My Three Best Friends

Hanging by my knees from the top bar of my swing set, I set the end of my routine in motion. With a flip and a flourish, I stick the landing on both feet with my chin up and my arms raised in victory. Nadia Comaneci would be so proud. I looked down at my Snoopy watch and the precocious pup’s little paws told me it was time to see my best friend. I dashed up the grassy hill of my backyard and up the whitewashed stairs, bursting through the side door and planting myself on the threadbare carpet in one continuous motion.

As the glow of the television illuminated my freckled face, my hero walked into the frame and stood in the white column of spotlight. “Cher, Cher? Is that you?” Dressed in pigtails and play clothes, she is crying and her mother asks her why. She tearfully explained that it is because she will never be beautiful because she doesn’t have blond hair or blue eyes. Those words were the echo of my own words coming out of her mouth. Cher was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen on television, and I couldn’t understand how it was possible for her to feel the same way I did when she was my age. Just like me, she had a mother and a sister with blond hair and blue eyes, and she looked so different from them. In one short skit, I realized I was not alone, and I didn’t have to feel ugly anymore. I was ridiculous for thinking there was only one kind of beauty, and I learned to see myself in the positive light my daily viewings of Sesame Street were working to instill in me. Television gave me inspiration, comfort, advice, and companionship when I couldn’t find it anywhere else. Television became my first friend when I struggled to find one in my everyday world.

I was a town bus kid. In my school, there were three kinds of kids: town bus kids, walkers, and country bus kids. There was no car drop-off lane nor any “car kids” because there were no parents that felt the need (read: attachment) to drive their kids to or from school when the bus was perfectly acceptable. As a town bus kid, my time on the bus was relatively short, as the town of 2000 only had a 1.5-mile radius. Still, during that short time, there was plenty of space for talking and teasing among the students. In kindergarten, I was brand new to the bus and scared. I needed to pick a seat, and the only space with another child about my size near it was next to Corey Paris.

Corey was in my kindergarten class, and we had the same regular babysitter. Our friendship was simple, built around Fisher Price Little People toys and talking about our favorite Muppets. Almost immediately, the older kids started a chant. “Corey has a girlfriend! Corey has a girlfriend!” The words rang in my ears, and tears stung my eyes as I tried so hard not to cry and make it even worse. I yelled back that I was not his girlfriend, but I was unheard in the sea of taunts. This time, society was showing me a vastly different reality than the one I always believed in on Sesame Street. On Sesame Street, you could be friends with a green grouch, a giant yellow bird, a blue monster, or a boy, or a girl. After a couple of bus rides, I came up with other places to sit, and what little friendship we had faded into nothing. From the moment it all happened though, I always thought it was wrong, but I was left to choose between taunting or silence, and I chose silence.

I grew up in a small home, 750 square feet in total, and my family’s finances, while not overflowing, were enough to keep my sister and me fed, clothed, and sheltered. We had one television in the house, an RCA color tube encased in a woodgrain console and slung low to the textured green carpet. My love for television came from my father, who spent hours upon hours constructing and maintaining an antenna tower that dwarfed our tiny house. All that perilous, high-climbing work resulted in an exceptional array of channels unheard of in the days before cable. From our home near Kansas City, we could receive stations from Bentonville, Arkansas to Omaha, Nebraska, St. Louis, Missouri to Hays, Kansas. While many of these stations had some original and unusual local programming, most of them showed the standard network fare provided by ABC, CBS, and NBC. Along with PBS and a few independent channels, our little home was filled to overflowing with plenty to watch. Aside from my sister’s occasional foray into soap operas, the set was mine all day until Dad came home, and I made the best of it. From reruns to game shows to educational programs, I devoured everything my eyes could take in on that TV set.

Around 5:20 each evening, Dad would arrive home from work, and the power would shift to him. By this time, Sesame Street had been over for 20 minutes and we were the same amount of time into an episode of Doctor Who, starring Number 4 with his large hat and ever-long striped scarf. I never got to see any of those episode’s endings, so I was left to ponder even more mystery than the standard Whovian of the time. When Dad came home, it was time for him to switch the channel to the nightly news and for me to go play outside until the sun went down and dinner was served. After dinner and the news, there was often a joining of the family to watch a Hogan’s Heroes rerun, which prepped us for prime time. We then finished off the night with hearty helpings of One Day at a Time, Laverne and Shirley, Donny and Marie, The Six Million Dollar Man, or The Love Boat. By bedtime, my head was spinning with stories, jokes, and “very special episodes” that followed me into my dreams.

