Sunday Salon: The Seesaw Girl and Me

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Currently reading: Dick York, The Seesaw Girl and Me
Pages read: 22 | total for day: 22
Time spent reading: 22 minutes | total for day: 22 minutes

Comments: On November 17th I launched yet another blog, this one about the 60s sitcom Bewitched. I'm going to watch the series straight through, from beginning to end, and blog about the episodes as I go. In the process of working on the site I discovered that Dick York--the first Darrin Stevens--had written an autobiography. Dick York died in 1992. I was vaguely aware from having seen something about it on TV that he'd had a difficult life after leaving Bewitched. He left because of chronic back problems, and--as I remembered it--he'd been close to bedridden in later years, not looking very good, but doing a lot of charity work via phone.

So I bought the autobiography. It arrived quickly, with a nice note inside from, as it happened, the publisher, Claudia Kuehl, who also wrote the book's afterword. Kuehl once wrote an article about York and subsequently challenged him to write his story, which is how this book came to be.

It is an unusual book. Apparently, York didn't actually sit down and write anything: he turned on a tape recorder and recorded himself. I don't know whether there was much editing after the fact, but what's on the page sometimes preserves his pauses (parenthetically noted). If there wasn't a lot of editing, then the product is quite amazing, because some of the stories he tells are remarkably crisp.

The book's format is odd. Mostly it's a collection of vignettes from his life. These are all very good, and as I say, some of them are stunningly good. (I'm thinking in particular of York's story, on page 33, of a boy in fifth grade defending another boy from bullies. The story will make you catch your breath.) But there are also strange parts in which the author talks to himself, or addresses the reader, or writes about things in the form of a play. Some of this makes no sense, to me at least.

In a few deft sentences York also tells the story of how he first hurt his back--the injury that would claim his health and his career. What caused the injury was such a small event--a man grabbing something York was lifting, so the weight was increased--that you feel as if you could just reach back and alter it, so the injury never occurred, so York's career wasn't ruined, so Darrin Stephens wasn't eventually reduced to this:

"You are Dick York, you are fifty years old and you weigh three hundred and six pounds, and through faulty nutrition, through lack of calcium in your bones or God knows what, or neglect or just plain good luck, you've lost most of your teeth. They've broken off, except for maybe two on the right hand side: one on the bottom and one on the top. And one day you're sitting in the apartment out in Covina and she says to you one of those, what, meaningless questions? She says, 'Would you like to go out for pizza tonight?'

"And he, all three hundred and six pounds of him and only two teeth at his disposal, provided a lopsided crazy grin that allowed just those two teeth to show and in a voice loaded with excitement, anticipation, and joy he said, 'Maybe.'"

Tags: The Sunday Salon

Comments

[Susan]

This sounds absolutely heartbreaking - not my kind of tale at all! I only read happy endings.

[Debra Hamel]

Yeah, I know what you mean. I usually run screaming from the depressing.

I'm hoping in the end this turns out to be uplifting.

[Clare D]

That quote is poignant - it feels loaded with things unsaid. I don't usually read that many biographies but I think I'd go for this one. First because of Bewitched - I really liked Darren - and second because this writing is so good.

[Debra Hamel]

Clare: I'm curious to see where this ends. It's by no means a traditional, straightforward story. I don't know how much we'll understand by the end of it. Hopefully a lot more.

[Susan]

btw, Debra, "inover" doesn't seem to be coming up in the Pipes feed.

[Debra Hamel]

Hi, Susan. It's up on the Pipes feed here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/dhamel/sundaysalon But it may not have made it into the RSS feed yet. As long as it's on the Pipes page, though, we know things are functioning okay.

Do you like IN OVER, or would you like IN OVER MY HEAD?

[Susan]

In Over's fine. Just not "All Over!" please.

[Jacob Russell]

Unable, for whatever reason, to connect to your email address...

I seem to have been thrown out of the Sunday Salon circle... my RSS feed reads, "empty."

Not that I had much to contribute today... but what I got ain't contagious--at least not on-line.

Or maybe you have a sensor that picks up a blogger's mood--at somewhere around -273.15 the blogger gets thrown out in the vicinity of the nearest black hole.

Good show--which one will devour the other?

... but I think you have an oversensitive setting. I'm not quite there yet.

I've been there, so I'd know.

There are many small pleasures I'm able to enjoy, even though I know we're doomed.

[Jacob Russell]

"not my kind of tale at all! I only read happy endings."

What? You haven't figured it out?

There ARE no happy endings... something of a contradiction, at that.

[Debra Hamel]

Hi, Jacob. Regarding your RSS Feed, please make sure you're subscribed to the feed at this address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SundaySalon

But as far as being left out, you haven't been. Your post is up on the Pipes page here -- http://pipes.yahoo.com/dhamel/sundaysalon

It just takes a while to slip into everybody's RSS reader, so some people may not have seen it yet.

[Susan]

Jacob, I believe in positive thinking and I refuse to even consider an unhappy ending! I'm prescribing "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" for your mopes.

[joeB]

Hi Debra,
Watched these shows with regularity as a young man because Samantha was a looker! Thanks for all you do!
Best Regards,
joeB

[Ann Darnton]

I hadn't thought about 'Bewitched' for years. They were such a big part of my childhood, too. What a sad story though. I wonder just how many people that we thought were 'golden, charmed, individuals' have ended up so crushed?

[Debra Hamel]

Thanks, folks! (I agree, Joe: Samantha *was* a looker.)