My friend Almond Zigmund has an art show up in one of the galleries at Guild Hall — the one that used to be called the Woodhouse Gallery, if I’m not mistaken — that is, I think you will find, more fun than most art shows are these days. The room is set up like a large living room or den, with shag rugs latch-hooked quilting-bee style by groups of busy bee volunteers, beanbag chairs, and wood recliners in geometric shapes that you can lounge in, and there are projections and, well, I guess you might call them floral decals on the walls. (No one says “decals” anymore, do they?) If you are Gen X or a Boomer who experienced the 1970s, Almond’s Hawaiian Punch color palette will transport you straight back to the era of “The Electric Company” and “The Dating Game.”
I’m an unreliable and overly cynical critic, and not to be trusted as a judge of contemporary art, but I dig it. The point, I might venture to guess, is to evoke the idealism of the 1970s, the forward-march, rainbow-coalition activism that permeated the pop culture of the Jimmy Carter years. And to perhaps nudge us to notice how far we have fallen, tumbling from skyscraper heights of optimism, cartwheeling in the sky. . . .
I didn’t really enjoy the 1970s when I was in them. The backwash of the 1960s was not pretty from the vantage point of a 6-year-old; there were weird people, acid casualties, stumbling around in parks and theaters topless, drooling and talking to themselves about Snoopy and Nixon, and it wasn’t nice. But how we miss that decade now that it’s gone. The glory of PBS. The dream of equal rights. Carol Channing explaining to the children in rhyming couplets on “Free to Be You and Me” that their mommies actually hated doing housework and that the actresses in television advertisements for soaps, detergents, cleansers, cleaners, waxes, and bleaches were only smiling like that because they were being paid. Little boys, little girls, chores are sunnier when done together.
We didn’t have a TV set in the remotest period of my 1970s childhood. My parents were right to impose that cruelty on us, as it made us into book-readers and forced us out of doors. We were — and in this the Gen X cliché is accurate, in my opinion — quite feral, roaming the wastelands of Napeague on foot or on banana-seat bicycle, running along the abandoned train tracks by the Promised Land fish factory, peddling to Fresh Pond in pursuit of a Sno-Cone from the ice cream truck, no adult supervision in sight.
My family bought a television when I was about 7 or 8, after my father got cancer and it became expedient for us kids to be distracted by what he called “the goggle box,” and I became an eager viewer of “Zoom,” “The Electric Company,” and “Schoolhouse Rock.” Almond’s exhibition is reminiscent of all those kooky, high-minded 1970s children’s shows that taught my generation what a gerund was, how a bill moved through the Houses of Congress to become law, and why it was a good idea to be nice to others even if their skin was a different shade, they wore a scoliosis brace, or were a girl. I credit PBS — and a childhood diet of clams and bluefish that saturated my growing brain with omega-3 fatty acids — for why I’m so smart. (Insert the smiley-face emoticon with tongue sticking out here, editor. I’m only joking.)
Well, I just don’t know. What is the world coming to? I mean, actually: Where is the world going? Where will all this end?
More than 50 years have passed since Rosey Grier recorded ‘It’s All Right to Cry” for Marlo Thomas’s children album. Do you remember that song? “Raindrops from your eyes / Washing all the mad out of you. / Raindrops from your eyes, / It’s gonna make you feel better.” And here we find ourselves as a nation, defunding PBS and “Sesame Street” out of pure troll-ery and nastiness, turning war refugees, the hungry, and the “homeless, tempest tossed” away from the great open gates of America (unless the refugees happen to be white South Africans), and selling off public parkland in the wild, open space of the West to developers and mineral mining concerns. I swear to God, I bet Donald Trump orders the Department of Education to ban “Free to Be You and Me” from the libraries of America. It probably already has. I should know if it has or hasn’t banned it, but I don’t because I’ve been avoiding the news lately. I really can’t stand the headlines. Excuse me for cutting this column short. I’m going to go enjoy some reruns of “The Carol Burnett Show.”