning America” in the bedroom.

 

 

Before George, of course, there was big ugly/handsome Chris Cuomo (brother of the current Governor of New York), who mostly seemed to enjoy getting into ticklefights with Sam Champion. 

 

 

Then there was the gorgeous CBS weekend host Chris Wragge, big and blond, like your handsome athletic cousin. He actually hosted the CBS weekday morning show for a while, but left this past January. He won’t be soon forgotten hereabouts.

 

 

Even the local hosts are interesting.  Partner and I used to enjoy the oddball pairing of Mark Zinni and Michelle Muscatello on Providence's Channel 12: they were always making each other laugh, and often came within inches of saying inappropriate things, which was exhilarating.  Michelle is still with us in Providence, but Mark is back in Cleveland, his home town.  I miss him.

 

 

Then there was the monstrous Vince DeMentri, who used to be the local Fox morning host.  He was big and blocky and handsome, but he gave off a kind of DANGER signal, like the abusive husband in a Lifetime movie.  The show had a meek little co-host named Sean Tempesta, who seemed to make Vince furious; after a while, Vince wouldn't even share the set with Tempesta. 

 

 

Then, suddenly, DeMentri disappeared.  I did a little research – wonderful place for research, the Internet! - and found that Vince had been a very bad boy in Pennsylvania before coming to Providence; he'd had an affair with another anchor, started doing stupid things (he hid her blow-dryer!), etc.  After he left Providence he went to New York City, where a few years ago he slapped the Bahamian ambassador’s driver for getting in his way.  Vince was acquitted, but lost his job in NYC. God knows where he is now.

 

 

I love morning television.  It's like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you're going to get.

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RuPaul's All-Star Drag Race 2012

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I am only half alive when RuPaul isn’t on the air. I have barely survived over the past few months, eating flavorless food and breathing stale air.

 

 

 

But all that changed on Monday night.

 

 

 

Ru’s back, bitches!

 

 

 

This season is different: Ru has brought back twelve of the top queens from the past seasons. We have Nina Flowers, and Pandora Boxx, and Shannel! We have Yara Sofia, and Manila Luzon, and Latrice Royale!

 

 

 

Naturally I have my favorites. I love Manila (though I notice many of the queens on the show aren’t crazy about her; I suspect she’s pretty high-intensity in person). And Chad Michaels is a consummate professional, and I never before realized how very beautiful (both as a man and as a woman) Shannel is. And Nina Flowers is as funny and energetic and engaging as ever, and Latrice is herself (as always).

 

 

 

I’m not a drag queen myself; I have no impulse to dress as a woman. (I only wish I had that much fashion sense.) But I love the energy, and commitment, and bravery that the queens on the show have. I love their humor. I actually think I learn a little something about color and design when I watch them put their outfits together. So I suppose this counts as educational television too.

 

 

 

Also, I think there’s a deeper subtext here, about performance as a natural human act. Don’t we all construct characters and perform them for other people? Don’t you portray one person on the job and another at home? Don’t you act differently with your family than you do with your friends?

 

 

 

I thought so. Me too.

 

 

 

So: if you’re going to create yourself as a character, make yourself a memorable character, or a beautiful character. Or (preferably) both.

 

 

 

There’s a moment in the Mahabharata when Yudisthira, a prince in exile, is sent into exile with his four brothers. By the terms of a wager they’ve made (and lost), they must spend a year in hiding. Yudisthira asks his father, the god Dharma, what to do. And Dharma says: “Let your disguise be guided by your most secret desire.”

 

 

 

So Yudisthira, a gambler, becomes a teacher of gambling. His brother Bhima, a glutton, becomes a cook.

 

 

 

And their brother Arjuna, the greatest and most powerful warrior in India, becomes a woman.

 

 

 

And he goes on, after exile, to win the war.

 

 

 

You go, girl!

