Writing, Teaching, and The Golden Age of Chicago's Children's Television

I must confess that I write these blogs off the top of my head. I edit as I go along, but I don't prepare ahead of time:

"Richard, what should I write about today?" I grumble as I stare at the computer screen.

"Why don't you talk about how TV influences your writing and teaching?" Richard inquires, leaning into his bowl of cereal as if properly slurping ramen noodles.

"I haven't watched TV since fifth grade. Netflix doesn't count." It's true -- my attention span varies from too short to too long, depending on the situation. Writing -- long attention span. Watching -- about the length of a 30-second commercial.

"Chicago improv," Richard replies as he slurps the remainder of the milk from his cereal bowl.

Ah! When most people think about Chicago improv, they think of comedy clubs, from the obscure to Second City. Improv remains one of the delights of Chicago comedy. However, the Chicago improv scene extended itself to the lowliest of mediums -- children's television on local TV stations like WFLD and WGN. I lived in the "Super Boonies", the rural towns just close enough to hook onto Chicago stations by cable, so I grew up with Chicago's rich children's programming.

By this, I mean Bozo and Cookie at the circus, who improvised whole scenes and sometimes cracked each other up to the point where they had to stop the scene temporarily. I mean Frazier Thomas, who deadpanned erudite conversations with a goose puppet -- and had to interpret his beak clicks for the audience, which meant he improvised for himself and the goose. I mean Ray Rayner, who not only entertained the children during the go-to-school time slot, but quipped for the adults and relayed school cancellations. And Bill Jackson, my first crush at age 7, who served as the mayor of a town full of eccentric cartoonish residents, including a clay statue that wanted to be reimaged on a daily basis, a contrary dragon, and a kid named Weird. I cried when BJ's show went off the air, but luckily it re-entered the station's lineup under a different guise.

My imagination lived in Chicago's children's shows. I subconsciously picked up the patter and the timing and the riffing off each other that made Chicago children's programming more involving than much of what adult TV had to offer. I learned that one could connect with an audience by understanding what the audience thought as they watched and voicing that thought. I intuited that there was a fine line between gently teasing the audience and insulting them. I don't know when or how I learned all this, but I know where every time I stumble across clips of Bozo's Circus, BJ and Dirty Dragon show, The Ray Rayner Show, or Garfield Goose and Friends on YouTube.

As I mentioned above, I improvise when teaching. I keep a loose script with the "what" of what I want to teach, and as illustrative examples come up, I use them. I act concepts out occasionally. Improvisation requires that one does not censor oneself, does not accept feeling stupid, and lives completely in the moment. Introspection waits for later. (Note: I do work hard at censoring a small list of things: opinions on politics not supported by data, and swearing. I do not always succeed at not swearing, given that my French Canadian ancestors considered swearing as punctuation.)

I improvise when I write this blog, somewhat. I write now and read it over later and tweak a few things. But like classic improv ("Whose Line is it Anyway"), I start with an idea and have to flesh it out.

Writing novels is the least like improvisation. I may write the rough draft spontaneously through fits and starts, but editing requires refining, tightening, and sometimes even eliminating a plot line. And sometimes, that's not enough. I'm looking at my first book, which came back from a prospective agent with the comment "The time stamps take me out of the story". The time stamps she refers to are the fact that the story has four points of view and we need to move between the four. I can see this could be confusing, but what can I do about it? Rewriting the whole book from the beginning is as far from improvising as I could get. And I love improvising. It's a dilemma -- needing to step from a strength to a weakness to get to my goal of getting published.