Is it too much to ask for people in the business of customer service to give us customer service?
Case in point: The last time I was in the grocery store, I became the victim of a check-out assembly-line which had evidently been cranked up to high speed; the idea being that the sooner one customer is processed and spit out, the sooner the next guy can be sent through the ringer and the sooner everyone gets to go home. It’s similar to being sucked in by an undertow where there’s a point of no return; Once your items are on the belt, it’s pointless to try and scoop them up to go over to lane 5 because someone just opened it…you’ll never make it.
I stood waiting at the conveyer belt while the woman in front of me was being helped. The cashier, who was evidently also the manager, was sliding her items past the scanner at a furious rate and all of them, eggs, bread, croissants…were piling up like cars on a foggy highway. The box boy, wasting no time, decided to conserve time and energy by asking her if plastic was alright even as he had already begun stuffing her groceries into one…in no particular order. She hadn’t answered his plastic bag question when the manager, being careful not to look at her for more than a nanosecond, asked: “Find everything OK?”
But it was too late! Already two questions behind, she had no chance to open her mouth when the cashier announced her total, forcing her into the financial part of the transaction. So she fumbled with her money, while the bagger piled her groceries into the cart and asked her if she wanted help out. It was purely a rhetorical question, as he had already started talking to another bagger as they went over plans for after work and the heavy drinking they would be doing later that night.
The lady gave up after the third question, I guess realizing they were not meant to be answered, and as she carefully put her change away, the manager began whisking my items toward the box boy, and an uncertain future in the bottom of a plastic bag. He had already thanked the lady but had begun my transaction while she was still standing there. Of course, when you’re drawn into this ugly game, your first instinct is to start nudging her out of what’s now your rightful place in front of the cashier and that little ledge where you’ll be counting out your cash or putting down your coupons or, if you’re really foolish, writing your check. My transaction had begun, but I was not part of it, and I felt cheated by having to hang back while she took my place at the trading post.
She was given her change and she began placing it in her purse. This she did with great care, but it was too late for her because the cashier was now talking to me and she was now officially out of the picture. She was history. She no longer existed. After a few more seconds, she took the hint and started moving off into the haze and out of our peripheral vision.
As I stepped toward the ‘ledge’, the cashier asked me how I was doing. He did this without looking at me and then said: “find everything OK?” and I said yes, although I wondered what he would do if I had said ‘no’. Would that stop everything cold? Would he stand there, he and the bagger, and stare at each other, not knowing what to do? Would it make their heads explode? I was tempted to do this and one day I will although I may regret it.
As I began getting ready to pay, the cashier, who you’ll recall I said is also the manager, started a conversation with the bagger about clocking in on time at the beginning of his shift, and coming back from lunch. The bagger, for his part, had an excuse for each offense and argued loudly with his boss, while the boss argued back, all in front of me and God and everybody.
I tried to be noticed. I waved a coupon and yelled, “Over here…HEY, over here!!”
He took the coupon and scanned it while the bagger, still gamely defending himself as being always on time because the union rules state that you have a ten minute grace period to clock in, threw my items in the bags. If he’d been careful about it before, and he was NOT, he was haphazard now, putting cantaloupe on top of eggs and muffins under laundry detergent.
At this point, I made a mistake that was to gum up the system for next few customers in line: I asked for a pen to write a check. This began a search for a pen that covered ten minutes and about 2000 square feet of the store. Customers behind me threw up their hands, sighed loudly and in general made me aware that I was an inconvenience and that if I held them up any longer, I would probably be signing the check in my own blood.
But a pen was found and I dashed off the check as quickly as I could while still being legible. As I signed it, the guy behind me in line had already seen his groceries scanned and put in bags and the lady behind him was being asked: “Did you find everything OK?”
She said “Actually, I couldn’t find the marshmallows…could you tell me where they are?”
As I walked toward the exit with my mangled and beaten groceries, I glanced behind me and saw the manager and bagger staring at each other. The store had gone strangely quiet and I could swear that the lights dimmed.
I left the store in a hurry
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
When I was growing up, there were seven channels on TV. Seven. Hard to believe these days when literally hundreds of them exist. But I can remember always being able to find something to watch.
That was when a new TV show was given more time to catch on than, say, 15 minutes into the first episode before being cancelled. So a lot of great stuff was allowed to ferment after harvesting.
And I did like the promise of new television shows.
