Cheers to Gary Portnoy! Who's Gary Portnoy?

(663 words)

Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.

Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot. Wouldn’t you like to get away?

By now, I’d say about three-quarters if you jumped right to the chorus. Sing it with me!

“Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name! And they’re always glad you came! You wanna go where people know, people are all the same. You wanna go where everybody knows you name.”

In a time of chaste isolation and self-quarantine, could there be a more poignant and tuneful lyrical yearn than Gary Portnoy’s “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” the 1982 bar anthem he co-wrote with Judy Hart Angelo?

While much of America is binge-watching the blood-drenched duplicity of “Ozarks” or the bizzaro appeal of “Tiger King,” my wife and I settle in each night to enjoy a nearly 40-year-old network sitcom that  only once dared to broadcast a pair of nipples (they were Woody’s).

The show still holds up. It’s still hilarious. And a big part of its charm will forever be Portnoy’s understated, yet euphoric theme song, the slender 91-word ditty  that TV Guide editors in 2013 declared the “Greatest TV Theme of All-Time.”

Given the pandemic backdrop, I think it deserves even better than that.

“Where Everybody Knows Your Name” is to sitcom theme songs what John Lennon’s “Imagine” is to humanity.

It’s an aspirational reflection on the flawed yet jubilant communal transactions that take place when, well, a bunch of mostly dysfunctional white people who like to drink and bitch get together.

And, damn, if that son of a bitch isn’t catchy as hell.

I wonder about Portnoy, 63. He and Hart Angelo also share writing credit for sitcom theme songs that kicked off “Mr. Belevedere” and “Punky Brewster.” Portnoy wrote songs for Air Supply (“I’ll Never Get Enough of You”), Dolly Parton (“Say Goodnight,”) and Cheryl Ladd (too murky for my meager research purposes).

He’s released four albums, the most recent being “Songs Along The Way,” from 2010. His must be a peculiar kind of fame. Or is it the opposite, a peculiar kind of obscurity?

He’s best known for performing what is arguably one of the most popular songs in history. A whopping 84.4 million viewers watched the May 20, 1993, “Cheers” finale — double “All in the Family” finale and second only to M*A*S*H (105.9 million). And guaranteed most of us at least hummed along with Portnoy.

I saw a pre-COVID-19 item that listed dates where you could see Portnoy live.

So he’s still performing “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” in places full of people who don’t know his.

I doubt the song’s made him rich, which is a pity because circumstances may lead him to resent it.

Portnoy on Stage: “Any requests?”

Rude Drunk: “Yeah, play the theme from ‘Cheers!’”

Portnoy: “I just played it.”

Rude Drunk: “I know. Play it again. Then play it again after that!”

It’s narrow-minded of me, I admit, but I’m with the drunk. I could listen to that song over and over. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel welcome. It makes me feel optimistic.

You could say it makes me, er, cheerful!

We’re so hyper-focused, justifiably so, on social distancing I wonder if we’ll ever be able to return to the days when there was no hesitancy in shaking a hand offered in friendship.

I wonder if we’ll ever feel comfortable congregating in rooms full of strangers on the faithful belief that we’re in a happy place where people go because we intuitively know our troubles are all the same.

They’re places where people think it’s a valuable use of time to spend hours discussing the irony of a man writing a song about everybody knowing your name toiling in anonymity.

So cheers to Gary Portnoy!

“Cheers!” just wouldn’t be the same without you.

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(696 words)

You know we’ve crossed another unwelcome technological threshold when turning on your typical television is more complicated than turning on your typical man.

Both are simple devices.You should be able to turn one on by pushing a single button, the other with a flirtatious wink, a playful touch or by maybe offering it a warm donut. 

The only time a TV should be difficult to turn on is when the remote is tucked beneath a cushion.

I’ve done it successfully maybe a million times. Understand, I don’t feel a wave of relief when I’ve turned it on and found my channel. I don’t do a celebratory dance or spike the remote. I just sit back in my recliner and commence to do my patriotic duty as an American and begin watching my 14-hours of daily television.

But now turning on the TV is beginning to make me feel anxious, like when someone asks me to do math without a calculator. 

Val, like all of you, is on a restless quest to reduce the cost of our most annoying monthly gouge, that being the TV/internet bill.  So she did all the research, shopped, haggled and secured the necessary hardware. We’d enjoy more options and pay less; a true win-win.

That was the easy part. The hard part was teaching it all to someone who rages against complicating additions to our already cluttered lives.

“This remote turns on the TV,” she began. “This one turns on the Roku. Once this screen pops up, you can toggle over to the home screen where you can choose from …”

At the mention of the word toggle, the room began to spin. I wasn’t an undercover operative programming an IED to obliterate an enemy combatant. I just an easily amused guy who still enjoys watching the same “Seinfeld” reruns he’s already seen about 192 times. 

I looked over on the end table and made eye contact with the book I’m reading. It’s the 1,152-page “Churchill: Walking With Destiny,” by Andrew Roberts. I telepathically tell it, “I’m sorry!”

