Says the Male Half:
The above was shot in 1978, during my black and white phase. (And, in case you’re wondering, a feeble attempt was made at hand-tinting, back when that kind of thing was all the rage.) I hung it in my swinging bachelor pad in Audubon, NJ. The story was told in the pages of this magazine that comic Dan Wilson was visiting the pad and he asked, with a straight face, why I had a photo of Roy Orbison on my wall. After ascertaining that he was serious, I told him it was my mom. Explosive laughter was the only option.
My mother appreciated the story. Or would have, if I had told her… I’m not sure if I did. She laughed at herself more readily than anyone I will know. Which made busting her chops very easy. And made for good training in the art of busting chops.
We took her and my father to Hawaii back in 1990 or so. It was the lifelong dream of many of her generation to travel to that exotic locale– a dream no doubt stoked by seeing countless trips to Hawaii given away on game shows in the five decades following WW II.
She watched a lot of game shows. I concluded this was because, many years ago, she actually appeared on one– a local production called “Cinderella Weekend,” described by one website as “one of television’s first question panel game shows.” This probably occurred sometime in the 50s. Family lore had it that, though she didn’t win the grand prize of a trip to NYC for a weekend of sightseeing and entertainment, she did come away with plenty of “consolation prizes”– among which, the story goes, was an intercom system for the home, which was never installed and probably sold through a prize broker. When I heard this I was sorely disappointed. I thought that it would be coolest thing in the world to have an intercom system. Of course, our house was so small that an intercom system would have been about as useful as an elevator or a system of pneumatic mail tubes.
Helen (I addressed her and referred to her as such after I became an adult.) also was taken by the idea of celebrity and fame. In the era way before Extra! and Access Hollywood, she knew a lot about Hollywood and the people that manned the movie and television dream machine. Obscure facts, trivia, stuff that enhanced her viewing experience– who was formerly married to whom or the real name of this actor or that. Much of it was gleaned from TV Guide, some of it was no doubt acquired via her near-obsessive crossword habit.
I think she would have been quite pleased to have been famous and would have been quite comfortable being so. As it was, she achieved a sort of fame, on a local level, in her hometown of Pennsauken– through her church, the organizations she joined, the volunteer work she engaged in. And I, by being the youngest of her five children, shared in that fame. No matter what level of fame I may achieve/may have achieved by virtue of being a comedian, to many of the residents of Helen’s hometown, that recognition will be dwarfed by my status as “Helen McKim’s son.”