At school, I always wanted to talk about television and music. I had so much to say about it, but it seemed no one else wanted to listen except for one girl. Linette loved watching Charlie’s Angels as much as I did, and we both had a blast at recess pretending to be the angels running after a criminal. She would listen to me when I went on and on about the music I heard on American Bandstand, and she would re-tell the jokes from Happy Days verbatim and get us both rolling with laughter. The first time I went to a movie with her, Disney’s The Apple Dumpling Gang, she gobbled down a whole box of Jujubes then fashioned the box into some sort of makeshift kazoo that she would blow during the audience’s uproars of laughter. I had never heard someone so young laugh so low, loud, and heartily. When she moved away during our third-grade year, I was devastated. When she came to visit for the summer before our sixth-grade year, I was ecstatic. When she told me that her family was moving back to my little town in time for the start of school, I was over the moon. When a car accident took her life that same summer, I was broken. It’s hard enough to lose a loved one. It’s harder when that loved one is only 11 years old. It’s even harder to deal with this loss when you yourself are only 11 years old and low on friends. I was left the rest of my life to wonder “What if…”.

When it was time to play at home, I wanted to hear something, anything. I wanted to be able to hear the sound of the television, the sound of the train in the distance, the sound of music from the radio. We didn’t have a garage, so my Dad’s workspace was in the basement. He had a brown brick of a radio there, with large silver, ridged dials that looked like the cover of a Norelco electric shaver. He used it to listen to music or a ballgame on the Saturdays and Sundays when he tinkered with his CB radio, his lawn mower, or any of his other dad-centric gadgets. On weekdays when it was time for the news programs, it was my time to break out that old radio. I could prop it in the high basement window facing out so I could hear it while I played outside on my swing set, my bike, or just running and dancing around in the grass in my bare feet. The first time I turned it on, an old country song played from when Dad last used it, with an announcer drawling “AM 61 Country” between the banjo outro of one song and the steel guitar intro to another. Another click of the settings and I found my way to the lusher sonic pastures of FM radio.

As I rolled my finger across the tuning dial, I listened closely for sounds that were new and different. I discovered a much darker sound when the dial hit KY102, filled with electric guitars and heavy drum beats. After a few songs of that, I turned the dial again and found the pop station at Q104. I spent years sliding between the two and finding great new discoveries and endless satisfaction. As I played, my imaginary friends became these musicians, and I pretended to perform with them on every stage of the world that my imagination could think up.

The more I listened to the radio, the more I wanted to hear these songs over and over again. Sometimes, even a song being overplayed on a top 40 station was not enough for me. It was time to put my allowance money to use and buy some music. When I was 4, my Aunt Mary spent a day babysitting me, and instead of playing with the toys I had brought over, I took an interest in an old blue/green General Electric record player. It had belonged to one of my older cousins, and it was sitting in a corner gathering dust. A little wipe-off followed by a plug-in was all it took to bring my new toy to life. I ran to Aunt Mary’s record collection and spent the whole day exploring old music that was new to me. At the end of the day when Mom picked me up, Aunt Mary sent me home with the record player knowing it would get plenty of use and care in my little hands. Over time, I started buying my own records to play on it in addition to the old vinyl relics my parents had stashed in the closet. The radio drove my tastes as I eagerly ran into The Record Bar or Camelot Music to seek my treasure. Soon, “Dark Lady”, “Funkytown”, “Another One Bites the Dust”, and “Another Brick in the Wall” were on repeat play in my tiny bedroom. My tiny bedroom became a rock hall, a discotheque, or a Broadway theater depending on my mood and my imagination on any given night. I memorized every lyric and I even sang along note for note with the guitar solos. When I listened to “my” music, it put me in my happy place, and I hung on every delicious note and lyric.

The start of my seventh-grade year was, like so many others, filled with doubt that I would manage to find a lasting friendship. I was ready to hunker down and muddle through like I had in so many years before, but suddenly there was another light in the form of a new friend. Martita had recently moved into town and she loved talking about music as much as I did. We went everywhere together, from church, to the skating rink, to The Ice Cream Factory, to school dances. We talked about our crushes, our homework, our families, our feelings. Her life, spent living in Puerto Rico and Kansas City before moving to our tiny town, was far more exotic than mine lived in one little town. I asked her to tell me every story she had. She was obsessed by a new cable TV channel called MTV and I wanted to see what it was all about. I went to her house for a sleepover and all we did was watch the channel until we fell asleep. When we woke up, we kept watching. In school, we kept talking. Now we recounted every scene in every video we saw, singing to each other and dancing the choreography to perfection. While this all seems like a rosy start to a forever friendship, she moved away only a year later, and so continued my troubles in maintaining an actual friendship. However, she helped me to see that there were other people out there just like me who were interested in music and television. I could use what some would see as my unhealthy relationship with TV and music to find my way into actual friendships in the real world. Thanks to Martita, I was not going to give up on finding my forever friends.

