THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509140159
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 46 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Ronald Speer
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
Sometimes I feel like I don't fit in to the cultural world everyone else seems to enjoy.
I really had that ``wrong planet'' feeling last week after reading the story about this year's Emmy presentations. The list of winners pretty well convinced me that I'm not really a regular earthling - but an alien dropped off for a while by space travelers.
Fifteen Emmys were given for what are supposed to be the best prime time television shows and performers of the past year. Shows that draw huge audiences and attract big-time advertisers. The best of '95. The cream of the crop.
Fifteen winners - and I never saw a single episode of any of those shows.
You can understand why I'm feeling out of it these days.
Winning programs included ``ER,'' ``Picket Fences,'' ``Frasier,'' ``Citizen X,'' ``The Burning Season,'' ``Serving in Silence,'' ``Cybill,'' ``The McMartin Trial.''
Apparently those shows, and people like Ray Walston and David Hyde Pierce and Christine Baranski and Dennis Miller and Judy Davis, are household words in most of America.
Drop those names in my household and you'll draw only a baffled look. I DID recognize the names of a couple of individual winners - Donald Sutherland and Barbra Streisand - but I missed the shows that won the old-timers their Emmys.
Admittedly, I'm not a big TV fan. But I do watch television. ``Murder She Wrote'' hooks me every time I turn it on. And Vanna White's skill at flipping letters keeps me tuned to the ``Wheel of Fortune.''
The Outer Banks' best-known resident, actor Andy Griffith, also lures me to the couch in front of the screen, whether the reruns feature him as a jovial small-town sheriff in Mayberry or a slick country lawyer in Atlanta.
But I didn't see any of those names or shows in the newspaper writeup about the Emmys (I missed the TV show).
It's not like I have anything against television shows. Mary Tyler Moore reruns still turn me on, and so do those decades-old shows like ``Gunsmoke'' and ``Bonanza.''
I've been tuned in to weekly sagas since I was a boy and huddled in front of our huge radio set listening to ``Jack Armstrong'' and ``The Lone Ranger'' and ``Fibber Magee and Mollie'' and Jack Benny.
That sort of dates me, and sometimes I tell myself that at 62 I'm older than the people they write TV shows for, and maybe that's why I don't feel like I fit in.
But when I go to modern movies that everyone else - young or old - is raving about, I find myself wondering how they could sit through two hours of this.
``Field of Dreams'' was a disaster for me, and ``The Bridges of Madison County'' seemed to me to be a shallow, herky-jerky flick even though I wrote stories about those very same covered spans when I toiled for the Des Moines Register.
Those gory flicks that are produced by the dozens and make big bucks for their backers are definitely not my cup of tea, either.
So the feeling of being a cultural oddball continues.
But there are some payoffs in not being attracted to many of our modern cultural offerings.
I spend a lot of those prime time hours on the back porch, enjoying the sights and the sounds and the smells of ginger lilies.
Sitting the other night under a waning but still-bright moon, I could almost reach the stars.
And then the quiet of the night was broken, not by gunfire or canned laughter or a scary scream from the television set, but by the boisterous honks of a flock of low-flying geese passing overhead.
I know I'm not alone in thrilling to the call of the wild geese.
And you don't have to subscribe to cable television to enjoy such award-winning moments. by CNB