I've been watching the Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon since 1971 or so, when we got a TV station that carried it in Baton Rouge.
I don't know what that says about me, but there you go.
Yeah, the show's full of has-beens and corporate hacks who can't read cue cards, and did I mention has-beens? And, of course, activists say Lewis is exploiting disabled people, which always leads this never-was to wonder every year how it's exploitation when you're trying to cure diseases that kill many of the "exploited."
But, as I said, there you go.
It's hokey and cloying and sometimes borderline torture to watch . . . but it works, and I love it. Somehow, it's so unreal it's real.
And how can you hate an effort to eradicate an awful group of neuromuscular diseases and help out the folks -- many of them children -- who suffer from them? Not to mention the man who's been hosting Muscular Dystrophy Association telethons since 1952, and annually on Labor Day since 1966.
It's a good cause. Think about parting with some scratch for it, eh?
And now I'm going back to watch.
Oh, yeah . . . the videos above are from some early telethons, and then the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis reunion -- on the telethon, of course -- in 1976. And, yes, I was watching.
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