It's 1983 and I'm sitting in my living room in Topeka, Kansas, having just installed the cable into my Betamax.
I'm all excited about being able to get the Kansas City stations. I tune in KSHB-TV, Channel 41, late at night and come across this crazy guy in a fedora who talks on a banana phone to some old lady named Mrs. Walker and a slightly fey guy named Lee Cucarachi.
The guy in the hat and the thick black glases makes chicken faces into the camera. He sings to himself while he does stuff. He starts the show with some crazy pledge while holding up his hand, the back of it turned to the viewer like a slightly obscene gesture. Every once in a while, he introduced "The Twighlight Zone" or some other old time TV show.
He even pals around with Cloris Leachman and steals the show from the old pro.
It's "All Night Live" with host Uncle Ed Muscare. And I'm hooked.
***
Over the next days, months, and years, while working at KTWU-TV (PBS), several of my colleagues and I talk about Uncle Ed nearly every day at work. "Did you see that routinue?" one of us might ask? "Did you see that interview?" another might say. "Damn, I wish I were as funny as Uncle Ed" another of us might say.
Image via Wikipedia
We love Uncle Ed. He is the Ernie Kovacs of local TV. He is both a throwback to another era of sight gags and schtick but he also understands the cool nature of the TV medium.
He seems to have no pretenses. Just the crazy characters, his hat, his old songs he sings to himself, his schtick, and an absolute ability to make you feel like he is talking directly to you and only you. He takes the every day and makes it funny.
Some of us send cards and letters to Uncle Ed telling him how great he is. He never responds. We ask to be on his show. He never responds.
We're obviously geeked out about Uncle Ed and his crazy little show. Ed Muscare is too cool to return the adoration.
***
Life goes on. I'm a new Wasbhurn Law School graduate but still working hard in my chosen field of local public TV, covering politics and public affairs. I'm a newlywed, a dog owner, and a fitness buff.
I still like Ed but he's no longer quite the obsession. I have a life as a young professional, a young husband.
In May of 1986, my wife Donna, our standard poodle Phoebe, and I move back to my former home state of South Dakota, where I go to work for South Dakota Public TV. There is no Internet yet to keep up with Uncle Ed Muscare. No YouTube. No satellite TV (or at least not much yet.)
Ed Muscare begins to fade--a little--from my memory. Though I'll still catch myself saying Ed Muscare catch phrases like "This is Mrs. Walker calling. You know, Ed..." and doing chicken faces to my confused South Dakota colleagues.
But once you've seen and admired Uncle Ed, you can't unsee and unadmire him. That is his pull. He is the hipster who made it to be the cool old relative you like to hang out with at family reunions. Just thinking of Uncle Ed brings a smile. For his many fans, he still does.
***
Friends from Kansas tell me when I talk to them in late 1986 that Uncle Ed is suddenly off the air. What could have happened to Uncle Ed? He's a comic genius!
***
Uncle Ed Muscare apparently has a past and a problem that we didn't know and couldn't see. When someone comes into your home night after night and brings you such enjoyment, you think you know them. But like any celebrity, none of us truly know them. Who knew O.J. Simpson was a wife-beater and a murderer? He seemed so likable on TV.
Ed Muscare has a dark deep secret. In 1986, he's convicted of sexual battery on a 14 year old boy in Florida. He's a sex offender. And then, later, he's a sex offender who failed to register as a sex offender.
As a juvenile is the victim of a sex crime and juveniles and victims of sex crimes are generally protected by the law and the media, it is not clear what happened. It will probably never be clear, a well-deserved mystery for the victim.
But whatever did happen, an old man apparently tried to take advantage of a young boy. And society just doesn't like that very much. It's the modern equivalent of the Scarlett Letter--probably even worse.
It's a kid, for God's sake. What kind of a sick f*** does that to a kid?
Apparently, Uncle Ed Muscare does. The "uncle" honorific doesn't sound funny or endearing any more but creepy.
At least he wears a jacket and tie for his Florida sex offender photo. Might as well class up the gig a bit, right Ed? Or is it another of your subtle jokes that is lost on most of us?
***
So, years later, after wondering what the heck happened to Ed Muscare, he suddenly reappears, on TV, sort of. He's
Image via CrunchBase
Living in borderline squalor in some hick South Carolina town in a ramshackle house, with three dogs and an old VW Beetle, Uncle Ed makes videos that he uploads on YouTube.
Ed takes his video camera everywhere. Literally. To the store. In his yard. On his roof. To his kitchen. With this dogs.
