Spontaneous Musings

Just watched a really good episode of Boston Legal - which has been surprising me this season, because up until this season, I'd more or less lost interest in David E. Kelly's writing. But assorted people talked me into giving it another chance.

The episode I just saw featured footage from one of the two 1950's series - Playhouse 90 or
Kraft Theater Hour (or something along those lines, can't quite remember what the name of the other one was - my mother would probably know, I suspect - she was a huge fan of these programs - which were the equivalent of PBS's American Playhouse in latter years. Television in the 1950s and 1960s was actually quite good and high quality. There were not as many commericials back then, for one thing. Usally there was a corporate sponser who often paid to have their name in the title and the stars of the program would promote their products before, during a brief intermission, and after the program ended. The drawback was sponsors got a say in the content of the program, which is less the case nowadays. It was in some ways very similar to how programs are shown on premium channels such as HBO and Showtime and well PBS. But back then people only had three channels plus PBS. In the 1970's it was five. And in the eighties six until well HBO changed things. The reason I know all this is my mother - who was interested in it and remembers it. We do pick up habits from our parents like it or not.)
At any rate Boston Legal took snippets from the 1950's playhouse shows. This drama starred James Whitmore (best known for playing Mark Twain on stage, I believe) and a young William Shatner - it was, as is usually the case with these dramas - presented in play format. Not pricey sets. Shown live - not taped. And with a small cast. Shatner, despite what many people believe, was a trained theater actor, who had studied and performed Shakespeare - part of his theatrics in Trek is well due to the fact that he was used to projecting on the stage. Prior to Star Trek - Shatner, like many of his contempories, appeared in numerous anthology series such as Playhouse 90, The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Studio 60, The Kraft Hour, GE Hour...etc. (Apologies for getting some of the names wrong).

The selection of this footage fit the story beautifully - it showed us the disagreement between Denny and his father. How the two saw justice differently. Back then the morale was - do you provide someone with a fair trail? Do you give them the best defense you possibly can, regardless of their guilt? Or do you convict without impunity? It asked the question - but never quite answered it. Today - the story is a little more complicated. It's how does the victim handle it? What are the consequences of defending someone convicted of a crime?
How do you know who is quilty or innocent?

And one other thing - love. There were two threads - one with Shore and one with Crane, and both asked about love. I know what unconditional love feels like, in that I am blessed. My parents love me unconditionally. No matter what I do or how angry they get, I know that.
I wonder how many other people do? And how this effects them for good or ill?

Denny Crane's father disowns him because Denny took whatever steps necessary to defend a man he believed was innocent and still does. Shore tells Bird, a Senator who has just told his wife within Shore's hearing that he slept with a prostitute because he needs sex but hates his body and is uncomfortable revealing it to his wife, that he and his wife obviously love one another and not to give up on that.

Love isn't easy. It's not about sex. Or what someone can give you. Or provides. It's simply about caring, I think. The Denny Crane arc is interesting - his father states in the flashbacks, "you liked the law because I taught you to, I wanted you to become like me, but you are nothing like me, I don't know you at all." I don't understand this. Parents for some odd reason think their children are them, copies just because they share DNA. I was taught that children are their own people, gifts to us, but their own individuals. They aren't going to become us, they won't think like us, and they will do their own thing. Parents feel pride in what their kids accomplish - often seeing it as their accomplishment, when in truth it is the child's not the parents. What a child does may reflect on their parents, who invariably served as role models in the child's development, but it is not necessarily because of the parents or a direct result of them. There are too many other variables in play, too many other things influencing that child's development.

I look at some people who have children and wonder, why. Why did they choose to do it?
To feel immortal? To put a lasting impression on the world? Or was it for the reasons mine did, because they wanted to care for someone, wanted to raise a child, love the child, watch it grow, and see what it might become - like a writer does a story, without outlining it ahead of time or planning too much, just giving birth to it then letting it mix with the world to see what it becomes. And whatever it does become, is happy with it and proud.

My Dad has a saying:" Children are a gift, ours for just a short while. Then we let them go to find their own place in the world. We don't own them. They are not our possessions. They are their own selves."

I think unconditional love is the ability to love and let someone be their own self without judgement or criticism. Or control. Letting it go. Instead of keeping it caged within our expectations and dreams of what it should be. I think children who never get that from their parents, spend their lives hunting for it and are always unsatisfied. (Or for those fans of BTVS and ATS - it was not *approval* Angel desperately needed but *unconditional* love which he never got from his father. Spike on the other hand had it from his mother, who loved him regardless of what he did. It's not approval we crave, but the feeling that God, our parents love and forgive us no matter what. And it is that which Angel wanted to give his son Connor - and did with the memory wipe - he provided Connor with a family who would love him unconditionally - something Angel himself, knew he could not provide. )

Anywho...that's what I got from this episode.

Just figured out Dresden Files was rerun at 9. So watching Desperate Housewives.