For example, the Fall Preview issue of TV Guide was honored and celebrated in my world, and given a special pedestal on which to rest its glorious thickness. It came via the smudgy hands of the mailman and was thus more or less in danger of being roughed up. More often than not a page would be bent here, a tear found on its cover there. But that would be overshadowed by the mysteries that were waiting within. It came packed chock full of the staff of the Fall TV viewer’s life: the promise of a new Great TV Show. Who knew what was previewed inside? Could be a blurb and photo about something as great as “The Dick Van Dyke Show” or “All in the Family” or “I Love Lucy”…looking at the picture of the fresh-faced cast gave absolutely no indication of the show’s hit factor. You might then, as now, find some well-regarded show-biz name at the top of its cast list, but then 2 or 3 months later that same Big Name might be skulking away with his tail between his legs. And not over to the big screen, either. No sir; back then if you were a TV actor, you generally stayed one. Heaven forbid you think of yourself as Movie Star material. Nope…just look for another opening in that little box and try again. Or go sell insurance or something.
But where I really found gold was in the off-brand channels: 5, 9, 11 and 13. That’s where you found the really good stuff. Sure, you found a rerun here and there of a sitcom, but watching a rerun of “I Love Lucy” 45 years ago is no different from watching it now, as good as that show was. And these days, what you find on channels 1-800 are those same reruns, the 287th showing of National Lampoon’s Vacation, a reality show about every conceivable thing relating to human beings and their foibles, including a recent one about vomiting (the ‘pitch’ meeting must have been brilliant), ‘news’ shows with four panelists all offering their erudite and educated commentary on an important and life-altering aspect of the ‘Jon & Kate Plus 8’divorce and, of course, shows about real crimes committed by people who brutally murdered their spouses because they couldn’t wait to get their hands on that $25,000 life insurance policy.
But on those odd -numbered channels were delights you can’t find much of now: old horror movies, old comedies and various and sundry other films that AMC just has no time for these days.
I remember a show called “Slapstick Cinema” that, on long and lazy Saturday afternoons showed all short and feature length comedies by every screen comic, famous and otherwise from the very dawn of the motion picture onward. Laurel & Hardy, The Three Stooges and Abbott & Costello, sure. But also regularly presented were The Marx Brothers, WC Fields, The Bowery Boys, Charley Chase and others. Some you had to develop a taste for. A true Three Stooges connoisseur might find the humor of old WC a trifle dry, his subtle but pungent one-liners escaping their underdeveloped wit receptors. But if they gamely stuck with Fields for two movies, let’s say, he would often slam their comic sensibilities into high gear by the third. I know it happened to me.
There may have even been more horror movies on TV than comedies, though. Creature Features, Friday Night Frights among many others plied us with a steady diet of thrillers and scared us out of our wits until we couldn’t take it any more and switched over to another channel and “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” There we’d get some relief with a sort of hybrid; mostly comedy with a bit of horror mixed in.
The horror masters- of -ceremony like Zacherley or Vampira didn’t really do the job for me. I liked my horror movies straight up without an appetizer in cheap, local television style wardrobe. I saw those guys for what they were: one more roadblock, along with commercials, on the way to the movie itself. That’s not to say I didn’t like all local TV hosts. On the contrary, as noted on a previous post about a certain clown, I loved those that knew how to present, then get out of they way of, their featured movies or cartoons. Chuck McCann was great not only because he knew how to present this stuff, but because he was a first-class comic himself and his talent landed him gigs in New York television for years.
But the horror people were just a bit too melodramatic and campy- great for those who love that kind of stuff- just not for me.
The mark of a good late night horror movie though, was nightmare potential. You know what I mean; you watch, even though you know you probably shouldn’t, until the point of no return. Once you’ve crossed that line, it’s all over. Those images are indelibly stamped on your brain and you run the risk of the Bride of Frankenstein charging into your dreams in the wee hours and hissing and screaming at you as you cower behind a tree in the middle of some fog-laden woods. You don’t forget stuff like that. But it’s like having ‘the right stuff’; You’re an astronaut who gets on that rocket and doesn’t know if he’s coming back to earth but goes anyway. And you’re proud of it!
At midnight in a dank and quiet basement, even a movie like “The House on Haunted Hill” (the original) will have an iron grip on your senses even if (in pre- CGI times) one of the ghosts looks like someone took a discount store skeleton and moved it by hand across the screen going: ‘Ooooooooohhhhhhhhh’. It makes no difference. If you’re afraid to come out of the cellar into a dark house where everyone’s asleep, you’re movie watching experience has been a resounding success.
Now, you’ll be lucky if you run across even “Halloween VI” any time other than October. And ‘old’ comedies are those made prior to 1990.
How is it that you can surf hundreds of channels and the scariest thing you’ll come across is yet another Chef Competition where they’re each given a can of beans, one clove of garlic, half a stalk of celery and a pumpkin seed and told to make a six course meal in 30 minutes?
I certainly won’t lose any sleep over it!
That was when a new TV show was given more time to catch on than, say, 15 minutes into the first episode before being cancelled. So a lot of great stuff was allowed to ferment after harvesting.
And I did like the promise of new television shows.
