Pen-Elayne on the Web

Idiot Boxing

I'm a child of TV. My earliest memories are in black and white, until around the mid-'60s when they're recalled in living color, like an iconic peacock unfolding. In fact, this site is a pretty good snapshot of what I spent a lot of my time watching as a kid. The first mythological fact I ever learned was that Thursday was named for the god Thor, remembered because the Thor segment of the Marvel cartoons aired on Thursdays. (And yes, I know the theme songs to all of them, and it was Cap on Monday and Hulk on Tuesday and Iron Man on Wednesday and Namor on Friday so there.) My initial lesson in "boys and girls don't like the same things" was probably learned via angrily storming out of the room every time the Three Stooges came on and my brothers refused to change the channel. In my preteen and teen years I cultivated familial ties with the Nelsons and Stevenses and Bradys and Partridges - especially the Partridges. By the time I was 16 I'd been run out of about 3 David Cassidy fan clubs for daring to opine that we were all in love with a manufactured image - which suited me just fine, I had no plans to ever meet the guy and images were more than enough for me, but my media awareness seemed to bother the other girls who couldn't separate things quite as easily. My political consciousness came of age during the televised Watergate hearings.

In college my dorm room was the one where everyone gathered to watch Star Trek reruns, then Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and its sequel Fernwood Tonight (later America 2Night), and by senior year my best friend Bill and I and a few others decided to start our own version of the Martin Mull/Fred Willard classic using the school's AV equipment, and wrote and taped about a half dozen programs; I hope to God those tapes have long since been destroyed, and mercifully I can't even remember our show's name any more. By that time I was into Uncle Floyd, along with the rest of the "dirty 30," a few dozen über-fans who'd travel to every personal appearance the cast members made. I started a newsletter dedicated to the show, which I called "Inside Joke" because so much of the program relied on in-joke running gags; IJ later branched out into a general "newsletter of comedy and creativity" which induced derision from the cast members but garnered me a small place in '80s zine history (if nothing else, IJ was the inspiration for Mike Gunderloy's Factsheet Five). I had a few uncomfortably groupie-ish dates with one of the guys on the show who lived in the next town over; and I once appeared on the show myself, performing a song I'd written about Floyd called "The Last of the Old-Time Clowns." (I guess I wouldn't mind so much if that tape were still in existence; I only have it on audio but as I recall I didn't do too badly.) Heh, me and the Ramones have something in common, we've both performed on Floyd's show. :)

Last time I saw Floyd was in the green room of the late unlamented Don Imus show, where I'd been invited at the behest of Imus' other guests, Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman of The Firesign Theatre. (Bh that time, IJ had spun off its "Firesignal" section into another zine entirely, Four-Alarm Firesignal - this is a perfect example of the "my life is a Venn diagram" phenomenon I touched on here.) I got on the air briefly then as well, asking a question from where I sat with the rest of the studio audience. Went to Letterman tapings a couple of times too, back when he had that drill sergeant of a warm-up guy/announcer, the one who passed away but I didn't really mourn him because he treated the studio audience like fourth graders.

During my first marriage my TV activity was heavily involved with videotaping. By the time Robin and I got together cable TV had finally come to Bensonhurst, and it's followed us here, but I find myself taping much less than before. In fact, because of the situation with the upstairs idiots, my TV watching has diminished greatly - it's hard to sit and enjoy something with constant (or even intermittent) stomping going on most every night above your head. So even shows that I'd made a point to catch have gone by the wayside, and thus I find myself not remembering to catch them even on the rare quiet nights because I've fallen out of the habit, so I wind up utterly befuddled at Peter David's Buffy and Angel recaps... and I'm left feeling kind of resentful that I'm missing it all.

Despite how it's woven itself into my life, I'm not a slave to the tube. I spend far more time nowadays on the Internet and reading books and comics. But I miss the freedom of just being able to turn the set on and zone out on alpha waves in the privacy of my own home any time I want to. My headphones are good but they're awkward and uncomfortable, and they don't block out the upstairs noise nearly as effectively as earplugs do. I actually think that's the thing I look forward to the most when the idiots finally move out (supposedly one week and counting but I'm not holding my breath) - watching TV again like a normal person.