Human beings, I firmly believe, can get used to anything
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- January 29, 2018
- 1370
Time was when being on TV was a rarity, a treasure to be savored, something that mattered. When I was growing up, we had three channels, well, four if you counted educational television, five if that UHF channel that featured “Three Stooges” reruns and “The Ghoul” was coming in.
In short it was a limited smorgasbord, akin to a radio station that offered only country and western. But we made do.
Human beings, I firmly believe, can get used to anything, and given a little time and an infinite supply of silly optimism, hardly ever miss what they never had. This applies to everything from lost love to exotic cuisine.
We’re here for such a brief time, existentially speaking, that it hardly makes sense to mourn the coming of the end when you can dance the night away.
Still, I understand why people worry about paying electric bills after they’ve shut off the furnace and rely on iffy space heaters, how they can dread opening the day’s mail for fear of another unexpected expense and why they’d rather reboot and try again.
Alas, you get no mulligans — no do-overs — in the game of life. You can only hit your next shot with as much confidence as you can muster, and most of the time your ball ends up in a much worse place.
Then again, I was never very good at golf, which seemed to me to be the “Gilligan’s Island” of games: a lot of pointless effort with no real results.
I mean those people didn’t really want to leave that island. And it says more about me than I care to admit that I watched that show religiously when I was growing up, knowing I was wasting my time.
That’s what happens when you’re a kid and you have only three channels to choose from: stuff like “Gilligan’s Island” suddenly becomes important. TV does that to you.
So then what happens when you yourself get to be part of a TV show? You flip out.
When I was a senior in high school, I tried my best (sort of) to be a great (kind of) student, but I wasn’t stupid enough to believe I’d ever be among the elite. Math and science, boy those did me in.
I was fine in ninth grade, whizzing my way through algebra I and biology, but after that it got dicey. Physics and algebra II left me in the dust, and I was never going to be on the playing field for calculus and trigonometry, let alone advanced biology.
I padded my GPA with speech and typing, not to mention journalism classes and as many English courses as I could find.
The Honor Roll never really worried me, and I was always surprised to find my name on that list. Didn’t happen every six weeks but often enough to keep my parents at bay.
But I ran with the smart crowd, guys who got good grades all the time. I have no idea how I drifted into their rarified orbit of achievement, but once there, I did my best to stay.
And so it came to pass that in the winter of 1973, my school was invited to participate in a televised game show for smart students. It pitted scholars from three places against each other, vying to advance to the next round. And it so happened that a couple of my friends were on the team. And I was asked to come along to the taping of the program.
This was as close to being on television as I’d ever been, and I remember so much of what went on that day in Cleveland: the chaos, the cameras, the seats where we sat, the stage that we watched, the lights, the microphones, the host and his perfect hair.
I’d like to report that my school rocked and rolled through the show, but no, that didn’t happen. Which was fine. Just being on the periphery was good enough for me.
I got a commemorative key chain from the show’s main sponsor — the Illuminating Company — which I still have somewhere.
So time passed, and I moved to the American South at the turn of the century, and my writing continued, and people read my words, and then I was asked to appear on local TV.
When I picked up the phone, I was pretty sure someone in the newsroom was punking me. A few of my colleagues had rather warped senses of humor, and I was always on the lookout for one of their jokes, something on the border between funny and cruel.
The invitation turned out to be legit though, and a few days later there I was, freshly shaved and wearing a shirt and tie, ready for my close-up.
And I had the best time, just talking about myself and my life, having fun. I wasn’t nervous at all, quite the opposite in fact. I couldn’t wait to do it again.
Luckily I was asked back four or five more times. I opened up about pretty much everything, telling stories of traveling with my wife and sharing details I’d never written about concerning growing up in a small Ohio town.
Of course I rambled on about music and movies, books and newspapers, school and church, politics and sports, and friendship and love.
A person, I realized, could become addicted to this kind of thing very, very easily. TV is a serious drug, which is why I’m having a hard time deciding whether or not I want to cancel the cable.
On the one hand it’s among our most costly household expenses, and neither one of us actually watches television much anymore. We’re all about the internet, and the computer is our main source for entertainment and news.
In fact if you don’t count Notre Dame football games, I’ve watched next to no TV in the last year. Still, pulling the plug would be a pretty drastic step.
Who knows when the next “Gilligan’s Island” rerun might appear?