For example, the Fall Preview issue of TV Guide was honored and celebrated in my world, and given a special pedestal on which to rest its glorious thickness. It came via the smudgy hands of the mailman and was thus more or less in danger of being roughed up. More often than not a page would be bent here, a tear found on its cover there. But that would be overshadowed by the mysteries that were waiting within. It came packed chock full of the staff of the Fall TV viewer’s life: the promise of a new Great TV Show. Who knew what was previewed inside? Could be a blurb and photo about something as great as “The Dick Van Dyke Show” or “All in the Family” or “I Love Lucy”…looking at the picture of the fresh-faced cast gave absolutely no indication of the show’s hit factor. You might then, as now, find some well-regarded show-biz name at the top of its cast list, but then 2 or 3 months later that same Big Name might be skulking away with his tail between his legs. And not over to the big screen, either. No sir; back then if you were a TV actor, you generally stayed one. Heaven forbid you think of yourself as Movie Star material. Nope…just look for another opening in that little box and try again. Or go sell insurance or something.
But where I really found gold was in the off-brand channels: 5, 9, 11 and 13. That’s where you found the really good stuff. Sure, you found a rerun here and there of a sitcom, but watching a rerun of “I Love Lucy” 45 years ago is no different from watching it now, as good as that show was. And these days, what you find on channels 1-800 are those same reruns, the 287th showing of National Lampoon’s Vacation, a reality show about every conceivable thing relating to human beings and their foibles, including a recent one about vomiting (the ‘pitch’ meeting must have been brilliant), ‘news’ shows with four panelists all offering their erudite and educated commentary on an important and life-altering aspect of the ‘Jon & Kate Plus 8’divorce and, of course, shows about real crimes committed by people who brutally murdered their spouses because they couldn’t wait to get their hands on that $25,000 life insurance policy.
But on those odd -numbered channels were delights you can’t find much of now: old horror movies, old comedies and various and sundry other films that AMC just has no time for these days.
I remember a show called “Slapstick Cinema” that, on long and lazy Saturday afternoons showed all short and feature length comedies by every screen comic, famous and otherwise from the very dawn of the motion picture onward. Laurel & Hardy, The Three Stooges and Abbott & Costello, sure. But also regularly presented were The Marx Brothers, WC Fields, The Bowery Boys, Charley Chase and others. Some you had to develop a taste for. A true Three Stooges connoisseur might find the humor of old WC a trifle dry, his subtle but pungent one-liners escaping their underdeveloped wit receptors. But if they gamely stuck with Fields for two movies, let’s say, he would often slam their comic sensibilities into high gear by the third. I know it happened to me.
There may have even been more horror movies on TV than comedies, though. Creature Features, Friday Night Frights among many others plied us with a steady diet of thrillers and scared us out of our wits until we couldn’t take it any more and switched over to another channel and “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” There we’d get some relief with a sort of hybrid; mostly comedy with a bit of horror mixed in.
The horror masters- of -ceremony like Zacherley or Vampira didn’t really do the job for me. I liked my horror movies straight up without an appetizer in cheap, local television style wardrobe. I saw those guys for what they were: one more roadblock, along with commercials, on the way to the movie itself. That’s not to say I didn’t like all local TV hosts. On the contrary, as noted on a previous post about a certain clown, I loved those that knew how to present, then get out of they way of, their featured movies or cartoons. Chuck McCann was great not only because he knew how to present this stuff, but because he was a first-class comic himself and his talent landed him gigs in New York television for years.
But the horror people were just a bit too melodramatic and campy- great for those who love that kind of stuff- just not for me.
The mark of a good late night horror movie though, was nightmare potential. You know what I mean; you watch, even though you know you probably shouldn’t, until the point of no return. Once you’ve crossed that line, it’s all over. Those images are indelibly stamped on your brain and you run the risk of the Bride of Frankenstein charging into your dreams in the wee hours and hissing and screaming at you as you cower behind a tree in the middle of some fog-laden woods. You don’t forget stuff like that. But it’s like having ‘the right stuff’; You’re an astronaut who gets on that rocket and doesn’t know if he’s coming back to earth but goes anyway. And you’re proud of it!
At midnight in a dank and quiet basement, even a movie like “The House on Haunted Hill” (the original) will have an iron grip on your senses even if (in pre- CGI times) one of the ghosts looks like someone took a discount store skeleton and moved it by hand across the screen going: ‘Ooooooooohhhhhhhhh’. It makes no difference. If you’re afraid to come out of the cellar into a dark house where everyone’s asleep, you’re movie watching experience has been a resounding success.
Now, you’ll be lucky if you run across even “Halloween VI” any time other than October. And ‘old’ comedies are those made prior to 1990.
How is it that you can surf hundreds of channels and the scariest thing you’ll come across is yet another Chef Competition where they’re each given a can of beans, one clove of garlic, half a stalk of celery and a pumpkin seed and told to make a six course meal in 30 minutes?
I certainly won’t lose any sleep over it!
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
If you read my previous post, you’ll understand the complexity of the relationship between Bozo the Clown and me.
