The Thrilling Days of Yestercable

    If you're like me (and the Geneva Convention strictly prohibits such sins!) and grew up in the last quarter of the 20th Century (which Millenials are trying to outlaw), you are probably aware of the great technological accomplishments of that era, particularly in the realm of chia pets!

   And how did we learn about the chia pet? I mean, aside from the person down the street conned into buying one the same way some schnook gets a My Pillow now, That's right, it was good old cable TV! Cable is, or rather USED TO BE, a marvelous invention with a very important aim...to make us grateful for more Diff'rent Strokes seasons after being subjected to the horrors of local access shows!

    No, don't be ridiculous, that show was useless right after the Bicycle Man 2-parter starring Mr. Carlson. Seriously, the original purpose of cable was to bring TV signals to homes in rural areas or at least semi-rural areas.

   Of course, many didn't want to pay for cable and instead opted for a huge aerial outside their house and connected to the TV.  When I was really little and we lived in Michigan, we had one that easily got the Detroit stations whose transmitters were only 20 miles away. However, when we moved to Pennsylvania in 1976, we lived in an area where any station was at least 35 or more miles away. In fact, we had 2 choices: aim the aerial to the west and get the Susquehanna Valley stations or aim to the southeast and get the Philadelphia stations...my dad chose the Philly suite, probably the better choice. Most of the stations came in well except for one of the independents.

   A few years later, we moved to Wilmington, North Carolina. NOW it was time to get cable as there were only 3 stations in town: ABC, NBC, and PBS. I distinctly remember when the cable truck pulled up in late June of 1979...it was plastered on both sides with an advertisement for WTCG Channel 17 in Atlanta...it was named a Superstation. At 6 years old I wondered what that even meant. Well, it turned out to be one of 2 independent sitcom/cartoon stations we'd get. Our CBS came out of Durham, and we got a couple other networks from other eastern NC towns. At one point, someone hooked up a wire to the TV and got us an illegal (I assume) connection to HBO. That was pretty cool! I remember seeing Grease for the first time there.

    Well, the South was a fairly short experience, lasting only 16 months. We ended up moving back to PA in the fall of 1980, and THIS time we got cable. All Philly stations came in along with a few Susquehanna Valley stations and a couple up in the Scranton and Allentown areas. A couple of years later, our service, Berkscable, got a new station called USA! It was its own network, airing a lot of older shows, including my beloved The Edge of Night starting in late 1985! I also caught the old Dragnet on this channel.  Also in 1983 we got a decoder box in order to have a local HBO-type station called PRISM which aired movies, sports and, late weekend nights, soft-core porn...or so I heard wink wink! Yeah ok...teenager me turning that opportunity down? Let's move on.

   In 1986, Berkscable got a MAJOR revamping: cable boxes! Suddenly we had 60 channels instead of just 12...of course we didn't watch all of them. Still, we not only had USA, we had ESPN, Nickelodeon, A&E, BET, MTV, VH1, Discovery, HSN, CNN, Weather Channel, Cinemax, TNN, and a few other channels to sort through. A year later we also got WTBS (previously WTCG) which was later just TBS, and even later TNT.

   Later in the 90s we got some other channels like Cartoon Network, Science Fiction (later just lazily Syfy), FX, Game Show Network (later lazily just GSN) and TV Land. I liked TV Land for a while because they aired a lot of classic shows and some classic commercials. By the mid 2000s it had gained too many ads and cut their shows more. As Cartoon Network began airing more original shows, it spawned its own offshoot Boomerang which eventually became like its mother.

   On top of all this were various incarnations of HBO, Cinemax, Movie Channel, Showtime, Starz, and Encore...most of which required an added subscription. Then there were tons of shopping channels as well. Long ads called infomercials replaced the test patterns on broadcast stations. Pretty soon, a lot of cable channels began running long marathons of the same damn show, inspiring the current trend of streaming show binge-watching.

   And with the growing number of cable channels out there, cable package prices got astronomically ridiculous, even just for basic, due to all the licensing fees either the channel or cable provider charged each other. It wasn't that way back in the good ol 20th century, even early 21st. We had Cox for quite some time, then when DirecTV made a deal with AT&T, we switched. It was ok for a time, but then in 2019, DirecTV couldn't reach an agreement with the company that owned our CBS station. That pretty much cut it for me. In the fall we dropped DirecTV (but not without a hefty early termination penalty that we recently finished off) and just used an antenna for regular channels plus their digital offshoots which carry any combination of classics depending on the day's signal strength. Plus a friend gave us one of her spare Fire Sticks, so we also stream with some selected services.

   What I have noticed, however, is the new tricky nature of streaming services, charging rental fees instead of just making all their shows and movies free...Amazon is guilty of this! Plus, other smaller streaming companies offer their own bundles of channels once attainable only through cable. Translation: they saw cable dropping in popularity and needed to find a way to make money.

