Tuesday, March 17, 2009

You Give Me Growing Pains, Theodore Huxtable

When I think of TV in the 80s, I think of the many things I missed out on. It’s not that I’m too old or too young—I’m in fact perfectly-aged to have been raised by television in the 1980s.

The problem was that my family lived at the bottom of a valley, surrounded on all sides by wooded hills. We had a glorious TV antenna that reached up way past the house in hopes of catching those precious waves, but despite its great height we only received one channel, the local NBC affiliate. My knowledge of television from my past is restricted to those shows that aired on channel 18, WHIZ TV—Alf, the Cosby Show & A Different World. I never even saw The Wonder Years until I went to college!

That’s why Mary Hamilton’s show, “You Give Me Growing Pains, Theodore Huxtable” was so important. Thanks to Erin Teegarden and Nicolette Bond I now I have a truer understanding of the joy so many found in watching The Wonder Years. Tobias Amadon Benglesdorf gave us a glimpse of Alex P. Keaton’s not so heart-throbbingly awesome future as coke-addled Republican jerk. Meg Barboza’s slideshow as to why Rosanne was the best show ever was very convincing. Zach Plague compared Al Bundy and Sisyphus with the zeal of a young Ph.D. candidate. Lindsay Hunter reminded me that I am so not a Chicagoan because I only learned what Bozo Buckets were last summer. Brian Costello wooed us, and Tracy Gold, with a story and song, and Jac Jemc cracked the room up by inserting herself into a typical (or not so typical?) Perfect Strangers scenario. Fred Sasaki and Jacob S. Knabb also jumped in and read some appropriately themed and hastily penned haikus.

Oh, and of course I have to mention the word-for-word reenactments of our favorite scenes from shows like the Facts of Life and the Cosby Show, excellently performed by Mary, Jill Summers and Erin!

Thanks to Mary for bringing everyone out. That show was a blast, and even educational for people like me who lived where no cables would run (seriously, they still don’t run cable out to my parents’ house). Thanks for the show, and thanks for the old memories!

1 Comments:

Blogger miki said...

oh, so I just learned that Bozo the Clown was not a Chicago thing, which is what I was led to believe last summer. Huh.

March 17, 2009 6:58 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home