But there was never a problem with me and my relationship with TV in general. We’ve gotten along just fine and dandy. I’m a little unhappy with it these days because it insists on showing me images of real people as they: Whine about wedding dresses, compete viciously with others for a life-long mate, let snooty, holier-than-thou people tell them whether they can a)dance b)sing c)cook or d)raise their kids right (although, in fairness, there are multitudes out there who need to be told that they ARE NOT raising their kids right).
Hopefully, before long, we will have covered the entirety of human depravity and craziness and gotten everyone their 15 minutes so we can get back to watching some good scripted human depravity and craziness.
But, as I say, I never really had a problem with TV. In fact, I was fascinated by it. Not just the shows, but the workings of the medium. When I was a kid, I went to the library in my town and took out all of the books about how television works- by all, I mean one- and read up on the technology. Technology back then meant a big, bulky camera, lights, seven broadcast channels and a big, bulky TV set. But they sure did some amazing things with that stuff in those days. And I wanted to try it.
I tried to lobby my parents into letting me visit studios in nearby New York City. Even though I’d been on the Bozo show, it was when I was very young and before my interest in television began to grow into an obsession. My efforts were met by feeble attempts at putting into practice the ‘delay of gratification’ theory which held that I should be making better grades in school before seeing the inside of a TV studio. This so-called theory was anathema to my bourgeoning career. How did they expect me to make boatloads of money in TV so that I could support them in their old age unless I could soak in the actual exciting, electric atmosphere that was the average TV station? By doing endless math worksheets?
I did start my own TV studio…actually, I had two different ones. The first one was in the garage with the backdrop being the garage door. This worked pretty well until the family cars had to be parked on my stage. The basement worked better, although it was not as spacious as the garage and there was no clear stage area and little room for an audience, except for three spaces on the sofa (this area also being used as our TV viewing room). But It worked out fairly well, as I was able to bring in lighting equipment (a hanging one-bulb lamp that was used primarily to hang on car hoods for working on engines) which I hung on a pipe that crossed the ceiling of my ‘studio’. And I secured a TV camera from my sympathetic grandfather, who fashioned a tri-pod of rickety wood, topped with a cardboard box painted black with paper towel tubing for lenses. The camera could even pan back and forth and move up and down. For a boom microphone, all I needed was a long thin piece of wood propped against a chair with a plastic bottle attached to the end and I had it made.
My main gig was as the vampire host of a show that presented monster pictures. Kind of post-Vampira and pre-Elvira, except that I was closer to what Bela Lugosi may have been like at age 9 (well, I hope not too close). I just donned my Halloween costume and got a few neighborhood kids to join in as co-stars and audience members. I don’t remember who operated the camera and I don’t know which movies I ‘showed’. My tastes at the time ran heavily to anything in the Frankenstein series and, of course, Dracula. If I found a movie on late night TV that I hadn’t heard of before but succeeded in scaring the hell out of me after I turned off the TV and the basement light and walked up the long stairs out of the darkness, I considered it a masterpiece of the genre.
By the way, I did end up visiting 2 or 3 TV studios later on, my parents having relented and deciding I would be easier to live with if I was encouraged to see what the whole process was really like. I think they hoped I would be convinced not to pursue it further.
It didn’t work. And I still didn’t take any prizes for my grades.
More on this later!
But there was never a problem with me and my relationship with TV in general. We’ve gotten along just fine and dandy. I’m a little unhappy with it these days because it insists on showing me images of real people as they: Whine about wedding dresses, compete viciously with others for a life-long mate, let snooty, holier-than-thou people tell them whether they can a)dance b)sing c)cook or d)raise their kids right (although, in fairness, there are multitudes out there who need to be told that they ARE NOT raising their kids right).
Hopefully, before long, we will have covered the entirety of human depravity and craziness and gotten everyone their 15 minutes so we can get back to watching some good scripted human depravity and craziness.
But, as I say, I never really had a problem with TV. In fact, I was fascinated by it. Not just the shows, but the workings of the medium. When I was a kid, I went to the library in my town and took out all of the books about how television works- by all, I mean one- and read up on the technology. Technology back then meant a big, bulky camera, lights, seven broadcast channels and a big, bulky TV set. But they sure did some amazing things with that stuff in those days. And I wanted to try it.
I tried to lobby my parents into letting me visit studios in nearby New York City. Even though I’d been on the Bozo show, it was when I was very young and before my interest in television began to grow into an obsession. My efforts were met by feeble attempts at putting into practice the ‘delay of gratification’ theory which held that I should be making better grades in school before seeing the inside of a TV studio. This so-called theory was anathema to my bourgeoning career. How did they expect me to make boatloads of money in TV so that I could support them in their old age unless I could soak in the actual exciting, electric atmosphere that was the average TV station? By doing endless math worksheets?
