A father uses his ingenuity to please his movie-struck son
"Dad!," I insisted, "stop laughing!"
He couldn't of course, Woody Allen being one of his major weaknesses. And so weak was Dad's movie memory, unlike mine, that from the first joke on, the entire film seemed new to him.
Each utterance from Woody's worrier's mouth made my father's body convulse with laughter, and each convulsion made Woody disappear, like one of the magic tricks he so lauded in his films, into a nebula.
"I can't help myself!," Dad would respond.
F. Scott Fitzgerald had it wrong. It's the poor who are not like you and me. Point in case, my father, that fateful night in the late 70's, with that long wire hanging around his neck, standing up on worn kitchen chair not far from our battered black and white television set, as if a dog chained to a video cinderblock.
It was the only way he could figure to make the set work, to offer the much wanted gift of comedy to his desperately movie-struck son, who not hours ago had whined like someone much younger than his years over the fact that their rescued-from-the-garbage television set had begun to live up to its disposability.
Dad, an unemployed engineer, cocked a snook at the world for not recognizing his talents by devising the aforementioned poor improved antenna, the one that would only deliver picture if it was worn around the neck, and only if the body attached to that neck stood on chair and didn't laugh. Then again, maybe Dad was proving the world right that they weren't hiring him.
Regardless, the purpose of Dad's invention was to please the son, and that it did - whenever Dad could restrain himself from doubling over. By the end of Love And Death, a film he had taken me to see upon its theatrical release, my introduction to Woody - Dad's maximized muscles were aching from the agonizing gift of restraint.
Finally, with utterance of "You're happy now, son?" and an affirmative from me, Dad removed the wire and let it all out, a veritable tsunami of guffaws, chortles, titters and tears; how fast, I wondered, the choicest parts of that movie must be moving through his mind right now.
I went to bed in a state of complete satisfaction. Circumstance had been against me, but I had gotten to watch my coveted film anyway, a triumph of providence over socio-economic determinism.
I know now, though, that I was happy because I was loved.
