PYOO - SEE - KAT

You're only young twice -- once when you're a kid & once when you're on your honeymoon. Otherwise you have to be a grown-up all your life, taking grief and giving it back and knowing in the backroom of your skull that there is nothing fantastic left to look for. So I'm going back to the glory that was Axel and the splendor that was Roundhouse Rodney.
Ah yes, those venerable TV kiddy shows in the Twin Cities, when Eisenhower ruled the land but didn't suspect there was such a place as Axel's Treehouse.
National television had Captain Kangaroo and there was something I vaguely remember as Romper Room but they were strictly dullsville -- unless the Captain put on that old vaudeville clown, The Bannana Man. That guy, with his chirpy squeaks and infinite watermelons, brought a breath of refreshing chaos into my life -- something I craved from the very first time I was told "Don't be so silly!"
There is the crux of the whole thing. Being silly. Pee Wee Herman tried to revive that old-time kiddy show manic silliness but he couldn't bring it off. He worked at it too hard, just like Jerry Lewis worked too hard at it. Truly great silliness is like an orgasm -- it comes after a great deal of comic foreplay and can only last a few seconds. And in most cases you feel guilty after it's all over because you've experienced something so unbelievably strange that you want it again right away yet know you can't get it again for a while . . . maybe a long while.
As kids in those pre-cable days my pals and I were always trolling the three available TV stations (Public TV didn't count) for those cherished moments of indecent foolery. Groucho Marx did it twice in his movies -- first in Duck Soup, where he solemnly proclaims: "The British are coming from near and far . . . with a hey-nonny-nonny-and-a-hot-cha-cha!" and then again in Night At The Opera, where he leans over a balcony, leering, and recites: "Boogie-boogie-boogie!" Nonsense syllables that had nothing to do with the plot or character -- just spontaneous bursts of pure silliness. We never heard those lines as kids without coming close to peeing our pants from laughter.
That's why the local TV kiddy shows were so important to us, to me. In a world where knock-knock jokes ruled and the Ed Sullivan zombie seemed to control all the major and boring talents, I waited for something unexpected and inarticulate to happen on Clancy the Cop or Lunch with Casey or Axel's Treehouse. I relished the way Axel said the word 'pussy cat'. In his weird Scandihoovian brogue it came out as 'pyoo - see - kat'. It somehow sounded indecent. I can still remember my mother clucking her tongue everytime she heard Axel say that word; she didn't approve of the way he said it but couldn't come up for a reason why except to say thinly "it's so silly".
I didn't know it at the time, but what I was searching for was purely existential; something that had no meaning, no definition, no purpose, but just was for the moment and then disappeared. Control and reason and sanity were all on the side of the adults; I only had a barely supressed anarchy going for me
This kind of thing happened on live TV with kiddy programs. A moth-eaten puppet would lose an arm. Casey's lunch would inexplicably slide off his checkered tableclothe. Willie Ketchum would forget the punch line to a joke he was telling Clancy the Cop; to cover his gaffe he just said one word -- 'waffle'. Axel's telescope, two pieces of cardboard tubing taped together by a demented kindergarten teacher, was so powerful he could peer through it and proclaim "by golly, I see the back of my head!" and then watch mutely as the tape came undone and the tubing fell in half, right there in the tree house. The anarchy was complete when a pie was pushed into Axel's or Clancy's or Casey's face. These role models and authority figures were revealed as genial ne'er-do-wells who needed a blob of shaving cream in their kissers to end a program. From them I learned that the world will end not with a bang or a whimper, but with a tinfoil pie plate full of Burma Shave.
Instead of Lord of the Flies it was Lord of the Pies. On a show where nothing could go wrong because nobody cared what happened I discovered the perfect world-view.
Little has happened since those chintzy play actors left the boob tube to convince me I was wrong.