Infomerzak

          📺

Much like any generation, there’s one amongst us today that pines for the particular décor of an identifiable past, the garish well taken for granted for so long, so long ago.  Then, one day, up comes a still image or a preserved video capture on YouTube or Facebook of that inescapable icon we’ve managed to erase from our memory for the last forty-five years, and *bang..!*……we’re back in senior year, or maybe middle school…..perhaps we’re square into that eve of the math test in the fifth grade……all provoked by a the long forgotten sound or image we’d never forget.   And there’s that moment…..the one that teaches or reminds us of the gratitude of time and perseverance….how far we’ve come from that foolish little anguished night…….or how blessed we are to suddenly feel as empowered as were on senior week in high school…..or the day after we got through that Regents Exam in the eleventh grade.

And perhaps we owe it all to a television commercial.

Or maybe some captured, unabridged spot break off the local TV station you watched that very week, that very day, that someone miraculously, astoundingly preserved and benevolently shared on YouTube for all to admire.

But wherefore art the admiration in this once-denounced video litter..?  Even as young teens, in real time as it were, we knew this ubiquitous flicker on our bedroom black-n-whites to be disparageable trash.  And there was no getting away from it.  Every day, every weekend, every same interval, there it was, the same damn Odd Couple rerun promo with the same damn clip we all knew by heart, the same damn trade school promo filmed in 1969 and running for the past fifteen years daily, the same damn spot for Automobile Club of America with that actor screaming “Did ya’ have to be that good…?!?!?”

Those sights and sounds were the crushing classmate in our lives, the one that cheerily trailed us every single day, the one we tossed off disinterested, with almost embarrassed disrespect. 

Forty or more years hence, for a good many of us, it’s now our crush.

It’s the Professor Higgins syndrome, pure and simple.  We’ve become accustomed to that face.  The one that hounded our awareness every day, reminded us it was time for school, time for homework, Friday night at last, suppertime…

And the fact is, it could be any historic fixture sprouted on that world-wide-web-scouring-tablet.  The one that only we know the way we know it. A thirty second advertisement, a little local station promo from our hometown…

Maybe even an infomercial…

Why not..?? Those are TV shows, too..!  On radio, now more than ever.  As industrial as their design and intention might be from the outset, the standard ubiquity of those consuming presentations have by now rendered themselves just as recall-and-appreciation-worthy of some of our favorite old sitcom reruns.  They do in fact have channels devoted strictly to exclusive product informercials just about all day and night.  They’re not about to break format for anything.  If heaven forbid a national crisis or incident were to summon all news channels to attention, The Kitchen Squasher infomercial will be playing on and acting natural, for all the glued viewers indulging in their news blackouts.

Infomercials, as the title was coined somewhere in the late 1980s and cemented in the 90’s, compose a genre that broke ground over forty years ago, in the pioneer days of public-access cable television. When product sales and consumer response began to skyrocket, television stations, network flagships in top markets accepted the fact that programming old movies and even any leased first-run syndie fare would never turn around as much revenue as an infomercial time-buyer laying down some good hard green for an acre of air time in the middle of the night.  Farewell to Kirk Douglas at 3AM on Channel 2 once and for all.  Hello to the “Kernel Cooker” for an hour….followed by “The Best of The Hollywood Palace” for thirty minutes…..then maybe the “Cap Crusher” demonstration show, with that guy that drops the bottle every time……..that’s because it’s the same damn half hour show every single night…!  But last night it was at 1:30.  Tonight it’s at 3:30.   Tomorrow it might be on at 2.  Who’s to say..?  Is anyone actually directing the programming of these things..?  Whatever happened to “audience flow”..??

That went the same direction veered by newsprint.  Over-the-air television has succumbed to overnight flea-markethood. It is today one huge video airbnb. 

Disparage it some of us will, lament the absence of that huge, overnight mall of obnoxious record-offer-spot-break-disrupted movies we shall.  We’ll also become fixated in the absence of anything else, and then…?

They become nostalgia.  Our nostalgia. 

Did I ever, as a young bachelor of twenty-four in the early 1990s, indulging in the solitude of my new little flat, arriving home after work past midnight, with no VCR, but simply my treasured five-inch-screen black-&-white, with no recourse before me but the least-objectionable presentation of the Super Sweeper half hour ever imagine that I’d now face a nostalgic yearning to see it again..?   What’s worse….I’m ready to go onto YouTube and look for it.

The radio side of things bears it’s own history with these program formats.  I was just a rookie on the control room scene when these slick little broadcast pageants began to seed, replacing in many cases the extensive public-affairs presentations the small stations couldn’t really afford to front, and the airtime traditional Tabernacles and Ministries couldn’t afford on Sunday mornings anymore.  Back then, this sort of thing was pretty new stuff, and a welcome cache of business clients.  To me back then, it was all in a day’s work………the sound of being on the job.

A few of those single, recognizable moderator-and-expert spokesperson half hours or more must have done well for the presenters, because those very half-hour shows, or “blocks’ as they’re respectfully termed would soon sprout in more locations on the broadcast schedule. Sometimes a few in one day.  It’s just another form of spot advertising, and it’s likely an extremely effective one.

