Jonathan's POZ Blog

Brett and Charles, thanks

So this weekend I find out that yet another childhood icon had died. Brett Somers, the ex-but not ex-wife of Jack Klugman and erstwhile Match Game panelist has died at age 83. After a long battle with stomach cancer, along with colon cancer. Charles Nelson Reilly died in May, after a brief battle with pneumonia.

I think about them, and mourn them WAY beyond their kitch personas. Because they were creatures who lived their lives in the public arena, who did so without apology and without press agents making sense or sensibility out of their every move. The smoked. Drank. Lived lives of bohemia and rhapsody, and did so under their own governership. Under the masts of their own sails. In a time when you COULD do those things, and have yellow teeth and fractured smiles to show for it.

I envy these guys, their lives, their freedom and their bravery. I envy their ability to flaunt the network censors and to live lives that might have gone scandalized in todays press- Except that they were as open about themselves as performers COULD be. They were who they were, and they aspired to live up to their personas.

These are not just people I wil miss as a triva answer on a game show. Thee are parts of my childhood, my young adulthood. These are real and relevant parts of a world that, sadly, has fallen into disrepair. A world in which Carol Burnett and Jim Neighbors can drop in for a racy answer to a generic question, and supply something both relevant and meaningful (and funny) while America laughs, and waits.

I miss the America that waits for that answer, that does not immediately think of the raciest, raunchiest reply. I miss the America that thinks, then replies, with tongue in cheek and answers with a double-entrendre. I miss the world in which we are “supposed” to take the higher ground, and then don’t. I am not fond of the country which eshews all semblence of civility in favor of the cheap laugh. There are mych funnier moments to be found in the sidestepping and backwards-tossing of lewdness. There are better times, if we choose to partake of them.

I miss these folks. For their Bohemian lifestyles and individualized moments, they were representatives of a civilization long past. One to which I still aspire, though I understand I shall never again partake of, in my lifetime.

Not without Gene Rayburn and that long, pointy mike. Long live them both, in the annals of Youtube.

And in my memory.