Saturday morning

28 January 2017

— This dawn a perfect replica of yesterday’s

Good Morning All,

Back in the 1980s and 1990s when the kids were growing up in our Hans Christian Anderson house, back when Denmark had only two tv stations, neither of them with commercials, the programming included a fair number of American sitcoms. We watched and recorded onto now useless VCR tapes most of Family Ties and very nearly all of M*A*S*H.

The latter show fascinated me for any number of reasons, including the acting talent of McLean Stevenson as the loopy Colonel Henry Blake and William Christopher as the mild-mannered Father Mulcahy. Salutes also to Larry Linville and Loretta Swit who played Majors Frank Burns and Hotlips Houlihan so well I could not help liking them a bit.

Often against my will, I identified with Alan Alda’s version of Captain Hawkeye Pierce. In fact, in 1979-80, the year I taught in Ashland, New Hampshire, my students called me Hawkeye.  I took it as a compliment. After all, Hawkeye was a good Yankee from Crabapple Cove, Maine, had a good healthy contempt for authority, and could be funny in an off-beat, irreverent manner. What was there not to like? 

Well, for one thing, he could be insufferably sanctimonious and holier-than-thou. Since some of my closest—if entirely misguided friends—had shockingly made similar observations about me, I was somewhat sensitive on that score. And as such, whenever Hawkeye got up on his soap box, on average once every other show, I took great delight in giving him the raspberry. 

That said, I would still have to say that Alda’s Captain Pierce has been one of the hundred most influential people in my life. He’s not as high on the list as Holden Caulfield, Buddy Glass, Huck, Hester, Fiddler Jones, and other people who never actually existed, but he is in the top 100, for sure, of the flesh-and-blood and fictional people in my life. So, for that matter, is Dennis Franz’s portrayal of Detective Andy Sipowitz in NYPD. I’m not sure why that is, but Andy is nonetheless one of my fictional heroes. (The irony of course being that Hawkeye and Andy come from the same pea pod.)

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron