Point #8: Masculine/Feminine

My failure to connect with strangers outside of my friends and family convinces me that my whole life is staged. All my tributaries of boundless good-naturedness slosh against a dam of hushed contempt. Pretty transparent formula, if you ask me.

Strangers=poor extras without any lines.

Which explains the hushed, witless banter of passsersby. The sitcom formula allows for only friends and family to have the good lines. Kind of like a cell phone plan.

Even friends make me feel like a stranger sometimes, especially when they talk about sports knowing that I am not a sports fan. I don't mind if my fellow guy friends talk about sports. I like to hear how the Yankees are doing every know and then. The problem is when Sportscenter is on. Then, it's an endless conversation about the Unit, Motumbo, Earnhardt and how ugly the WNBA is. Sportscenter is on ESPN. Disney owned ESPN after it bought ABC. ABC bought it in the '80's. Why? I was a developing boy in the '80's and if I didn't watch ESPN as a boy, I would grow up feeling emasculated.

Well, their ploy didn't work. Not that I tried to be effeminate, but even if I did, I would run into another entrance of the Magic Kingdom. My friend Liz knows every Disney song on the planet and most females I meet love Disney musicals. My other friend Sonda watches nothing but Lifetime movies. Yes, Disney owns Lifetime. And Oprah, the matron saint of strong femininity, is on ABC.

Refusing to indoctrinate myself with either of Disney's schools of gender definition, I stopped watching television and plunged into the gender-neutral Web. So there you have it, ABC: the star of your show; a gender-neutral underachieving problem drinker who hates football, musicals and jokes about having eight bowls of ice cream after a guy doesn't call.



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Point #7: Weather Hot Enough For You?

Back in season 24 (1999), I turned 23 and moved away from home for the first time. My first job living on my own was as an adoption associate for the local animal shelter, where I acquired most of the skills I use now as a freelance writer, such as getting the hottest scoops.




One day, I had to help clean the shelter at 4 AM, even though it opened at 10 AM. Why? The Channel 7 Eyewitness News Van was coming to cover the month-long adoptathon.



We cleared up all the wet newspaper shreddings from the cat cages that fell on the floor and moved an open plastic puppy playpen to the center of the cat room around the corner from the URI pets. The smug weatherman came in with his crew, which gave everybody umbrellas with his creased red face on it. The whole staff and Mr. Umbrella stood around the puppy playpen. All of us were on live television, laughing as a Rotweiller-mix puppy bit the weatherman's finger.
Surely, this episode slipped your mind. I even forgot about it for three years. Then, it dawned on me while I was writing this blog - Channel 7 was the New York affiliate for ABC.
I can now say with precision that for at least one minute, ABC had broadcast an image of me on live television. Three years after I first suspected that my whole life is on television, a fraction of my life is on ABC.
At this point, I still wasn't convinced that my life was on television. But if it was, it definitely was on ABC.

Note: Today, the paper I work for (Long Island Paper) had a cover teaser on how Extreme Home Makeover made a Long Island family happy. Also, pulling out of the Borders parking lot, I saw an Eyewitness News van parked there for no apparent reason.



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Point #6: Disneyfication

Remember that episode back in season 21 (1996) when Mike, Jim, Rich and I first took the train together from Levittown to New York City? The first time I went into Manhattan without Mom and Andy? I sure do.You might not know this, but it was the first time I went into a peep show.
I saw the blue awning emblazoned with big white letters on 42nd street:

FREE STRIPPERS!

I slowed down and told Jim and Rich to wait up for me (I don't know where Mike was). Booking up the stairs, I saw the girls standing over the peep show booths,...,
It wasn't the last time I lost all my crisp bills in one night. The more I frequented the red light district, the more Disney plays and stores I passed.

"In June 1997, Disney organized a thirty-float electrical parade through the heart of Times Square to promote its animated film Hercules. The parade ran down 42nd Street past the new Disney Store, just months after the block's last porn shops were closed by the city as part of Disney's conditions for moving in. The New York Times reported on the "Disneyfication" of the area in an editorial announcing "42nd Street Becomes Main Street USA.": The Nation, October 18, 1999 issue






