Our little television in the living room, black and white and smaller than the average purse, caught me from its very first entrance into our East Avenue home in Atlanta. That screen light began to flicker and that was it for me: hypnotized in only the way a five year old can be. My recollections are cloudy, about time and place and content exactly, though I do know they were black and white, those images dancing across that tidy, powerful screen. I don’t remember thinking about it at all. I just sat on the floor in front of it, with my brother Richard, drinking milk and watching . As if Elmer’s Glue had been applied to my eyeballs and i became attached to the small screen.
AS i got a little older, I do remember, especially when color tv became the thing, that Sunday nights would fill my tummy with joy because I knew I could enter for my weekly fix of Fantasy Land, from the Magical World of Disney …I was always disappointed if it was Davey Crockett or any other thing from real life…I needed those color cartoon characters and all those lively silly goings-on to get me into a new week of school. I main-lined Mickey and Minnie and Goofy and Donald Duck and his three nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, to make me a happy child, but mainly i needed to see Snow White and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty get their men at the end of their evil-Step-Mother-soaked sagas. I needed to see their pretty dresses. And finally:
I needed to see them all ride away on those tall white horses, nestled snuggly in the arms of their tall white Princes, all of whom looked exactly the same, with variations of Princely clothing, none of whom appeared to have any genitals. But what did i know of genitals then?
I needed that colorful , tuneful completion…that assurance that One Day MY Prince would come too. I thoroughly identified with those milky white young ladies, no matter their hair color. They were me.
And so, my life began, and through decades of love, marriage , romance and flinging myself about on various theatrical stages all over the world, I pursued Fantasy.
I may never stop.
After all, I am now a writer.