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By JAN GLIDEWELL, Times Columnist
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 25, 2003
And so began an experiment in letting someone else control the remote.
Actually, I did pretty well.
I moaned only once when she had a panel of three talking heads nobody ever heard of on PBS discussing the war in five-syllable words, and I'll admit I broke out in a cold sweat when she mentioned the Lifetime channel, until I realized she was only pulling my chain.
But it was still scary and, I think, in my case, genetic.
My grandfather might have been one of the nation's first remote hogs.
He had one of the first television sets in the neighborhood, and peace reigned for the years during which there was only one television station (WTVJ-Ch. 4 for the specificity-obsessed) to watch.
But when we had three, it got to be a problem, although not a serious one, because not only manual channel changing, but much shifting around of rabbit-ears and rearrangements on balls and sheets of tinfoil that were supposed to make them work better, were required.
But then the dreaded day came, when the first analog, motorized, tuning-fork operated channel changer appeared.
You would hear "sppprooonnngg" from my grandfather's chair and the thing would begin a painfully slow journey through the three available channels, and all of the blank ones before returning to them. It was only a hint of the technologically enhanced nightmare to come.
And, somehow, I became a part of that nightmare. I became adept at watching five or six channels at once, jumping from one to the other, while following story lines and live news happenings and leaping deftly away from Saturday Night Live when the band nobody ever heard of was doing the musical interlude.
I guess some dim portion of my brain, or what some would say is some portion of my dim brain, realized that perhaps my choices weren't everyone else's, but then, who cared? I was in control.
It's such a guy thing that when I went to bed and left my stepson as the alpha (and only) male in the room, I would automatically hand the remote to him, as though it were a scepter.
But that's okay. I'm enlightened. I can handle ceding control . . . sort of.
Betty kept her word. She hid the remote when she went to the bathroom and sat on it the rest of the time.
She refused my pleas (in hopes that something would sway her) to check the program guide to see if anything else was on. (Truth be told, I don't think she knows how.)
After the brief Lifetime scare and a stop on the Oxygen network (like Lifetime although much more hip and much less schmaltzy) she -- that is we -- settled in to watch Armageddon, which we had both seen before. We watched it anyhow, mostly, I assume, so that she could watch Bruce Willis and so I could say, things like, "Hey, there's that guy who plays the doctor on Ed," or, "Hey look! there's the guy who plays on The Agency in hopes that she would get tired of my nostalgia trip and cough up the clicker.
But, no.
With only two brief mercy trips to CNN so I could reassure myself about the state of the war in Iraq while we were watching the impending death of the entire planet in a movie, I had to stay with one channel for the entire evening.
After the movie and my little object lesson about being a control freak, she surrendered the remote, and I happily got in some multichannel viewing . . . at least enough so I could relax and go to bed.
And tonight I don't have to worry about her grabbing the remote first.
She'll never find where I hid it.