Is it possible that some late-night listener, wracked with insomnia, with nothing but a pitch black bedroom, a glowing digital clock flickering away the sleepless night, and a spirited discussion between two nondescript voices about some amazing health-restoring product can be a gateway for purchase persuasion..?  Much like TV, whether those discussionists are celebs or not, they become the viewer’s trusted companions.  Not like the angry Judge Judy or judgmental Dr. Phil, but rather the familiar friends whose immensely predictable conversations we can relax and find solace in each night. Almost like a favorite movie with that unforgettable scene we can always watch…..or a hit song that’s found it’s comfort in the couch of our mind.  No political fights, no scary weather reports.  Just a trip to that faraway holodeck known as………The Informercial.

And back then..? It must have been good.  Especially if some of us can be quite that secretly nostalgic for those thirty-plus-year-old little presentations now.  But unless you literally rolled tape on that obscure little TV or radio half hour and kept it forever, good luck reuniting.  Of course, I’m not necessarily unable to implement my best recall, the kind that blocks my memory of where I left my phone an hour ago, to recall note-for-note the industrial production music that opened that little show I’d hear at work each Sunday night around nine-thirty when I was young, free, and without care of where I’d be at middle age. And a fine and cherished memory it is.

Only an elder acquaintance of mine who long ago minded the front end of an urban supermarket day after volatile day in her cash-strapped youth might understand. With empowered excitement, she one day notified me, albeit buried in her daily professional crises, that she stumbled upon that song……that very piece, the obscure Muzak arrangement that played regularly over the store P.A. during her shift in the mid 1980’s.  She found it suddenly on YouTube one day and her “whole world stopped”. According to her report, she was (and I’m paraphrasing..) reborn.

Resigned over the reality of so much these days, the one wish I don’t naively hold is that of locating the audio of those long-gone infomercials of my upward-gazed youth. No matter what’s on today, nothing’s quite like the vintage stuff.  In comparative truth, they’re probably indiscernable, and for all I know that vintage is still playing somewhere, and wallpapering the ears of some young impressionable lad such as I.  I don’t know him, but if that’s the case, it’s a bond well shared.

Indeed, there’s hope for all of us.

 

Noah F.

My Friend Bea

 

Ask me what a friend is, and I can’t promise the answer you’ll want.  To me, a friend is someone that will tolerate you when they absolutely can’t or shouldn’t. and insist at 3AM that it’s no problem at all.  I’ve been that friend to some once or twice, and I had to spend some time afterwards wondering why I was.

Is it some kind of sub-level codependency of some sort…? Or is it something greater..? Is it the need to play martyr to escape our own callings..?  In any event, in a lot of cases, it’s not necesssarily all bad.  In fact, we just might find ourselves paying honor to those friends in need who in-turn by nature of themselves become friends in our need.  It’s just possible that The Man Upstairs designed it just that way.  It’s not perfect, of course.  But the 12-step Codependency Family and Recovery Group industry wouldn’t be the factory that it and its book sales and lecture circuits and retreats are today.  It’s the fuel of our ecosystem.

Sometimes though, the primitive ecosystem is the creature itself.  As a child, like so many of us, I lived in that very ecosystem.  And it was fascinating.

I didn’t have “young” elders.  Mine were all middle age or more and grew up in that wonderful old nightmare called The Great Depression, followed by The War, followed by the angry 1950s, etc, etc..  They saw it all.   My mother was for much of her life a desperate, functioning alcoholic forced in motherhood to straighten out once and for all.  When I hit thirteen, it looked like it was actually happening.  She’d been dry nearly a year, after a few years of heavy AA participation. 

My ailing uncle and aunt, my mom’s sister-in-law of some decades, now lived in Florida.  Not the swiftest move on their part, since all their kids and family lived in Queens, near us. 

My aunt didn’t really have that many close friends, but plenty of acquaintances.  Most of them were long-time ones as neighboring couples in fifties Queens suburbia during the Ike Era.  Now they were all rich retirees in sprawling palms, just an hour’s drive from one another.  My uncle was ill with worsening PSP at the time, unable to engage with others.  But there’d still be polite visitors.  It was only right.  For awhile.

One of these folks was a lady I’d heard about for years, since early childhood, but never got around to meeting.  Her name was Bea.  I thought it was “Bee” like from Mayberry R.F.D., but no, more like Beatrice.  The long-time story about Bea was that she drank heavily.  My mom had a bender now and then, but hers were more sporadic.  Bea was well older, rich with no responsibilities, and wasted most of the time.  It wasn’t really something I spent time thinking about, though when I finally met her and her husband of thirty years, it did get me wondering.

On a visit to Florida, to my aunt and uncle’s new expansive condo (it looked like the set of an Aaron Spelling nighttime drama, literally), we rode from Snapper Village to Miami Springs for dinner at Bea and Gary’s home.  Their home was an honest-to-God movie set out of the late 1950s.  I thought I was walking into a museum.  Where were the velvet admission ropes…??

