Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

"Finding a better Puppet Show" Edition

The drift-sibs all gathered at the castle this weekend, which always makes it the merriest, funniest, wonkiest place on Earth. Still, there was blogging to be done, so after erecting the proper shielding devices to protect them from Teh Dumb, I fired up the teevee machine for a little Mouse Circus.

It was pretty thin soup.

Dana Perino is looking smoother and more translucent every week as she settles into her new job as another of Fox News’ Blond Perk-O-Matic Bush Administration Apologists.

Chris Wallace amused us with the many, exciting Fox Newsy ways in which Rupert Murdoch uses his journo-homunculi to shoehorn his radical opinions into “news’ coverage. (Example: “Some people say that the Hussein the Kenyan Usurper is a jackbooted tyrant who wants to destroy the American military and turn our country over to the Taliban. Others say he’s a weak fraud who secretly plans to sell us out to the Climate Change Chiang Kai-sheks in Commie-hagen (tm). Exclusively!Here!On!Fox! to weigh in on this important controversy…Karl Rove…and a baby otter.”)

As we blurred on past “This Week” , sis pointed out how aggressively Peggy Noonan was signaling her sexual availability by fiddling with her hair and touching her face and mouth…while Katrina vanden Heuvel distractedly read through her talking points notes.

From what I could make out through the howling of damned souls that attends every Mouse Circus puppet show, Noonan seems to believe that if America troops just pull out of Afghanistan – if we just yank up our pants and leave -- it will hurt their feelings.

Instead we should apparently stay and cuddle.

Or something.

Thankfully, since George Will only ever touches his hair when he screws it onto his head in the morning, we were spared his sexually semaphore.

On ”The Chris Matthews Show” -- after Matthews’ repeats the word “grifter” 99 times -- the panel notes...

…now, to be a human interest story you have to be a fucking freak…

…once, when there were only three networks, only really awesome people got to be famous (oh how well I remember those intricate foreign policy debates Johnny Carson used to moderate between Zsa Zsa Gabor and Joey Bishop)…

…now you can be famous for nothing…

…because it pays!

Katty Kay tried briefly to point out that the teat on which they themselves suck is the very source of the “eat a bug” poison that is swamping everything else, but is shouted down by Matthews waving his verbal penis in the air and squealing “grifter” again.

No one mentioned that it is in the nature of a decadent, collapsing society that each iteration of Crazy that claws its way temporarily to the top of the heap tries to bar the door against the next, larger wave of Crazy that is following their chemical trail to sugar pile of Fame and Fortune. And that it never works.

And no one even dared to whisper the name of “Jeff Gannon”.

Sigh.

Thankfully I had had the great good fortune to attend a much better, sweeter, wiser and happier puppet show the day before.

Bill Jackson was back in town for a one-time-only reprise of his role as the legendary creator and front-man for the “B.J. and Dirty Dragon” show (among others). “B.J.” was a stellar member of a constellation of original Chicago children-and-young-adult programming from a time when such shows were funny, corny, live, gentle and not single-mindedly devoted to ramming sugary cereal and Chinese toys down our collective throats.

The Saturday event was a fundraiser for the Museum of Broadcast History (the funding for which was another casualty of the perfidy of our soon-to-be-dragged-off-to-the-House-of-Many-Doors former governor, Rod Blagojevich, about which more here.) Bill Jackson was there -- older, balder and sans his signature Vast Sideburns, but spry and as Midwest kindly and genial as we all remembered him -- with original voice-work, the original puppets (now too-fragile to use) on display, video clips from the old shows and stories for us all.


And if you had squinted very, very closely with a particular kind of eye you may have also noticed see that “B.J” also prefigured the Mouse Circus in every way.


Each has its own

tiny brunette chatterbox,


its own

professional fusspot,

and its own

wailing old lady.


Both have a snarling puppet

filling the air with rage and smoke.


Both have a slab of clay

ranting incompressibly.


And of course, both have

an Old Professor

If you missed it, I feel sorry for you.

Because if Sunday Morning Comin’ Down is like licking our cultural ashtray after an all-night smoker in a portable outhouse, then Saturday with Bill Jackson and his delightful creations was fresh lemonade

and a plate of Maurice Lenell cookies.