Beth's Ponderings
When my sister and
I were younger, our house was hit by lightning one night. The lightning hit our TV aerial and travelled
along the wiring, into the house...an outlet cover was blown across the room,
but the most freaky part of the whole thing was that the lightning went horizontally into our metal TV stand just
above all the LPs storied on the bottom shelf before it changed direction
sharply and went straight up into the TV.
As a consequence of
getting zapped, our colour TV became a black & white TV, except if we
watched black and white movies - which always appeared in bright vivid colour. Other than the quirk of the coloured vs black
and white, and the odd loud snap and crackle when you least expected it (and
the house was totally silent otherwise), the TV was fine so we didn’t get a new
one, until it finally did bite the dust.
After literally
YEARS of watching the TV, and knowing that if we saw black and white it was
really in colour, and visa versa, you’d think we wouldn’t have been surprised
when we were able to watch shows and movies the way they were meant to be.
The first time we
popped in the old John Wayne classic “Angel and the Badman” (VHS) to watch on
our brand new TV we were sure that the TV, or the VCR, or both, were broken as
the movie we were viewing was definitely black and white, and not in colour as
it had always been every other time we viewed it. (It has since been updated in
colour and newer releases on DVD are almost all in colour).
We even scrutinized
the video case in sheer disbelief to discover that the version we had was in
fact a black and white movie. As we sat
there watching the movie we could remember the colour of each and every outfit
and item of scenery, as well as the vivid blue of the sky!
Even though we had
known in our minds that what we had been viewing before had been altered as it
was being seen on a (for all intents and purposes broken) TV, that had been our
“reality” for so long that when we saw it through a new lens (TV), it took a
while to adjust.
Beth
Read the complete issue of The Chautauqua here: https://sites.google.com/site/thechautauqua23/home/November%2017%2C%202017%20Chaurtauqua.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1