   All in all, I miss the old days...don't we all? Progress is not always good. In fact, progress in terms of TV viewing has created a system, an ENABLING system if you will, of making us feel ok to just sit and veg on a show all damn day, whereas when I was more youthful, I knew what was on and when, and did other things during those times. If I sit for a binge-watch now, I fall asleep around episode 2! None of the shows are what I'd label RIVETING.

They don't even try to sell me a chia pet!

From the Raven to the Dove

    Recently I read a good book. 

   I know I know, you're saying ANOTHER DAMN BOOK REVIEW?! DON'T YOU KNOW WE HATE THESE AND WANT YOU TO WRITE FUNNY SHIT TO MAKE US GIGGLE?!

   Yeah yeah, I'll write jokes later, I'll smash a damn watermelon, put a prop arrow in my head, whatever you want. For the time being, though, I need to talk about something...

   Or rather someone.

   About 36 years ago, I was channel surfing when upon me came a show on USA that I'd seen once or twice before in daytime called The Edge of Night. I hadn't caught the plot or characters before that, I just liked the music theme. Come to early 1986, I finally sit to catch the actual show. It was an array of some really interesting, off-the-wall characters, from psychotic killers to fraudulent actors to obsessed cops...and at the center of a lot of these stories and dialogues was what could be described as an anti-heroine, someone who people rooted for but wasn't necessarily good. 

   Her name was Raven Whitney...actually I would later come to learn she was Raven Alexander Jamison Swift Whitney. She was played by a quite gorgeous woman named Sharon Gabet. I must admit, at 13 I was quite smitten with her just as much as any girl I liked in junior high.

   When the Edge run ended on USA in early 1989, I was quite bummed, though I knew she was on another soap at that point, just not a front-of-the-line role. For the next ten years, all I had was the scant videotapes of whatever I'd recorded. Then in 1999, I found an Edge web page from which I found some people who had more than I had on tape! I bought a few tapes and that kept me going for some time. Then AOL video aired episodes earlier than the USA run and I got an earlier and quite nastier Raven!

   Even later I found a group on Facebook devoted to Edge as well as another person who sold episodes on disc! Admittedly I spent over $300 on these but this show was important to me and I got to relive what I saw decades before, plus stuff I hadn't seen because I caught it months after the run began. Most importantly, in the group was none other than Sharon Gabet herself! She shared much with us about the show, as well as the fact that she had written a book called From the Raven to the Dove (yeah I know, talk about your long preliminaries, Bryan!). It was more about her spiritual and emotional journey as an adult than about her days as a soap star. She was also good enough to answer questions from me in IM personally. You have no idea what that meant to me after all those years.

   It took me a while, but I finally decided I wanted to get this book and read what Sharon had to say, so I asked for it for Christmas. Thankfully my sister-in-law got a copy for me. When I opened the present, I was beyond ecstatic!

   Truly, I felt a surge of energy holding this book before I opened it up. It was like I held a certain expectation of what I would read, even though I truly knew Sharon is just a human being like the rest of us. Then I flipped past the opening title page and what not and got to the actual text.

   What I received through reading this book over the course of a few weeks was an incredible journey, a tale of someone who grew up in a seemingly idyllic 1950s environment. I must admit that as a child of the 70s and early 80s, I shared some of the same memories...mostly the outdoor life, exploration, options of places to go in a time before the virtual world consumed us. Millenials would not likely understand this life, it is so foreign.

    Yet, that was just the opening.

    The ensuing chapters are about her growth and experience as a model, then a nurse in New York City...and a nasty perspective of an abortion clinic in New York City in the mid 1970s...not a pretty scene. 

    Then there is the acting part of her life that would go for over a decade of thrills, excitement, and a sad number of downs that came toward the end. How Sharon describes it is more than what some might consider a midlife crisis, but more about a person looking around herself and wondering suddenly who she is. She is frustrated, angry, and in despair...almost like the acting had gone on for much longer than her years on TV.

    What really got to me in the "meat" of the book was how she saw herself in terms of her relationships with men...as well as with her children. What she was looking for, or what she thought she needed to look for, tended not to pan out in the long run. Anyone can see someone going through a divorce, maybe two divorces,  and say, "Well, they didn't try hard enough to make it work." Sharon goes to great depths to show that we do not always know what our souls truly need or want. Society has a great, almost EVIL, role in telling us what we should do in our relationships, what roles we are destined to play...especially for females. Yet the same goes for men, the sense of tough dominance and authority they need to exhibit in order to fit the role, to be accepted. 

   I have to confess that my vocabulary in terms of spiritual journeys, so-called "mythical" creatures and ideas are many times lost on me as I read Sharon's words...the words "skip a bit, brother" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail hit my brain a few times when it got too deep vocabulary-wise. Yet, those were small parts that just enhanced Sharon's overall message which was always understood at the end of each chapter.

