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Hank, Rod and Kris
The pandemic has certainly created some odd arrangements. Take our household. For about the past year, our son has been living with us while he teleworks in Ottawa. His entertainment proclivities have become my entertainment activities. And he has introduced and re-introduced me to three interesting people along the way.
The first person is not really a person at all; he is a cartoon character in a television program called King of the Hill, which ran for some 13 seasons between 1997and 2010. Call me an elitist if you want, but I knew nothing about the show before my son introduced me to it. And I’m glad he did.
Hank Hill, the star of the show, is a wonderful character who almost gives conservatism a good name. He is stuck for a lifetime in Arlen, Texas, where he is the assistant manager of a store selling “propane and propane accessories.” He loves to drive his ride-on mower and barbecue (but never with charcoal). He dreams that he could have played for the Dallas Cowboys. and is embarrassed to talk about feelings.
With his slow Texas draw and Buddy Holly glasses, he could easily be just another cartoon stereotype. But as he is put through his ever more ridiculous paces by his family, friends, and well meaning but hopelessly weedy liberals, his basic decency comes to the fore.
The second character is, or was, a real person. Rod Serling brought a TV series called The Twilight Zone to North America between 1959 and 1964, in the black and white era. A related show, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, ran on colour TV from 1969 to 1973. Several follow-up versions of the original show were broadcast, and Serling also wrote scripts for a number of films.
Serling’s constant theme is the operation of a force—somewhere in the passage between life and death—that calls into account all the unpunished sins of a lifetime., Many of his topics, such as cloning and genetic sequencing, were foreign concepts in his time. His screenplay pokes at conventional lives that are not open to other possibilities.
His work is not to my taste, but I admire his dogged pursuit of his chosen trade, his selection of an interesting niche for himself, his prodigious output, his ability to presage current controversies and his willingness to go head to head with television studios over artistic control of his creations.
The third person in the group is the musician and songwriter Kris Kristofferson. He is a real person, but a larger than life one—he was a Rhodes Scholar, joined the US military, and literally swept the floors of music studios in Nashville until his songs eventually caught on. After taking the country music world by storm, he went on to act in movies such as A Star Is Born and Heaven’s Gate, He retired last year, to Hawaii, in his 80s.
Like a lot of other people, I have always considered Kristofferson the architect of a disproportionate number of the best country songs of all time—Me and Bobby McGee, Why Me Lord, Sunday Morning Coming Down, Help Me Make It Through The Night, For the Good Times are the top few that come to mind, But my exposure to Kristofferson was limited to his early work.
So it’s been a treat to reconnect with Kris Kristofferson (and his partners in The Highwaymen: Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash) through the lens of someone from a different generation. I’ve found songs like Here Comes That Rainbow Again that I missed the first time around.
So there you have my influences from the pandemic period—Hank Hill, Rod Serling and Kris Kristofferson, Thank you, Jeremy, for sharing them with us. Who says entertaining your parents has to be boring?
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