So Glad We Had This Time: A Love Song

My rebellious teen years formed me. I was an iconoclast, an outlier, a pugnacious and angry loner dancing on the knife edge of chaos. Refusing to play the idiot game, I skulked around the outskirts of the Established Order and its meaningless rules of conduct, taking wild, ferocious swings at this stupid world and its numbing expectations. That is, while my male teen cohort spent their hormonal evenings drinking like fish, chasing girls, and doing muscle car donuts in the school parking lot, I was home watching The Carol Burnett Show with my mom. 

The Feathered-Back Hair Gang Would Swagger into Algebra I

The summer after my freshman year of high school, my family moved from Boulder, Colorado, to Phoenix. At Centennial Junior High in Boulder, we wore flannel shirts and chunky hiking boots with Vibram soles. The popular kids at Centennial were witty loudmouths and lovebirds. I was the silent wallflower in the back of the class. We spent summers swimming in the Boulder reservoir and winters saucer sledding down Wonderland Hill. 

High school in ‘70s Phoenix was another world – climate-wise, the planet Mercury. My parents had wearied of the Colorado winters and thought it would be a good idea to try out the Sonora Desert and Phoenix – a furnace charmingly nicknamed the Valley of the Sun by an early marketer probably living in Connecticut.

At Phoenix’s Arcadia High School, the popular guys sported feathered-back hair which they would manage with insouciant tosses of the head. They carried enormous salon combs whose tortoiseshell handles stuck idiotically out of the back pockets of their skintight bell-bottoms; a strutting stupidity that absolutely enthralled me. 

The feathered-back hair gang would swagger into Algebra I in loose formation, blank-faced as samurai, sit in a remote corner of the classroom and spend the hour snickering and high-fiving. I knew intuitively they were not comparing notes on Harvey Korman’s champagne-like comic timing, or Tim Conway’s on-air habit of cracking up his co-stars mid-skit with his endless rad-libs. And would those self-regarding, hat-haired hotshots with their protruding combs have any remote conception of the indescribable Lyle Waggoner? 

The Very Idea of Carol Burnett

That first year at Arcadia H.S. I didn’t know my ___ from my ___. I’d always been shy and jittery, and the move from the Rocky Mountains to the Sonora Desert only increased my painted-window interiority. The next year I would tentatively fall in with the theater geeks and begin efflorescing into an actual life, on campus and in my own raggedy temple. Sophomore year, though, was a demoralizing crawl through a wilderness of imagined humiliations and infinitely collapsing self-regard. Thursday evenings would arrive like healing triage.

“From Television City in Hollywood! It’s TheCarol Burnett Show! With Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, and Lyle Waggoner!” Burnet’s beloved charwoman character would appear in cartoon form to introduce the three (cartoon-rendered) principles. It was a strange ensemble – a vaudevillian comic genius, a Carol Burnett lookalike, an 8’ tall TV Titan in tuxedo, and the literally inimitable Ms. Burnett. 

Leaving aside the weekly reminder that there was, in this storm-wracked world, a place actually called Television City, Thursday nights with Carol Burnett were an absolute salve, a respite my mom and I shared that one night a week. We adored the Carol Burnett show, we communed over it. We were each navigating lives of unrelated turbulence and our weekly Carol Burnett summit put everything in momentary, spirit-lifting perspective. 

The day’s primetime roster perfectly teed-up our weekly Carol Burnett liturgy with a pine-scented aperitif called The Waltons. An earnest hour in the Blue Ridge Mountains with this homily-murmuring clan, and you couldn’t wait another minute to see Korman and Burnett energetically chewing the scenery and throwing endless deadpan glances at an appreciative studio audience who – but for this or that regulatory restriction – would surely have swarmed the stage to embrace the players. The Carol Burnett Show was love in a CRT-powered box. Seeing my beleaguered mom collapsing in such happy tears was its own bracing medicine, if only one restorative evening a week.

Carol Burnett…the very idea of Carol Burnett! What is it about her? Thanks for asking. Carol (if I may) is the personification of the best we can be; as individuals and as a checkered, accidental nation burst from a hollering match with a nutty old king. Yeah, even our origin story reads like sketch comedy. What is America, again? What typifies “the American Experiment?” Is it the Second Amendment? NATO? The Pentagon? COVID? Our system of government? Our economic system? Endless schoolyard slappy-fights between our elected workfare cheats? NOPE. 

America is Carol Burnett in her squashed maid’s cap – teaching us to laugh through our tears, consecrating that Chaplinesque hilarity and bittersweetness that is the very stuff of our wholly unsung national essence.

U!S!A!

I hesitate to invoke the vision of an enormous Pattonesque American flag flapping momentously in a manufactured breeze, but… America. What makes this country a lovable freak in the family of nations is our wiseacre ability to subsume the wanton b.s. in knowing, instructive laughter. America is not swaggering global hegemony, is not the phony stentorian yammering of our largely useless, besuited “lawmakers,” is not the bipolar behemoth whose $842 billion defense budget and unctuous Sanctity of Life preaching coexist without irony. America is not placard-pumping and fist-throwing, neither is it our GNP. America is a wise, lopsided grin. That is our global strength. Take it to heart.

America is Carol Burnett lightly mugging for the camera as she and Julie Andrews deliver themselves of a gorgeous, Golden age of TV rendition of “I Have a Love” from West Side Story; the eternal Bernstein/Sondheim flame. America is Carol Burnett and Betty White singing a stirring comic duet to the toothless joys of aging. America is Carol Burnett letting fly with a rafter-rattling Tarzan yell. 

Today being an American can seem a bit of a mixed bag – thanks in part to our habit of dumping ketchup on Chateaubriand by lamplit French boulevards. Other reputational details attach like lampreys. News flash: we’re NOT drone strikes, we’re NOT religious entrepreneurs, we’re NOT police actions, and we’re NOT assholes. What are we? 

We are Leonard Bernstein, Adolph Green, Betty Comden, the miraculous Nicholas Brothers, Jerome Robbins, Paul Robeson, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Tony Bennet, Sammy Davis Jr! We ARE Lena Horne! We ARE Cyd !%&$! Charisse! Bill Evans! Langston Hughes! Sid Caesar! Eydie Gorme! Donald O’Connor! Sarah Vaughan! 

Most tellingly, America is Carol Burnett – a gorgeous, take-no-prisoners smartass with a huge heart and two left feet. That’s a National Identity we can all embrace – one whose Exemplar-in-Chief lives in our town and is occasionally seen walking around. Like one of us.

Ms. Burnett, thanks a million for what you gave my mom and me when we most needed it. And thank you for being so effortlessly emblematic of what this wildly misunderstood country is truly about – what it’s FOR. Keep up the great work. We need you. Now more than ever.