I was haunted for a while by the picture below.
It may be the scene of the high point of life. Or the happiest, in retrospect. Not at the time, but in retrospect. Is that possible?
I think so. You can look back to an event or action, recall the general mood, then inflate it with more meaning than it had at the time. Given what we know now, this was the apogee. Given the things you prize, this was your zenith.
What produced this reaction, I’m not sure. I think I was looking through old South Dakota papers and read an account of the upcoming Corn Palace theme. (Egyptian.) This made me search for more articles about the CP in different years.
1953, the Canovas:
Judy Canova’s star had sunk by ’53, obviously. She got her start doing vaudeville with her sister and brother, neither of which have wikipedia links. Well, guess the talent at the ’53 show was the sorta-kinda washed-up acts of the day, and -
Oh. Duke Ellington at the Corn Palace!
That got me thinking about the Corn Palace itself, and why that picture is the Happiest Time. It was 2009, and we were on a family trip to the Black Hills to see the Heads. This meant all the basics: a stop at the Happy Chef statue, a stop at the Jolly Green Giant, a long haul to Mitchell, where we put in for the first night. We got into town in early evening, and the Corn Palace was still open. Downtown was deserted. Everything had the feeling of a day when the parade was at noon and the crowds had all gone home. We explored the Corn Palace, stopped at the gift shop to buy - well, corn; I got a cob you could put in a bag, stick in the microwave, voila, popcorn. Then we went across the street and sat in the plaza and had something to drink. Just the three of us heading across the plains on a family vacation, off to see the great heads hewn into the mountain. I think of it now and it’s as if we were the only people in town, and were all perfectly content with being together.
No thoughts of career are present in the memory, no worries about the future, no doubts about the past, no encumbrances at all. Just the three of us sitting across from the Corn Palace on a warm summer evening. Greatest day of my life.
I looked up and down the street for that Rexall sign, and didn’t find it. I did find an old building someone had given a spiff-up with some late 40s (maybe) glass:
The Navin Hotel. It was built in 1911 and touted as South Dakota’s first fire-proof hotel. A paywalled article says that all the hotels downtown were destroyed by fire, except the Navin. All at once? Anyway, it was improved with glued sheets of glass.
The effect of modenization fades after time, and people just get used to it being the way it seemingly always has been.
NOT A REVIEW. THOUGHTS on Disclosure. I would be happy if the entire series took place in the office, and every week was one discrete story grounded in the strange, abstracted office culture. An entire episode about copier paper. An entire episode about the stapler situation. I get the need for a grand overarching story that resolves its mysteries at a steady pace, and I appreciate that they’re not attenuating these things like some other shows would do. But the very fact that there’s a third season means that this one will end with QUESTIONS and I am tired of questions.
It is easier to ask questions than provide satisfying answers. By this time I think the audience has figured out where this is all going, so the ultimate reveal will be anticlimactic. And I could be, and probably will be, completely wrong about that.
I’m just harking back to the days when each episode of a television program was discrete, and disconnected. One never bled into the other, with very rare exceptions. Such as:
Wo Fat! Oh, we loved that guy. Chow! Chin Chow! he would say when something went well. (Or so I remember. The internet does not seem to back me up.) He was a perfect foil for McGarrett.
Google AI answer:
In the 1968 series, Wo Fat was portrayed by Khigh Dhiegh and was initially depicted as a Chinese agent. After the U.S. and China established diplomatic relations, Wo Fat became an independent force.
The name came from a Chinese restaurant in Honolulu.
Anyway. I enjoy reading the obsessive recaps and reviews, but I always get the sense that people have invested 37% of their mental capacity and processing power thinking about the show, which always leads to frustration, anticlimaxes, disappointments, and online obsessions.
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