Hey Kids, What Time Is It?

(Originally published in the Globe and Mail, May 4, 2010)

My mother ushers me into the womb-like alcove of our Toronto home. A wooden cabinet with swinging doors faces me at eye level; a screen of dreamy, black and white images flickers below a metallic V of rabbit ears. At first I take the smooth glass screen to be a mirror, but I do not see myself.

 A jolly man wearing a walrus moustache and a big, floppy coat with enormous pockets is talking directly to me. It’s not Santa, my mother explains, but Captain Kangaroo. Transfixed, I sit down and with unnatural quickness befriend Bunny Rabbit and Grandfather Clock. My mother leaves me alone, a boomer child of the first television generation, a captive to the cathode ray bath of an infant medium.

 I am four. And I am hooked.

 For my fifth birthday party on September 16, 1955, my mother invites my kindergarten classmates from Brown Public School to travel to the CBC studios at Yonge and Marlborough and participate in an episode of “The Howdy Doody Show.” On a bank of bleachers, we join the fabled Peanut Gallery. A buckskin-clad Timber Tom -- a Canuck derivative of the Yankee Buffalo Bob -- shouts, “Hey kids! What time is it?” and we tiny Pavlovians all know the answer. One by one, Phineas T. Bluster, Dilly Dally and Flub-a-dub dance out, then freckle-faced Howdy himself, strings visibly attached. A mute, red-nosed Clarabell the Clown honks his rubber honker and, raising his bottle, baptizes us with seltzer water. Like happy mice, we squeal in unison, drunk on our ritualized brush with celebrity.

 Behind the cameraman stands a monitor and for a moment I am confused. As I watch a mirror image of myself in short pants and bow tie, I dimly sense that I am now ON television. Or maybe IN it. Some aboriginal peoples believe cameras steal your soul, and children are not so different.

 After the show, we migrate to the adjacent studio where, off-camera, I solemnly shake the soft hand of Maggie Muggins, a 12 year old knockout in gingham gown and red pigtails, more than twice my age and size. She introduces me to her velvet-lined sidekick, Fitzgerald Fieldmouse, and naturally I identify.

The ‘60s roll in. I graduate to Lassie, The Lone Ranger, Leave It To Beaver, and Soupy Sales. In 1961, FCC Chairman Newton Minow cruelly denounces my beloved electronic babysitter as a vast wasteland: “When TV is good, nothing is better. . .when TV is bad, nothing is worse.” But nothing is wasted on me.

 On Easter break, 1965, a decade after my cameo appearance on “Howdy Doody”, my mother flies my brother and I down to the CBS Studios in New York City to see “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Bobby Vinton sings “Blue Velvet”; yet another mouse puppet, a kissing Italian named Topo, flings me into a state of déjà vu. After the show, we migrate to the adjacent studio to watch the game show, “What’s My Line?” where the hound-faced actor Robert Mitchum signs in as the mystery guest. He is nowhere as cute as Maggie Muggins.

By university age, under the influence of Monty Python, my brother and I conduct imaginary talk shows in black leather swivel chairs, interviewing the famous, the fictional and the absurd: “In the studio this evening we are pleased to have Buster Mountbatten Von Snowsuit IV…” Electronic media are changing our nervous systems, or so says Marshall McLuhan, and I am getting worried, for I love books, too. At journalism school in 1972, as I devour “The Glass Teat” by Harlan Ellison, a literate screed against the narcotic effects of the idiot box, I struggle to remain a true believer in both mediums. The Word is barely holding its own against the Image; doing my bit, my sentences, like my hair, grow longer.

In 1999, in the wake of my first published book, I make my first adult appearance on TV, a precise Warholian 15 minutes. Even as I leverage the most powerful selling medium ever invented, I feel something like a global village idiot, anticipating a ritual spray of seltzer. “Saw you on TV!” people parrot, one by one, but they can’t recall what I said; nor can I. In the alcoves of my unconscious, the mouse puppets dance on, nibbling holes in the channels of time.