GOING BACK TO THE PLACE I'VE NEVER BEEN

Ever since I can remember (and perhaps even further back than that) whenever I watched a wonderful black and white TV show or classic movie I often yearned to be transported back to whatever year they were shot in (or to the era that they represented) and lately I find myself wanting to go back more than ever.

For the last two years and especially now, it has felt like the President is Ebenezer Scrooge who was so mean and awful that today more people are named after Adolph Hitler than him.

Ours is a Scrooge who from day one mocked Tiny Tim, thus making America grate.

After a few hours watching cable news, just as my head begins to spin on its axis at the speed of LInda Blair in the Exorcist, that is when I leap headfirst like Esther Williams off a sky-high diving board towards my where-the hell-is-the-remote and head to my own, personal Willoughby (a Twilight Zone reference), TCM.

I don’t care what they’re playing at the moment, it could be the first film starring an international cast of insects and rodents for all I care. The point is: I’m all in. I’m gone and best of all, I’m back to where I have never been.

Now if I really luck out, and say Casablanca or Citizen Kane is on, then I have to prevent my heart from exploding into a sudden cloudburst of circus confetti from the kind of pure ecstasy that a baby exhibits the second that they become captivated by their own about to be self-devoured wiggling toes.

Disclaimer: there is a TCM time limit.

Past a certain point you feel as if you've tried to indulge in every single cake and pie that is glass housed into those slowly revolving diner pastry carousels and you simply have to return to the wonderful word of suddenly startling COLOR, in order to hear the modern day language of your contemporaries as they slowly coax you out of your self-induced movie coma and gently escort you back to the slate gray existence of your everyday life.

Ah, but while you are still deeply rooted in the once upon a time times of Hollywood, it is pure bliss.

The players all seem blithely innocent, totally dazzled by their day jobs which seems to be the obsessive, compulsive pursuit of falling deeply, madly in love. What comes immediately to mind is the thirties version of “A Midsummer’s-night’s Dream” or the romantic hi-jinx of “The Philadelphia Story.”

Despite the myriad of boneheaded, self-created obstacles, we all know intuitively that our bumbling, fumbling man or woman archetypes are going to find heart Nirvana seconds before the end credit roll. And man does that film meal feel satisfying.

Those sweet, of the day movies, were fairy tales for grown-ups, which lulled us in the dark, just like our mommies and daddies once did, shushing away our anxieties and fears until we felt every bit as loved as the stars of those films did in the end.

Film in those days was not only double-bill, mass consumed, but they were literally developed in the photo labs of our hearts whose final prints were something that we held dear and could not wait to share with our closest friends and family members.

If a film was really impactful, scenes might be recreated on the screens of our over the moon swoony dreams where we could replace the actor of our choice in order to have a far more personal, tactile experience. The lightest kiss could make for quite the damp dream experience.

Add to that, any lush film score, which is equally transportable and that film could keep playing in the double helix our own, personal art house DNA, long after it’s no longer playing at our local theater.

Our lives have simply become too damn complicated since the days when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers flew like a pair of choreographed doves across the canvas of the screen, propelled by the sonic bliss notes of George Gershwin or Irving Berlin’s.

There’s a very good reason why today movie theater is called a complex.

Just look at our lives.

Today things come at us relentlessly.

Pop music BLATS at us like impatient, horn-honking traffic. BREAKING NEWS is as soothing as the frantic musings of the Gone With The Wind’s Butterly McQueen. The SIREN CALL of our electronic devices seduces us, luring us into their garden of Eden with its impossible to resist Apples until our brains are both MICRO AND SOFT and we finally devolve into a kind of virtual reality where we are the Kings and Queens of our own private country, self-serving at the pleasure of ourselves.

As Robert Flack once famously asked, where is the love?

Add to that the image of the orphaned, way too tuneful waif, Oliver, with an empty bowl in outstretched hands, asking, “Please sir, can I have some more decency, kindness, and civility?”

Until those elements return (and they will, I promise) personally I have no choice but to knock the acid rain of color out of my life and sink into the soothing celluloid waters of old Hollywood where the dress for the evening is top hat, tux and cane, where people are almost ruthlessly polite and often moved to spontaneously erupt into song in public places, where waving the flag gives you goosebumps instead of goose steps, where amber is the color of the grain and not our child snatched alerts, where inventors and sports figures are bigger than life role model heroes, where certain woman dare to wear the pants in the family and speak their minds, where personal sacrifice is as important as faith, where prejudice is confronted rather than accepted, where laughs come at our benefit and not our expense, where we run directly towards evil and hold our ground until it has been obliterated.

It is not hard to figure out how to get there.

It’s right there in front of you, in black and white.