Being Bud Anderson

When I was six, we got our first television. A blond swivel Motorola the size of a Buick Roadmaster, it lorded over the living room and our lives for years, even when my father was promoted to Branch Manager and my mother redecorated and relocated all the old furniture to the new basement rec room, another perk of my father's promotion.

Before the Motorola reared its swively blond head, I'd been hotfooting it across the street to watch Steven Farley's TV, that is, when I wasn't watching Steven pull down his corduroys and pee in the window well. Being the middle of three girls I was anatomically-challenged, and though we were barely out of diapers, Steven was more than happy to set me straight. His father was a doctor, after all, which is also why the Farleys had a TV before the rest of the Upper Midwest.

When I first encountered the Farley's Magic Box, I figured there were tiny people living inside, who put on plays and variety shows and encouraged the use of Lux detergent and Old Gold cigarettes. The real mindfuck was how so many of them could fit into such a small space — a kid's version of "how many angels can fit on the head of a pin" — and I wondered about meals and sleeping accommodations and bathroom breaks. Details, details. I had two imaginary friends who could walk through walls and distract me from buzzkills like brussels sprouts and polio shots and even fly when the situation called for it. Anything was possible.

The Farleys eventually packed up their Magic Box and their son and his magic corduroys and got the hell out of Dodge (a feat I myself would accomplish twelve years hence), and after a brief period of mourning my lost soulmate — was it Steven I missed or his 12" Zenith? — I wiped my tears and began lobbying in earnest for a television of our own.

It took thirty-seven hours.

I remember every detail of those first heady weeks after the Motorola arrived to take its place of honor beside the picture window, beneath the Green Stamps Rembrandt, in front of the knockoff World Books. We floated through our waking hours as if spellbound, waiting for the Magic Box to glow to life and dispense its hypnotic power, blissfully unaware that we'd joined the ranks of an historic band, the first unsuspecting lab rats in the Great American Experiment of dumbing down and fattening up an entire nation.

So far, so fat.




In those days, in our neck of the woods, programming was limited to a short window of time in the afternoon. I'd tear ass home from Greenhaven Elementary, scattering school paraphernalia like a trail of breadcrumbs, and fall to my knees before the blond altar, to be present when that silent screen grew its tiny belly button of light and expanded like a lotus blossom until it filled my eyes, my head, the living room, the known universe.

So much for Nancy Drew, Miss Pickerel and the Bobbsey Twins. Once Buffalo Bob and Miss Francis showed up in Dodge, the writing was on the wall. Nix the writing, now it was all pictures. Many many pictures. Pretty pretty pictures. The books towering around my bed grew as dusty as the encyclopedias cowering behind the Motorola. We weren't in Kansas anymore.

Actually, it was New York. An apartment building in New York, where I lived with my parents, Ricky and Lucy, and my fake aunt and uncle, Fred and Ethel. If I wasn't in New York, I might be out at the ranch riding Fury, my horse, or maybe lost in a cave waiting for Lassie, my dog, to rescue me. Or maybe I'd be auditioning for "The Original Amateur Hour" with my rendition of "Back in the Saddle Again" from "The Gene Autry Show," which I'd perform while beating time with my Bolo Bouncer and tapping.

My first enemy was the Sheriff of Nottingham, my first crush was Mighty Mouse, my first BFFs (besides Steven Farley and the two Imaginaries) were Annette Funicello and Cubby O'Brien. I was as addicted a lab rat as the next kid with Mickey Mouse ears and a Robin Hood quiver, except...




...there was a problem. Quicker than you could say "Hold onto your seats, as we blast off to visit all of your favorite cartoon stars!", I was in the midst of a full-blown identity crisis: no one like me existed inside that Magic Box. I didn't recognize myself anywhere. I'd been sidelined, disenfranchised, marginalized before I'd left Kindergarten.

"The Honeymooners," "Our Miss Brooks," "My Friend Flicka," "Make Room for Daddy" — I consumed everything. But try as I might, I was at a loss. Where was that TV role model, that mentor, that special someone I could relate to? I studied the obvious candidates and discarded them all — too frilly, too smiley, too coy, too too. Where was that confused, scabby-kneed, nail-bitten middle kid given to hallucination and lost hopelessly in the family shuffle?

There I was, adrift with my Spin and Marty lunchbox and my Davy Crockett popgun, staring endlessly into the abyss of the television screen, trying in vain to decode that magical miniscule world within where someone who embodied my experience, my vision of myself might be lurking.

And then finally, after a long and bitter season of sobbing into my Bosco and mooning around the window well with a heavy heart, I was redeemed.

One fateful morning (like all pandemics, television rapidly telescoped out from its initial time slot to subsume all available space), I plopped my Sugar Smacks down on the TV tray and my wee ass down on the new lavender sectional couch and heard, for the first time, what would become the soundtrack of my life, that is, until those four lads from Liverpool showed up on Ed Sullivan.

One episode, one 24 minutes, and I knew.

At last! This was it! My life, my very soul reflected on that screen! So what if the house was as big as a Monkey Wards and they didn't know from blizzards and the father wasn't a crabby Finlander and the mother spoke with a weird accent. Details, details. For the first time in the (albeit short) history of the Magic Box, I had representation! I had presence! I had arrived!





So Billy Gray, wherever you are, this one's for you — for time spent and dues paid in that crowded madhouse inside the Motorola, for doing your homework and getting it right (or asking for help from your fake father), for letting a wee lab rat with my particular (albeit short) life experience come to the party — thank you for Bud Anderson!

Huh?