The Pixels of Dorian Gray

Great googly moogly! I was idly googly-mooglying Barb and my past lives as Late Night Monster Movie Hosties, when hoot toot and a hit, we now live forever on YouTube! It seems a citizen and taxpayer has treasured his 22-year old Millie tapes, and is digitizing them and posting them on the Millie channel! Not only that, but he has the uncommon good taste to start with one of the better shows, leastways as far as I remember them. I remember that particular show; and looking at the cuts from the show, I can honestly say that I only remember remember the infamous cold open. I don't remember any of the other inserts at all, but yep that's the show and that's Barb in the glasses and me with my hand up a puppet's hinder.

I expect I ought to make it a summer project to write down as much as I can remember of the life and times of those shows; except that of course we've long since tossed our treasure trove of memorajunquilia hauled around from storage to storage through the moves. We haven't looked at the tapes in 20 years; I assembled a few minutes of material for Barb's thesis show, as a humorous cold walk-in; and the learned toads evaluating said show were pretty darn aghast at the temerity of it all, probly woulda yanked that degree right outta her hands if it didn't make for bad form in academe. From a performance standpoint, I am pleasantly surprised to see how well the thing holds up (at least given the internal terms of the show itself): no air, pacing is good (well, not mine), all the pieces mix together, lighting stunk but we never changed the basic rig and some of the things we tried worked OK given they never tried this stuff before ... plus, it's entertaining and funny. That's the mark we were trying to hit -- be entertaining and funny, be worth staying up until 3AM Sunday morning.

I also can see now, which I couldn't see then, the huge influence of the Rabb on the show. The only time that Keith the Director and I had a serious Artistic Difference was when he accused me of writing a radio show and not a television show, to which I replied "You're the director, making it a television show is your job." Sure enough, the next week it started becoming more of a television show, and the more confident he got about videography stuff the more opportunities I wrote in. But peace and blessings be upon Al Gore for inventing the Internet, I found some air checks of the true Johnny Rabbitt, to whom I and many another Midwest teen wasted the hours of 7PM to 10PM every night between '64 and '68; and be damned if I can't see the Rabb in the show.

That's the real point for this meminiscence: Rabb n Bruno took the kids seriously, entertained on his terms and assumed we'd keep up with him, worked hard for the money and did Good Work. That got imprinted in whatever part of my brain drives the work; and every piece of art and work that I've made since then has got a piece of the Rabb in it. Unconsciously, that's all through those Millie clips: we had a lot of fun doing those shows, and even though we chose to make it look cheesy, we put a lot of work into the limited time and resources that we had available to us. And as a result, at least one teen in midKentucky held onto his tapes, because he got the message -- work hard, be smart, have fun. I am just floored and humbled by that thought, and will never again wonder if it's worth it.

I shall write our fan, and tell him the truth: we surely read his letter, and I hope we read it on the air -- usually the few we didn't read, we showed so that they could see that we got 'em. We taped every letter to the set, so that we'd see them every week. And I shall thank him, from the bottom of both of our hearts, for remembering and reminding.