My lifeline has always been television and music. My radio, my record player, and my television have never let me down. They were my three best friends growing up, and they kept me company and lifted me up in my loneliest times. The lessons I learned from Corey, Linette, and Martita helped me understand the difficulty of navigating friendships in the real world. Over time, I found my forever best friends who shared my love of all things pop culture. I met Brother Mikey at an open jam night, and 7 days later we were performing as an acoustic duo. I met Bestie Crystal when we were hired at the record store, and 3 months later, we became roommates. I originally met True Love Steven when we were toddlers growing up in the same small town, but we reconnected at the town fair decades later, bonding over the movies, television, and music we treasured. From each of these beginnings, we grew our friendships into the rewarding and lasting relationships we will enjoy for the rest of our lives. Each of my three best friends earned those titles of Brother, Bestie, and True Love because they accepted me and my love for music and television. They found their perfect places in my life, and it might have never happened if we did not share that love. These human best friends are now the ones who keep me company and lift me up in my loneliest times, but there is still comfort in the music, movies, and TV shows of my past.

“Don’t be late, get moving! We will be right behind you.” “Okay, we will save you a seat.” Brother Mikey needed a moment to get his little daughter Junie’s diaper changed and get her into the stroller. Steven, Crystal, and I started our epic speed walk down the convention center corridor, dodging Iron Man, Harley Quinn, Darth Vader, Mario, Darkwing Duck, and a Dalek on our trek. Dressed as Linda Belcher from Bob’s Burgers, I led the charge, followed closely by Steven as Bob Belcher and Crystal as Poison Ivy. The closer we got to the Great Hall Room 3501, the more crowded our path became, and we finally fell into line as rows and rows of eager attendees zigzagged around the queue stanchions to enter the hall. As we entered the double doors, we noticed that a convention worker was counting heads, meaning that they were about to hit capacity in the venue and would have to turn away some of the line-up. At this point, it was standing room only, so we walked along the back wall until we found a place where we could see the stage. I grabbed my phone. “Bro, you better hurry. The place is packed and they are going to close the doors when they hit capacity.” After an agonizing three minutes, the doors shut and I couldn’t see Mikey anywhere in the dark, vast hall. Then I got the text response. “We were the last ones in before they shut the door but it’s too crowded to get to you. I give credit to Junie’s cuteness, lol. Look WAAAAY to your left.” Squinting through the dimly lit room, I saw his long monkey arms waving, and Steven waved his own long monkey arms back at him. Crystal tapped my shoulder and said, “Look, it’s Barrowman!” Lo and behold, the famous, handsome actor John Barrowman came trotting onto the stage clad in a summery Doctor Who dress with blue TARDIS tights. The crowd roared its approval and we knew we were in exactly the right place to celebrate our fandoms and our friendships. As expected, Barrowman had the entire audience crying with laughter as he told hilarious stories and made the sign language interpreters sign dirty phrases over and over. Crystal was here to see him because she loved the TV show Arrow, and Mikey, Steven, and I were in attendance due to his work as a recurring character on Doctor Who and Torchwood.

After a few minutes, we noticed a rustling in the curtain (plastic pipe and cloth drape) behind the actor, and suddenly, the whole 15-foot-tall, 30-foot-wide structure came tumbling down across the stage to the sound of gasps and shouts. Barrowman, after verifying that no one was hurt, then ran at a full sprint across the front of the stage and screamed, “I brought the f*#@ing house down!” and the crowd erupted in laughter and cheers. When the event was over a few minutes later, the crowd dispersed and we searched the room to reunite our crew. We soon spotted a tall Ghostbuster with a much tinier one in a stroller, and we had found our Mikey and Junie coming toward us. “Did you see that?” “Oh my God!” “That was hilarious!” I laughed until I couldn’t breathe!” “He was amazing!” Our crossfire of conversation rattled on for a couple of minutes until we realized we were all hungry and ready for dinner. “To the concession stand!” My three best friends and I (plus cute little Junie) strolled down the hallway shoulder to shoulder in a scene that seems to crop up in every buddy movie ever. Smiling, laughing and moving toward the camera in slow motion, our heroes walk off into the sunset, on to other new adventures in music, movies, and television.