Here I am on Friday.
In all the years I’ve written a weekly column, I’ve never appeared regularly on this day. Even so, I’ve always considered Friday the best fit for what I first pitched as a lighthearted look at the world.
No day is better situated to help readers blow off steam after a week in white- or blue-collar America. And no day is more forgiving. Even the bosses are less annoying because you won’t see them for the next two days.
After all, if I rile you up with my opinion on a Friday morning, with only eight hours between you and the end of the workweek, how angry can you be? And if I make you angry on a Friday night, after the trials and tribulations of the day have passed … well, let’s be honest, you probably aren’t reading this on a Friday night. Too many other things to do.
Days of the week don’t matter much in the newspaper industry these days. The print product exists mostly to round up material posted on a “newspaper” website hours or even days earlier. Readers no longer worry about the paperboy tossing their laptops or phones into a mud puddle or onto the roof, and those two means of communication – laptops and phones, not mud puddles and roofs – are the way most readers get information in this brave new world.
Still, Fridays are pretty cool.
Pop-culture enthusiasts of a certain age, and especially aficionados of TV horror and sci-fi, know Fridays have a distinguished pedigree. The first three seasons of “The Twilight Zone” aired on Friday nights. “Kolchak: The Night Stalker,” a short-lived series about a heroic reporter — see, newspapers again! — battled vampires and zombies on Fridays. “Kolchak” is arguably best remembered for starring Darren McGavin before he went on to holiday immortality as the father in “A Christmas Story.”
In my childhood, Friday nights were the home of the greatest one-two (and sometimes -three) in semi-rural, corduroy-pants-wearing history – “The Incredible Hulk,” followed by “The Dukes of Hazzard,” followed by – if Mom and Dad fell asleep – the super-steamy “Dallas,” all on CBS.
If I were really lucky, I stayed awake until 11:30 p.m. for “Hoolihan and Big Chuck,” the Cleveland movie hosts. They eventually morphed into “Big Chuck and Little John,” mixing un-politically correct sketches with bottom-of-the-barrel fright flicks.
If you’re getting the impression that my social calendar wasn’t exactly filled to bursting, you’re not wrong. My idea of fun was to invite friends over on Friday nights and subject them to arduous sessions of recording my homemade comedy scripts on a portable tape recorder, complete with sound effects of flushing toilets and slamming doors.
For some reason, few friends came over more than once.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the greatest Friday series of all, “The X-Files,” which aired on that night for its first few seasons before being moved to a much-less-scary Sunday timeslot. I’m traumatized enough by thoughts of work on Monday; I don’t need extra thrills courtesy of Mulder and Scully, thank you very much.
I realize for most people Friday night is more about whatever high school sport is in season, preceded or followed by pizza and adult beverages. Whatever floats your boat.
For me, though, Fridays have always been about horror and comedy, in somewhat equal measure.
And if you think about today’s world, being scared senseless or laughing hysterically at the news is pretty much de rigueur, pardon my French.
So catch me in this space each Friday, if you’re so inclined. I’ll do my best to scare you or make you chuckle, like the Incredible Hulk and Bo and Luke Duke, way back when.
And if you really want me to, I can stop over and record the sound of your toilet flushing or your doors slamming. I mean, my social calendar is still very open.
Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.
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