Imagine a weekly 'reality show' set in Ithaca, New York.
Eight contestants from all walks of life: a likeable florist from Topeka, a willowy 23 year old trail guide at a Wyoming dude ranch, a fast talking catamaran salesman from Key West, Florida, a former Jesuit priest from Detroit - well, you get the picture, a real cross section of American life - marooned for a month in Ithaca with only a $30 bus pass, a fistful of TCAT schedules and a coupon good for one sub and a pepsi at Short Stop. Do you think that most Americans would be glued to their television sets every Thursday night?
Reality shows should be about reality. Living in Ithaca, the last time Ezra checked , is as close to reality as you can get. Pinch yourself. Are you real?
What does the Australian outback have that Ithaca doesn't? OK, kangaroos and koala bears and kookaburras. Ezra will give you that much. What's with the preponderance of "k" words, anyway? Is that an aboriginal thing? maybe Irish? Killkenny, Killarney. Yeah, a lot of Scots and Irish settled in Australia. Not by choice, either. It used to be a prison colony. A Celtic devil's island. Do you think Ithaca could have started as a former prison colony?
So Australia may have a few more charming National Geographic critters than Ithaca does. I-town (don't you grit your teeth when you hear someome at Juna's chirp that out?) still has plenty of rugged terrain, a variety of natural and man-made obstacle courses and enough tests of human endurance for any survivalist. That's why we have an Outback store on the Commons, right? Plus enough miserable weather to try even a grizzly's soul . And it has gorges. Don't forget that Ithaca has gorges. Throw some ropes off those slopes, laddies, and watch them scale down! Next test of superhuman skill and endurance - try to get a job in Ithaca!
Every week we could watch this group of typically photogenic Americans go through the motions of surviving in Ithaca. Like eating at the soup kitchen, getting through another night at the homeless shelter, staying out of the cold in Center Ithaca, applying for a job at Cornell, standing in line at DSS., picking cans and bottles out of trash receptacles, washing dishes up at Cornell, rounding up advertising inserts from the Friday IJ to stuff in their clothing to keep the chill out. That's survival, folks. Who needs snakes in your sleeping bag?
How many people living in downtown Ithaca watch 'reality shows' anyway? You can buy little decals at Autumn Leaves showing a little guy with a sledgehammer bashing in his tv. The Nielsen ratings people stopped sending out survey postcards years ago to folks in Fall Creek. There's not a single satellite dish within the city limits. No wonder Channel 78 went off the air. Back in the '70s it was cool to sit around, talk about relevance and hatch new community access programs with real 'content.' By the '90s the Salvation Army had stopped accepting discarded tv's because Ithacans were fed up with the tube.
Back to reality. In a future blog, Ezra will tell you what he thinks of people who watch 'reality tv." Folks in Ithaca don't need to watch those kinds of shows because they see the real thing everyday. Anybody who lived in Ithaca for a while might want to get away and take a vacation in the Australian outback.
Reality mixes with unreality. You get exposed to too much of the grittiness and the hard cold surface of life and you enter a trapdoor into another dimension. Rod Serling settled in the Ithaca area after his Night Gallery program was cancelled by the network. He taught at Ithaca College until he died at the age of 50 from a heart attack. Who knows whether, before he died, he didn't stand up there on South Hill, look down and seriously think about a sequel to the Twilight Zone?
The Ithaca Zone.
Coming to Ithaca Sucks:
The Poetry Store (formerly the Poetry Corner. It's all retail these days.Nothing is for free!)
The Ithaca Sucks Sunday Edition (The Ithaca Journal merges with the National Enquirer.)
The First Annual Ithaca Sucks Fundraiser Drive.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 5:42 AM
