On Process and Place: Letter One (Television)

Substack Letters between Mark Dykeman (How About This) and Julie Falatko (Do the Work) about where we're from and how that influenced our work now

Welcome to a Substack Letters project between me and

Mark Dykeman

of

How About This

. Go subscribe to Mark’s Substack – it’s about creators and notebooks, creativity and influences. 

On Process And Place - Letter #1

Mark is Canadian and I’m American, and our first thought was to write about that. But the more we talked about a theme, the more local and specific we got, until we landed on: On Process and Place. Our goal is to tell each other about where we grew up and where we live now, and how that influences our creativity today.

In letter one (this one!), we explore local television shows we watched as kids (Mark and I are both Gen X, so that makes these shows from the 70s and 80s). Next week, in letter two, we’ll be talking about regional foods. In letter three, we’ll think about how the towns where we’ve lived have influenced us. 

In fiction, specificity is more relatable than generality, because it makes the characters more real. It’s the difference between “Jenny was craving pizza” and “Jenny was craving a butternut squash and goat cheese pizza with balsamic reduction.” We know a lot more about Jenny in the second example. The specificity is also way more interesting. 

I think too about what George Saunders says about looking to your influences. We weren’t melting our brains when we were sitting in front of the televisions, we were laying a foundation for flourishing creative lives.

With all that in mind, I loved hearing about the television Mark watched as a kid. Here’s my reply to him.

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MARK!

I’m so glad you asked me to do this letters project! I loved reading about Miss Anne (I honestly laughed out loud at you remembering her as “a grayish blur” – POOR MISS ANNE – what if it turned out she was a ghost? That would be a very different show) and Switchback. I’m jealous that you got Switchback! It sounds so cool. I watched some of one of the episodes (it’s a testament to this show that there are so many full episodes available online), and I see what you mean about UHF + early David Letterman. There’s a vibe to shows like that where they’re having such a good time, and they understand that kids can have good senses of humor. They’re having fun by being themselves and respecting their audience. Which is what I try to do when I write for kids! (Wait – was I influenced by Switchback???)

Like you, I watched Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I also watched Romper Room and The New Zoo Revue and everything from Three’s Company to Love Boat to Little House on the Prairie. 

I grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey, which is pretty close to New York City. Tenafly itself isn’t huge but the proximity to NYC made it feel bigger. When a lot of your friends' parents commute into Manhattan to work, it feels like you’re pretty close. Both of the shows I’m going to tell you about are out of NYC, and they even align somewhat with Miss Anne and Switchback.

When I suggested we talk about local television shows we watched as kids, there was one show I was thinking about: The Magic Garden. The Magic Garden was a show about two women, Carole and Paula, who lived in a magic garden (obviously) in a cupboard (ok, that part is less obvious). They were friends with a squirrel named Sherlock, picked terrible jokes off of a giggling patch of daisies called The Chuckle Patch, and acted out stories from The Story Box. Wait, Mark, I’m realizing Carole and Paula are nothing like Miss Anne. They are the opposite of grayish blurs. They are colorful explosions. The New York Times called the show “inadvertently psychedelic” and…yeah. They sit on giant toadstools and talk to flowers. 

While I am the sort of person (and was the sort of kid) who tends toward David Letterman/Switchback humor, I really loved The Magic Garden. Carole and Paula, sitting on swings with an acoustic guitar, their hair in long ponytails, was the coziest, safest place in the world. I was a huge fan of Free to Be…You and Me (did you listen to that, Mark?) and it’s a similar feeling of having the truth of the world sung to me. Watching it now, it’s all pretty corny, but I think that’s what I liked about it. The opening song that they’d sing every time sets the tone for the whole half hour, which is that they’re going to sing and be goofy in this tiny magic garden, but for that half hour everything will be soft and kind and joyful. They sang a song about how it’s nice to say hello that still goes through my head sometimes. And then at the end, they’d sing a goodbye song as the camera backed up and the doors of the cupboard closed.

I’m realizing now that it might be hard to sell a show in 2023 about two women who live in a cabinet forever and sing songs about how happy they are. That sounds dystopian. But in fact it was extremely utopian! I think a lot of my outlook on the world – that it’s a good place, that it’s nice to say hello, that I can talk to flowers and squirrels – was influenced by this show.

