Musculature in the Closet

Steve has taken some ribbing this week for his high school appearance in a borderline beefcake calendar. It could have been worse. In any number of ways. Thank goodness you didn't see the bare-chested commercial for a non-existent brand of jeans that I did in my thirties (I was trim but not hard-bodied by any stretch.) Grace Lee did show me wearing a tux in a bowling alley, back in Washington, D.C., when some friends and I would stage sporting events, do facetious play-by-play with fake commercials and news bulletins, and adjourn to a restaurant where the participants, including some fairly well-known broadcasters, could watch the event and hear what we said about them. From a golf tournament: "I'm not sure what his handicap is. I think it's palsy." From another golf event: "He has an excellent lie. He tells it as often as he can." From a news bulletin about a possible change in Soviet leadership: "But I do not think the premier's condition is that serious: Radio Moscow is playing banjo music." Baby pictures can be embarrassing. I'm truly fortunate that I possess some reasonably nice ones. My son Sean, who is a respected film and video editor in Hollywood, appears on one of my old videotapes of a bowling tournament, maybe 10 years old, saying, "Gentlemen, start your bowling balls!" My daughter, a gifted high-tech recruiter in the Washington, D.C., area, can be heard at the age of five on one of my old audio tapes babbling newscast-talk after hearing the Mutual Broadcasting System news theme. (She keeps talking about "President John Reagan.") All week long, my first full-time foray into commercial television news has left me wondering what the blooper reel will look like a few years from now. My strategy is to encourage Jeff and Steve to do wilder things than I do.