I've always been fascinated by art. I don't know why. My dad used to be the president of the school board in the district in rural northern Idaho where I was born and where I attended the first and second grades. I remember he invited the teachers from our grade school to the farmhouse one summer, and I prepared for this by making the teachers individual gifts: works of art. I took my lined tablet and with crayon colored in a different color between each line. Then I cut these ribbons of color with scissors and presented it to each teacher. I wonder if those color ribbons were not an early sign that I would be attracted to minimalist art.

We left the farm. We moved to another small town in the West. My cultural experiences came from TV, magazines, books and movies. There was a show called The Ed Sullivan Show, which just about everybody watched on Sunday nights. He had Elvis Presley on his show. He had the Beatles on his show. Imagine almost the entire country watching one thing that isn't the Super Bowl. That's what The Ed Sullivan Show was.

But Sullivan didn't just present rock & rollers. Opera singers--Joan Sutherland, Beverly Sills--were on the show. James Earl Jones performed a scene from The Great White Hope with the entire Broadway cast. Standup comics--George Carlin, Richard Pryor--were on. Circus elephants were on. Rudolf Nureyev danced. Natalya Makarova danced "The Dying Swan" and millions of children--boys and girls--tried to imitate her the next day. The poet Carl Sandburg strummed a guitar and droned on about Lincoln.

Ed Sullivan took high and low culture and mixed it all up so that some people began to get a notion that there really wasn't a difference between the two. Weren't some of those comics as artful at what they were doing as Joan Sutherland was singing from La Bohème? Weren't the Beatles doing amazing things with melody, harmony, rhythm--and in the later psychedelic years, sound itself? And wasn't that as interesting as anything Aaron Copland was writing?

And Ed Sullivan, who looked like a zombie on stage long before zombies were hugely popular, never explained anything.

(to be continued on the Monday post, have a good weekend!)