IT’S ALL MY FAULT

Not on Christmas

By Duane Scott Cerny

Several holiday seasons ago, an opportunity arose to have my antiques store appear on a nationally syndicated morning television show. We were told there would be four live spots: an opening teaser, followed by the main segment, a brief recap, then a short good-bye. Two and a half of minutes of airtime, tops. Merry media Christmas!

The store was decked out in its glittering Christmas best. With wide ribbons of red and gold laced above our heads, the color we were most concerned about was the green needed to fill the cash registers. For holiday shoppers, this can be a wonderful time of year, but for those who work with the public, it’s sink or swim in the cold water of retail reality. If you have any doubt, check out all those empty storefronts that pop up in February and March. The owners aren’t in their vacation homes; they’re in hock.

After much discussion, the staff pulled together an appropriately elaborate display of vintage holiday items to appear on this live televised segment. Viewers would first see a glass showcase filled with Bakelite jewelry, Christmas tree pins and wreath clips in seasonal colors. Next, we assembled four silver, aluminum Christmas trees from the 1960s and set them beside one another. The branches crisscrossed in a reflective forest of kitsch, creating a veritable wall of aluminum foil pom-poms, hanging Christmas lights, and ornaments.

We projected in our collective heads that as the television camera passed by the Christmas tree display, it would discover our festive showcase of holiday cocktail shakers and barware — the showstopper of the segment. Nothing says the holidays like your drunk Uncle Bob saying something inappropriate before a crying Baby Jesus. Why not buy him a cocktail shaker? Uncle Bob, that is.

However, when the television crew arrived, it quickly became evident that the host and cameraman had very different ideas about almost everything. Someone assuredly woke up on the wrong side of the camera’s focus.

As I was interviewed at the sales counter, the cameraman unexpectedly moved right past “A Bakelite Christmas.” This guy was going holiday rogue and fast. With an unwieldy camera atop his right shoulder, he barreled forward and crashed directly into our deep forest of sharp aluminum Christmas trees. Branches flew in every direction, holiday lights blinking in panic as they dropped to the carpeted floor below. Christmas balls fell like a group testicular cancer test. You could have turned your head and coughed tinsel.

The host continued to yammer on with some confusing introduction to plastic jewelry and a few disparaging words about our prices. But the visual to these complaints was the sight of dozens of multicolored aluminum branches crushing your television screen in a holiday blur. It was as if some psychedelic, acid-infused candy cane had been licked and the trip visualized for the coffee-starved, barely awake morning audience.

“Are we still on?” I whispered to the host. “Can’t we go to commercial?”

Inexplicably, the cameraman continued to move forward into a tinseled nothingness. If his intention was splitting through a forest of Christmas trees like a festive bulldozer, he would eventually end up in a dealer’s booth — one that was not necessarily prime-time ready. And that is exactly what happened — without pause, he drove through the fake forest and created a path for himself and his camera that did not previously exist.

Do fake trees not fall? Oh, they most certainly do, and with them fall more ornaments, more lights, more decorations. Yes, it sounded as bad as it looked — and it looked very bad, as the trees so roundly fell over like a cushioned crashed catastrophe in slow motion. It was our Shelly Winters/Poseidon Adventure moment. Timber!

To the viewer at home, it must have appeared that a lost holiday hiker had finally broken through the tinsel forest and into a small clearing. But with no pre-planning involved in this live segment of the calamity, the camera’s focus now centers on an old typewriter sitting on a small art deco desk in the middle of a dealer’s booth. It’s a nice typewriter. Clean. Working condition. The camera continues to glide slowly forward, moving Godzilla-like on its path toward the typewriter. A crisp sheet of paper appears to have been inserted into the machine. Oddly, and to my mind, there were no words previously typed on the page.

Ho, Ho, Oh, No!

Now, the camera moves in closer still, and the typewriter fully frames the television screen, blocking in square to the viewer’s eye. Breakfast kitchens across the country pause to see this precious holiday moment.

Like a demonic Norma Desmond, the camera prepares to film its final close-up of the all-caps words typed on the page:

I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I’M PREGNANT—SEND ME MONEY, ASSHOLE!

But the camera doesn’t pan away; it just lingers longingly, leeringly. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Either the cameraman is in similar shock, or he is a very slow reader. And yes, for many inexplicable reasons, people are compelled to express themselves inappropriately on random typewriters found at antiques stores. I don’t know why that’s a thing, but it is one that people do. And it is rarely “Now is the time for all good men … blah blah blah.”

So, an unknown customer had unwittingly scored her 15 seconds of fame and gotten her message across bigly — and on live television.

That Christmas, we could have sold the smutty typewriter a dozen times over.

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Duane Scott Cerny takes the blame for most everything in his monthly satirical column, It’s All My Fault. Best-selling author of “Selling Dead People’s Things” and “Vintage Confidential,” he is the co-owner of Chicago’s Broadway Antique Market and is a guest favorite among fearless podcasters. Contact him at E-ThanklessGreetings@yahoo.co