MAD ABOUT HARRY ANDERSON

Harry Anderson died yesterday, which is the ultimate magic trick when you think about it.   It’s not so much a slight of hand illusion as it is the full and total evaporation of both a body and a body of work.

Now you see him.

Now you don’t.

Famous people are in fact the ultimate illusion, the illusion being that we know them inside out intimately when the reality is, unless you get to buy them a drink or accidentally spill one on them, they are total strangers.

Having worked in Hollywood for all these years and before that as a publicist for United Artists during the golden age of the seventies, what struck me  when I met some of the biggest stars in the world is that from the very first moment of eye contact, I realized that I had no idea who they were.

Famous people are in fact blank screens who we project ourselves onto.   

Watching movies, we sit in the anonymous dark and literally role play with whatever actor we most identify with.

For two hours or so they become our stand-ins; our most visible spokespersons who are somehow able to articulate our deepest and most coveted secrets which from an aerial view are nothing more than layers of feathery duvet covers which we use to cover up our pain.  

The problem is we tend to get way too cozy and lazy when it comes to doing anything about what hurts us the most. They become way too familiar, comforting even. 

Satan smiling becomes the approval that we are desperately seeking.

So rather than drag our asses to the mental gym which we avoid at all costs, we instead pay Hollywood actors to do our treadmill bidding instead.

They are our surrogate emotional  roombas who deal with all our dirt so we don’t have to so we can live in, well, a vacuum.

That is why we laugh and cry and why we love certain films or plays or tv shows while others are repelled by them.  Entertainment is a very personal and private experience.

Actors are the do-something Congress whose work, which is on permanent display 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year is available for us to work through all our twisted like intestines, psychic stuff.

You walk out of a play like Angels in America (which I just recently did) and man do I feel like I just went to Epiphany Boot Camp.  Thanks for all that torturous pain, guys!  Mission accomplished.

So when someone like Harry Anderson dies, we feel privately cheated, insulted and hurt.  It’s like being stood up by the adorably perfect prom date.  Hey! Where is my corsage??

Harry himself has been living in Asheville, North Carolina, where coincidentally, I recently spent a rapturous week with a woman that I loved. Love.  Love is the other form of fantasy entertainment that is rivaled by World Wrestling Entertainment and Extreme Cage Fighting.  

Asheville, in my experience, is a place that is daffily infused with life: music, theater, bars, and FOOD.  It is generous. Liberal.  North Carolina’s Austin.  The perfect place for Harry who previously held court, doing a one-man show in his Louisiana bar until a woman kicked him out:

Katrina sent him packing.

Harry has been on public display via repeats of Night Court, which has literally long lost its luster, as colorless as the end of life often feels.

Funny how painting and sculptures and great movies are lovingly persevered which is just so Hollywood when you think about it.  I mean movies do get the best work done.

But not so much TV shows.  They fade from memory and fade in real life.  They become as surreal as a kinescope.  Charming artifacts.  Cheap entertainment reels for low-level cable stations.   They are this generation’s Nickelodeons.

And yet, if you sit down and binge watch, they begin to blossom right before your very eyes like a startling FTD bouquet.

The vivid color and music of the rat-tat-tat sitcom dialogue which is matched by the generally over the top Vaudevillian performances is a wonder to behold.  A lost art.

Before you, I give you JOKES!  SONGS!  Or in Harry’s case SARDONIC, DROLL MAGIC!  The brilliance of Night Court was that it was its own cosmos of weirdness.  It's own New York.  (Relax, I live here and I am one its most weird citizens).

It was LIFE.  

It was every relative infused holiday meal that we have had to endure.  It was every nut on the subway, suddenly given a national platform, like the Presidency.

We don’t so much tolerate weirdness as we do readily accept it with dollops of bemusement. 

The crazier it is, the more captivated we are by it...unless there is a gun or midtown machete involved.

We likey our outcasts and rebels. And that is what Night Court was all about.

And who better than Harry Anderson to be the least judgmental judge of the mentally unbalanced.? He did not see what the accused did as a crime.  He saw them as not very sure-footed clowns who did not know how to operate the oversized shoes which caused one life-sized pratfall after another.