“I apologize for again straying. You’re so beautiful, so uncomplicated. You don’t cause stress. You relieve it. Yet, I continue to turn to that trashy whore who costs me a fortune. Can you forgive me?”

I expect it to answer in Churchill’s voice, but my mind is so saturated with TV dominance the voice I hear is Gilbert Gottfried’s from when he was doing the Aflac duck commercials: “You’re fine! Books harbor no petty jealousies. Life moves too fast … so do the benefits of Aflac!”

They say we’re supposed to be in a golden age of TV viewing, but every time I watch something hailed as “great” I think, well, that was fun, but in six months I won’t remember who was in it or what they did.

Some of the recent shows we’ve truly enjoyed include, “Ozark,” “Friends From College,” “Master of None,” and “Making A Murderer.”

And for every one of those, there’ve been four or five I found unwatchable.

I haven’t seen anything that feels like it’s enriched my life in a way that’ll make me ever want to watch it all over again in two, five or certainly not 10 years. It all feels like a big time kill, like I went to the right hotel the wrong weekend for my high school reunion. Everyone was very nice, polite and pretty, but we had no shared past and no future.

Golden Age? Feels more like being mired in mediocrity.

As our options become more plentiful and our screens ever grander, the once communal act of watching great TV has become somehow smaller. 

It’s why I think I felt such a primal urge to read when my poor wife was trying to explain how to navigate ever deeper into the swampy maze that is our TV viewing options.

I never feel diminished by time spent immersed in a book. Just the opposite. I often feel enhanced.

It’s a feeling I intend to cultivate. Because as TV becomes glitzier and more bewildering, books remain defiantly books.

And you never need worry about turning on a book.

The book turns you on.

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(692 words)

It could have been any of one thousand small talk conversations I’ve had with my senile 84-year-old mother as we putzed around town. I asked her what she did the night before.

“I watched TV.”

Any plans for the rest of the day?

“I’ll watch TV.”

You really like watching TV, don’t you, Mom?

“Oh, I don’t know what I’d do without it. I have it on all the time.”

Her gushing affirmation made me decide to up the ante. I gave her what I thought was a softball question: 

What would she rather have: A life with no TV or a life with no people?

I guess I thought she’d immediately respond, oh, I couldn’t live without people, especially my family and you, my darling son, the one who sees to all my needs and brings so much warmth and joy to my days.

Wrong!

She actually paused and engaged in what for her was deep thought. I’d puzzled her. I wonder if in her dementia-addled mind she was thinking, “My son, Chris? Or Steve Harvey? Chris? Steve Harvey?”

Her consideration was long enough that it had the drama of a game show contestant playing chicken with the buzzer.

She finally said, “I need people in my life. I’d choose people over TV.”

She lies.

I know if push came to shove, she’d take TV.

Her dementia is such that she still lives independently, but with daily assists and visits from either Val or me. Yesterday at lunch she couldn’t recall she’d just an hour before been with me to church, but in at least one way her mind is sharp.

She’d be lost without TV and basic cable.

Who wouldn’t?

Be honest, at some point today someone you know is going to do or post on social media something that is going to make you absolutely hate people. And at some other point today you’re going to find yourself looking forward to watching something on TV.

It’s been that way since October 3, 1960.

I choose that obscure date after a conversation with a friend who was sharing with me his morning tread mill viewing habits. He said he watches the local news for sports and weather, maybe some stock updates.

No political bickering?

“I used to do that, but it was too upsetting. Now, I make sure I start every day off with a little visit to Mayberry.”

Ah, yes, “The Andy Griffith Show.” One of my all-time favorites. The offbeat characters are warm, engaging and in the end accepting of one another’s human short-comings.

I know, it’s so unrealistic.

Maybe that’s why it’s becoming so heirloom appealing. 

Who do you know who’s as kind and wise as Sheriff Taylor? He’s a real uplifting role model.

And when the scary headlines of each mounting hour come crashing into your brain, he’s right there on your DVR.

Just in the past few days, we enjoyed watching the “Walking Dead” season premier, “SNL,” “black-ish,” “Gravity Falls,” and various movies and sporting events. None of it was upsetting to my sunny disposition — and “Walking Dead” is about the zombie apocalypse!

Compare that to our daily dealings with our fellow man. Surly shoppers at the grocery store, rampant road ragers on the way home. Worse, the institutions designed to bring us together are tearing us apart. I’m looking right at you, Facebook.

Incivility, close-mindedness, petty hatreds — Facebook helps us mainline what reasonable humans used to keep at arm’s length.

Extended families offer little respite. They’re God’s way of proving we’re incapable of helping even the ones we love the very most.

Our oldest daughter has previously said she one day hopes to have a big family.

“What you really mean,” I corrected, “is you want to select who’s in your family.”

People or TV?

It’s a no-brainer — and please don’t take that as a subtle shot at beloved dementia patients.

TV is getting better and better while people are behaving worse and worse. That makes TV superior to people.

It’ll be like that until changing minds is as easy as changing channels.

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