Okay,
I’ve written enough heavy posts in recent weeks to warrant one that’s just for
fun. I mentioned in passing in last week’s entry that one of my self-care
habits is watching old episodes of Murder, She Wrote and Frasier.
First,
both TV programs overlapped my move from Los Angeles to Atlanta, so they gave
me continuity. And I shared Murder, She Wrote with Mom and Frasier
with both Mom and my brother, more continuity. (This may make you nostalgic for
the days when we all watched the same programs on the same day at the same time
and thus could talk about them the next
day!)
Both
helped me survive the death of my mom, followed by the death of what had
promised to be a lifelong relationship, followed by the death of Open Hands
magazine, whose editorship accounted for about half my income.
I
know you’re thinking, where’s the lighter part of this post?
At
the time, Murder, She Wrote episodes aired twice in the morning
and twice in the late afternoon. I would only allow myself one episode per day,
given my work ethic! But escaping to the homely and picturesque Cabot Cove,
Maine, and hanging out with both a writer and a motherly figure (pardon me,
Angela Lansbury) trying to solve a mystery was just the escape I needed. I
preferred the episodes in her hometown to the ones on location or in New York
City. (Of course I noted the scenes filmed in my home state of California,
which I missed.)
What
I subsequently discovered is that many clergy LOVE crime dramas, maybe because
the solution to a life’s mystery can be discovered within an hour, whereas most
life mysteries require a lifetime to solve, if then.
Plus,
watching the show encouraged my own new project, writing a mystery novel and
spoof about a “spiritual profiler” named John Boswell, not to be confused
(wink) with that medieval history professor at Yale. Every afternoon I would
escape to my fictional town of Crowbar, Mississippi (the prototype of which I
discovered on a solo road trip) where Boswell interviewed, one by one, selective
citizens of the town to determine who murdered the pastor of Primitive Presbyterian,
Angus MacDonald. Originally I called it A Presbyterian Murder, but later
renamed it Angus Dei.
In
his sometimes stodgy first person narrative, the Roman Catholic Boswell describes
how he realized his gift of spiritual profiling:
As I look back, my adulthood prescience of the
spiritual dimensions of traffic accidents should have intimated to me the
possibility of applying my gifts to crime scenes. One traffic accident I
happened onto, for example, I sensed, came from one driver’s inability to
forgive the trespass of another, and that first driver’s insistence on his
right-of-way brought them together in death, though never meeting in life,
giving a spiritual if not ecumenical twist on the traffic instruction,
otherwise ignored, to “merge.” And another: A one-way street seemed to confirm
the theology of one driver, only to run into a universalist going in the other
direction. Unbelievably, only their theologies were badly shaken. And you can
imagine the multiple car pile-up when a fundamentalist refused to “yield.”
Back-to-back
Frasier reruns came on twice in the evening between 6 and 7, my dinner
hour. And since I was now eating dinner alone (though my dog Calvin was
mindfully aware of any dropped or leftover food), far from family, the ensemble
cast of characters became a kind of substitute family. And it was a
non-traditional family, and the stories were often about love sought and found and
lost, with the “loser” always able to return to the bosom of the extended
family. Of course, there were some hilariously gay episodes, my favorite, and plenty
of gay sensibility humor in others, which got the series written up in a New
York Times article lauding subtle gay themes and jokes in otherwise
mainstream sitcoms!
The
truth is, Frasier can still make me laugh out loud! So when I need a
laugh, I watch an episode on Netflix or Cozi TV, the latter of which also runs Murder,
She Wrote.
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