I did start my own TV studio…actually, I had two different ones. The first one was in the garage with the backdrop being the garage door. This worked pretty well until the family cars had to be parked on my stage. The basement worked better, although it was not as spacious as the garage and there was no clear stage area and little room for an audience, except for three spaces on the sofa (this area also being used as our TV viewing room). But It worked out fairly well, as I was able to bring in lighting equipment (a hanging one-bulb lamp that was used primarily to hang on car hoods for working on engines) which I hung on a pipe that crossed the ceiling of my ‘studio’. And I secured a TV camera from my sympathetic grandfather, who fashioned a tri-pod of rickety wood, topped with a cardboard box painted black with paper towel tubing for lenses. The camera could even pan back and forth and move up and down. For a boom microphone, all I needed was a long thin piece of wood propped against a chair with a plastic bottle attached to the end and I had it made.
My main gig was as the vampire host of a show that presented monster pictures. Kind of post-Vampira and pre-Elvira, except that I was closer to what Bela Lugosi may have been like at age 9 (well, I hope not too close). I just donned my Halloween costume and got a few neighborhood kids to join in as co-stars and audience members. I don’t remember who operated the camera and I don’t know which movies I ‘showed’. My tastes at the time ran heavily to anything in the Frankenstein series and, of course, Dracula. If I found a movie on late night TV that I hadn’t heard of before but succeeded in scaring the hell out of me after I turned off the TV and the basement light and walked up the long stairs out of the darkness, I considered it a masterpiece of the genre.
By the way, I did end up visiting 2 or 3 TV studios later on, my parents having relented and deciding I would be easier to live with if I was encouraged to see what the whole process was really like. I think they hoped I would be convinced not to pursue it further.
It didn’t work. And I still didn’t take any prizes for my grades.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Bozo The Clown
Larry Harmon, the man who owned the rights to Bozo the Clown, and who often played the venerable children’s TV character, died not too long ago. This barely rocked the entertainment world and I myself wasn’t too terribly broken up by the old guy’s passing, but it did stir a memory which I had conveniently kept locked away in a rarely-used corner of my mind. As I have an excess of corners, it’s a miracle I found it at all.
Virtually unknown to kids today, Bozo was a fixture on local TV in many American Cities when I was a child. Chicago had the Bozo show the longest, ending just recently after a 40 year run. They got to a point where they took reservations for kids who appeared in the bleachers on Bozo’s show. At one time, the reservation wait was ten years, although it’s unclear how many former kids, now 16 or 17, were clamoring to appear with a big clown on afternoon TV.
Being on Bozo was like being admitted to an exclusive country club. You were in the stands right behind the Big Guy, so you had, if you were placed just right, a good deal of prime camera exposure. But one of the best parts of being on Bozo was that you had a chance to kiss Bozo’s big red nose at the end of the show while credits rolled. Not every kid on the show got to do that; there were only so many credits. So the prime gig on that show was available to only a handful of lucky kids. To be on Bozo and kiss his nose was to have found the Holy Grail. Truly the Brass Ring of kid’s television. And since you couldn’t be a Mouseketeer, you could at least have this one-time glory.
I was on the Bozo show in the early sixties in New York. I remember riding the train down to the City, my mother and I, and taking a cab to the television studio. WPIX –TV, channel 11. Back then you had channel 11 and channel 5 for most of your kid friendly programming and between the two of them, a kid could get through the dullest week of pre-elementary school life with a hearty helping of slapstick and toy commercials. Best were the live shows where hosts like Soupy Sales, Chuck McCann and a band of others regaled us with goofy skits, cartoons and general silliness. Pure kid Heaven on Earth.
As we walked into the building, I asked my mother where she thought Bozo might be at that particular moment, hoping that she might suggest that he would be right there at the front door greeting us with a big laugh and maybe a pratfall or two as he led us into the giant 3-ring circus that was his studio.
“He’s probably in his office,” was her reply.
His office? That’s weird, I thought. What’s a clown, especially one as famous as Bozo, need with an office? That was for ordinary Joes like my father. I’d seen his office and it was a box with a desk and a small window. I couldn’t see it as a holding pen for a guy with bright orange hair who showed cartoons and gladdened the hearts of children everywhere. I decided Mom was hopelessly out of touch with the Clown Mystique.
We went in and sat in a waiting room with a bunch of other kids, all anticipating their encounter with the King of Clowns. We were fidgety but under control. We didn’t have to wait long.
We were all gathered together and sent out into the hallway single-file and placed in a line-up against the wall.
In walked Bozo. Tall, bright orange hair, dressed in bright red, white and blue ( I never knew that…his show was in black and white) and, of course, the NOSE. He stood there looking at us, his hands on his hips. What was he planning to do? Break into a big knee-slap and guffaw?
“All right, you kids”, he began. “I wanna make sure you keep in line and behave yerselves, you hear me?”
