Thursday, April 03, 2003 I'm putting my "Victory laps" series on hiatus until I get a little more done on my thesis. It seems wrong to write about writing more than I write. I'm going to take Helen'slead and post some stories of my bizarro childhood and youth instead.
The tapes are real
My mother used to go to La Leche League conferences wearing a wire. She would tuck a mini-cassette recorder into her purse and surreptitiously attach a tiny lapel mic like the newscasters wear to the front of her blouse. Then, for weeks later, she would replay highlights of presentations about the best solutions to engorgement or improper infant sucking patterns.
We didn’t get a television in the house until a year or so after we moved to Richmond, when I was about five. Even then, my sister and I were only allowed to watch an educational, wholesome and short list of programs. Years later, when I was finally in a position to interact with my peers on a daily basis, one of the things that made me feel like a space alien was my lack of knowledge of shows like Carebears, Thundercats, Punky Brewster and the rest of the pack of campy 80s offerings that the generation right over my head is currently weeping for on VH1. To this day, people will say shit about Voltron, and I’ll kind of just nod and bow my head in shame, hoping my igtnorance won’t be discovered.
Left with the option of Little House on the Prairie or Bob Ross, the family televison lost its novelty fairly early on. My mother moved it to the basement, where it sits to this day. My (somewhat brighter) sister used its new seclusion to watch forbidden shows, such as Murphy Brown. I turned back to the old household stand-by: the tape recorder.
When they’d set up their homestead in Buckingham County, VA, cable hadn’t been invented, and regular television reception was snowy or non-existent, so my parents became big fans of public radio.
My father is from the era where you had to build your own hi-fi out of its component parts, and my mother is from the era where you didn’t give your parents lip about being bored, so they saw nothing weird about depending almost exclusively on audio entertainment.
They began to record each week’s production of “A Prairie Home Companion” with the fervency of Dead followers. They progessed from putting a simple cassette recorder next to the radio to a complicated taping and editing process on their state of the art (for the mid 80’s) stereo system. My mother distilled the raw tapes down into gem-like best-of editions. She sought a balance of comedy skits, “News from Lake Wobegone,” and humorous folksongs. We would listen to them on long car trips, and in this way I remained ignorant of 80’s pop until I was well into highschool.
Not willing to let others supply all the content, my mother started a campaign of reading "quality' kids' books onto tape. The entire Little House series (so much more palatable without insipid seventies moralism of its television counterpart), The Secret Garden, a Little Princess, a series called The Great Brain (about a pre-teen swindler in 1890s Utah), National Velvet, and half a dozen others gradually filled a brown plastic tape caddy that I would manage to overturn and spill disatrously every few months.
The top rows were taken up by store-bought cassettes of a series on famous composers, “their lives and their music.” This was my father’s abortive attempt to instill us with culture. To this day, I can tell you little known facts about Giuseppe Verdi, but I’m foggy on my Boy George lore. I feel like VH1 could be my ticket out of my personal Molasses Swamp of pop cultural illiteracy except I find that my eyes begin to bleed after only a few minute's of Soleil Moon Frye's passionate commentary on her own show.
posted by Frenz | 4/03/2003 04:12:00 PM
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