Appreciate your uniqueness. ~ Captain Kangaroo
Over the last two years I’ve been to Terre Haute four times, and three of those times I was there for about three weeks. I stayed with my brother and his wife, whom I call Hermanita (Little Sister). She’s from Hondouras and will speak only English to me, so I give back what little Spanish I have. The extended visits were working visits: the first two getting Dad back and forth to doctors, hanging out with him, sitting with him when he had chemo, and finally, sitting with him when he died and working alongside my brothers and sisters to do all those things that must be done when someone dies. In the evenings, we would have a late dinner and watch TV, all of us settling back into an ease that meant the work day was over.
At home I don’t watch TV. Now I’m going to out myself and be very literal about what I just wrote: I don’t watch TV. I watch TV shows on my computer. I don’t need a TV to do that. In the past I’ve been sniffy about that, nose in the air indicating that I am so above watching TV, except for PBS or maybe I would watch the Olympics.
Well, I’m over it now. I think I got over it the time I was sitting with my brother in the barn working a crossword puzzle (he works Sudoku) and relaxing. The TV was on one of those stations with such a high channel number that not only had I never seen it; I had never heard of it. It was called “Redneck Weddings.” We both looked up, he offered to change the station, but I wanted to watch, you know, like a cultural anthropologist, the Margaret Mead of rural Indiana (or rural Anywhere, USA). It was hilarious. I thought I had already laughed my butt off, but then the mother of the bride was running around the bride’s apartment just before the wedding trying to find her teeth.
I want to make this very clear: Neither I nor any of my family (rural or otherwise) deliberately watch “Redneck Wedding.” But that one time was a gift of laughter and incredulity that still makes me snicker. Picture white wedding dress, long train, wedding set up in a barn (a real working barn, not my brother’s pole barn) - and it rains the night before the wedding. White satin shoes stepping carefully on the emergency path made of boards as the bride makes her way into the crepe-paper-strung barn to an altar made of hay bales. Lordy!
So anyway, back to the quiet evenings at my brother’s house. He has one of the satellite things that lets him record everything he programs into it, and one of the shows he and Hermanita love to watch is “America’s Got Talent.” Once upon a time, without ever having seen the show, I’d have put my nose in the air: Sharon Osbourne? Oh, puleeze! Cut to the present: I love the show. I love Sharon, Piers, and Howie. And guess what? I can watch the latest episodes on Fancast! On my computer! For free!
I grew up in that transition time between radio and television. We listened to radio shows in the evening; only rich people had a television (it wasn’t referred to as “TV” back then). Then in 1953, by some miracle, we got a TV. It had cabinet-style doors over the screen so that it would look like an ordinary piece of furniture during the day - when no shows were televised. And what did we watch? The Steve Allen Show, the Ed Sullivan Show, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, Your Show of Shows, Ted Mac’s Amateur Hour, Your Hit Parade. Shall I go on? All of these shows were variety shows, very similar to "America's Got Talent."
TV shows like “America’s Got Talent” aren’t new, and there’s a reason they’re so popular. Based on my limited research (and a talent for sounding like I know what I’m talking about), I have found that most of us - in addition to enjoying a good song or dance or magic trick or harmonica or synchronized pogo sticks - also love a good rags-to-riches story, especially if the story involves terminal disease, a childhood spent on the wrong side of the tracks, orphans, babies, or old people who get applause for being old. Who doesn’t thrill to the stillness that precedes an extraordinary voice coming out of a completely unlikely person? And don’t we love to boo, hiss, and laugh at the guy who, probably on a dare from his buddies, makes music with his belly button? Don’t we wonder, "What kind of person would do these things?" Don’t we feel a tug of longing that we never tried?
Dad was one of my greatest teachers, though I’d never have told him so because then I’d have had to explain what I meant: I watched him hold onto his judgments and his biases and his hurts until they would have destroyed his life had he not had persistent and loving children. I see in me this same propensity to judge what I know nothing about. I learned a lot about myself by watching my father navigate his world as a man, as a child of depression-era parents who kept a family of eight alive and healthy but were not openly affectionate. My brothers and sisters and I, who all hug and pat and say aloud “I love you,” figure we got this way by deliberately not being like our parents.
I’ve learned to recognize my judgments for what they are: not “the truth,” as Dad used to say. And in learning, I mess up a lot, which gives me reasons to laugh at myself. Lots of contestants on shows like “America’s Got Talent” laugh at themselves and they make us laugh. In being such a funny person, Dad taught me how important it is to laugh. That’s another gift he gave his kids. So I watch “America’s Got Talent” and I laugh and I cry and I wonder about the lives of all these people "who would do something like that."
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