What was this, a joke? He just had to be ready to break into a big grin and do a Bozo dance, didn’t he?
“I don’t want no monkey business out there. You sit on those benches and don’t move, you got it?”
This was terrible! We had come on this special day expecting a big, goofy funnyman in loose-fitting pants to give us clownly encouragement, and here he was, already anticipating several serious “Bozo-No-Nos”! We were already on the outs with the Big Guy!
We stood, trembling in our Buster Browns and Keds and nodding our heads. Who’s gonna argue with Bozo, we all thought, throwing quick sidelong glances at each other.
“OK,” said Bozo, evidently satisfied. “Now let’s have some fun!” And in we all went to the studio. By now I was thinking that maybe if we were all super-good clown citizens, we could win his trust back and maybe all of us could do the nose-kiss.
The studio was dark. The familiar bleachers, the stands I’d seen a hundred times on TV, stood to the left. They were much smaller than they looked on television. They seemed to have been built for little kids. By that I mean kids much smaller than me. Six was most definitely not a little kid.
We were settled in and, before we knew it, the show had begun. From a tangle of cameras and cables and equipment and lights came a signal for Bozo to start talking and, boy, did he talk! He came alive! Darting back and forth, throwing out Bozo-isms at a furious rate, he was in fine form. Some of the hardier souls in the audience started reacting to him as he exhorted them to cheer and clap, but I looked into a nearby monitor as a camera panned down my row of seats and a close-up of my face appeared. I was, let us say, contemplative. Actually, the picture that pops up in my mind after all these years is kind of more, well, lost and vacant.
Boy, I had really blown it. Here I was on TV, with a close-up even. And I had let the Bozo tirade get the best of me. Shake me up. My frizzy-haired hero had clearly had a bad day. That’s all. Maybe his nose was crooked or there was too much starch in his too big pants. Who knows? But I had to get myself together. And quick.
I looked around to try and steady myself. Over on the other side of the studio was Officer Joe’s Precinct set. I hadn’t noticed it before! Officer Joe was in the top five of kids TV shows. And one of the main reasons, maybe the only one, was that he showed Three Stooges shorts. But what had made him the real hero was that he had actually had the Three Stooges themselves as guests on his show! I gazed longingly at the dark and empty set. If only I could be there trading quips with Moe himself, giving him an affectionate poke in the eye!
But my attention went back to Bozo as he mugged his way through an introduction to another cartoon. One camera was pointed directly at him, while the other two were directed at other kids in the bleachers; those kids who had sucked up to Bozo and laughed at his antics as soon as the lights had burst on. Laughed a little too hard, I thought.
But the fact is that I still loved Bozo and I still wanted one more chance of getting a close up of my smiling face. And the only way to do that, I knew, was to be caught giving him a great big kiss on the schnozz. A kiss framed perfectly by camera number one and viewed with envy all over the Tri-State Area.
But now the show was getting ready to end so I had to make my move. And the only way I could do that now was to be as heartrendingly cute as I could possibly be. You couldn’t very well get up out of your seat, grab Bozo by the orange hair and kiss his nose by force. He’d been pretty clear about that. But the right look, the proper winsome expression would not only melt the Clown-Master’s heart, but it might very well even turn his rotten day around one hundred and eighty degrees.
I steeled myself for a really adorable look. I widened my eyes and lifted my eyebrows. I put my knees together and pointed my toes inward and I was ready.
The light blinked on and so did Bozo. Earlier in the show, when a cartoon or commercial had come on, he had left the set briefly, I guess to slap on a little more white-face or frizzy out his hair some more. And each time the stage manager had counted down from three to start the show again, Bozo was back in front of the camera just before he was done counting. So I had no time to waste. I had to get his attention.
And I had to do it fast because now I could see the credits rolling in the monitor and Bozo was saying goodbye to all the kids at home and then he was done.
And the nose kissing began.
All I had to do was make eye contact and I felt sure that the big nose would be mine! I put on the most achingly adorable face and positively willed him to look my way. But I was running out of time, so I added one last touch. It was physical but, in my opinion, not overdoing it. I slowly raised my arms as if asking for a hug. It wasn’t that no one else in the bleachers was using arm tactics; most were. They raised their hands, they waived their arms frantically, even crying out “Me, Bozo!! Me, me, me!!” But my plaintive expression of longing was a subtle, but much more powerful, tool.
And it was working! Bozo looked my way and our eyes met. Almost in slow motion, I saw him coming my way. He was headed towards me and it was clear now that we were destined to meet, mouth-to-nose. I stood up, he drew closer, and contact was imminent.
Then it happened. The kid next to me jumped up without warning and reached for the nose. I had been intercepted! The kiss was planted and then Bozo moved away, his nose lost to me forever. The little brat next to me hadn’t even been trying to get a kiss. In fact, he had been picking the wax out of his ear and studying it. This disgusting display had been seen everywhere in TV land and the kid had still been rewarded with the Grand Prize! But it had all been an act; he had to be cleverer than I had given him credit for. Now he had Bozo in his back pocket.