The living room was too immaculate to enter.  We all sat in the equally as exquisite Florida Room.  You can’t have a house in Florida without a Florida Room.

That living room was a piece, alright.  Shame this was long before digital smart phone photos.  All that room was missing was Donna Reed.  In 1979.  On the couch sat a tiny, hand-woven pillow with the inscription, “To Have A Friend, You Must Be One”.

Bea was predictably Judy Garland to her mansion.  A five-foot waif, with a jet black coif bigger than herself, tilting around incomprehensively and precariously, with a huge splashing goblet that never went empty.   She was relatively tame, gracious, talkative as far as muttering and mumbling went, and for the condition she was in, she held it together pretty well. I was betting she’d collapse before evening’s end.  My mom and her niece weren’t exactly known for holding it down so well.  Bea on the other hand was a visible pro.

Bea and Gary were an object of troubling curiosity.  What was their thing, anyway…?  What did they do..?  Here was this quiet, soft spoken retired pilot, and his afflicted wife.  They must have had extensive and lucratively paid staff.  Our dinner was what White House visits were made of.  Was Gary a former pilot or a U.S. Senator..??  Gold silverware..!

It was later on of course, through my mother’s inquiries to my aunt, that I’d learn of some of the behind-closed-doors-history of Bea and Gary.  Some domestic physical response from time to time was not out of the question, and at one time explained Bea’s bandaged eye. 

It may be no surprise that folks existing as such did not seek emotional or supportive refuge in others, and as a result didn’t engage too much in the social carnival of mah-jongg and shuffleboard retirees.  Gary looked oddly good for his age, if stout, with a 1959 slick as black as his wife’s.  I don’t think he touched a drop.

But an alcoholic in-progress needs a sounding board, someone to be heard by, as in a bar, on a train, plane, ball game, etc.   Those trapped at home, like Bea, made use of the phone. And she had one reliable, captive ear:  My aunt.

Those phone calls from hour-away neighbor Bea rang nightly around midnight, muttering jibberishly about some movie that was on Channel 4 and are-you-watching..?  Maybe about some cars driving loudly down the road, or perhaps wondering if my aunt got home alright, my aunt unavoidably countering with “Bea….we weren’t out tonight”…

But Bea muttered about anything and everything for at least an hour, and it’s a good thing my aunt didn’t have to be up early.  She also didn’t know what to do about this.  Good thing my mother in recovery was around to respond to her dilemma.

“She’s an alcoholic..!  What are you expecting from her..?!?  If he doesn’t ger her into treatment, she’ll be dead…”

Meanwhile the phone visits went on quite regularly.  

In a discussion with my mom about something else entirely, my aunt offered a point that was made in a conversation with Bea one late night….something about bug season, and my aunt said “Oh that’s right……..my friend Bea was telling me…”

My mother found that validation of a crippled alcoholic absolutely outrageous, and she told her sister, the aunt on my mom’s side, all about it.  Her sister was the first line of gossip defense against the U.K.-born sister-in-law they’d had reservations about since they were all teenagers during the war when I wasn’t even born.   I just knew them as old gossip hens. Buck buck.

“Do you believe her…?!? My Friend Bea…!” My mother roared her trademark smug laugh into the phone.  A day later, her sister-in-law would be getting the smug laugh about some insulting thing her sister said to her.  These family triangles were pretty isosceles.

A few years later, when my uncle became immobile with his illness, and he and my aunt moved back to an apartment near us, in a comparatively swanky Queens condo, word was Bea was coming to stay for about a week.  I was about fifteen and really had little thought about the matter, but got to hear my mom’s nightly analysis on what a deadly disaster this could be.

“She’s in their apartment and drunk constantly……she’ll fall over and drop dead..! And then what…?!?!”  She tried to explain that danger to my aunt.  My uncle, eldest brother and greatest life-long enemy to my mother, in his incoherent, decaying growl uttered to her one afternoon….”It’s none o’ ya’ business…!

I was treated to a three hour one-woman performance at home that night, depicting how this bastard had continuously to this day ruined her life. Hour three was just as good as hour one.  No repeats.  I’d rather have caught Letterman that night, but…

Even if some kind of semi-cathartic time was had by all over the years in some way, a year or two later we learned that Bea had passed.  There was little or no discussion of her and their association with her afterward.  My mom upon hearing the news, intoned to me, “not a surprise..”   My mother would lose her own battle of recovery four years later.

It was in that brief several-year time though, that Bea was a name we never really stopped hearing.  Kind of like Koch or Brezhnev in newscasts, only it was Bea in our lives.  She was this figure of reference that served as a default cast member, a comic relief, a buffer, a non-sequitur, something historic, a piece of furniture perhaps.  And in all that, she did in fact offer something everyone in my family needed.  And probably got what she sought in return.  I don’t know where that tiny pillow went, the one that read “To Have A Friend, You Must Be One”.  But when that living room gets enshrined at the Smithsonian, that pillow damn well better be there.  If it’s not, no one will know whose living room it was.  

Noah F.