"WHAT'S A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE?"
That was the 1st question I asked, 53 years ago, when Bewitched was interrupted by a "Special Report".
By the time I was 9, in the spring of 1968, the words"We interrupted this program to bring you a special report"had long before created within me an involuntary, Pavlovian feeling of dread.
I did not recognize the name "Martin Luther King, Jr". I did not know what a Nobel Peace Prize was, nor that there were other Nobel Prizes other than for Peace.
What I did know is that Bewitched on ABC channel 7, here in New York City, had been interrupted because something terrible had happened. And I knew something terrible had happened because the show was "interrupted... to bring you this special report."Special Reports were reserved only for when something bad happened.
The episode of Bewitched that was interrupted, and of which we never did get to see the conclusion, was about what the world would have been like had Samantha Stevens announced to the world that she really was a witch, that Gladys, the crazy old lady who lived next door, was not really crazy, instead of hiding that fact.
Hiding Sam's magic was the sum total of the plot of the show, the basis of its comedy, where, like "Jeannie" and other powerful women, she had to make sure that her husband could succeed and be the breadwinner in the family on his own, without her magical help. She had to voluntarily subjugate her super powers to salve Darrin Stevens' ego.
Of course, as a 9 year-old, that Sam's voluntary subjugation was horribly sexist was, unfortunately, slightly beyond my comprehension. I knew it was wrong, but didn't fully understand why. It was, to me, a frustrating plot device. I actually wanted to know the outcome of that story line, that night, to know what would happen if Sam had been free to be who she truly was. There would be, perhaps, something liberating in shedding that subjugation.
The horrific conditions that mandated the involuntary subjugation of the Memphis sanitation workers, however, would have been very clear to me, had I been aware of their plight. As a 9 year-old, I understood when things were "not fair". What I did not know at the time was that they were on strike. I also did not know who MLK was, or that he had been in Memphis to support the strikers.
I never did learn what would have happened had the world known that Samantha was really a witch. It would no doubt have been a cautionary tale, justifying the status quo of Sam's voluntary role of subservience. Instead, the Special Report, with its accompanying Pavlovian dread, upended all sense of status quo.
Something awful happened.
Again.
Someone important had been shot. It took a few more interruptions with a few more Special Reports to announce that he had been assassinated.
Assassinated. That meant to this 9 year-old, who remembered JFK and his assassination, that someone very important had been killed because he was very important.
That Thursday night I discovered that Martin Luther King Junior had been a great man. The following Tuesday I stayed home from school and watched the funeral.
And I remember asking my mother -- it was 1968, after all --
"How come I only find out about great people after they die?"