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A world of opportunity

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While in France, we were stuck (of course) with French TV. This is not so bad: they have game shows, and variety shows, and talk shows, and comedies, and dramas.

 

 

 

Since neither my nor Partner’s French is completely fluent, however, we pretty much stuck to CNN.

 

 

 

The news was – odd. They do a strange mélange overseas: American stories (GIANT EYEBALL FOUND ON FLORIDA BEACH!) to global-interest stories (the saxophone industry in Taiwan, for example).

 

 

 

(I’m not kidding. They did a story on the saxophone industry in Taiwan. We saw it at least six times, on six different days.)

 

 

 

All this is fine. But what really captured my attention were the commercials.

 

 

 

No more commercials for The Scooter Store or the Jitterbug! These were commercials for countries.

 

 

 

For example: every ten minutes (it seemed), CNN / France showed an edited version of this video, which portrays “the unforgettable energy of freedom” in the nation of Georgia. Behold!:

 

 

 

 

 

 

(I like the music, and the dancing. I was not, however, aware that there were Georgian Ninjas.)

 

 

 

Speaking of former USSR republics, here’s Azerbaijan:

 

 

 

 

 

Lots of factories and oil wells and fast cars, and a decent-looking restaurant. Okay! I will definitely build my saccharin factory there!

 

 

 

Many other countries were represented. There was a Taiwanese ad with a nice-looking man doing Chinese calligraphy with a mop. There was Kazakhstan (not so memorable). There was Morocco (all factories and factory workers, but with a nice Moroccan-music background). There was Montenegro (part tourism, part business).

 

 

 

But I will leave you with my very favorite, for eastern Poland.

 

 

 

And I ask you: why haven’t you invested in eastern Poland?

 

 

 

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Anderson Cooper

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I was pleasantly surprised to hear on TV the other morning that my darling boy Anderson Cooper has come out of the closet.

 

 

Not that this is a surprise, mind you. I think I (and many others) have pretty much always known that Anderson is on our team. I am always delighted when a celebrity comes out of the closet. As I’ve said before: the more the merrier. It makes it that much easier for a teenager in Two Dot, Montana to come to terms with his / her own sexuality.

 

 

 

And I do like the words Anderson chose, for their breezy casualness: “The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud . . . By remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something — something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true.”

 

 

 

Do yourself a favor and go read Anderson’s whole letter on Andrew Sullivan’s blog.

 

 

It addresses, nicely and neatly, the question: Is there ever a good reason to stay in the closet?

 

 

For Anderson, there were two: the desire to have a private life, and the desire – as a journalist – to maintain objectivity. (“I want to report the news, not be the news,” he said.) Not that there’s any question about his objectivity; I find his reporting very balanced. But then, I’m a fan. But his deeper point is worth pondering. If you’re a member of the radical right, what do you think of Rachel Maddow? Smart? Incisive? Nah. She’s that lesbian on MSNBC. See, for a lot of people, you can’t be gay and objective. You’re always advancing the gay agenda.

 

 

(As I'm advancing it now. As in: gay people are part of society. Always have been, always will be.  And, increasingly, we are choosing not to live in celibate seclusion. So go deal with it.)

 

 

As a journalist, Anderson was confident of his own objectivity, but was (understandably) reluctant to give critics any reason to doubt his objectivity. Appearances aren’t everything, but they’re not nothing.

 

 

But sometimes the mere fact that you’ve come out – Here I am! You wanna make something of it? – is a worthwhile and powerful statement.  It goes to prove that “gay,” like “Asian-American” or “Californian,” is just one of many attributes, and it doesn’t define or inform your entire life. He’s not Anderson Cooper the gay journalist; he’s Anderson Cooper the journalist.  (Example: Neil Patrick Harris is super gay. But he plays a womanizer on a stupid CBS sitcom, and people love it. And I love him for doing it.)