My mother and I left the studio in the chilly winter evening air and she asked me if I had had a good time. I said I had, but I didn’t tell her that I felt strange about the whole Bozo thing. I had been on the show now, seen him in person, but something was, I don’t know…different, I guess. It wasn’t the nose thing. But it wasn’t something I could put my seven year old finger on.
I still watched the show. I still watched Soupy Sales and Officer Joe and the Three Stooges and the great and wonderful Chuck McCann. But it was kind of weird to know what goes on behind the scenes on TV. Because once you do, you join a club you don’t really want to join. The fantasy is sort of taken away a little and you grow up a bit and you gain knowledge you’d rather not have.
I don’t know what Bozo did after the show that day. I never really wondered. But he probably went back to his office, lit a cigar, poured himself a bourbon and muttered to himself about the next group of kids he’d have to face tomorrow afternoon.
Oh, well. I never thought he was that funny anyway.
Virtually unknown to kids today, Bozo was a fixture on local TV in many American Cities when I was a child. Chicago had the Bozo show the longest, ending just recently after a 40 year run. They got to a point where they took reservations for kids who appeared in the bleachers on Bozo’s show. At one time, the reservation wait was ten years, although it’s unclear how many former kids, now 16 or 17, were clamoring to appear with a big clown on afternoon TV.
Being on Bozo was like being admitted to an exclusive country club. You were in the stands right behind the Big Guy, so you had, if you were placed just right, a good deal of prime camera exposure. But one of the best parts of being on Bozo was that you had a chance to kiss Bozo’s big red nose at the end of the show while credits rolled. Not every kid on the show got to do that; there were only so many credits. So the prime gig on that show was available to only a handful of lucky kids. To be on Bozo and kiss his nose was to have found the Holy Grail. Truly the Brass Ring of kid’s television. And since you couldn’t be a Mouseketeer, you could at least have this one-time glory.
I was on the Bozo show in the early sixties in New York. I remember riding the train down to the City, my mother and I, and taking a cab to the television studio. WPIX –TV, channel 11. Back then you had channel 11 and channel 5 for most of your kid friendly programming and between the two of them, a kid could get through the dullest week of pre-elementary school life with a hearty helping of slapstick and toy commercials. Best were the live shows where hosts like Soupy Sales, Chuck McCann and a band of others regaled us with goofy skits, cartoons and general silliness. Pure kid Heaven on Earth.
As we walked into the building, I asked my mother where she thought Bozo might be at that particular moment, hoping that she might suggest that he would be right there at the front door greeting us with a big laugh and maybe a pratfall or two as he led us into the giant 3-ring circus that was his studio.
“He’s probably in his office,” was her reply.
His office? That’s weird, I thought. What’s a clown, especially one as famous as Bozo, need with an office? That was for ordinary Joes like my father. I’d seen his office and it was a box with a desk and a small window. I couldn’t see it as a holding pen for a guy with bright orange hair who showed cartoons and gladdened the hearts of children everywhere. I decided Mom was hopelessly out of touch with the Clown Mystique.
We went in and sat in a waiting room with a bunch of other kids, all anticipating their encounter with the King of Clowns. We were fidgety but under control. We didn’t have to wait long.
We were all gathered together and sent out into the hallway single-file and placed in a line-up against the wall.
In walked Bozo. Tall, bright orange hair, dressed in bright red, white and blue ( I never knew that…his show was in black and white) and, of course, the NOSE. He stood there looking at us, his hands on his hips. What was he planning to do? Break into a big knee-slap and guffaw?
“All right, you kids”, he began. “I wanna make sure you keep in line and behave yerselves, you hear me?”
What was this, a joke? He just had to be ready to break into a big grin and do a Bozo dance, didn’t he?
“I don’t want no monkey business out there. You sit on those benches and don’t move, you got it?”
This was terrible! We had come on this special day expecting a big, goofy funnyman in loose-fitting pants to give us clownly encouragement, and here he was, already anticipating several serious “Bozo-No-Nos”! We were already on the outs with the Big Guy!
We stood, trembling in our Buster Browns and Keds and nodding our heads. Who’s gonna argue with Bozo, we all thought, throwing quick sidelong glances at each other.
“OK,” said Bozo, evidently satisfied. “Now let’s have some fun!” And in we all went to the studio. By now I was thinking that maybe if we were all super-good clown citizens, we could win his trust back and maybe all of us could do the nose-kiss.
The studio was dark. The familiar bleachers, the stands I’d seen a hundred times on TV, stood to the left. They were much smaller than they looked on television. They seemed to have been built for little kids. By that I mean kids much smaller than me. Six was most definitely not a little kid.