Uncle Walt's frozen head now loomed over New York - the state I lived in. The few peep shows that were left had closed windows that prevented access to the girls. No matter how crisp the dollar was, the window wouldn't open. Thanks to Disney, I had to wait until I was 21 to lose my virginity.
Less than a year after I start frequenting adult entertainment palaces, Disney and Guliani decide to drive the smut peddlers from 42nd street. My parents weren't going in to the city with me anymore - who else would watch me? Disney took it upon themselves to drive the porn shops out and make my visits to the city wholesome. Even if I found the rare porn shop in Time Square, all the cameramen had to do was stop taping for the duration of my visit to the booth and shoot me smoking a cigarette pensively past a marquee for "The Lion King."
It's one thing for ABC to surreptitiously tape my life - it's another thing for them to covertly meddle with my adult entertainment in my state. Perhaps this is why I don't get too much action. I mean, c'mon, you've seen me - I'm gorgeous. Maybe I'm a little chubby, but I'm no Dom DeLuise.
The Disneyfication of Time Square. The town owned by Disney. The TGIF propaganda. The Drummonds moving to ABC when I move from my old apartment with my family. The Schoolhouse Rock Renaissance. The conditioned responses that "Charlie's Angels" elicited. The year of my birth being the first year that ABC is #1 in the ratings. All this wasn't enought to convince me that my life was on one big soundstage. But nine additional intersections between ABC's history and my development would open the curtains for me - even if the windows were closed.

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Rerun

Diff'rent Strokes was NBC's flagship sitcom for seven seasons. For my Asian third-grade classmates and I, it was our first "water cooler" show. As summer drew near, I had to say goodbye to Yung-Suk, Mitsuhiro and a young Chinese girl with porcelain skin named Angela that my peers accused me of liking. My mom, my grandma and I were moving from Flushing to New Hyde Park.




Guess who moved with me? Arnold, Mr.Drummond, Willis and the gang. Not Todd Bridges's street gang, mind you, but the rest of the Diff'rent Strokes crew. In 1985, Diff'rent Strokes moved to ABC. It tanked and was cancelled after its first season.
Now I admit this seems coincidental. Truthfully,I thought nothing of it at the time. But look at two factors: The Emmanuel Lewis Factor and The Curse of Diff'rent Strokes. Emmanuel Lewis Factor: In 1985, ABC had the monopoly on shows with rich, white, non-biological fathers that took ethnic children into their homes by having both Diff'rent Strokes and Webster in its line-up. I always wanted a rich white dad like Mr. Drummond or George Papadapolous to adopt me. Lo and behold, my Mom meets Andy on the beach. Andy - a white doctor. Who proposes to my mom and later acquires an ethnic stepson in September of 1986 - the same month that Diff'rent Strokes doesn't return? Dr. Whiteboy. Why? Because ABC was holding on too tight to the empire of Rich White Dads and George Papaluffagus wouldn't cut the mustard, even if he was adept at cutting cheese.
The Curse never existed before the Drummonds moved to ABC. The ill-fated move opened up a whole Pandora's box however. Though it was a while later, I had my own problems with drugs and the law. How else could I succumb to the Drummond Curse unless I was on ABC?
The white stepfather with the cute,chubby ethnic wiseass stepson; the later drug use; the simultaneous move of my family and the Drummonds. Can't someone give up the ghost and tell me who the sponsor of my show is at least? I guess what might be right for me may not be right for some.

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Point #5: Permanent Vacation

1986: Mom told me about a 4-day medical conference at the Hyatt in Orlando that she had to attend. She said we would visit Disney World while we were down there. Since this would be the first time for my family, I ran up and down the beige carpeted stairs in our Levittown-style house and squealed delightfully.

1996: My mom, my friends and I went for a ride with Andy in the rental SUV. We left the Disney-owned time-share we were staying at and barreled down I-64 towards Kissimmee. Anticipating a visit to Old Town, I was agog over the chance to see the vintage cars and hear the rare oldies once again. Andy said Old Town is too seedy - we were going to Celebration.






Celebration? Established in 1994, Celebration was a town owned by The Walt Disney Company (in January of 2004, Lexin bought downtown Celebration) with its own hospital, university (Stetson) and movie theater. Pastel townhouse apartments line antiseptic Market Street.
As my friends cowered in fear, Andy suggested that my mom and I might move down there with him.

My mom shot him a disapproving look, as if he cussed in front of a child without spelling out the words instead.

We didn't move to Celebration. But the fact that I spent more than a nanosecond in a town owned by a multimedia conglomerate frightened me. Having visited Celebration a year after Disney bought ABC, I began to suspect - for the first time ever - that my whole life may be on the ABC network and everyone was trying to hide it from me.
Not that anything is strange about a corporation owning a municipality, but a company that's known for making magic should never be trusted with running a town. Life in that town would be a dream - it wouldn't be real. All the friends you lose move on to invisible Hollywood careers with movies you never know exist because you are still in the dream.

If a movie studio like Disney can have its own town, why not its own county? Or its own state? Or its own world,..., perhaps all that babble about Disney World being a "simulation"was meant to distract me - it really owned the "globe." It's a small world after all.

Why were all of my family's vacations in the Magic Kingdom? Like The Tanners from "Full House" and the Winslows from "Family Matters," my family vacations were perfect opportunities for product placement. Before ABC and Disney tied the knot in'95, they flirted with each other. Explains why we would go to Disney in '86: the tenth anniversary of my show, which began in 1976. The bicentennial. The year I was f-u-c-k-i-n-g born.


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