Submitted for your edification and amusement; a darkened theater on the near south side where some four score and an odd baker’s dozen of idle curiosity seekers, liberal intellectuals, telecom students, and the kind of lonely characters you find talking urgently into dead pay phones at cheap arcades are all huddled in a communion of nostalgia and the bizarre.
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It is a Saturday afternoon in March. Wind and sleet buffet the windows of the Museum of Broadcast Communications, a modern temple to past glories of the airwaves. The general public moves through the television and radio exhibits with glazed smiles of recognition and bland pleasure at Garfield Goose and Frazier Thomas, Uncle Johnny Coons and Fibber McGee; but inside the Kraft Television Theater an oddball assortment of refugees from reality cock their heads in the darkness at the sound of a famous three-note theme. They have gathered to watch a series of 30-year-old television shows both venerable and absurd, brilliant and improbable, black-and-white prime-time dreams from the pre-Kennedy-assassination years that would, like the show itself, quickly become nightmare; a surreal reflection of the zeitgeist of that wonder era when the world itself was poised between light and shadow: The Twilight Zone.
“When exactly…” he interrupts loudly, taking his time, “was the episode-aired-called-‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’?”
Schumer presses on, comparing Serling with the French surrealists, his slides of stills from episodes from 1959 to 1964 punctuated with photos of Kennedy, to whom Schumer compares Serling’s television presence, as well as Sean Connery as James Bond, who Schumer suggests learned a thing or two about suavity from Serling.
“Excuse me?” The woman, fur-coated and unaccompanied, responds.
After the talk two girls in their late teens leave the theater to view uninterrupted episodes being shown in the museum proper on a monitor in an exhibit booth. When asked what they thought of the show, one girl says, “It’s so typical 60s. The corny camera angles and the campy black and white.”
