How I Had My Psychic Vibration Antenna Cleaned

I hab a code id by dose. In full bloom. While I still have a job where I can take a sick day, it occurred to me to try to answer a question I often get, "what do you do with yourself without a T.V.?"  Every day at work there are people who discuss something they saw on television the previous night. Most people get these references. Most people expect everyone to recognize the names. I am the one that does not. I am the one who has never seen American Idol or a single episode of Friends or Seinfeld.

Let me explain...

I grew up with television. I went to public grade school across the street from my apartment in New York City and came home for lunch to watch Rocky and Bullwinkle. After school there was I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, Gilligan's Island, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, The Gong Show. After dinner and homework there were the family programs, The Carol Burnett Show, The Sonny and Cher Show, All in the Family. After I went to bed there were the grown-up shows I sneaked out to watch like Laugh-In, and the cop shows my parents watched that I somehow or other happened to see, Mannix, Kojak, Hawaii 5-0. I'm sure there were others but these are the ones that stick in my memory.

It seems like a lot but I don't think it was uncommon. In school I would discuss with my friends the shows we had watched and we could gossip about the characters like they were people we knew. As a young teenager I liked Monty Python's Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live. But then I left my parents house and struck out to see the world where there was no T.V.

When I was 18 I told my parents I was going on a camping trip with friends upstate, but instead drove across country with 2 boyfriends and a guy we found off a ride-board in his van to Oregon.  (this was pre-internet people! we found him off an actual bulletin board with bits of paper thumb-tacked to a real board on a wall, as incredible as it may seem.) We stopped in Yellowstone National Park and I lay on my back outdoors to catch the milky way in the darkest night sky I had ever seen. You don't get too many stars at night in Manhattan.

to be continued...