Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
An Evening
of Television in King County, Washington, Saturday,
September 20: Flip away from "Mad TV"
at every commercial break, stay away about six
minutes and you stand a mathematically reasonable
chance of missing the fantastic sketches and
catching all the horrible ones. It doesn't work
for me tonight. I took the anal-leakage sketch
full in the face, precisely as planned (and had I
a dime for every "anal leakage" I'd
hardly need the job I lost this afternoon)--but
wait a minute, we're promised "Dr. Martin
Luther King," and after the a capella
invocation that ends every commercial break like
an invocation before the rending of an Aztec
heart, here he comes. He's working a room that's
supposed to be the Apollo; heedless, or just
plain bewildered, Dr. King holds the mike and
tells it on the mountain--he could have stepped
out of a '66 newsreel--but the women scream and
the men bark, telling him to go home now, nice
knowing you, go cash that check somewhere
else--and then he bellows "Why can't you
people just SHUT THE F$%# UP!"--and that
approving while outraged squall comes up from the
assembled. "Fine city, you've got, New York
City," he resumes, calming himself
"cold in the winter, true"--back come
the screeches, the barks--"City's so cold,
you fine men and women have fur coats out
there,"--higher screeches--" Yeah coats
so thick YOU CAN'T TELL HOW BIG A MAMA'S BOOTY IS
'TIL YOU GET HER HOME!!! DAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMM! PUT
THE COAT BACK ON MAMMA THAT IS TOO MUCH BOOTY FOR
ME!!"
Deadlier is the
skit I catch while flipped away from all that,
from Jenny McCarthy's MTV variety show, which
apparently took advantage of its cancellation to
unleash its cache tales from the Michael
O'Donoghue script drawer. This one showed
dentistry as strip-club porn--up the stairs came
Jenny the dentist twirling her drill, twisting
her knees, simulating crown work on the back
molars as her "partner" lay back with
mouth open, drool and blood down the front of the
shirt, disco lights whirling, your MC spouting
that six-pots-of-coffee barrage that says "I
never got to be Dick Vitale." I had to flip
away. Let anal leakage be manna in the face of
this.
Transmissions from
the Satellite Heartland Dept.: Boston, "The
Star-Spangled Banner/4th of July Reprise,"
from Boston's Greatest Hits. Tom Scholz
has disappeared, successfully, for so long--I
can't imagine him really there, and even
if I went so far as to attend a Boston concert I
don't think I could see him, just an oscillating
penumbra six-four or so, maybe get the basketball
jersey would, on a hot night--and his salute to
our nation's resilience ("Star-Spangled
Banner," you'll recall was about winning a
hard fight) has the hermetic seal of a time
capsule except that it has no time about
it--unlike, say, Howard Hughes' spasms of
dictation designed to rule the world, it cannot
corrode in contact with air. It lingers in
naugahyde essence, and must surely be what
ball-club owners punch up while gazing out at
their fields through plate glass and scrinching
their toes inside whatever replaced white bucks
in the pantheon of
we-were-born-with-only-microshits-to-give
footwear. Don't ask what "4th of July
Reprise" is; it fades quickly enough for the
whole to occupy 2:15 like a Tyson bout plus end
credits. And meanwhile, I'm still thinkin'...
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