 

 

(And here’s another thing: it’s not always safe to be openly gay. Read this excellent piece by Kathy Griffin on the subject. She points out, very neatly, that gay people are subjected to hatred and violence in much of the world – including the United States.  She praises Anderson’s bravery, and rightly so.)

 

 

All things considered, I think Anderson made the right decision. And I like that he did it right after the end of Pride Month. Here’s the message I got from that: Pride doesn’t end on June 30. It’s a yearlong activity.

 

 

Long live Anderson Cooper.

 

 

And his eyes, which (as Anderson tells Pee-Wee Herman at the end of this wonderful video) are a national treasure.

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PBS

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Public television, when I was a kid in the 1960s, was a weak and watery thing.  It was the fifth and feeblest of the stations broadcasting where I lived (the others were the three major networks and a local independent station that mostly showed old movies and reruns).  PBS (in Portland: KOAP / Channel 10) was always full of static, and often faded in and out.  My mother didn’t like it when I watched it; she was afraid that the static actually harmed the TV set.  (People – especially my mother – believed lots of crazy things in those days.)

 

 

I was a nerdy child, and I was fascinated by the bizarre variety of shows on Channel 10: cooking shows, language shows (I remember “Beginning Finnish”), college lectures. (Frankly, I got some part of my education, and my intellectual curiousity, from Channel 10, and god bless them for it.)

 

 

Something happened in the late 1960s.  “Sesame Street.”  “Masterpiece Theatre.”  All of a sudden, people were watching public TV, and talking about it.

 

 

It’s a pillar of the temple nowadays: news programs, science, commentary, foreign programming, odd programming.  Who else would have broadcast an entire series of Peter Brook’s “Mahabharata”?  Who else would show an animated version of the “Popol Vuh”?

 

 

Cable has taken away some of PBS's uniqueness, but PBS is still free, still broadcasting away.

 

 

And the Republicans have always hated it, and want to take away its federal funding.

 

 

Kids: tell the Republicans to go to hell. Vote Democrat, and give to PBS.

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The waiting room

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I write this while sitting in the waiting area of a medical office, waiting for Partner to have a two-hour test.  There is a TV in the corner (tuned to MSNBC). We are all sitting numbly and basking in its glow.

 

 

(In my youth, back in the 1950s and 1960s, doctors and dentists had aquariums full of all kinds of crazy colorful creatures in their waiting rooms. The aquariums served the same purpose that televisions do today.)

 

 

The people in the waiting room can’t control the channel changer, which – I think – makes them droopy and inattentive.  This is exactly what TV viewing was like in my youth: no control.  You had your choice of a couple of things – three or four channels at most - and you made the best of it.

 

 

But here I am, tapping away on my iPad.  I can write, send emails, surf the Net. I’m free!

 

 

Quick visual survey of the area: two magazine readers, three book readers, one iPod, one person actually watching the TV.  There’s a surprising lack of representation from the iPhone / Blackberry community.  (The stats just changed: one book reader just put down his Grisham and moved in front of the TV screen.  Evidently he wanted to hear the story about Lady Gaga.)

 

 

Years of television exposure have made me TV-aware.  I can’t help listening to the television, even when I have my back to the set and am trying to think about something else. MSNBC is moderately relaxing for me because I can live with most of the opinions presented; I can live without the visual content, however, as most of their presenters look like they were hit in the face with a two-by-four. 

 

 

(But - you know? - I miss the days when doctors and dentists had aquariums.)

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For Sunday: “I’m a Hard-workin’ Dog,” from Sesame Street

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This video is from Sesame Street’s very earliest days.  I used to watch the show (though I was much too old for it) because I was fascinated by the creativity of the puppetry and animation and videos, and I was (at least dimly) aware that there was often a more mature humorous subtext.

 

 

This video is without subtext: it is what it is.  I’ve never forgotten it, or the song in it.  I can still sing it in my sleep, and I probably do.

 

 

“All I know how to do is teach a hundred cows some manners.”

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 

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