If you watch primetime TV, you know that Southerners are rarely cast in a decent light.
We are uneducated, straw-chewing, chaw-spewing, barefooted, backwoods, beer-gutted, sweat-stained losers.
And that’s just the women.
So it’s hard to explain why I watch so much TV. It certainly isn’t for the Southern role models, which include those fluffy idiots on Designing Women and the sincerely senile Ben Matlock.
Southerners are tired of this notion that we’re all Elly May Clampetts leading the critters around the cement pond and kicking the chicken shit out from between our toes.
Southern women are portrayed as being just bright enough to “fiddle-dee-dee” when excited. Like at tractor pulls or kitchen showers.
But even though TV portrays the Southern woman as having the brains of a bag of Red Band flour, I can’t stay away from it.
I love TV like the cat loves the cream jar, and my husband—who reads books—doesn’t understand.
The other night he approached me during a commercial break with a grave look that I interpreted to mean he’d forgotten to tape Friends like I asked him to.
“You forgot, didn’t you?”
“No. I taped it, but we’ve got to talk about your addiction to primetime TV. It has to stop.”
“And stop it will. Someday. Now, step aside. ER is coming on.”
He rolled his eyes and looked sad.
“See what I mean? The other night you woke me up talking in your sleep, ordering me to ‘get blood gases, type and cross, get a CBC panel and a crash cart in here, stat!’”
“And your point would be…?”
“Look. Why don’t you try reading? When’s the last time you read a book?”
“Does TV Guide count?”
He buried his face in his hands.
“Okay,” he finally said. “At least watch educational programs for a change. Try the Discovery Channel. They’ve got a great series this month on the world’s great deserts.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” I said. “They’re still hot and dry.”
“What about the Amazing Predators segment? Maybe you’d like that,” he offered.
“It’s not exactly suspenseful TV if you watch an eight hundred-pound lion stalking a six-pound Peter Cottontail. Who do YOU think is going to win?”
Although I was being snotty, I deep down thought it was really sweet that my husband was concerned about my intellectual development and I told him so. During the next commercial break.
“This reminds me of Episode fifty-eight of The Dick Van Dyke Show, when Rob thought it would be good for Laura to—”
“STOP IT! Can’t you see that TV is taking over your life?”
“That’s not true. From midnight to nine A.M., I hardly ever watch TV. You silly man! I can quit anytime I like.”
But, to myself: Oh, no I can’t. Please don’t make me. If you make me give up TV, how can I turn the world on with a smile? How can I take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?
“Okay,” he said, suddenly smug. “How about this Monday. Eight P.M. Go one entire week without TV. I dare you!”
“Are you MAD? This is sweeps month. And if you think I’m going to miss all-new episodes of Must See TV this month you’re as nutty as that cult leader who kidnapped Sydney and threw her in the hole out in the California desert last week.”
He looked real depressed and was staring at me just like Mandy Patinkin looked at his wife when he’d visit her in the crazy house in between surgeries on Chicago Hope.
“Sydney. You must be talking about Melrose Place.”
“Please put your answer in the form of a question.”
Okay. Maybe there was a little problem. The next morning, I agreed to try one week without TV.
“Starting the first week of March, though, because I absolutely must finish the last installment of A Woman of Independent Means which is based on one of those, whatchamacallit, books you’re so crazy about.”
In anticipation of a TV-less lifestyle, I felt much like Dr. Joel Fleischman in those early days in Cicely, Alaska, when he felt adrift and abandoned on Northern Exposure.
Giving up TV was terrifying to me. I believe TV is the only thing that separates us from the savages. That, and underpinning.
Here’s how my week went:
Day 1: Ate breakfast cereal without Today show blaring in background. Wondered if cereal has always been this noisy. Realized I’d have to start the day without knowing who’d turned 110 in what obscure Midwestern town. Realized I’d live. Cats circled TV and looked nervously from blank TV to me.
Day 2 (evening): Turned on radio, spent next two hours listening to show about NASCAR drivers. Experimented with making race-car noises, softly, then louder. “Vrrroooom, VROOOOOM!” Cats flipped through yellow pages for psychiatric hospitals in area.
Day 3: Stayed late at office to delay arrival at silent, tomb-like home. Drank cheap wine from bottle in brown paper sack. Went to bed in my clothes.
Day 4: Felt better today. Decided to catch up on letter-writing to old friends. Got out stationery, propped up pillows. Realized I didn’t have any old friends.
Day 6: Don’t remember Day 5. Days run together in one silent, lifeless void. Think I can make it. Watch this. I can hold TV remote in my hand and not turn it on. Progress. Hand shakes. Batteries spill to floor and cats bat them under the dresser. Free cats to good home.
Day 7: Sneak peek at TV in restaurant where husband is taking me for reward lunch. Later, get on hands and knees to find remote batteries. Husband approaches from behind. “Looking for these?”
Day 7 (evening): Sounds of rain pattering gently on roof. Distant train whistle. Rustling leaves of oak tree. Who can stand all this racket? Tomorrow, things back to normal.
Day 8: Alert Willard Scott. After a week without TV, I feel 110.