THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503050051
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
There are no gurneys slamming through the doors of my office.
There's no one yelling: ``Clear!'' and making bodies jump up with those little electrode things. No one ever screams: ``We're losing him! We're losing him!''
Maybe that's why I like ``ER,'' this season's runaway TV hit about an emergency room staff. It is completely unlike my own life.
There are all these disasters spilling across my TV screen. I have nothing to do with causing the catastrophes. And no responsibility in resolving them.
I am neither on the table nor standing over it with a scalpel.
There's something about that I like. In fact, I take incredible delight in watching it all unfold, the gorier the better.
If my husband tries, even dares to think about interrupting this show with some short comment, even a ``Hmmm,'' I glare at him like a surgeon who's just been handed the wrong scalpel.
Many is the time I've almost jumped up and screamed: ``Code Blue, Code Blue,'' when the heart monitor line goes flat. Or yelled: ``Stat!'' (that's ``ER'' lingo for ``right now'') when a nurse moves too slow.
Sure, I know I should be spending this time planning menus for the next month. Or cleaning out that closet that used to have a floor. Or at least reading a book on existentialism or something.
I used to do that, really I did. There have even been periods of my life when I went years without a television set. But job and child-rearing demands have driven me to this much-maligned medium.
Thursday night is my one opportunity to step cleanly and completely out of my life. It's like a one-hour frontal lobotomy.
I get to watch other people run around saving people's lives, and at the same time try to keep their marriages together, deliver the proper innuendos to whatever love interest they work with, and make sure some other big ego doesn't plow over their own.
It's completely exhausting. But at the end I feel fulfilled. I'm ready to step back into my own life and see how lucky I am to work where my decisions are not life-and-death ones. Where I walk out each day without blood on my shoes. And where there's no good-looking Dr. Ross to distract my attention.
Well, maybe that last item wouldn't be so bad.
Yeah, I'm addicted. Miss my weekly dose and I'm liable to go into full mental arrest.
Friday mornings when I'm briefing my husband on all that transpired the night before, he gives me a look that says: ``It's a TV show. TV. These are not real people. It's television.''
He stops short of sawing my skull open to see if there's anything left inside.
I remind him that ``ER'' happens to be the highest-rated TV drama in years, and that 40 percent of TVs in use on Thursday nights are tuned to the show.
So I'm not the only one out there telling her children: ``Clean up your rooms. Stat.''
I think most people are watching for the same reasons I am. It's totally involving. We can claim victory for success without lifting a Band-aid. And escape blame for the failures because, hey, we don't even have medical degrees.
On a Thursday night, that's just the kind of escape I need.
Stat. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Anthony Edwards appears on ``ER,'' the highest-rated TV drama in
years.
by CNB