Let me take a quick commercial break. The Magic Garden was on a station called WPIX, and the other thing I really, really remember about WPIX was this bit they did between shows, where there would be a very pong/asteroids looking video game, and kids would call in and say “PIX!” over the telephone, and every time they said that, it would shoot a small pixelated block at some other pixelated blocks. And they’d get points. Or something. It was the most analog possible way to play a video game. What I really remember is that once every ten kids or so, you’d get a kid who had the strategy of saying “PIX PIX PIX PIX PIX” nonstop for the entire thirty seconds, and I’d always be impressed that they were just going for it, and also slightly annoyed. It was a good strategy but made for a less-riveting thirty seconds of watching for me, a kid in Tenafly. I will link to yet another (unlocked!) New York Times article, with this quote: ''As a kid who played video games, I'd get frustrated at those players,'' said Robert Perlman, 33, whose mother was and remains a WPIX executive. ''They took away all the strategy.'' Yes. Maybe that was the problem. The rapid-fire pixpixpix kids took away the strategy. This is where I can tell you that I don’t know anything about video games or video game strategy.

(Mark I’m so glad we’re doing this via the magic of the internet so I can load this letter with all these links. What if I was writing this on paper and sending it in the mail and I had to be like “if you would type www.youtube.com backslash etc., you’ll see Carole and Paula”? That would be tedious. This other blog post about the TVPIXX game reminded me of Network 77, a satirical 1970s television channel created (in 2018) by Rachel Lichtman. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but I really, really love it, and you might too.)

Ok! So my whole original intention was to tell you about the Magic Garden, but Switchback dislodged something in my brain, and that something is: WONDERAMA. Wonderama was this variety show that was on for hours on Sunday morning (seriously: three whole hours). Researching it now, I see there were a lot of famous guest stars, but I don’t remember any of them, because they weren’t famous to me when I was a kid. It was hosted by this guy named Bob McAllister, who ran all over the studio interviewing the kids and being hilarious. I remember very specific things about this show.

I remember this Wonderama wall, which I still consider the height of graphic design.

I remember the Kids Are People Too song (which later became the theme song for another Bob McAllister show). I remember that kids who won prizes got a Lender’s Bagel necklace, which was a real bagel on a necklace, which I wanted so much, even though it’s hard to properly fashion an outfit around a bagel.

And that was the thing I remember most about Wonderama: those kids in the audience, they got stuff. A lot of stuff. I’m sure it was cool to be in the audience of a television show and potentially get on camera, but from my perspective, sitting at home in New Jersey, the entire purpose of being in the Wonderama audience was to get free stuff. 

Like, I remember this snakes in a can game so much, where you might get a cool board game (my favorite board game they give away in this clip is one called TENSION – fun! tension!) or, if you were really lucky, you’d win the bike.

And the other thing I remember is at the end, Bob McAllister walked around the audience with a plastic tote bag full of stuff (candy, mostly) and threw it at the audience. It was such a fantasy to me. Here is a guy just tossing me Twinkies and RC Cola. Well, not tossing them to ME. But tossing them to kids like me. It was possible, not far away from where I lived, for an adult to throw me a coupon for Burger King. 

Wonderama was a lot more chaotic than The Magic Garden (in a good way). There was a studio audience, for one, plus lots of guests. Paula and Carole were the only humans in the Magic Garden. And while I loved the gentleness of The Magic Garden, a bigger part of me absolutely adored Wonderama. Songs, jokes, bagels, and candy. Plus: kids are people too. It’s like Switchback in that sense (if I’m reading Switchback right), that they were having fun, and respecting the kid audience.

My first thought is that I like these things now. I like sweet and sincere things, and I like chaotic and hilarious things. I like things where the people in them and the people creating them seem to be having a blast. I don’t know if that’s just always what I’ve liked, or if it’s a direct influence of The Magic Garden + Wonderama. 

But then I think about how people tend to characterize the books I write, and often it’s some version of “very funny, with a lot of heart.” That’s a direct line to both of those shows. If anyone ever described any of my books as “it’s like The Magic Garden meets Wonderama” I would be overjoyed.

Your friend,

Julie