We were settled in and, before we knew it, the show had begun. From a tangle of cameras and cables and equipment and lights came a signal for Bozo to start talking and, boy, did he talk! He came alive! Darting back and forth, throwing out Bozo-isms at a furious rate, he was in fine form. Some of the hardier souls in the audience started reacting to him as he exhorted them to cheer and clap, but I looked into a nearby monitor as a camera panned down my row of seats and a close-up of my face appeared. I was, let us say, contemplative. Actually, the picture that pops up in my mind after all these years is kind of more, well, lost and vacant.
Boy, I had really blown it. Here I was on TV, with a close-up even. And I had let the Bozo tirade get the best of me. Shake me up. My frizzy-haired hero had clearly had a bad day. That’s all. Maybe his nose was crooked or there was too much starch in his too big pants. Who knows? But I had to get myself together. And quick.
I looked around to try and steady myself. Over on the other side of the studio was Officer Joe’s Precinct set. I hadn’t noticed it before! Officer Joe was in the top five of kids TV shows. And one of the main reasons, maybe the only one, was that he showed Three Stooges shorts. But what had made him the real hero was that he had actually had the Three Stooges themselves as guests on his show! I gazed longingly at the dark and empty set. If only I could be there trading quips with Moe himself, giving him an affectionate poke in the eye!
But my attention went back to Bozo as he mugged his way through an introduction to another cartoon. One camera was pointed directly at him, while the other two were directed at other kids in the bleachers; those kids who had sucked up to Bozo and laughed at his antics as soon as the lights had burst on. Laughed a little too hard, I thought.
But the fact is that I still loved Bozo and I still wanted one more chance of getting a close up of my smiling face. And the only way to do that, I knew, was to be caught giving him a great big kiss on the schnozz. A kiss framed perfectly by camera number one and viewed with envy all over the Tri-State Area.
But now the show was getting ready to end so I had to make my move. And the only way I could do that now was to be as heartrendingly cute as I could possibly be. You couldn’t very well get up out of your seat, grab Bozo by the orange hair and kiss his nose by force. He’d been pretty clear about that. But the right look, the proper winsome expression would not only melt the Clown-Master’s heart, but it might very well even turn his rotten day around one hundred and eighty degrees.
I steeled myself for a really adorable look. I widened my eyes and lifted my eyebrows. I put my knees together and pointed my toes inward and I was ready.
The light blinked on and so did Bozo. Earlier in the show, when a cartoon or commercial had come on, he had left the set briefly, I guess to slap on a little more white-face or frizzy out his hair some more. And each time the stage manager had counted down from three to start the show again, Bozo was back in front of the camera just before he was done counting. So I had no time to waste. I had to get his attention.
And I had to do it fast because now I could see the credits rolling in the monitor and Bozo was saying goodbye to all the kids at home and then he was done.
And the nose kissing began.
All I had to do was make eye contact and I felt sure that the big nose would be mine! I put on the most achingly adorable face and positively willed him to look my way. But I was running out of time, so I added one last touch. It was physical but, in my opinion, not overdoing it. I slowly raised my arms as if asking for a hug. It wasn’t that no one else in the bleachers was using arm tactics; most were. They raised their hands, they waived their arms frantically, even crying out “Me, Bozo!! Me, me, me!!” But my plaintive expression of longing was a subtle, but much more powerful, tool.
And it was working! Bozo looked my way and our eyes met. Almost in slow motion, I saw him coming my way. He was headed towards me and it was clear now that we were destined to meet, mouth-to-nose. I stood up, he drew closer, and contact was imminent.
Then it happened. The kid next to me jumped up without warning and reached for the nose. I had been intercepted! The kiss was planted and then Bozo moved away, his nose lost to me forever. The little brat next to me hadn’t even been trying to get a kiss. In fact, he had been picking the wax out of his ear and studying it. This disgusting display had been seen everywhere in TV land and the kid had still been rewarded with the Grand Prize! But it had all been an act; he had to be cleverer than I had given him credit for. Now he had Bozo in his back pocket.
My mother and I left the studio in the chilly winter evening air and she asked me if I had had a good time. I said I had, but I didn’t tell her that I felt strange about the whole Bozo thing. I had been on the show now, seen him in person, but something was, I don’t know…different, I guess. It wasn’t the nose thing. But it wasn’t something I could put my seven year old finger on.
I still watched the show. I still watched Soupy Sales and Officer Joe and the Three Stooges and the great and wonderful Chuck McCann. But it was kind of weird to know what goes on behind the scenes on TV. Because once you do, you join a club you don’t really want to join. The fantasy is sort of taken away a little and you grow up a bit and you gain knowledge you’d rather not have.
I don’t know what Bozo did after the show that day. I never really wondered. But he probably went back to his office, lit a cigar, poured himself a bourbon and muttered to himself about the next group of kids he’d have to face tomorrow afternoon.
Oh, well. I never thought he was that funny anyway.
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