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PatchWork
by Joyce Whitis |
May is the month where lots of things come to an end. And as often happens, with an ending there is a new beginning. Graduation in our neck of the woods takes place in May. Every eighteen year old graduate thinks his world is ending but of course the next morning there is a new beginning. Lots of marriages take place the last week in May, right after graduation. Marriage is an ending to being one and a beginning of being two all in one ceremony.
May is also the month when many television shows air their season finales and some show us their last hurrah. I am always amazed to read in the paper about a show that is giving its final performance and realize that it has been on for nine years and I never saw a single episode! You would think that just once I would have stopped on Wings or Mad About You just to see if they were worth watching. Fact is, I never did, not once in the nine years. Makes me feel sort of bad that I missed all that. Now I'll most likely never know what they were about. Television is a strange pastime anyway. Unless the show has something to do with sports or history or nature, there's not a lot out there, yet watching television is America's most popular pastime, and we all have our favorites.
As for me, I'm a M*A*S*H a-holic. I've been watching for years and years and can go to sleep every night after just one more time of hearing that familiar theme and watching the helicopters come over the mountains. I've got lots of M*A*S*H company on the internet and anytime night or day, I can play M*A*S*H trivia or hear the Suicide Song. I cried buckets when my favorite show went off the air but since then, I just haven't cared what went.
Roseanne is gone, right? Wrong! Just when you thought it was safe to turn on your television set, an unsettling headline bounces up from the page, "Roseanne to star on Daytime Talk Show". Oh my Lord, she's back. And she hadn't even hardly left yet. Just goes to show you that there is no justice for those of us who joined the "I hate Roseanne and I don't ever want to hear of her ever again team."
Now I know very well that it is not Christian and not nice besides that, to even think about hating somebody, much less writing it down on paper. So it is with shaky fingers that I tap out the four letter word. Nothing else seems to measure up when I really sit down and think about it.
In the beginning there was a lot to like about the show. It was so different from any other comedy. Roseanne said things that had never been said outloud on television. When Dan asked her where were his socks, she gave him her special blank stare and came back with an answer every wife around the world would appreciate. "Well...the last time I saw them they were walking down the street, headed for a beer!" Since wives spend a lot of mindless hours matching socks, stuffing them together and putting them in their husband's sock drawers, and since they have been doing this for an eternity, and besides that have gone nuts trying to solve the mystery of socks that go into the dryer but never come out, to be asked by the man of the house where his socks are, deserves a very curt answer. Roseanne was a master of curt answers.
But then the show began to resemble All in the Family with Roseanne playing a female Archie Bunker. That role belonged strictly to Carroll O'Conner in my book so I started switching to something else. Then when Roseanne messed up the national anthem before a ballgame and she made fun of ball players all at the same time, that really tore it! My country and my baseball game are right up there at the top of a long list of stuff I am fiercely loyal to. After that fiasco in California, before the Padre's game, watching Roseanne was too painful for me so I gave it up entirely.
This past Tuesday the final episode of Roseanne aired on television. I watched the Rangers beat Oakland while she was saying good-bye on another channel.