Our First Television
- Our First Television
Our first television was not our television. It was my grandmother’s, “Noni’s,” and it was downstairs in her half of the house. When not showing us soap operas in the afternoon or Lawrence Welk at night, it sat by Noni’s front door, encased in a blonde wood cabinet. This was also the set that was coveted by our next-door neighbor, a woman who occasionally came over with her husband to watch the Jackie Gleason show.
“I want a television like Mrs. Benevelli’s,” she would say.
Her husband would chide her. “Come on, what do we need a new TV for? It’s the same as ours.”
Her response was emphatic. “This one has fewer commercials.”
Such was my introduction to the mysteries of broadcasting. While my own sensibilities admired its furniture-like qualities, allowing me to enjoy the tactile experiences of playing with the latch, I had a more important use for this machine—one that fit my life at that time. The cool, quiet TV screen on the turned-off set gave me the means to explore more fully the world of self-centeredness occupied by three-year-olds: I used it as a mirror.
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Still from The Package, 1996 video. Jackie Pardon at a very young age.
But not just to check out my looks. The doors of the cabinet were opened in preparation for the ritual dance that I had prepared for a specific audience (my father, uncle, sometimes my mother and Noni), a dance that portrayed a dying [End Page 27] swan and that lasted as long as I wanted. It had to happen with certain people in the room, they had to be quiet or risk the shame of being shushed by the dying swan, and I had to have on my finest party dress. (The one occasion on which I had agreed to dance in my overalls, I stopped short in tears; my image was reflected to me as a banal little girl, not as the magical bird worthy of recognition.)
I managed to watch my image in the gray-green tube throughout most of the dance. I kept my gaze glued to the reflection until the last possible moment, when I lowered my head in a folded-wing death spiral, landing on the fattest couch cushion.
These were my first, inverted, broadcasts.
Jackie Pardon programs the Video on Video series for the Saratoga Springs Public Library in upstate New York. Her own video work has been screened in festivals and galleries in Europe and the U.S., broadcast on PBS and cable stations, and used in college classrooms.