He is a spectral figure now. Pale skin, thin, uncut hair flying everywhere, deepset eyes surrounded by darkened skin, a missing front tooth, he looks like a cross among an aging Penguin, Beetlejuice, undertaker, and ghost.
He looks like death warmed over from central casting. He's 77 years old or so and wearing torn clothing like his "airconditioned shirt" and pants that are neither shorts nor trousers.
And now he makes videos that I watch again late at night. Sort of like back in the old days.
***
For many of us who "knew" Ed Back In The Day, his look is off-putting. He looks like the crazy old man down the street with a pack of baying hounds who wanders aimlessly around his yard in the rain. Plus he has that whole registered sex offender thing going on.
My wife Donna, while not the crazed Uncle Ed fan who I was in the 1980s, used to enjoy watching him on "All Night Live." But Ed gives her the creeps now with his videos.
So I ask Donna, the clinical social worker, for a diagnosis after watching his "Backscratcher/Suckling Dog" video.
"Disturbed," is her one word answer. No DSM IV axis. Just disturbed with a major helping of creepy.
***
But there's one problem. Uncle Ed still knows how to make love to the camera. When he talks, he's still only talking directly to me. He pours grits from a big box to a small jar. Jim Dandy Grits. He adds, "Go Jim Dandy, Go Jim Dandy" ala the song. I watch, transfixed. He's still funny.
And many of his his videos, like pouring grits or watching his dogs drink water from a faucet or a tour of his closet have a sweetness, lightness, and Zen-like "in the moment" quality that you can't help but to watch.
With a sweet tenor voice, an ability to carry a tune, he's still the consumate showman and broadcaster. He is a communicator with a side of Buddha.
If Buddha were a sex offender on a child, that is.
***
People from around the world comment on his site. Lots of young people, junior high, high school, and college aged. They want him to be their grandfather. They want to be like him when they are old like him--still "cool," still creative, still looking at the world through a child's eyes.
Ed touches something in them like he touched in me nearly 25 years ago. A spirit of wonder, of marching to your own drummer, of looking at the world through fresh eyes. And being subtly but still damn funny when he's not weirding you out.
In "Shadow Painting Signed," he shows a painting of himself as a ten or eleven year old boy--not much younger than his victim--painted by his late brother. Artistry apparently ran in the Muscare family. The young Muscare has a full head of dark hair, neatly combed. He's a good looking kid.
And then you wonder what happened, from that sweet young boy to this slightly nutty but sweet old man. What made him do what he did to another sweet young boy in the interim?
We'll never know. Ed probably doesn't even know.
***
I obviously didn't know Uncle Ed Muscare on TV 25 years ago when I watched from my living room in Topeka. I thought I knew him. But I didn't. None of us really know any celebrity. Most of us don't know our own friends and family as well as we think. You can't really know another person.
We don't even truly know ourselves.
But one thing is typically missing from Uncle Ed's current YouTube videos--other people. He seems desparately lonely. The camera is his surrogate for companionship. Ok, maybe not, maybe off camera Ed has friends and neighbors and fellow Lions Club members and church congregants and a book club. But I'm guessing not.
As close as we get to some Ed self-reflection is a video called "Tragedy." Even it only skirts the issues, couching them in traditional Christian terms. He talks of forgiveness and Christ and following and turning your life over to God and God even being in evil people. He talks about Paul, the ultimate Christ follower, who gave up so much to be with and promote Jesus.
But no mea culpa. But I have no doubt that he knows tragedy, self-inflicted as it might be. And perhaps God is in him. Even a man who has done an evil thing.
Being a convicted sex offender who has victimized a child is not a good way to become popular in your community.
No one wants to hear excuses or explanations or that you found God.So Uncle Ed shares his life via one take, unedited videos shot on a cheap camera with the rest of us now.
His dogs--Buster, Buddy, and Lady--love him unconditionally. Like his fans like me once did. But that unconditional love has probably been gone for decades. From the looks of things, conditional love has also gone the way of my old Betamax for Uncle Ed. Thrown away, long forgotten. An anachronism in an age of iPods and YouTube.
And age that has no tolerance for creepy old men who perp on young boys.
Besides the wry wit, the snippets of old songs, even bits and pieces of "All Night Live" schtick that comes out from time to time, you get the sense that Uncle Ed Muscare is no longer anybody's uncle. And he's making the best of it that he can, one crazy, poignant, creepy, brilliant, and Zen-like video at a time.
And I'm not handing you no jive.
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