The shows marking the coming new year last night aimed at a demographic much different from my own, so I wandered the dial with my TV remote. I don't have cable and if you don't have cable and live in a heavily populated area like I do you get many channels over the air. They're somehow affiliated with network channels but have higher numbers after a decimal point. In the computer world, the higher the number, the newer and more improved the program. In TV, it's the opposite.
Last night I came across a The Tonight Show episode that aired on New Year's Eve of 1975, forty-six years ago exactly. I tuned in late and Orson Bean was talking about how he recently communed with a butterfly as he sat nude in the backyard of his South California home. The butterfly flew here and there and eventually landed on his finger at which point man and insect stared at each other for half a minute after which the butterfly took to the skies. Bean said he felt he experienced what it was like to be a butterfly, and that the butterfly experienced what it was like to be Orson Bean.
There are many remarkable things about this to me. The most remarkable is that I remembered watching that episode as it originally aired. I was seventeen. I'd forgotten it was Orson Bean, misremembering the guest as Charles Grodin, but I remembered much of what was said verbatim. I was very much a magical thinker at that age, engrossed in ESP, levitation, telekinesis, the supernatural in general, and I would be so for several years to come. (Eventually, after much research and reading and living, none of those things proved true to a level that satisfied me and I now see the world from a scientific viewpoint.)
Orson Bean was the most interesting guest on the show, which included Joan Rivers, Charles Nelson Riley, and Scatman Crothers. He was forty-seven at the time and was, to my generation, known more as a TV personality—a frequent panelist on game shows and guest on talk shows—than as an actor, though one of his later roles was as the 105-year-old Dr. Lester in the 1999 Being John Malcovich, a favorite of mine and a certifiable cult movie. ("If I was 80 years younger, I'd box your ears.") Bean, who died in 2020, showed a knowledge of theater you don't see now. (Look up what it means in the theater world to "swallow the file" and see what you find.) The Tonight Show back then was on five nights a week and was an hour and a half long, which meant that even with that number of guests, who all stayed from the time they came on until the time they left, the conversations meandered. Now, they're largely semi-scripted and promotional and about the only reason to watch these shows is for the host's monologue.
Bean's butterfly story was representative of that era, the mid 1970s, when such things were common. An actor, he would probably have tried drugs like LSD or others, and been very open to the things I was even at his age. Watching the show made me remember myself at that age. I would have been watching it alone, both brothers out, my parents at a party elsewhere. It was on a Wednesday night and I'd be off school for a the week. Other shows would have recapped the year that ended, highlighting events like the fall of Saigon and the movie Jaws, the first to be called a blockbuster. Betty Ford, the first lady, was Time Magazine's Person of the Year in an era when women were seldom given that honor. Americans anticipated the coming year as one of celebration as their nation marked the bicentennial of its founding. Things that got no attention in 1975 but would later happened, as always: Two young men founded a company they named Microsoft; a little known group of comedians started a show called Saturday Night Live; Angelina Jolie, Kate Winslet, and Tiger Woods were born.
Channel surfing used to be a thing. It's not now. With streaming services algorithms suggest shows people want, or they're dug into their beliefs enough that their TVs are set to the channel that best entertains them or reinforces their belief. But sometimes, it pays to just sit there and scroll at random.
