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Growing Up in 70s Television: The Addictive Glory of Marshall, Schwartz, Larson, and Slade

The 1970s in the United States, as seen through the innocent, yet perceptive eyes of a child, was a period marked by profound cultural, political, and religious shifts. The 1970s were a decade where the vibrant promises of the 60s’ counterculture movements began to clash with the realities of ongoing political strife and societal change. The Vietnam War lingered in the background, its echoes felt in living rooms across the nation, while the Watergate scandal shook the foundations of public trust in government. Amidst this backdrop, the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, and a burgeoning environmental consciousness were reshaping the American social landscape.

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Opera in Mainstream American Culture

With our ASL Opera project picking up steam, I was curious to know just how the “High Art” of Opera has influenced mainstream American culture over the last 50 years or so, and I was surprised to learn, via ChatGPT-4 AI, just how deeply many of the most famous Opera melodies made their way into our shared childhoods and our culturally maintained totems of relevance!

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Seven Seconds in Jersey City is a Lifetime Too Long

My ophthalmologist is always excitable. She enjoys life. She’s an excellent MD. She knows I’m a writer, and a Script Doctor, and she makes bumping into her at her office to pick up my contact lens order, a real delight!

My doctor is also a Jersey City girl, born-and-bred, and she’s tough, and smart, and she knows the city well; and my doctor implored me to watch the new Netflix Seven Seconds cable series because it was about the city in which we spin.

She told me Seven Seconds was dark, and ugly, and that “bad people live here in Jersey City” — but my doctor loved the series, and she binge-watched all 10 one-hour episodes in a single sitting! She went on to tell me I had to watch it too, and that she would be testing me on what happened in the story the next time I sat with her for my annual eye examination. I took her up on her offer — and challenge! — because I had no other choice!

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Reconstruing a Culture: A Reckoning for Retro TV

There was a time in the monument of America — during the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s — when you could have a life, make a career, and be somebody, just by hosting or appearing on, a broadcast television game show or talk show.

Since we now live in the perpetual machine of “everything old is new again” — we can dive back in time, and watch all the old television shows of our youth, now digitized, and Closed Captioned, and made publicly palatable for our short mindsets by removing most of the modern commercials in favor of the old, embedded soap pitches.

Buzzr is one of my favorite retro channels, and orange seems to be the “color of nostalgia” (and 1970s sexiness!) in the logos of these channels of recondition.

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Performing Arts and Broadcast Entertainment Professors Should Not Compete with their Students

One of the first things my friend, and mentor — and Columbia University in the City of New York professor — Howard Stein told me, was that he was once a produced, and award-winning Playwright, and when he decided to teach other Playwrights at the University of Iowa for a living, he gave up his Playwright life because he didn’t want to compete with his students. I thought that instinct was honorable and right and the lesson sticks with me today. New plays have a hard enough time getting produced on their own, and when you’re in direct competition with your professor for stage time, and production dollars, you quickly discern how easy it is for the amateur Playwright to fail in the same professional arena as the Professor.

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Predators, Children and Sexual Prevarication

Children are some of the most vulnerable in society. They are trusting by default and unaware by necessity of nature. Popular culture and the Arts are filled with the sexual exploitation of, and the aggrieved results of, unattended children in peril with no one to protect their best interests except, oftentimes, their grooming predators.

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Three Eras of Preservation and the Scourge of Magnetic Tape

In the Modern Age of Entertainment, we have — so far — sustained Three Distinct Eras of performance preservation. The First Era was Film.  The Second Era was Magnetic Tape. The Third, and current, Era is Digital. The most cursed of all the Eras, is the misbegotten second — Magnetic Audiotape and Videotape — where performances were not actually preserved, they were only perpetuated to die!

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