It's all personal

Here is what happens after months of varied degrees of isolation: there's never enough digital content. My streaming music library has expanded, now including Pandora, SiriusXM, Spotify (the free version), Amazon Music (whatever comes with my Prime subscription) and the international channels I can reach with my Como Musica. My video streaming options include Disney+, Netflix, Hulu, CBS All Access and, most recently, Apple TV+. Getting that last service finally gave me a way to watch "The Morning Show," the drama with Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. It is at times marvelous and other times just a drag, but it caught me up especially short when an episode found the morning-show team setting up in the Safari Inn, pictured above.

"I stayed there," I said to my wife, and the memories came rolling back.

 It was 1999. The Cleveland-set "Drew Carey Show" was making its 100th episode, and I had gone to L.A. to cover the event, appear as a background extra (I think you can see my elbow in one scene) and do a couple of other stories while I was out there. Yes, that was how the print game worked once upon a time: You could get the budget for travel for a couple of interesting stories. Hey, I got four columns just from Carey, as you can see in this post on my old Northeast Ohio Onscreen blog. (Yeah, that blog was another good idea I never kept going -- not to mention never-written book I thought it might spawn.) I soon enough reoriented my brain back into "The Morning Show," but for those Safari Inn scenes I was in my own world, personally bound.

But, of course, it's the personal that makes things matter to us. The emotional connection can be more potent than any theoretical, political, artistic one. Big Supreme Court decisions on, for instance, LGBTQ+ rights or abortion matter more when we have close contact with people who are affected -- or when we are those people.

My recent reading of "The Great Influenza," a book about the 1918 pandemic, is more intense because so often the events have been echoed in our recent pandemic. Another book on my shelf, "Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop From Elvis to Jay Z," is striking because so many of the essays in it are not only first-person but built on a foundation of the writers' experiences -- that the importance of rock and pop was based not only on broad critical standards but on individualized, internalized connections. I've heard local audiences murmur appreciatively at, say, a movie like "Draft Day" when it hit an especially strong, Ohio-centric note.The passing of journalist and Akron native Betsy Rothstein generated admiring and not-so-admiring reflections; I remember her mainly for a spat she started with me about a column I wrote in 2015. Carl Reiner is worth remembering for his enormous contribution to comedy -- but I've seen a lot of columns today from critics and reporters who had the chance to talk to Reiner over the years and had a deeper fondness because of those conversations. (I was in Reiner's presence more than once, and he always gave a full measure of entertainment and insight, including at this event.)

I don't know exactly where I'm going with all this. Maybe because now I'm neck deep in memories of my own. After all, it's all personal.