He showed them kindness. Decency. Respect.  Find that on the front page as of The Washington Post or The New Times, I dare you.

Harry also became Dave Barry in Dave’s World and to this day that is part of my email address.

Now here was Harry in the suburbs, which was just a milder version of Night Court.   It lacked the sharp edged wit and bite of Night Court, but it still had Harry as the bemused ringmaster in this case, in the circus that is  mom and dad life.

The baton was passed to Ray Romano whose family was far more Night Court.  Ray lived in A Droll’s House and it was Harry hilarious.

Still, I find myself sad at the passing of only 65 year old Harry Anderson whose name to me sounds like the friendly neighborhood fella who owns the local Ford Dealership who offers a free turkey on Thanksgiving just for coming in and saying hi.

Despite our obsession and addiction to the ever changing tide of electronic devices (which is slowly causing us to become our own robotic versions) we Americans liked our steak prepared precisely the way it has always been prepared without out any sudden fancy recipe changes.

We do not like restrictions.   We do not like to pay for anything that used to be free.  The simple color choices of our lives remain red and blue which is just our version of black and white.

Even though the constitution comes with amendments, most of us do not cotton to change or anyone’s sudden Declaration of Independence.  Many of us still want men to marry women only.  Guns to be as plentiful as fireworks on the 4th of July.  Blacks to act appropriately and obediently if they want to use the bathroom at Starbucks.

And we want our shows and the characters who live in them to live forever.

This my friends, is why we still Love Lucy.  And god help us, Roseanne. And Will and Grave.  And Murphy Brown. And Mad About You.

It’s a comfort I suppose, that they can defy the laws of logic and resurrect Jesus-style our previous most beloved electronic Gods.

It’s like getting a glimpse into TV heaven where no matter how old they are, they still act and think just like they did twenty years ago.  To me, that would work fine with Lamb Chop and Howdy Doody.  But people?  Uh. I like mine rare and evolved.

It’s like our memories have been given a third dimension, where we get to see the good old days with startling HD clarity.  Surely this is God’s POV.

So when of those actors as opposed to John Goodman, actually dies in real life on a few levels it is simply hard to accept or even understand.  Wait. Can Mickey Mouse die too?  If he does, trust me, he will be re-animated.

Still to come: live concerts featuring holograms of performers like Michael Jackson.

The Beatles fittingly represent a fully dimensional hallucination presentation of forever too, thanks, to their offering of baked to perfection 3 and 1/2 minute (And Hey Jude long) music confections but more importantly to the fact that they will never age.  That one has been unacceptable-to-this-day murdered and the other slain by that thug, cancer, is tragic and painful, but it does not for a second diminish the size and scope of their ongoing crater sized impact.

How powerful is fantasy?  Look who murdered John.  That’s how powerful it can be.  Especially when we believe that we can freely approach and shoot to death the perfect strangers of celebrity who in our twisted minds believe is our best friend or worst enemy.

We claim ownership to stars.  

They are our favorites.  A game we would never dare play with our own children.

We take delight in their willingness to perform just for us, which of course is the other level of illusion.  When we are home alone, in our man Uggs and nightshirts (Wait. Did I say that out loud?) and watching TV, we are are not fully there.  We are lost in a kind of pixilated Twilight Zone space, which manipulates our senses, flirts with our hearts and thanks to the news, terrifies the crap out of us.

I spend more time lately SCREAMING at White House images than I do the paper boy/man who keeps tossing my New York Times into his favorite target: the nearest bottomless puddle.

So, yes, I will miss Harry Anderson, because, like all great shows, they are preserved in the TV and Movie hall of fame where to this day Desi Arnaz still beats the Ba Ba Loo conga drums, Dick Van Dyke falls over the ottoman,  Mary Tyler Moore tosses her hat, iDanny Thomas spit takes, Carol Burnett pulls her earlobe and Archie Bunker and Edith sit on that piano bench singing, “Those were the Days.”

#harryanderson
#nightcourt
#NBC