by PIBarrington

Created on: March 10, 2007   Last Updated: April 13, 2007

Many moons ago,when I worked at various non-entertainment jobs,co-workers would come in and talk about the television shows they watched at home the night(s) before. When they would ask me, I always had to say, "I don't know, I don't watch television." Right about then, they would look at me, eyes askance as if they were looking at the undead.
Finally, one of them got up enough courage and asked me, "What do you do instead of watching television? How do you live without watching television?"

My answer was, "I listen to music. I read. I write. I paint."
I rarely watched television, other than Marx Brothers movies and the ancient "In Concert" and "Midnight Special" music shows. Why? Because something happened that changed forever the way I viewed, or more correctly, the way I didn't view television. I was about 10-years-old and was in the advanced kids' program at school when one day they happened to take us to the Universal Studios back lot on the tram' ride through the television and movie sets. Everything was fine until we were allowed to get out (this was when they let you get out, it was so long ago) and they showed us the sets up close. I was very impressed with the sets, lighting, the cameras, and the audio, everything that was simulated until I got to one specific facade. Fake rocks. Up until that point, I understood why it was necessary to make everything a facade. I knew instinctively that you could not get the correct camera angles if you shot in a, say, real house, instead of a set. I understood that you had to be able to control the lighting so that everything could be seen properly as well as creating the mood to get the effect you wanted. I understood all of that. However, when I walked through a fake mini-canyon and I brushed up against my first foam rubber rock-well, that did for me. The one thing we have in Southern California is rock. Big rock formations. Okay, maybe they are not as pretty, big, or picturesque as Sedona, Arizona, but we still have a lot of them. So, in my mind, there were lots of places you could shoot, outside, that had no need for fake rocks. To me, that was the breaking point between reality and television. Imagine, therefore, how I felt when one of the tour guides climbed up a small fake hill and told us, "You know how they have those scenes where the hero picks up a great big rock and grunts when he throws it at
bad guys? Well, here's one of those big rocks!" With that, he tossed what appeared to be an 80-pound chunk of granite at us. With one huge gasp, we all flinched as the boulder came at us. One brave little boy caught it as it bounced against him and bounced off. The relief I felt was nothing compared to the anger. Yeah, you could fake a fistfight, a barroom brawl, or even a slap across the face. In fact, you had to fake all of those things. I don't know, maybe it was my revulsion at touching the itchy, grotesque, painted foam rubber, but I was upset. Maybe it was the scare thrown into us by being threatened by what we thought was something destructive only to find out we'd been duped into looking foolish. As I've said, I don't know.
All I do know is that until I was about 33, I rarely watched television.
Like I said before, I listened to music, I read, I wrote, I painted. I worked in the garden. I went to shopping malls, I sat and drank coffee in the kitchen and talked with my mother endlessly about deep and not-so-deep subjects such as religion and comedy and Lord of the Rings. I did without television, excepting newscasts and the Watergate investigation, for many, many years without ever thinking I was missing anything.
Of course, this was all before Seinfeld.

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