Sitting on the sculptured carpet, listening to my birthday album

Any time I'm out enjoying paid entertainment, during movies and performances in darkened theaters, I notice the tiny screens all around me, glowing blue. Even in the middle of action movies, there must not be enough stuff exploding fast enough. People who just paid to see this movie are looking at their smartphones to see if they can find supplemental input.

This post is not, happily, another Baby Boomer jeremiad about the ruination of culture by millennials with their dadblasted digital devices. Each generation is baffled by the needs and tolerances of the next; I well remember, way back when, that the families of teenage girls were pressured to buy Princess phones for the young women's bedrooms.

Newspapers and magazines were full of cartoons showing teenage girls lying on their stomachs on top of their chenille bedspreads. The girls had Civics textbooks open in front of them. From the top of the bedroom dresser, a portable television showed "Shindig" and a transistor radio laid on its back on the bed with music notes and "Yeah, yeah, yeah" emerging from the speaker. And of course, with the radio and television on and clamoring for attention, the "studying" teenager was also talking to her best friend via her personal telephone. 

We, the readers, were supposed to shake our heads at  the tremendous quantity of overstimulation our modern youth could screen out while preparing for a Civics exam.

Personally, I remember the time before portable television sets. Our televisions were in black and white only, and the viewing screen was really small inside a large metal console. There was one television in the house, and it was in the living room. We had the choice of  three networks and plus a local low-power station. There wasn't much programming in the daytime The best programs came on around dinnertime. Stations went off the air at one o'clock in the morning, after providing us with the magical seal of Good Practice from the some important agency, the American flag rippling in the wind while the national anthem played, the exact number of megahertz used for the broadcast, and a rainbow graph accompanied by a loud annoying humming noise.

I was a kid when television took over the world, but my parents were of the old-time radio era. My maternal grandparents didn't have a television set when I visited there in the early 1960s. I remember the floor model radio in the front room, which offered Paul Harvey's version of the news, the farm report including daily values of crops and livestock, and the Household Finance musical commercials.

This radio ad tells you what to do if your rainy day savings are depleted

My father's father (with a little input from my grandmother) tried telling us kids about radio shows starring Fibber McGee and Molly, but if we'd never heard such a thing. It was hard for us to relate to. I also found the idea bizarre: did people just sit still and stare at the radio? I didn't understand, of course, that while the radio was on, people might be doing other stuff like chores or hobbies.

[ Here is an overview of the some of the most popular Old Time Radio programs.]

These memories came to my mind because a day or two ago I came across a copy of the record "How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All?" by The Firesign Theatre.

The record came out in 1969, but I'd never heard it till I moved away from home a few years later. I had two roommates and they had a wide circle of friends, with whom we'd all sit in the living room and listen to comedy records together. Some dope was smoked, of course, but even when the air swirled only with cigarette smoke (hello 1976), we'd sit companionably in our under-heated apartment, with a blanket spread over us all, listening to LPs from The Credibility Gap, George Carlin, and Firesign Theater.

We listened to the same records pretty often, and we heard new things every time. I remember when my roomie Bob pointed out something in the Ralph Spoilsport portion of "Who Can You Be in Two Places At Once. . .", during the faux World War II morale film parody. Eddie sings a song, the one that went "Ask the mailman, ask the postman. . ." 

Bob, waving a lit Bel Air at me, said,
Hey, you know what? "Mailman" and "postman" are the same thing. And a minute or two later, he and my other roomie John would laugh when the announcer described our huge country reaching "from Bangor to mighty Maine."

I know other people in other apartments sat still and absorbed the comedy from records, because they went to the trouble of transcribing the multilayered dialogue found in Firesign Theatre bits. For example, here's a snippet of dialogue from the script of "How Can You Be in Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere at All"

[The whole written-out script for the Ralph Spoilsport routine is found here]

When, a year or two later, I'd moved to a different apartment with different roommates, I received a copy of Lily Tomlin's new album "On Stage" (which I always incorrectly called "Appearing Nitely") for my birthday. I remember inviting people over to listen to the LP. Everyone was excited, and we filled our paper plates with snacks, and then we all settled into the room where my RCA record player was set up. The two speakers, each the size of a five-pound bag of sugar, gave us glorious stereo comedy. I'd offered my guests the limted couch seating and since the furniture was now occupied I sat cross-legged on the sculptured carpet. The rug was speckled brown, black, and cream like a bowl of raisin bran into which the milk was pour two minutes ago. 

And we all sat, eating broccoli florets dipped in ranch dressing and potato chips and pretzel twists and brownies made from a mix, and we just listened to the opening track on Side 1. There was a fanfare, then comedy string orchestra music in the background as we get into a taxi with Mr. Theater-Goer to the Biltmore Theater. 

We laughed at the best jokes, and people got up now and then to put more potato chips on their paper plates, but no one did anything else. Maybe when the first side of the record ended and I had to flip it over and put the needle into the outer groove, somebody might have asked me to wait to start it while they went to the bathroom. But that's all we did. We sat on my beat-up old sofa and on the raisin-bran-colored carpet, and we listened to a record play.

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