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Cutting the TV cord
This family watches no television. No television. No television?
By RODNEY THRASH
Published October 19, 2006
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[Times photo: Bob Croslin]
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At dinnertime: Though some families may watch the news or a game show during dinner, this family sits down to a quiet, homemade meal with Lisa's brother, Matt Collins, left front. The Mackanesses entertain at least three nights a week.
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ST. PETERSBURG -- Sylvan and Lisa Mackaness live on Snell Isle in a pretty house with a pretty baby boy. It's neat, like one of those homes Realtors show off to prospective buyers. Sylvan owns a mortgage company. Lisa's a stay-at-home mom to Myles, the couple's 4-month-old son. They talk a lot. They read a lot, too. Their library contains titles such as A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose and Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. At dinnertime, they sit at the table together. When most of us are microwaving Lean Cuisines or idling in the McDonald's drive-through, Lisa is serving crab cakes, grilled chicken and homemade pineapple upside-down cakes. She makes everything from scratch. Myles' baby food. Salad dressing. She's even about to start making her own bread. "To get all the vitamins," she says. When you don't watch television, all you have is time. A fixture in our lives Sylvan and Lisa are anomalies in an age when television is available on cell phones, iPods and computers. Once a living room fixture, the tube has crept into bedrooms, kitchens, even bathrooms. No wonder there are now more television sets in the average American home than people. According to a Nielsen Media Research study released a few weeks ago, there are now 2.73 TVs per household but only 2.55 people. We keep them on longer than we work - eight hours and 14 minutes per day. Daily, we actively watch four hours and 35 minutes of programming, Nielsen reports. That's also a record. "I have a couple of friends who will say, 'Don't even bug me on Sunday,' " Lisa says. "How could you ever choose a show over spending time with people?" Television is a part of us. It's there when no one else is. It soothes us. It informs and entertains us. It rocks us to sleep. It babysits our children. It dominates our conversations. We can't get through work and school without recapping last night's Grey's Anatomy, Lost or American Idol. Sylvan and Lisa can. On the same channel It's 5 p.m., a Monday. Myles, in his Fisher-Price Cradle Swing, giggles at his reflection in the mirror overhead. Sylvan, 32, sits in a leather chair near the dining room. Nothing's staring back at him, just the wall. Lisa, 36, shuttles between the kitchen and the den. She has already set the coffee table with a plate of cheese and crackers. She hands Sylvan a plate of crab cakes with seafood sauce. He thanks her. "You're welcome." They met two years ago through Match.com, an online dating service. Under their profiles, they wrote that they wanted someone kind, someone adventurous - someone who didn't watch television. They preferred to make their own stories, live their own lives, rather than watch someone else's. They communicated for a month by e-mail and phone before meeting in person. The moment they saw each other, they knew they would marry. He proposed on a Tuesday. They married that Thursday. Every weekend, before Myles came along, they traveled, went to restaurants and live music shows. "Just picking up and going at the drop of a hat," Lisa says. It's amazing, she and Sylvan say, what they can do when they're not in front of a television. They can sit on the porch in the mornings, sip coffee, learn about their neighbors and themselves. They can take strolls in the evenings with the family dog. They can unwind to the sounds of Rosemary Clooney's Just A-Sittin' and A-Rockin' on their XM Satellite Radio. They can host dinner parties three nights a week. "I called Mom and Matt and they are probably going to join us for dinner," Lisa tells Sylvan. Myles lets out a loud noise, not quite a scream and not quite a screech. "Aeeeeewww!" He will grow up without TV, his parents say. They have other plans for him. "Big plans," Lisa says. He has already visited four states and by the time he's a teenager, Sylvan and Lisa want Myles to have visited every country. A woman approaches the front door. "There's my mother," Lisa says. She opens the door. "Hola," Lisa says. "Hola," her mother replies. Her mother stands over Myles, cooing. "He's changing every day," she tells Sylvan. "His 'Mimi' is pretty involved, like another mother," Lisa says. "I see my mom and my sister, my niece and nephews a lot." Sylvan says, "It's kind of the way I envisioned life before TV." Family influences To understand Sylvan, you have to go back to a place in New Mexico called Taos. Sylvan grew up there, the son of hippies. There was no running water, no electricity until he was 8. "It was the life that they chose," he says. "They wanted to rebel against society, get back to nature." They grew their own foods. White bread was prohibited. "I remember thinking it would be so great to have a bologna sandwich with white bread," he says, laughing. "That was the ultimate." "We read a lot, we talked a lot," he says. "We always had music on and would dance and socialize." "I remember all my friends would talk about The Dukes of Hazzard, Tom and Jerry or different things," Sylvan says. "I didn't know who the Incredible Hulk was." "Being a rebellious preteen, I wanted to get a TV," he says. "I bought a small black-and-white TV with bunny ears. I remember coming home and my mom just shook her head in disappointment. 'How dare you bring that thing' - she called it a thing - 'into this house?' I always felt like I was missing out." He kept the TV against his mother's wishes. He even got cable in his name. He rushed to the mailbox to retrieve the bills so his mother wouldn't find out. He watched TV, off and on, into his late 20s. In Lisa's house, the television was on all the time. Nobody talked to each other. "My father's really into television and probably, he rushed to finish dinner so he could watch his new - whatever - golf show," she recalls. She didn't give up TV until age 31. She was a fan of The Simpsons. That was the last show she watched before her older brother told her about the Four Arguments book by Jerry Mander. The books argue, among other things, that television's popularity has minimized the spoken and written word. In other words, people don't know how to communicate anymore. A literature major in college, Lisa disconnected the cable and sold her TVs. She admits that she misses The Simpsons. A year after Lisa read the Four Arguments book, Sylvan took a look at his life. After work, he would watch television until he fell asleep. He hit 340 pounds. His father, also overweight, went into a diabetic coma. "Man, that was a wakeup call," Sylvan says. He didn't even have a favorite show. He jokes that he mainly liked the car commercials. He turned off the tube. He does watch the occasional DVD on a home projector screen and he kept one TV in storage. He gave his big-screen TV to his brother-in-law and sold three others. He lost 80 pounds. Confounded friends They sit down for dinner at 6 p.m. They pass salad bowls, bread baskets, Lisa's homemade yellow curry salad dressing. "Remember in Ohio," Sylvan asks Lisa. The couple lived there for a year after they married. "That storm?" Lisa, holding Myles, starts laughing. "It was so funny," Sylvan says. "It was apparently the verge of the storm of the century. We were drinking our coffee, hanging out, watching the snowflakes come down, not thinking anything of it." "I don't watch the weather," Lisa says. "No weather, no news." She reads magazine covers in the grocery store line so she will "know the important stuff going on." Friends still don't understand. Rather than explain, Lisa gives them the Four Arguments book. "I've given multiple copies out to people," she says, "to try and explain why I've made the choice that I've made." Her explanation and the book, however, don't seem to work. "You don't have cable television?" their friends will ask. "They look at us like we're getting ready to put them into a Super 8 motel without TV," Sylvan says. "People are really traumatized by it. They freak out." Reluctantly, he pulled his 19-inch Apex TV from storage this past February. You can't watch the Sopranos or Nip/Tuck on it. It has a DVD player, but no antenna, let alone cable. He only brought it into the house because of the pressure. He put it in the guest bedroom. Rodney Thrash is single and owns two televisions. He can be reached at (727) 893-8352
[Last modified October 19, 2006, 06:46:17]
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