   And then when she talks about her children, I can see the love, the deep connection...and the frustrations that accompany. Sharon has a daughter who is autistic, and her journey from discovering that quality to exploring ways to cope and communicate with her, show that Sharon Rose Gabet is not your average suburban single mom who merely gets her child diagnosed and fights with the school over the IEP for years...no she went BEYOND that and found people and experience to help make connections. There is a part near the end when her daughter says "NO" and means it...I won't tell the story of that, but it showed that those people and experiences had borne fruit.

   Possibly one of the deepest themes (maybe THE DEEPEST)Sharon explores, maybe deeper than relationship dynamics and expectations, is the relationship with God that she has explored...often referring to God as Creator, an accurate name and perhaps more appropriate as a descriptor. It is a deep topic explored throughout the book, from her Catholic upbringing to examining the social norms and expectations of believing and what believing truly means when one digs deep into their soul about their true relationship with "the man upstairs". I related to this theme as I have taken a smaller mental journey of my relationship with God and have come to understand what I see it to be...and have felt it to me more rewarding inside.

   Toward the end, Sharon shares her online and phone reunion and some times with her Edge love Larkin Malloy. We as fans were devastated when he left us over 5 years ago, but her take was especially emotional given their past time together. You can feel the love between them onscreen even though they never got together in real life. One understands that sometimes things are meant...and not meant to be. Our inner energy does not always match with others the way we WANT them to. Yet what they had in their way was more real than probably most marriages I have seen onscreen and real life.

   All I can really say to end this review is that it all started with being a fan...and I still am. I can watch the adventures of Raven and Sky on The Edge of Night over and over on disc and Youtube and never get tired of it. Yet, by the end of the book, I feel empowered to dig even more deeply into myself to unravel a few knots and see where I end up. It could be scary, it could be exhilarating...possibly both simultaneously. 

   Thank you, Sharon, for giving me probably one of the most meaningful reads I have ever experienced.

Egg Bites

2021...A Mild Hell in Review

 It's the New Year, everyone! It may be raining or snowing or sunny where you are today, but no matter where you are, we're past the fireworks moment. That moment was not really about it being 2022 so much as kicking 2021 to the curb permanently...for many of us!

If any of you had a positive and blessed 2021, that is wonderful, and I wish you the same happiness this year.

For many others, however, it was not a positive and blessed year. Many had personal or health (or both!) problems. COVID pretty much ruled the year with vaccination side effects or not knowing what to do about getting the vaccination or its booster, and the damn masks!

And then there was the political turmoil. The events of January 6, 2021, are still fresh in the minds of many, and like the vaccination controversy there are varied opinions on what actually happened. This is the first year in my life that an ex President remained in the public eye and attention after he left...because he wanted it that way.

As for me and my family, we hung in there as always. Vickie had a hysterectomy and I was lucky (har har)enough to get 2 kidney stones blasted. Vickie got us a deal online for 2 bikes, and in the late Spring and most of the summer I rode all over the northernmmost neighborhoods where some orchards and many horses resided...almost a rural Pennsylvania feeling, except the high humidity was missing.

Working summer school provided funds for some short getaways in late June and all of July, the highlight being Cedar City, Utah for me.

Thankfully we teachers were able to start and STAY in our classrooms with our kids, little to no virtual quarantine emergencies.

Celebrities we lost (ones I am familiar with anyway): Peter Scolari, Willie Garson, Norm MacDonald, Charlie Watts, Jackie Mason, Charlie Robinson, William Smith (I didn't know this one till today!), director Richard Donner, soap performers Ray MacDonnell and Stuart Damon, Clarence Williams III, Arlene Golonka, Gavin MacLeod, B.J. Thomas, Robert Hogan, Charles Grodin, Tawny Kitaen, Olympia Dukakis, Frank McRae, Johnny Crawford, Jessica Walter, George Segal, Rush Limbaugh, Larry Flynt, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Diamond, Cicely Tyson, Cloris Leachman, Hal Holbrook, Larry King, Hank Aaron, Phil Spector, Joanne Rogers, John Reilly, Marion Ramsey, Tanya Roberts, Gregory Sierra, and, just yesterday, Betty White....proving 2021 had one more groin kick for us all.

Celebrity deaths aside, many of us suffered the loss of a friend or family member, which makes the loss much more heartfelt. My mom lost her friend Rose, whom she had met at the National University library in San Diego almost 29 years ago. She was a very sweet woman, I remember her fondly. She passed at age 73. We also lost our elderly former downstairs neighbor Norma in June. Even after we moved into the house, we continued to come help her with her cable remote or pick things up (like smokes) from the store. A very kind woman who had known Natalie since she was 2. Norma passed at 89.

This may sound trite, but let us take the tragedies and bad news of 2021 and do what we can to make 2022 the best we can make it. My advice...make reasonable goals you can attain and maintain, not crazy half-hearted "resolutions"...New Year's resolutions at heart are a meaningless tradition passed on from other generations who usually failed at resolutions as well...and as we are a nation often fails to learn from past failures, let's break this bad habit once and for all!

A happy blessed and successful 2022 to all!